Comment by nhashem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhashem | Hacker News Reader

As a resident of Los Angeles, this seems anecdotally (which has the usual caveats) obvious to me. I saw home ownership lead to issues with employment within the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

There is a lot of "affordable" ($400K to $600K) single family homes in the San Fernando Valley, or towards Orange County, so I had a lot of coworkers buy homes in those areas. If you work in Venice, a house in Torrance is about a 45 minute commute by car. I know this will sound absurd to a lot of people in HN, but if you told a Los Angelan your commute to work was 45 minutes each way, they would say "that's pretty good."

However, if you bought a home in Torrance and live there and a company in downtown LA wants to hire you, even though you're only driving about another 8 miles or so, your commute will probably explode close to an hour and a half, and at least one day a week there'll be some clsuterfuck of an accident on one of the freeways, and you'll have the lovely experience of leaving your house at 8:00am and somehow still being late to your 10:00am stand-up meeting. Fun times!

So I saw home ownership cause former coworkers limit their economic mobility to within one section of one city. For them, it was an option to simply wait until a desirable job opened up in the areas with a bad-but-not-intolerable commute, or they were able to mitigate commutes by negotiating flexible hours with their employers (e.g. working 7am to 3pm, or 11am to 8pm, or only coming in 2-3 days a week, etc).

I recognize Los Angeles' traffic is about as bad as it gets as far as a home ownership "anchoring" someone, but if home ownership causes a reduction in mobility for professionals in a high-earning and high-demand field, I can only imagine the kind of impact it has on the rest of America.

Venice to Torrance is about 20 miles? Commuting great distances of 20-30 miles to work will hopefully be solved sometime in the latter half of the 21st century.

I don't think most people in America suffer in quite the same way. Ok, the NYC area can be that bad but most people use mass transit. Maybe there's room to make the roads even wider in CA?

Seriously, the problem is self-inflicted and was easily avoidable with some better urban planning 4-5 decades ago.

s/urban planning/less restrictive zoning/

LA has great transportation bones and layouts (http://www.humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-...), but it cannot densify, so it's stuck at a bad level of too dense for cars to work well but not dense enough to be primarily transit based. Metro LA is denser than metro Boston, SF, or Chicago.

True, and sadly LA is more dense than like 95% of the places people live in the US (including "cities" like Houston, Phoenix, and Jacksonville). If they can't make transit work in LA, that's pretty bleak.

It's not really fair to compare LA county to single cities. LA county contains something like 80+ cities that grew into each other.

"You have to have a car in LA" is little by little becoming outdated. We rented a car for our 3 day vacation in LA and ended up ditching it and taking the light rail and subway everywhere. Even the little shuttle bus up to the Griffith observatory to see the Hollywood sign. And it's only $5 for a day pass. It saved us a lot of time, gas, & parking money. LA's rail services are spotless as well. The only thing that's missing is the density to truly make it a city and not just one big crowded suburb.

This is a striking contrast to recent news of Amazon's expansion of their grocery delivery system to Los Angeles. How do they justify offering grocery delivery services in a city with such poor urban planning?

Delivery has "locality of reference" (to borrow a term from computer science): if the density of customers is high enough, a delivery truck can travel to a particular neighborhood and spend the entire day on local streets, where the traffic isn't bad. The truck only has to use the crowded freeways to travel from the warehouse to the neighborhood and back. And it can do that during off-peak traffic hours -- few people need to have their groceries delivered at 8am, when everyone is on their way to work. When I visited LA, I was surprised at how empty the freeways could be outside of rush hour.

> if you told a Los Angelan your commute to work was 45 minutes each way, they would say "that's pretty good."

Malarkey. I live in LA & I don't know a single person who would say that.

well... at least the metro is making progress.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com