There's a kind of unfairness in small communities creating safe and nurturing environments for families, educating children well, then waving farewell as their young adults move to a city far away. It's especially unfair if the young adults would just as soon stay in their hometowns given comparable opportunities.

He's part of the college track, where it's not uncommon for students to graduate and attend Ivies or other good universities.

But he also gets to interact with people across racial, religious, and socio-economic groups. So he won't freak out and be terrified to leave his insular, closed little community and experience the bigger world.

Whether or not something is fair is a subjective statement, and when stated like this it reads like nothing more than a veneer on entitlement.

At the end of the day, "fairness" is a quaint ideal held by people that wish that power structures were different than they are. Life is not fair; it is ruled by politics, power and leverage in a Hobbesian fashion. While I enjoy urban living, I did not choose to play the emigrate-everywhere version of "modern life". I did what I needed to because the economics of the situation demanded it.

This is why the rural complaint rings hollow to me. The economy decides where you go and what you do, not some suburban ideal.

Also, if calling it unfair is subjective, so is calling it fair. Urban areas could just as easily be the entitled ones in this narrative. There is concern about ethical trade when buying goods from third world countries, but there is no concern when swaths of Appalachia and the Upper Midwest resemble a third world country in many respects. We have cosmopolitan types fretting about Whole Foods exporting the entire Andean quinoa crop, leaving locals little to eat. But there isn't similar concern about whether American towns are being likewise exploited.

I don't mean to belittle your situation but..an hour seems like fantastic commuting time. Most people I work with take an hour to an hour and a half to get to work. Up until our office moved there was two guys that had a 2 hour trip into work every day. Most people I know would kill to have an hour commute.

But you're also kind of missing the point of my post, focusing on one small tree and forgetting there's a whole forest out there. Whether it's an hour, or an hour and a half, or 45 minutes isn't the point-- the point is we should optimizing it as close to zero as possible.

Yes.

> Commuting time is wasted.

Commuting time is a reserved time, which makes it less useful because it's inflexible, but it isn't necessarily wasted. I have quite a few podcasts I listen to, and there's some I'm interested in listening to more than all but the most interesting TV shows on. I have a short commute, just 20 minutes or so each way, and I only do it three times a week, but I find myself happy to run errands after work because it gives me more time when I can listen to the shows I want, as I'm at that point where they stack up faster than I can listen to them, and that's with me aggressively culling the ones I never seem to get to because there are so many I like slightly more so I never have time for them.

Commuting can be a wasted time or you can try to use it for what it is, a block of time where you have limited options, and try to make the best of those options.

Public transit shouldn't be reserved for major east-coast cities and for poor people.

I agree, but that's not all there is. There are audio books, serialized fiction, narrated short stories in every medium you can think of, extended learning, and I'm sure more I can't think of. Finding something to do in this time is less a problem of content and more a problem of knowing it exists.

It of course doesn't negate that it does take time away you could choose to do something else, but it can make the time less onerous.

> Public transit shouldn't be reserved for major east-coast cities and for poor people.

Public transit doesn't change the equation all that much though. It means you need to be less actively involved in the process, so there's more available to you (visual mediums), but it's still time that is reserved for commuting. You aren't physically playing with your children during that time, or visiting with family.

Quick access routes to economic hubs might easy associated problems somewhat (double digit percentages if you're lucky), but it doesn't actually change the equation that is at play here, which is that dense groups of people have many benefits, and living close to that is desirable, and we all know what happens when demand outstrips supply.

The biggest gains you'll probably ever see in this area are likely to be had by putting less restrictions on an entirely different dimension of travel. Group your population up, not just out.

There's natural network effects to people congregating in larger cities rather than small towns (at least towns too far from cities to commute). There's a reason most industry is located in cities. Instead of trying to fight these natural effects, you need to concentrate on using technology to counter the downsides.

Why don't people just move closer, or change jobs?

Why can't you move? If real estate is twice as expensive, just pick a place half the size?

Don't you value your own time---wasted in commuting---at any positive dollar figure at all? If you spend an hour commuting each way for 21 days a month, that's 52 hours a month extra that you spend on `work', even if your employer doesn't gain anything from it.

Which is doublespeak for him feeling entitled to live in a huge and inefficient property for no reason other than him liking it.

Perhaps there are families out there that need more space, would like to be self-sufficient especially in emergency situations and feel happier outside of an urban center.

