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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Are people doing office work for $7.25 in Houston?

I agree that prices vary widely, I'm not sure it makes sense to take expensive places as typical.

Those office workers rely on a huge infrastructure of other services -- food preparation, cleaning, maintenance workers, parking lot attendants, etc. etc.

The people who work those jobs should have the same access to their worksites as anyone else. Our willingness to tell people who make less money they should just "live farther away" and have longer commutes is awful. No, we should fix our cities so that we support a range of incomes and workers in one place.

> Are people doing office work for $7.25 in Houston?

In that it's in an office building, yes. But it's not office work like sitting at a desk.

It may not be office work, but I bet it's location dependent (restaurant, janitor, grocery store).

Office jobs are less interchangeable than service jobs though. I'd expect someone with a job in a grocery store or restaurant to always be looking for a position closer to where they wanted to live compared to an office worker looking for suitable, better positions in locations that that would have a shorter commute.

(the service workers would be looking for better positions too, but the pay differences between similar positions are smaller there)

Does that matter when there are plenty of other businesses and services doing not office work to support the office workers?

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