The answer, increasingly, is that they do — and it's slowly destroying them.

A growing number of Bay Area workers have been priced so far out of the region that they've landed in the Central Valley. Tracy. Manteca. Lathrop. Even Merced and Los Banos. We're talking 80 to 130 miles, one way. They're trading their sanity on I-580 for something radical: a house with a backyard and a mortgage that doesn't require a second kidney.

One Bay Area resident summed up a friend's experience in Tracy: "He says the commute is worth living in a house with a backyard, in-law unit, relatively lower cost of living that you can manage with a single income." But here's the kicker — in six years, this person had only managed to visit the friend five times. "The commute for those five times were themselves exhausting even when done on a weekend and we had nowhere else to be."

That's not a housing solution. That's a hostage situation with a garage.

Another local noted that everyone they've known who attempted the super-commute "eventually stopped after about six months to a year. They either left their job in the Bay Area, or moved much closer." The body simply can't sustain three to four hours of daily driving indefinitely. Your health deteriorates, your relationships thin out, and your "savings" on housing get eaten alive by gas, car maintenance, and the years shaved off your life.

So what's the real problem here? It's not that people are making bad choices — it's that Bay Area housing policy has made normal choices impossible. Decades of NIMBYism, absurd permitting timelines, and regulatory overhead have strangled housing supply so severely that a $600,000 home in Tracy looks like a deal compared to a $1.4 million teardown in Fremont.

One resident put the transit angle bluntly: "Demand better buses and trains." And they're right — but let's be honest. The same governments that can't build housing efficiently aren't going to revolutionize public transit anytime soon. High-speed rail was supposed to connect the Central Valley to the Bay Area. That project is now old enough to vote and still hasn't carried a single passenger.

The super-commute isn't a lifestyle choice. It's a policy failure measured in hours behind the wheel. Until Bay Area cities get serious about building housing where the jobs actually are — and stop treating every new development like a threat to neighborhood "character" — workers will keep driving from Stockton at 4 a.m., wondering if this is really what the California Dream was supposed to look like.