While it is true that travel of excess distances simply cannot be avoided in some areas and jobs, I think allot of people in the US have made some poor job and home location choices. People in the LA area strike me as the most irresponsible driving not just into the center of town, but from one outer suburb to another on the opposite side of town. It's just insanity in many cases.
When I purchased our first and current home 6 years ago, commute is one of the primary factors that I considered. There were other areas of town that I had a preference to live in, but I knew that there was no practical reason for it and I don't believe that I made any sacrifice in the monetary value of my location by going against that. So I chose a home in a location that I felt would be centralized to my employment needs - then three years later my employer moved 4 miles to another section of town. My house however is nearly dead in the middle of the old location and the new location, keeping my car commute within 2/10 of a mile longer and equal time of what it was before, and extending my bicycle commute by only a half mile and a minute or two.
Meanwhile, some of my coworkers who opted to purchase homes in the far reaches of the area continue to enjoy a commute that wastes up to an hour of their time and fuel every single day. By my wage scale, that means they are giving up the economic equivalent minimum of $25 per day to driving. At an average 19 working days per month (subtracting for vacation and sick time), that is $475 they are giving up to commuting - without even considering fuel, insurance, and maintenance.
We have the attitude that you live where you work or work where you live. Until we are both retired, there simply remains no reason to treat our residence as a permanent housing solution. If for some reason my employer moves to furthest reaches of our town, we will move to the nearby area. It just makes too much sense to us not to.
I will concede that our area has limited socio-economic disparity from one part to the other, but I also believe that if most people just did a little math on what their commute really costs them, living close to their employer makes allot of sense.
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