Hacker News Reader

Comment by idreyn | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com