The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the next best time is now and California is finally deciding to plant some trees.
Certainly the last few times I've been there, before the pandemic, it was like entering the matrix, you get on a ferry and you show up at the Ferry Building, and boom, you're inside the internet, you went through the monitor of your computer. Ads for ad platforms everywhere, startup credit cards, everything targeting startup founders, and you know what that means? Fucking crazy abusive inescapable prices. Even at the MacDonald's, my best recollection is $8.30 for a quarter-pounder. No wonder you would get assistance from the City if you made less than $120,000.
Often, the "more money" part is not enough to actually fund living and showing up for work, commute or not.
You cannot live on $17/hr in SF. Your post-tax income wouldn't even cover the the rent of a studio apartment. Not sure how you'd pay for food and transportation on top of that. Let alone actually doing anything fun that would make it worth living here.
That's 40 hrs/wk, of course. Many people end up working twice that, or more, across several jobs, in order to make ends meet here. And at that point I wonder why they stay.
I myself work full time and am going to school for Software Engineering. Right now job prospects in where I would like move don't look great since the last job fair I attended, I got the feeling most companies are planning to axe remote work ASAP. Which then limits my ability to move in the market place for jobs.
The question is not why others can't; the question is how did you do it.
Please elaborate about your background, education, geography, occupation, whether you have a partner, children, medical issues, and what kind of home you purchased (is this a tent you set up in the woods, or a single-family house), how far it is from work, and how you get there.
Also please include any assistance you got from your family before getting to that point, including contributions to the downpayment, owning property where you could live without paying rent (or allowing you to live comfortably rent-free at their place), co-signing on the mortgage and/or student loans, paying for your education, buying your first car, etc.
Usually, the answer to your question is "because not everyone's parents are well off"; but let's hear your success story.
- America's inability to build mass transit cost-effectively. At this point train rides along BART are mostly between high-cost areas, and discussions of expanding the system even a little more have price tags in the tens of billions, and timelines of a decade or more. Besides, the radius of BART is about as wide as it ought to be — it should be filling in, not sprawling out, and that requires upzoning the areas along the train to be effective.
It'd never pass environmental muster, though. You've got multiple protected species of wildlife in the marshlands, shipping channels, salt flats, whole cities whose selling point is that every house is waterfront property, etc.
He has more work than he'd ever be able to fill, but now has the work/life balance to actually see his kids, too.
The neighbor one more house down is a welder, same deal.
The family at the end of the street, another trade, another SF/SJ escapee.
Hell, I work in tech directly, and am pleased to say that 90% of my clients are within a 20 minute drive. I don't earn a FAANG salary, but I don't need to, either, and I am 100% certain (and I say this non-judgmentally, just a statement of fact) that I actually enjoy my daily life more than many of my former compatriots.
One is that minimum wage falling way, way below living wage ensures that the employers can always pay lower for even low-paying jobs.
Another is that perverse zoning laws often don't allow people to work where they live.
You're missing racism and greed.
"We don't want those people in our neighborhood" has been the reason for not allowing fast, dense, efficient, usable public transit to exist in the US.
As for the basic laws of economics, they explain that the benefits of public transit are a positive externality; and therefore, public transit has to be subsidized by the government to actually serve the needs of the people. "Not on my tax dime!", says the US. "Who would even use this, poor people? Of color, even? Not in my backyard, and not with my taxes!"
In the same breath, we pay for the ever-expanding highway systems which don't solve the problem, but without which all the Teslas and Porsches would not be of much use.
On top of it, the higher-paid peons (tech workers) can get to feel superior to the people they depend on for living (service workers) by wasting fewer hours of their lives in traffic each day.
See comments in this discussion saying "I don't believe anyone is entitled to live within a short commute from work".
The world desperately needs a new metaphor. How about "prices zoom to the moon!"