Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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

And frankly, your comparison to the hypothetical hedge fund manager in the Hamptons is INSANE, and you should actually feel bad about it