I recently looked at moving from SanJose to Mountain View (aka closer to Google). The rents fell off approximately linearly with distance to MountainView. If you put a dollar amount to the falloff for a 2 bedroom... it corresponded to approximately $50-75 per hour of daily commute time. So you're "paying" $50-75/hr to live closer to work.

Using Oakland as an example (2 hours of commute daily * 20 days), that's ~$2000 less in monthly rent compared to a comparable place in MountainView. Which is about right...

[Assuming you moved into areas that weren't themselves local hotbeds such as SF, PaloAlto, or Atherton.]

Yes, I said you could do a little better. But rents over there are going up faster than the city, and the places that are convenient to BART are the most expensive.

Add in the cost of a car (which you need if you're living over there) and a daily BART commute, and you've easily added on $500-$1000 a month in transportation expenses. Again, housing around here is an efficient market, modulo the cost of commuting.

$1500 a month isn't "a little better." And Oakland is far from being a cripplingly long way out in the 'burbs.

Plenty of people -- most people? -- in SF have a car too, and no, you don't actually need $500/month for a car. And hey, it's eminently possible to live in Oakland without a car if you really feel that's a priority.

I agree with you: the market is efficient. It's efficient and filled with people who put a big premium on being near the hip areas of SF. If you have less money than those people, you can get more monetarily efficient by being willing to be farther from the hip areas of SF. If you have identical preferences to a bunch of other people making $100,000-$150,000 in an area averse to adding housing density, then... well, you're going to be bidding a lot for a limited supply of housing.

Look, you're preaching to the choir about not living in "the hip areas of SF". People around here have lost their minds -- they all want to crowd into the same 20-ish blocks of trendy real estate, and pretend that it's the city's fault when those blocks are expensive. But, I digress...

My point is that if a company wants you to work in SF, you should be demanding a salary commensurate with the costs of that lifestyle. Making an excuse for the company not to pay you is silly. Making a daily BART commute and living in Oakland is fine, if that's what you want to do, but you shouldn't be doing it because a tech startup won't pay you enough to afford housing near where you work.

> People around here have lost their minds -- they all want to crowd into the same 20-ish blocks of trendy real estate

It would help if more than ~20 blocks of San Francisco were conveniently accessible by subway. BART, MUNI, and Caltrain are woefully inadequate.