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Comment by 0898 | Hacker News Reader

Excellent article. Key take-away: "There is no amount of money an owner could pay an employee within the economics of a small business to allow their employee to live within the borders of the city or even within a reasonable radius that doesn’t have them traveling for two-plus hours a day to come to work. This is the reality of where we live."

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It's unclear to me whether the author meant two-plus hours one way or round trip (I think they meant one-way, but I'll address both cases).

If the author meant 2+ hours round trip: Lots of tech employees making 200k+ do this regularly. For example, driving from your house to the Fremont BART station and taking the train into downtown San Francisco can easily take 1 hour and 15 minutes one way.

If the author meant 2+ hours one way: There are affordable areas outside of San Francisco's borders that have a reasonable commute. This is especially true if you're willing to have roommates, although that would be more difficult if you have four children like one of the employees mentioned in the article. Oakland comes to mind - you can take the BART from Oakland to the Mission (where the restaurant in the article is located) in ~35 minutes.

While I do think that there is a housing issue in the Bay Area, I don't think the lines you quoted from the article are fair.

I really don't find the evidence agreeing with such a broad statement.

At most you could claim: "A worker in food service with family will not be able to afford living in SF, as a restaurant will not be able to pay the needed salary without raising prices above what the market will bear"

I really don't find the evidence agreeing with such a broad statement.

Here you go: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

All the numbers and data have gotten worse in 2014.

Oh yeah, and SF's onerous rules are making it even harder to expand the housing supply: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/12/19/hou...

Not arguing that housing is expensive, just that "There is no amount of money an owner could pay an employee within the economics of a small business" is an extremely broad claim and obviously wrong.

High-paying small businesses, especially when employees do not have children to support, do fine. It's not like you see mass retail vacancy in SF.

hm. what if the employer starts counting commuting as work time? I mean, the big difference between this and just paying enough that I'm getting more money per hour counting my commute is the recognition that if I'm commuting 10 hours a week, there's not going to be much more than 30 good hours of non-commute work in me.

I don't see how or why the employer should care how long their employees commute is it is incumbent on the employee to make the decision if the commute is worth it. Maybe people would prefer a 2 hour commute to a place where they can make $80k/year, over working 10 minutes from home and only being able to make $35k/year.

The very subject of this article is why the employer should care. Ethically the owner has no requirement to care. When you can’t find people willing to make the commute then you’ve found when the employer should care.

If that were the case, then restaurant owners wouldn't have much trouble finding staff, right?

Small business owners do care about the health and happiness of their employees. But even if we pretend for a moment that they do not, it's a threat to the business viability if workers cannot afford to live within a reasonable commute. If rents continue to outpace wages, those workers will eventually leave the area or the industry. The article talks about the business impacts of people leaving in detail (loss of talent, reduced quality of service, direct hiring costs associated with turnover, etc).

'Reasonable' is defined differently by everyone. Some people would balk at a 30 minute commute. Other people like long haul truckers and sailors choose to be away from home for weeks or months on end. Some people would be okay with and even prefer a 2 hour commute if it means they get paid 3x what they would get paid with a 15 minute commute.

That may be, but good luck running a business that relies on all of your staff deeming 4 hours of daily commuting reasonable.

How do you even recruit someone living that far away for a (relatively) low paying, low skill job? 2 hours get's you almost the entire way across the state I live in, people living that far away have often never even visited my city once in their lives. Why would someone who lives as far away as San Jose (apparently just 1hr 30min from SF) be tuned in to the local job boards in SF when there are plenty of job opportunities in their back yard?

I can understand why people with valuable skillsets are willing to balance the cost of commuting from their dream homestead to their place of work but I can't see how this system works for those on the bottom rungs of the societal ladder.

> I don't see how or why the employer should care how long their employees commute

Long commute times makes it far more difficult to hire. Why wouldn't an employer care about that?

That's what they should care about. So they care about the commute as a factor in how easy it is to hire.

Restaurant owner: "everyone walking past my door is paid so much in salary that I can't raise my prices"

Me: Think about what you just said.

That sounds ridiculous until you realize that no one is going to pay ~$100 per head every time they go out to eat on a regular basis except for those who have become so wealthy that they have lost all touch with the value of a dollar. I make the rough eauivalent of $175k in San Francisco dollars and if I had to face those prices for a dinner at a mid-range restaurant I simply would not eat out. Restaurants are a luxury that can be easily subsituted with home cooked meals by practically anyone except a Jetset/Road Warrior traveling businessman.

My takeaway from the article is that all "middle class luxury" businesses are slowly being priced out of SF, which is a non-issue for everyone living outside of that bubble but should be of enormous concern to those banking on the future success of the area. Eventually no one will want to move there for a price employers can afford to pay. In the grander scope of things, I'm actually supportive of the concept of fast food and cheap dine-out businesses going under because the habits people form around them are killing us as a people.

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