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Comment by xtalx | Hacker News Reader

You’d have to drive a lot longer than an hour.

For argument’s sake, I just visited craigslist rental section for the city of Olympia, a WA state capital which is about 1 hr drive from Seattle. You can totally find a decent looking 1bedroom for $600-700, and I’m pretty sure that studios and/or a room in a shared house will be considerably less.

Olympia is only an hour drive from Seattle during the middle of the night, or sometimes on weekends. Most of the time, it's at least a 2 hour drive, and can be a 4 hour drive in the right conditions - heavy rain, collisions on I-5, construction reducing lanes, Ft Lewis traffic, and Capitol traffic. That length of trip greatly increases the number of probable delays encountered. It also increases the probability of being involved in one, especially in those "right" conditions.

Olympia's a smaller city, but still a city. Exurbs like Snoqualmie or North Bend are likely to be even more inexpensive (edit: although, less likely to have apartments — your cheap option is the less desirable trailer park). Or Bremerton / Peninsula.

To the north there's Everett and that area.

Lots of options within 1hr of Seattle, if you don't have to commute it regularly.

Did you actually look through those rental listings? A lot of them are super vague, some are probably scams, some list their rates per week not per month. Show me one with full details and maybe I'll believe it. Also, it says something that it's non-trivial to hunt down rental listings in that price range, not everyone has the tools or the ability to scour through listings to find the few legit ones. Also, show me a listing where moving in doesn't cost near $1k for the first month.

Why does someone have to have a full apartment by themselves?

There are many options for rooms that are <$500 a month within half an hour of Seattle:

https://seattle.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=500

I already replied to this, clearly you haven't actually looked at these listings.

Two hours then, or three. What difference does it make?

The goal here is to find something that’s better than staying in your SUV in a Walmart parking lot.

A two to three hour drive every day is subjectively worse than sleeping in an SUV. Not to mention the health effects of hours of driving, pollution - and about $18-27 a day in fuel[0] that could be saved or used for food.

[0] 60mph/20mpg (generous for SUV) = 3 gallons/hour * [2 to 3] hours = [6 to 9 gallons] * (ballpark)$3 gallon = [$18-$27]. For 20 days of commuting that would be [$360-$540] per month.

Why does literally every other comment keep assuming that she has to commute?

The story says that she makes $1300 a month from disability and doesn’t have a job.

Why does she need to drive three hours a day?

I’m going to assume that, being a human being, and having a daughter, she has a social life in the city she lives in. To tell her she’s forcibly (by means of economic coercion with potential state violence to back it up) no longer to live near her social and support network is completely unethical, in my eyes - otherwise is to suggest that only the rich are allowed a stable life. No man is actually an island, as much as that is the American ideal. Replace “housing instability” with “being kicked out of their homes and told to live somewhere multiple hours away where they don’t know anybody”, and you get the actual problem.

So you're going to tell all of the people who live in a cheaper part of the US that their tax money should subsidize her so she can live in one of the most expensive cities in the US?

This reply[1] to your initial comment asked if the person would still be receiving $1300/month if she moved. To which the replies were "to commute". And so we're replying to those.

Would she still be making $1300/month in disability if she moved to Olympia? Or would it drop to near $1000? That extra $10 per day is a lot.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873680

She's on disability which is where her sole income is derived from - she doesn't need to drive into the city every day.

Gas costs are significant expenses when you only make $1300 a month.

The point is not to drive back and forth, but to relocate.

Not just to relocate. But to relocate into a permanent situation with no hope of change. Firstly, none of those cheaper rental options fit that bill very well, those aren't places that can be relied upon for years and years. Additionally, moving away from one's support network and from the best opportunities is a hell of a thing and not something to be taken lightly. People here are pretending that this woman can simply guarantee herself a future that is more comfortable than the one she has right now by finding some cheaper apartment somewhere, and that's a proposition that is questionable at best.

Especially in this case where the end result was that she ended up just crashing on her daughter's couch, moving down to Olympia or whatever to rent out some questionable super cheap room somewhere seems like it would have been a much worse decision. Perhaps she was just waiting long enough to justify "giving up" and having to rely fully on her daughter.

It seems like the only two people she had in her life are in the Seattle area, and she had relied on them for financial support in the past. If she has car trouble or additional health problems, then that's going to be very difficult to handle

Why are you so defensive about the mere existence of a homeless person?

Right. But what transportation costs does she have when she doesn't have to work?

Unfortunately she's not here to tell us. Maybe someone could send her a link to sign up and do an AMA on HN?

Her life has situations we cannot see from this perspective and we have not lived through. It's unhelpful to discount her situation with a smug "She could be doing XYZ better".

I’m open to hearing about what special situations she has that has made it impossible to pursue the obvious options. Those things should’ve been included in the article, but they were not.

In the absence of such details, the article is basically just vaguely pulling at heartstrings.

I wasn't being smug, I was being curious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com