I think if we build these types of communities/houses, we should have a way of sustaining them. This man wants to work and is not asking for a handout. This should be celebrated and the person should be given work to do to earn his keep.

If you were really eco-conscious you could probably get more gains out of owning your own house. Especially since most houses have already been built, whereas most of the new construction I see in my city (Baltimore) is going towards mixed-use condos/apartment towers for all the trendy folks wanting to live downtown. If they really cared about the environment and efficiency they'd be fixing-up the thousands of run-down homes.

That's pretty small relative to the extra energy consumption from having to commute farther, and the land that you might live on could be used for solar power regardless of whether you live there.

It's definitely not typical since I'm in the minority of solar panel and electric car owners who are within commute range on a single charge. But there you have it. It's at least possible.

For purposes of that calculation, it's double-counting to include the solar panel energy, because we can already put a solar panel at that location regardless of whether you live and commute from there; your choice to live there did not expand our solar energy capability, and you're still avoidably drawing down the supply of clean energy.

Just to clarify: I'm not criticizing your decision, only justifying why it's not an argument against this being a systemic inefficiency.

But I guess I'm really getting into the definition of efficiency. I suppose in my mind I'm considering clean energy as more efficient even though from an economic POV fossil fuels are still more efficient based on price (though probably not for long).

So in conclusion, you're right. I'd just add the caveat that faced with the reality of a mostly uncoordinated system run by large groups of people with competing interests, you can possibly find higher efficiency (depending on how you look at it) from making your own intelligent individual decisions while living in a large home away from the city center.

Perhaps repairing the houses would be less efficient than building new apartment blocks, I'm really getting well beyond my knowledge or expertise. But I'd somewhat presume that instead of building new high rise apartments downtown it would be more efficient overall if we refurbished some of the crumbling residential areas.

Course that only applies to older cities mostly on the East Coast.

The cost of the housing stock is of minor importance in these arguments, and nobody suggest tearing down existing houses just for the sake of efficiency. That wouldn't make any sense.

(A house build and paid for once can stand for hundred years or more, but only with a constant expense on maintenance in either money or sweat.)

What we want is denser urban cores. That way there will be less sprawl, and even the country pumpkins would have shorter commutes, because the countryside could start so much closer to the city centres: given the same or even larger number of people in them cities, they would take up less space.

Fully charging the Leaf should be about the same as my Fiat 500e, and that's roughly equivalent to running a space heater for 18 hours. I'd conservatively estimate your commute takes 1/8th to 1/4th that power. (There are lots of details I don't know that could affect that.) It is roughly the same going by that.

Also, in most localities in the US, good luck getting custody of any kids if they don't have a separate bedroom.

On a policy level, we can make almost arbitrary amounts of rooms in cities: just build up.

In essence, the paper argues that highly-leveraged homeownership causes NIMBYs.

Being able to get rental real estate for your business. In the suburbs you now need a loan, credit, collateral, 30% down, etc to build your own building as there generally isn't a rash of empty floors on skyscrapers like cities do.

Being able to have face to face meetings frequently with your investors, board members, and bankers and other people who hold your pursestrings.

Being able to find investors in the first place. Picture two similar business plans. One by a group in the far out suburbs and one nearby. As an investor, which one would you lean towards, especially if you expect yourself to do any hands on work or attend board meetings?

Being able to get to the airport and mass transportation hubs quickly.

Being able to wine and dine investors and customers in places that will impress them.

Being able to court youngsters and urban professionals who want a city life and won't even interview in the suburbs. (Hi! This is me and almost everyone I know.)

Being near urban universities for the above reasons and job fairs.

Being near your competitors to help you poach their staff.

Being able to work with a local government that understands business needs and not being subjected to a 'board of elders' of out of touch 70 year old suburban retirees who will bikeshed the shit out of any proposal of yours and NIMBY you to death.

Being able to quickly expand by taking more office space instead of, you guessed it, building another fucking building.

Being able to order 1gb fiber and have in here in 30 days as opposed to 360 days in the suburbs and that's on top of paying tens of thousands of dollars for that last mile to your office, which they will need to dig up just for you.

...and yes, maybe some perks of city life as you mention. Work life should have pleasant parts and it helps attract talent.

discretionary income: income minus taxes and base housing costs

hour lost to work: time at work plus time commuting or otherwise stuff you wouldn't otherwise have to do

That metric captures dynamics like "yeah there are jobs, but with much higher cost of living, so it cancels out the DIPHLoW" and "yeah you can live where it's cheaper but you have to commute an extra 90 minutes, which eliminates the impact on DIPHLow".

