Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Recently heard about a family that relocated to Phoenix to get a break on rent and whose primary earner commutes to SF most weekdays *by plane.* We're incenting this via the growing gap between career & housing opportunities. Plastic bag & straw bans are environmental theater.https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1133509769702957056 …

The fact that this happens is not a failure of SF Bay Area policies, it's a failure to price externalities. In fact, I'd argue that anecdotes like these suggest the problem is less with the Bay and more with California and America in general.

By "this" I mean fly-in commuters. Certainly SFBA has lots of policy improvement possible, but the fly-in commuters are more a sign of global, not local, policy failure.

Nobody *wants* to deal with the airport rush and manhandling each morning before work. Barring a horrifically unmanaged housing crisis in an area with exceptional career opportunities, you would not see this behavior — it's bizarre

The different in rent between a new 4 bedroom McMansion in Dublin, CA and Phoenix, AZ is about $1500 m/o. Let's round up and say $2000. There is no reason a semi-regular 1,200 mile round trip commute should cost less than that a month.

They bought a home in Phoenix, where the median home price is about 1/4 of what it is in Dublin