The problem is your office is 20 miles from your workplace.
20 miles is more than the entire length of Seattle. Heck it is more than the entire width of the Seattle Metro area (western most tip of Seattle heading straight east until it turns into farmland).
There should be sufficient housing stock such that people don't need to drive 20 miles to work!
You can only fit so many real houses in a given area, after which you're building high density housing and a lot of (I'd even argue most) people don't want to live in.
Public transport is key, especially trains that can bypass traffic at high speeds. In my city in Australia I live about 25km out from the CBD, but I can get there in under 30 minutes via train if I ever need to - it works very well and I don't have to live in a tiny shoebox on top of 100 other people.
When tenure at a job was 20+ years, and a house could be paid off in 10 years, it made a ton of sense.
The fact that such an idea is absurd now is not because the idea itself is absurd, but because how we have structured our economy is absurd.
People shouldn't be wasting their lives commuting.
In older books they have kids and the dad coming back home to eat lunch together! Heck I have friends who grew up in countries where 20-30 years ago that was still the norm.
indeed. But in the short term, we gotta do what we gotta do. Despite the RTO mandates, no one in power seems interested in making walkable communities to make the commute easier, nor anything else involving semi-efficient public transportation. I am already fortunate enough to live in a house, I'm not multiplying my rent by 2x+ and reducing my QoL by 3x+ just to satisfy some real estate owners (not that I have an in-office job right now).
And the lack of housing is entirely self-inflicted by locals in most US cities. There's no shadowy conspiracy; people have just spent decades opposing even the most basic new construction.
Another thing that's happened is that all the good jobs in many industries have hyper-concentrated into a small number of locations. There's plenty of space to live available in many "main street" towns, but not necessarily anywhere nearby to work if you do choose to live there.
My own city (Chicago) does have new construction, but it can't possibly keep up with demand from people moving into the city, because all the land is already full of lower-density housing, and you can't replace half a city block's worth of two- and three-flat dwellings with a modern high rise without first getting all the people who already live there to move out. Which, best case scenario, takes time. So instead most the new construction consists of replacing 130 year old 2- and 3-flat residences with luxury single-family homes, because nimbyism or now, reducing housing density is just more economically feasible. All it takes is one wealthy family buying one lot of land, and there area lot more individual lots up for sale than there are contiguous blocks of eight.
> and you can't replace half a city block's worth of two- and three-flat dwellings
It is funny because here in the Puget Sound, if we had two and three flat dwellings that would be a major improvement over the bullshit we have now. Like seriously, 3 story flats would be a dream for density and alleviate much of the area's high house prices.
Unfortunately due to a confluence of factors there are only two types of "density" being built around here:
1. Giant apartment blocks owned by multi-national investment firms where the rent goes up by LOL each year that exist just to drain money out of the community.
2. Awful 4 story townhouses that are inappropriate for anyone who has small children, or knees that aren't perfect.
Also because of reasons, the townhomes don't have usable yards (they have to be set in the lot such a way that neither the front or back are usable), and they can only be built in a few designated "upzoned" areas.
Zoning changes are slowly supposed to come that upzone[1] more and more of the city, but if building actual usable housing isn't even possible, just pure zoning changes aren't enough.
[1] Where upzoned means not just SFH, but still most of the city will be zoned SFH only.
20 miles is more than the entire length of Seattle. Heck it is more than the entire width of the Seattle Metro area (western most tip of Seattle heading straight east until it turns into farmland).
There should be sufficient housing stock such that people don't need to drive 20 miles to work!