Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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

The only useful measure of housing affordability is rent. If they chose to buy because they prefer the lifestyle of owning, then that's a different conversation and only reinforces my point that housing affordability is only a minor part of the fly-in commuter story.

The Phoenix commuter is more like a hedge fund manager taking a helicopter from the Hamptons than rent-burdened tenant paying out the nose to live in squalor. Sympathetic cases: family moves to Phoenix and takes a lower paying job or works remote w/ total productivity loss.

I'm sorry, guess I just strongly disagree with your apparently deeply considered categories of sympathy

Just spitballing here, but I'm guessing that people who have children care a lot less about where they fall on your Personal Sympathy Metric because they have to consider what will happen if they choose renting over ownership somewhere with unpredictable price stability