This is to capture that increasing working hours from 8h to 24h a day even when pay would be more than tripled, would leave you with a very sad life.

(Shadow) price of time would be a good one, too? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_price) In some sense, that's the same as marginal cost of your time, expressed in dollars or some `utils' or `hedons'.

Then you can say, eg taking a longer commute for a cheaper house would value my time at 30 hedons per hour---but spending time with my daughter is worth at least 50 hedons per hour. So it would be bad trade-off.

(Or am I not getting a pun here?)

Edit: Also thought of "discretionary income per UnFree hour" (DIPUPH) ... not sexy either though.

I've read the above several places, but anecdotally, I live in Raleigh (technically Garner) commute 25-30 minutes to work, and have one of the longer commutes of people I work with.

As a general yard stick of how you implicitely value your time:

$4k / 52h <= $77

Now, your current place probably costs money too, and your commute won't be cut to zero. You can plug in the numbers yourself:

($4k - current rent) / (52h - commute from apartment in SF) =: implicit value of one of your hours.

I hope you are making more than 77 dollar an hour as a programmer (?) in SF.

(Yes, I know, taxes complicate the picture. But only by at most a multiplier of 2.)

Whether your commute takes 3 hours or 3 minutes, you are paid the exact same because you can't work an extra hour instead of commuting for that $77.

Others folks that are on H-1Bs can't even work on side-hustles because of immigration law so what are they really missing out on?

The existence of this opportunity cost doesn't require that you literally be able to put in an extra hour for extra pay.

[1] For example, you could go based on "how much would I pay for an extra hour to spend doing XYZ?"

I do the same calculations simply to figure out if something is worth it.

For instance, laundry. I hate laundry. I could walk 100 steps to the laundromat, pay ~$5 to wash it. Or I could pay someone $15 to walk up to my door, take my laundry, wash it, fold it and return it to my door.

Ehhh... not that hard of a choice. The pain is worth $10.

I used to commute 1.5 hours every day and it was so incredibly painful, so I shopped around and found a cheap(-ish) place close to my work. My life is so much better now and I am much happier.

Looking at your pay per hour is just a decent yardstick for when you should trade off time vs money. No need to find an outside job for the yardstick to be applicable.

Eg should you order groceries online, or go to the shop, or plant vegetables in your own garden? It's all a matter of time and money, and also hassle vs enjoyment---since some people dread going grocery shopping, and some people enjoy gardening.

As a subjective experience, crowded public transit and public transit with sufficient seating are entirely different things.

I was recently talking with a former software company founder who started his company in Boise, Idaho in the late-90s.

The first few years, their product was a success and they doubled or more in size every year. Then, they started to plateau even though demand was still through the roof.

They couldn't keep up with demand, because they ran out of developers who lived in or were willing to move to Boise. In the words of the founder, "Every qualified developer within 100 miles of us got a job-offer, until there weren't any left."

The obvious solution would have been for them to move to Seattle or San Francisco. But all the founders were from Boise, and were committed to keeping the company in their home town.

At the end, they were paying qualified developers Silicon Valley wages, in addition to signing bonuses equivalent to a year's salary just to get them to move to Boise. As you can imagine, that severely hampered their ability to compete.

Finally, they sold to Microsoft. The founders assumed that the cache of Microsoft's name would be enough to draw developers, but Microsoft had the same problem. After a few years, Microsoft moved the whole operation back to Redmond.

All that to say, you (and I coincidentally) are in the minority. Most creative and technical professionals want to live in nice, big cities. The great thing for those of us that don't fit that mold, is that it's easier than ever to work remotely.

So, yes, I made a choice to get into software development. It wasn't an informed choice.

How about we come at it from the reverse angle: why are all those 55-person tech companies founded in Seattle? They pay more taxes. They pay more for office space and pretty much everything else. They create a longer commute for everybody by centralizing all the work. What's the problem with spreading-out a bit?

Anyway, the question was how to help blue-collar workers, and I just gave an answer that amounts to basically, "move jobs where they are".

This is all interconnected, and nothing is going to change it in the foreseeable future. I'm sorry, it's just the reality. You can commute, work remote, move to the city, struggle to put together a teeny company in a small town, or do some other kind of work. That's just modern reality.

