Coming in hot with my personal financial situation, eh? Nice. For what it's worth a major reason I was able to buy the home I have is because we've been here over a decade - bought just as the crash started to recover. And if you re-read what I said, cost was absolutely a factor in my choosing where to live. If I could afford to spend at least double for a similar house in the middle of the city, maybe I would have. But I couldn't. The last thing I want to do is take a "fuck you, I've got mine" attitude but that doesn't mean I can't point out giant issues with ideas people are coming up with. You're welcome to pick apart those arguments, but if you feel the need to go after me personally instead, maybe you should think about why that is.

Like when you bring up taking location into account for an office location. I live on one side of the metro area, many of my coworkers live elsewhere. Take a company with enough people working somewhere, and their "average" location will probably end up near the middle of the city - more than likely a downtown area. Which brings us right back to where we started.

What's more, everything you say may theoretically work for one person going to one workplace from one home. What about a married couple who work in entirely different places? If one person has a job in (for example) Omaha, NE and the other in Lincoln, that couple could conceivably live in between those two cities and each have a sorta long but doable commute. If a company were to "provide a benefit like a subsidized loan for property closer to the work" (you mean like a mortgage?) that would not only be insane for that random shop with 3 employees (not all business owners are automatically in the <1%) but it would put that employee's partner at a disadvantage by making them have a longer commute.