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"He [Yelp CEO] continued by noting that he's 'been focused' on the high cost of living in San Francisco and has backed a group trying to bring awareness to the issue.

He also noted that he's often spoken out about the importance of making housing more affordable."

The CEO of Yelp has no control over the cost of housing in SF, but he does have control over what Yelp pays its employees. If he was really concerned about housing prices being too high for his employees to afford, he could give them all raises tomorrow.

Original discussion of this story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11138086

moving to less expensive neighborhood is not an option anymore?
From the original Medium post:

"I have to save as much of that as possible to pay my rent ($1245) for my apartment that’s 30 miles away from work because it was the cheapest place I could find that had access to the train, which costs me $5.65 one way to get to work."

Yes, that's Dolores' point. Living in the easy bay, I pay 2/3 her rent, and <$4 for the BART one way. And I don't have a roommate. If I had a roommate, I'd pay 1/3 her rent.
"I was not directly involved with firing her" => "I have someone else to do my dirty work".

I don't know why this one person's story bothers me so much personally. I think that it was her 50 lb bag of rice comment reminded me so much of old Charlie Chaplin bits.

I actually went and found my old Paypal account, gave her $50 bucks, and deleted my Yelp app.

"We didn't fire her because of the letter" ... yet the same night she wrote the letter she is suddenly fired?? C'mon...
That was my initial reaction though looks like a bit more info coming out that there may be other reasons and the letter may have been written in response to a pending firing. This made the front page of reddit which seems to have turned up some deleted posts.

https://archive.is/AR4XX/image < bourbon delivered to work http://imgur.com/5WJFUAF < "watch me get fired for this"

This tweet by Jeremy (Yelp CEO) speaks to the broader issue: "5/5 entry level jobs migrate to where costs of living are lower. Have already announced we are growing EAT24 support in AZ for this reason."

https://mobile.twitter.com/jeremys/status/701094909072150528

It's bizarre to me to imagine a city without entry-level jobs. I understand why this is the right business decision (well, except that I still don't understand why programmers need to be physically located in SF), but the resulting city seems extremely confusing. If you grow up in the city, do you move to another city to get a job? If you're designing systems for EAT24, and (your company belives that) in-person contact is needed to understand things, do you not get to understand how some of your employees work and how the systems you build impact them?
Not my company, but our very similar competitor in SF is moving their call center operations to Reno. I saw they were hiring for my specific job in Reno, at a 20% salary cut. I was tempted, very tempted... I'm sure the COL is so much cheaper there I would come out ahead, and those ski seasons...

Anyway, I thought it was a smart move of them to move their call center operations to Reno, we pay our reps $20 an hour, I bet they can get away with paying their reps $10 or $13 up there, not to mention how much they'll be saving on rent. Also the exec team etc can easily drive or fly up to Reno if needed.

Wonder if they'll have any problems staffing up there?

Did you factor in NV's lack of income tax, too?
Nope, but very good point! Hmm... maybe I'll chew on it a bit more and see if they're still hiring.
Housing Market again. While Tech has ALL the disruption like Uber, where is the one for property market?

3D Printing that print GREAT quality houses in cheap and fast way?

I really would invest, or donate if there is one.

> While Tech has ALL the disruption like Uber, where is the one for property market? ... 3D Printing that print GREAT quality houses in cheap and fast way

The cost to build a house is relatively cheap -- that's not the problem. The critical factor in housing prices is location.

In the case of SF/SV, it's a desirable place with limited housing supply. Techies, startups, tech corporations, and VCs have all convinced themselves that they need to be crammed into a tiny geographic area to thrive. This, coupled with relatively high wages, has driven up rents and home prices.

I imagine many of us assumed that tech would prevent this situation, by building faster, more reliable communication networks. Yet tech in SFBA wound up as a concentrated, insular industry (second, perhaps, to finance in NYC).

It wouldn't matter since land is a commodity vs something like uber which is a service. No matter how cheap you make the structures, the land prices will skyrocket to anything a bank will give a loan for under demand.

The only solution is what some execs are already doing. Taking fiscally impossible problems out of the equation and moving operations elsewhere.

> The only solution is what some execs are already doing.

The SMART execs... others like my old out of touch rich CEO are just totally clueless about the housing market here. He was actually shocked when he learned that my rent in Oakland was 2300 a month. He goes, "woah, that's really expensive!!" and raised his eyebrows. Then he kept talking about how I was overpaying until other people at lunch verified that yeah, that is how expensive it is around here now.

Like, how much do you THINK all your employees are paying to live here dude. Not all of us inherited mansions in Tiberon from our moms. (seriously, he was living in a $6 million dollar mansion in Tiburon that his mom gifted him).

So may be instead Hyperloop is the solution, quickly transport people from one place to another in a cheap way. People can live out of the city and 10 min within the Hyperloop traveling time. ( Not sure how far away that is but just a sample time )
True, but doesn't it seem simpler to just move operations to places your workers can afford?