by bryanrasmussen | 2025-09-10 04:13:40+00:00
>Explain it like I am five. Also include in your answer why just living somewhere affordable is no longer an option

OK well, I was hoping to get something done this morning since I woke at 5, but I will provide an edge case.

Sometimes people are living in a high end community, but something bad happens to them, and when the bad thing happens to them the community has programs in place to help them. You might think that the community having programs in place to help them is good because that's what communities should do but it has a hidden bad side called lock-in, because getting the program to help you often takes a lot of time and effort and then when you have it you depend on it and you can't really leave.

But sometimes when bad things happen it means more bad things happen! The first bad thing causes other bad things to happen!

Like if you have a child born that needs a lot of special help and you start spending all your spare time helping them and going through all the work of getting the community to help which means undoubtedly months if not years of fighting for your child and getting stressed and then after a few years of that you can't handle your high paying job anymore you get fired.

So now you can't afford to be in the high end community!

If you move you have to move with the child that needs help, but moving is extra difficult because you have a child that needs help! Also maybe because you lost your job you don't really have the money to move anyway, because moving costs a lot of money! Maybe your best bet is to try to find some way to stay in the expensive community because that community is forced to help you because you have all the paperwork in place.

Also moving takes a lot of effort, you couldn't handle your fancy job anymore because of the stresses of having whatever problem you have (doesn't have to be a child with problems could be other things) and so you might not be able to handle all the stresses of moving, hell you might not even really be able to handle the stresses of searching for a new place to live far away.

But hey, there is a lady here with an RV. So you move into that for a small time until you can get a place in the community that provides help for your problem and devote your time to getting such a place, because that is actually the most sensible solution.

Now admittedly this is an edge case and whatever reasons these people have for wanting to build in Palo Alto, a place they obviously can't afford, those reasons might be different. I do get some feeling that people have a job in the area and need to be in that area to keep that job feeling for some of the characters described in the article.

Those people seem sort of rational (they're after all maintaining a place to live and not living on the street). But you're right they are doing something that on its face seems irrational. Your conclusion on seeing this irrationality seems to be that they are just stupid, much stupider than you.

My conclusion on seeing someone who is rational doing something that seems irrational is that there is something I don't know.

on edit: changed searching for a job to searching for a new place to live.