Up at 3:30 a.m., Jackie Turner is out the door by 5:15 a.m., when it’s still pitch black outside in Brentwood — her new suburban hometown, a place where she actually could afford to buy a house.
Then the San Jose native hops in her car and joins the crowd — the thousands of mega-commuters who drive four, five and six hours daily to get to and from their eight-hour jobs in Silicon Valley, Oakland and San Francisco. Having purchased homes in less costly outlying areas, they travel through multiple microclimates on their way back to the Bay Area’s core, battling and occasionally outwitting gridlock, testing their emotional endurance.
“The commute is cray-cray,” Turner said. “It’s a drainer. It sucks the life out of you.”
It’s trouble in paradise.
When the U.S.Census Bureau crunched the numbers in 2013, it found that about 115,000 commuters traveled 90 or more minutes to their jobs in the San Francisco-Oakland and San Jose metropolitan areas. Those long-distance commuters are the heavy hitters — at the time, 3.9 percent of the total work force of more than 2.9 million — in a region where almost everyone understands the nightmare of the roads.
Given that thousands of new jobs have been added in the two years since and that housing prices have continued to climb — passing $1 million for a typical single family home in parts of the region — the pressure on homebuyers continues. It’s a good bet that even more middle class folks now find themselves driving out into exurbia on their way home from the office.
“It’s kind of like what you have to do if you want to own your own home,” said Guillermo Alvarez, a clinical supervisor who had rented in pricey Pleasant Hill before pulling the plug to buy a place in the less pricey and more distant Pittsburg-Antioch area. The cost: $316,000.
Turner, a database administrator who earns around six figures, found herself even further out, in Brentwood, whose population has more than doubled since 2000 as more people pushed into far eastern Contra Costa County. There she found a 3-bedroom, 1,600-square-foot home for $250,000 — 52 gridlocked miles away from her job in Milpitas, where she figures a similar house would easily have cost twice that.
It’s a common trade-off: “I work with people who commute from Modesto to Milpitas every day,” Turner said. “And from Patterson! Do you know where Patterson is?”
It’s in Stanislaus County, 27 miles southeast of Tracy, 70 miles from Milpitas.
“How is that even possible?”
When the Bay Area News Group asked readers about their faraway homes and long commutes, the responses flooded in. They described a wide assortment of grueling drives, including from Manteca to Mountain View (140 miles round trip); Los Banos to San Francisco (240 miles); American Canyon to Santa Clara (150 miles); Discovery Bay to South San Jose (130 miles); Patterson to Palo Alto (170 miles); Tracy to Walnut Creek (90 miles); Modesto to Campbell (170 miles); Hollister to Mountain View (120 miles); Newman to downtown San Jose (190 miles).
The migration took off in the boom years of 2000 to 2006, when traffic between the Bay Area and outlying counties jumped 20 percent, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). Country highways suddenly were choked by commuters.
Then and now, the explanation is the same: “Families with high levels of education and high levels of professional achievement, who think of themselves as homeowners, face a widening gap between what they earn and what housing costs,” said Carolina Reid, assistant professor in city and regional planning at UC Berkeley.
The mega-commuting phenomenon is “the result of decades of housing decisions — or non-decisions,” said Dave Vautin, senior transportation analyst with the MTC. “It speaks to the lack of sufficient housing production in our region over many decades. We’ve gotten ourselves in a giant hole and we’re having to dig ourselves out.”
Dianne Isaak can relate.
Every morning in Manteca, where she and husband Albert bought a new home last year for $300,000, she wakes up by 4:30, while their children sleep. Out the door in 20 minutes, she drives to a commuter bus stop and jumps on the bus to Dublin, where she catches BART to San Francisco. For the last leg of her 75-mile journey, a company shuttle takes her to the health care facility where she works as a surgical coordinator: “All in a whopping three hours time,” she joked. At night, she reverses the process.
She lists the pros of maintaining this grinding daily routine: the backyard, the shady trees, the children’s happiness. The mortgage in Manteca is $2,000, less than the $2,600 in rent that she and Albert would have paid had they stayed in their old apartment in Pacifica.
And she lists the cons: “I’m exhausted. I love my job, but I’m almost at the point where I can’t wake up in the morning.” When she arrives back home around 8:15 p.m., she has “to review the kids’ homework, give them their baths. They don’t understand that I’m tired and I don’t like to show them that I’m tired.
“I try to keep it positive,” she said.
Balancing their Bay Area wages — more than they would make in surrounding counties — with those distant backyards and good schools for the kids, many commuters make peace with the bargains they’ve struck.
“It becomes a way of life,” explained Jonathan Levers, who clocks 130 miles during his daily commute between Brentwood and Redwood City, where he works for an e-commerce firm. “It gets stressful, but you just roll with it. I understand that what I’m driving home to (his family) is far better than what I’m driving in (gridlock traffic).”
Heading back from the Peninsula, he plugs into his Waze navigation app, which spots traffic tie-ups and suggests alternative routes, while wife Danielle tracks him on her “Find My iPhone” app and updates their three children about daddy’s progress. “My two-year-old is trained. She’ll get on the phone and say, `Are you on Vasco yet?'” — and, often enough, dad will be on Vasco Road, the crowded commuter route through the far East Bay.
“If we were living closer to my job, we’d probably be looking at a little 1,000 square-foot townhome and squeezing into three bedrooms,” Levers said. Instead, he and Danielle are considering a move from their four-bedroom house — purchased in 2010, in the downdraft of the 2008 crash, for $325,000 — to a nearby $600,000 place with four or five bedrooms, larger yard and a pool. Bigger is better than closer, in their case.
If he had his druthers, he would live in Danville or San Ramon, “but the truth is we’re totally priced out there.”
Most commuters try to display good humor in the face of their impossible driving chores.
Three times a week, Turner schedules 6 a.m. “mom time” on the phone, a dedicated hour of catch-up with her mother that she might not have outside the commute.
Driving together to their government jobs in downtown San Jose from Newman — a Central Valley farming community, 95 miles distant, where they bought a home last year for $189,000 — Ed and Patty Brooks enjoy their quality time, and can’t help thinking about their financial savvy. Their $1,200 mortgage is half the cost of their former rent in San Jose, and retirement is looking good.
Ken Lourdes, an engineer in tech whose office is in South San Jose, enjoys being productive while driving. He listens to books such as “The Hunger Games” and studies Mandarin during the 130-mile round trip from his home in Discovery Bay — where his family’s 3,700 square foot, four-bedroom house with pool cost just over $500,000.
“Do I miss the closeness of my friends, the rock climbing gym I am a member of, and the quick access to in-town activities” near the office, he asked? “Yes, yes, yes. Do I hate the drive and the frustration of traffic jams that make it worse? Absolutely. Do I regret my decision? No.”
Contact Richard Scheinin at 408-920-5069, read his stories at www.mercurynews.com/richard-scheinin and follow him at www.twitter.com/RealEstateRag
