Sunday, September 5, 2010

Grey Lady Covers the Bay, is not A-OK

I learned from reading this that many well paid employees of the City and County of San Francisco live somewhere else, and deprive the city of their spending and taxes. Boo friggin hoo. From the article, it seems that most of the people moving out of town are making well into the 6 figures, and are living in the lush landscapes of Sonoma country (or at least San Mateo. Why would you move to San Mateo when you could afford to live in San Francisco?). The article, however, lists the number of city employees in several nearby counties, but not the two closest - Marin and Alameda. I would imagine many or even most of the SF employees who live out of the city live in Alameda country (which includes Berkeley and Oakland), because it is easily accessible by public transportation (BART), has less expensive housing, much less expensive child care, and may have better public schools (it depends). These truths are not well represented in the article, which chooses extreme examples (125 miles away? 63 year old mother with school age kids?) at the cost of describing the real and difficult choices people make.