If their friends and families care so much they should take them in, not put them on the public dole. As retirees they are probably better off living somewhere cheaper anyway, like a retirement community in an exurb, where everything, food, medical, and entertainment was a lot cheaper.

If we're going to set aside subsidized apartments in newly constructed buildings close to job centers for low or moderate income people, I don't think it's especially callous or outrageous to insist that they be provided to people who need to be close to job centers for employment reasons.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like either outcome, really, I'd prefer to see an elderly person get to stay close to where he or she lived for many years. But I also see the effect that these brutal commutes have on low income workers who can'r afford to live near the job centers, how little they see their families or kids, how much it takes out of them. Seems like there's a lot of harm there you aren't really considering.

Even in that case, though, I might be ok with telling people that they may have to transfer units if they are no longer working. We are talking about providing free or heavily subsidized housing for people who can't afford it, and there isn't a unlimited supply of this, especially near high cost job centers. There's pain in the displacement you have described, but I was responding to the comment that said that it is a warped point of view to prioritize working people when assigning spots in subsidized housing in job centers. There's a lot of pain in the commutes low income workers must endure to feed their families, too, a pretty heavy human toll involved in soul crushing commutes from the exurbs to the job centers. Would it warped to say to low income seniors: "we will continue to provide you with clean, safe housing, but now that you are no longer working, we will provide this further from the job centers, so that we can reserve the more expensive and scare units near the job centers so that low income workers don't have to commute two hours each way in traffic and rarely see their families."

Honestly, it does seem a reasonable allocation of scarce public resources to me.

This is the common retort.

Here's the thing: This goes for pretty much everyone ever born somewhere, so, uh, everyone.

You simply can't have everyone live somewhere. Imagine if everyone in the world wanted to live on a a small, 10 square mile island. You'd agree this is impossible (blah blah blah, current technology, blah blah blah), right?

How do you decide who gets to live there and who doesn't?

At least, IMHO, the best way is not "blood right" (IE i was born there, or spent most of my life there, i get to live there). It's essentially being "born lucky". It wouldn't work anyway. At the rate people have kids, you still run out of room. It's simply not a viable mechanism of deciding who gets to live where.

What is happening here is no different. If you have too many people who want to live in one place, you have to decide who gets to live there somehow. While i'm not necessarily a fan of "whoever pays the most", i'm even less of a fan of "because i spent 50 years there" or "i grew up there". Great, so you got to enjoy it for 50 years, let someone else have a turn.

Let's also add that the only reason, at all, those people are there in the first place, is because someone moved away. The likelihood that we are talking about people where generations of their family lived and died in the same place is very very low. In all likelihood, the only reason they have these "support networks", etc, is because someone uprooted the family and moved them somewhere else. After all, the vast majority of us are immigrants. How soon we seem to forget that.

Do i feel for folks who get displaced? Of course. But i don't believe in magic, and, eventually, you run out of room.

(now, there is a reasonable argument we aren't there yet, and we should do it to provide as nice an environment for people as long as we can, but in the end, someone is going to get screwed here)

There's two sides to that coin.

You could eliminate Section 8 today and this would not be solved in the bay area.

But you don't need to throw out attacks like "warped." :-)

It is unethical and impractical to hold wealthier individuals accountable for the financial missteps of individuals. Especially when hardworking and financially responsible people get crowded out from living in a desirible location who could actually afford it.

Of course, this assumes that anyone can acquire as much wealth as they desire regardless of circumstance, which, as we have seen numerous times, is as much a "theory" as gravity is.

Are a bunch of 20/30 something tech workers really wealthy? How much money do these kids have in the bank? How much school debt? What percent of their income do they have to spend on rent?

In the calculus of renting vs buying a home you gain flexibility in renting. You can pick up and leave with minimal hassle. The risk you incur by doing so is that housing and rental prices might go up. You can't just reap the benefits of renting and then claim foul when the market prices them out and make others pay for it indirectly via externalities. If we're talking about people who are young enough that they've been priced out of home ownership in San Francisco their entire lives, then maybe they should have seen the writing on the wall and made a life for themselves somewhere they could afford it.

And, if their families want these people around so badly, why aren't they boarding them? It's the norm in plenty of other cultures.