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Comment by Aspos | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate and explain this further to a curious non-american? So, sounds like the problem is in transportation: if train ride from a low-cost area to a high cost area would take minutes and cost almost nothing, then the problems you mentioned would not be an issue, right? So, why try to fight the laws of economics? Why not let the rich where they want, and let the poor commute to high-job areas by solving the transportation problem? Why there is so much ado and drama? What am I missing here?

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- The basic geography of the Bay Area: it's big, it's polycentric, it's hilly, there's a huge body of water on the direct route between many origin/destination pairs. The train ride can take hours and can actually cost quite a bit.

- 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.

I've often wondered what it would be like if we blocked off the southern part of the bay and drained it

Various people have proposed it. The most recent one I know of was Larry Page.

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.

That's basically what large parts of that area already are.

Some of this is ancedotal from a coworker who has a friend who works in a "support role" in silicon valley. That being something like the guy who keeps the AC going, janitor or working in a FAANG coffee shop. While there is some transportation, the issue is, some of this friends in this role, have to take a 1-2 hour commute (using public transit) since they have been priced out that far.

Why don't they just get a job that is a 10 minute commute? Even poor businesses in America want their AC running sometimes.

That's what a lot of them do. I live in Gilroy, and my neighbor is an HVAC guy that moved from San Jose to Gilroy, and only services as far north as Morgan Hill.

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.

Because poor people often live together with our poor people and rely on each other, and the question of "why don't you, your partner, your parents who help you look after your children, and everyone else don't just get a job in the same area that won't pay much less than what all of you are getting now?" has many answers.

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.

Because of NIMBY. Basically the rich people at the city's center won't let regulations pass that would increase density and therefore more poor people living around them. They like the current status quo because "they got theirs". They limit what kind of housing can be built, how tall it can be, etc and price out all but the richest land developers who in turn charge ultra high rent for the limited housing. I don't even think they necessarily need to build "poor" housing as much as loosening regulations and allow other than historic buildings to exist.

> Why not let the rich where they want, and let the poor commute to high-job areas by solving the transportation problem? Why there is so much ado and drama? What am I missing here?

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".

San Mateo County rejected BART expansion when it was initially constructed, which means that essentially all suburban rail traffic into San Francisco goes through the same tunnel under the Bay, and trains are regularly packed to the gills already.

You are not missing much, it's a systemic issue of zero public transportation, constantly growing demand, broken housing market, zoning, and decades of scalability problems.

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