[jordonwii]

> Lower income people live there because there are a lot of service jobs for unskilled workers

> What you have is a situation where these workers have to be in SF or NYC because that’s where the service jobs are

Well, yes, I intentionally was including everyone, not just people working six-figure office jobs: everyone else also benefits significantly from living in a place with a large and growing job market. Growth in high-paying white-collar jobs generally leads to even faster growth in the wages and number of less-skilled jobs in the same place.

Historically, there is also a wage premium for unskilled workers in larger metros - today much of that surplus flows to landlords instead, thanks again to under-building of housing in those areas. Even in SF, wages for the lowest-income workers have grown slightly faster than CoL over the last ~decade (thanks in part to the effect of rent-control for long-time tenants).

> Someone receiving UBI can move from SF to Bakersfield.

This is true iff UBI is generous enough that many of the people who work those service jobs would choose to live on it without being employed - at $1000/month, I suspect that would not be very many. If people want to be employed, living near the much larger and growing job market of the Bay Area would remain much more attractive than living in Bakersfield. The fundamental issue would be unchanged AFAICT.