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Comment by rank0 | Hacker News Reader

The youngsters are free to live elsewhere no? I just purchased my first home earlier this year. Obviously I had no choice but to purchase a home in a city/neighborhood I could afford. Why can’t others do the same?

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A number of different factors that vary for people depending on circumstances. My wife is in nursing school. Sure, we could move to some rural town in Montana when she finishes, but its not reasonable if the closest hospital is 4 hours away. Some of the more affordable places just don't have good access to jobs people want or are qualified for.

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.

Others are free to do the same, except that they have to continue to commute to where the jobs are. If they're lucky they might live on the fringes of BART but increasingly people are just condemned to hours-long gridlocked freeway commutes to get to their $17/hr job in SF. To recover any kind of decent quality of life you're talking about moving to a different region/state.

Firefighters typically work 24 on, 72 off. My family members in firefighting tell me it’s shocking how many of them live in Reno, where they can afford a house. If there is another huge earthquake, they won’t be able to drive in to help.

$17/hr is essentially an unskilled labor rate in 2021. Why not make a move? $15-17/hour jobs are pretty plentiful in other places with a far lower COL than SFO.

Many people have deep ties to a place — as caregivers to aging parents, as members of diaspora enclaves, or as young people willing to struggle through a few years of hardship for the chance of success. Many others have seen the writing on the wall and moved elsewhere, and more power to them. It's a question of whether individual solutions (people can just move somewhere else) compose into societal solutions (we need lots of "unskilled" labor or our cities will collapse into chaos within days).

Understood, but to your point, if a city needs unskilled labor to survive it shouldn’t work directly against it.

Why? Won't the unskilled laborers be free to choose if they want a big commute and more money, or a smaller commute and less money?

Maybe.

Often, the "more money" part is not enough to actually fund living and showing up for work, commute or not.

If you're making $17/hr in an unskilled job in SF, and move to somewhere cheap, you're probably now making $12/hr. Maybe that change is worth it, maybe not.

i live in des monies iowa. the local burger king is starting at 15/hr. if you can live on 17 in SF, then 15 here will seem like riches) i know of plenty of other jobs that pay more as well with little experience needed.

That's great to hear that people are able to earn a living wage where you are.

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.

You're a youngster that purchased your first home?

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.

Yes we're all free to live by market forces. We're also all free to decide if we want regulations. That's the discussion here.

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