That's not to say they're idiots, of course not. But it might be to say that the reasons for placing their company in the center of a large city aren't very rational or well-considered.

And lots of them do. See all the startups in decidedly suburban Silicon Valley. (And yes, I am being a bit snarky here in equating everything outside of cities, be that suburban sprawl or proper countryside.)

Also see SAP in Walldorf.

I think there are quite a few companies which will accept remote workers, so in some sense, you can work in tech literally anywhere.

My understanding is that if companies were more spread out, then compensation would also be lower because there's less competition for employees. With compensation also being lowered, wouldn't you just be in the same situation because while real estate is more expensive in Seattle, salaries are higher too?

As salaries increase, the real estate near those companies will naturally increase. I don't see why having companies be spread farther out would change this relationship.

I live in Seattle but grew up in the suburbs and also sometimes miss living in a house (mainly because I play piano). But even my friends who live in the suburbs are struggling to save up to own a house, so as far as I can tell it's not any different. If anything, it's even better working in the city because as far as I can tell it's easier to save money since even if you save the same percentage of income you would make more.

First world problems indeed. I can own a dwelling much larger than the vast majority of people living in the world can afford, on a spacious lot, or can live in a much smaller dwelling with much more convenient access to my place of work, but can't have both!

Sorry, but you're not ranking high on my list of people in desperate need of government intervention to fix your problem.

Well, that's been our strategy with these red state rust belts for decades and it doesn't work. These states receive much more in taxes than they pay. These get doled in various ways, and some ways very close to what you're proposing[2]. It didn't work. Unemployment and wages are still poor.

The larger issue here is why do you get that wonderful suburban home and I get a tiny condo and yet somehow I'm taxed extra so you can live, and lets be frank here, a wasteful and high-carbon footprint lifestyle? Urban migration, telework, and re-training are the real solutions here. Everything else is just welfare with 'make work' jobs that will evaporate the second those tax credits get cut or the company in question has a bad quarter and realizes it can just eliminate that office, that only really exists as a tax shelter, for cost savings.

Lastly, the "come to the suburbs for savings" is a staple in business. Every suburban mayor is constantly flirting with urban companies to move jobs there as he's empowered to give significant tax sweetheart deals and other incentives. In fact, this is one of the main policy platforms for suburban mayors: bring in jobs. This is a normal part of suburban political life. Its not a new idea, its the status quo. One of my previous employers moved from downtown Chicago to the suburbs exactly for this. Ultimately, you can only poach so many jobs, so its not some magical solution for suburban and rural unemployment.

[1] Because thats where the money ultimately comes from, we wont cut medicare or SS or our military in half to pay for this, we'll just raises taxes on the middle class.

[2] Tax credits for creating jobs in poor areas are common public policy on both the state and federal levels. For example and were vastly increased after the 2008 meltdown. These were so popular many corporations not only didn't pay tax but received free money from the government for it! Worse, they're easily abused eve before they create jobs (if they even do, its easy to take these credits for new offices you were planning on opening anyway):

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/08/11/1B-Tax-Cre...

I'm not proposing anything. This is a casual conversation on a web forum, not drafting a party platform.

> a massive tax[1] increase

I'm definitely not proposing anything massive.

> on urban workers who live with urban compromises (traffic, high prices, crime, etc) to be near work so that other workers in the suburbs can enjoy big lawns and beautiful single-family homes?

I live in the suburbs and I have to deal with all of those things. Remember: my exact gripe is I have to commute into the city to be employed. While I'm there, I'm subjected to the same traffic, high prices, crime, etc. as all other city dwellers are. And I get even more traffic coming and going.

And I don't see anything wrong with people who want to own a lawn or a single-family home being able to own one.

> Well, that's been our strategy with these red state rust belts for decades

No it hasn't.

You know what? Nevermind. I don't want to get into any more political discussion right now. Just relax a bit. It's just a casual conversation on a web form, I don't run the RNC or anything and I wasn't drafting a law and I don't need to be yelled at for how wrong I am.

There are software jobs outside of Seattle.

i was just reading an article about a company with offices near St Louis. They took the tax incentives to open an office, promised like 150 jobs, and now they're all but shuttering it and laying off the 77 IT workers they had. And contracting their jobs to a company in India.

The tax incentives are definitely there. But the incentive to keep the jobs there isn't, when offshoring is so in vogue still.