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Comment by jakelarkin | Hacker News Reader

Reporters keep trying to find profiles of the housing crisis but this seems disingenuous. A lot of what this woman is doing is a choice; waking up hours before the train, huge house in Stockton vs condo/apartment closer. She makes $80k/year meaning post-tax $4600/month. She could easily afford a nice 1 or 2 bedroom in Pittsburg or Pleasanton for ~$2k a month, and her door-to-door commute would be well under 80 minutes.

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That's $12000 extra on rent per year, which is a lot to someone making $80k a year.

Take the time to commute (8hrs) into consideration. Is that extra $12000 worth it?

For some people, yes.

Probably. They mentioned apartment sizes in the article. The other quality of life improvements would be pretty massive since her commute puts her somewhere her dollars go much farther because she's not competing with the SV crowd for goods and services.

In the article she can work from home some days a week (I know for feds in DC, it's mandatory 5 days out of 10, so maybe at least that many for her) and she has a government job which (for many in the non-tech, non-startup world) is the Holy Grail of jobs- incredibly stable, great benefits, pension, etc. She's 61, so in her mind the trade-off might be worth it if she plans on retiring at 65 (and perhaps even earlier if she's got a ton of time in her PTO bank). Coming at the angle of a young tech person raising a family, the trade-off might not be worth it, but for an older person with retirement coming soon, the priorities are different.

People are required to work from home 5 days out of 10? I'm for encouraging working from home, but that policy assumes that everyone can spare the space in their home to have some sort of home office. (And since it's not a fully remote job, you still have to live near DC.)

Mandatory minimum allowed remote-work days. It's a quality-of-life measure for the employees - not some way to save money/office space on the employer's part.

Thanks for the clarification.

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