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Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

Pittsburg, CA seems to be a 57 minute train ride to Uber HQ and has houses rent for $1800. That kind of commute isn't shocking for any global city. You could save a lot of money living there and nabbing one of these big salaries, and ideally you'd only come into the office 3x a week.

I'm not from the Bay but seems you could hack together a much better situation if your office is in SF vs Valley, due to BART and more land east of the Bay.

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Your forgetting last mile times in that calculation. If you lived in pittsburgh it's unlikely you'll be living by the BART station, which means an extra 10-20m on your commute.

I Caltrain to work, and the "last mile" … on both ends … is the majority of my commute.

I agree you can hack together a better take-home pay situation, but Pittsburg, CA isn't exactly a quiet, pleasant suburb... it's more like shooting-and-stabs-ville. There are, of course, safer suburbs - with commensurately higher prices.

You can generally assume that if a property near San Francisco is affordable, there's something wrong with it: usually something like 'not actually being near San Francisco' or 'crime'.

That is true but also does not account for BART delays. A friend commutes that way and it is usually more of a 1.5 hour commute.

Having grown up around that area, and now living in Redwood City, that $1800/month house is surrounded by bad neighborhoods and a broken school district.

Concord and Martinez would be a much better and slightly closer option. I found 3bed 2bath rental Concord for $2300 last year for example.

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