When Nobody Can Afford to Live Where You Practice

There is a version of the hiring problem that has almost nothing to do with your budget and everything to do with your zip code.

Jackie Ho co-founded Ho and Lacy Architecture in San Francisco, and when it became clear the firm needed a third person, the local hire was ruled out fast. Not because they could not find anyone. Because the whole equation did not pencil.

Start with the intermediaries. She had been introduced to headhunters and the fee was steep enough that it was not remotely worth considering. For a two-person firm making its first hire, a recruiting fee is not a line item, it is a project. That alone removes the conventional route for most small practices, before anyone has even looked at a resume.

Then the actual market. Her description of Bay Area talent is one that anyone practicing in an expensive metro will recognize. Talent is incredibly tough to come by, especially young talent. Nobody wants to move there. It is very hard to incentivize someone to come after graduation, and harder still to get them to stay, because the cost of living is what it is. You are not competing with other architecture firms for that person. You are competing with the rent.

So Jackie reached a conclusion well before she knew what shape it would take. She was pointing at a remote hire anyway. The reasoning was almost passive, which is what makes it credible. If this person cannot realistically be here, then this person could be anywhere, and the only question left is what the best way to go about that is.

Here is the part that I think gets missed. The mirror image of her problem is just as common and just as expensive.

During that same conversation, a firm owner practising in Stockton pointed out that he has the opposite issue. His young talent wants to live and work in San Francisco rather than in a market where they could comfortably afford a house. He trains people and the metro pulls them. Jackie’s problem is that nobody will come. His problem is that nobody will stay.

These are the same problem. In both cases geography is making the staffing decision, and the firm is absorbing the cost of a housing market it has no influence over. One firm pays a premium and still cannot fill the role. The other fills the role and loses the person in three years to a city that pays more because it has to.

The move is to stop treating location as a requirement of the job when the job does not require it. Production work does not. Documentation, modelling, and drawing sets do not care where the desk is, provided the working hours overlap enough for real conversation to happen. Jackie’s third team member works a day that lines up closely with theirs, roughly a two-hour offset, and they are in a shared chat all day and on video every morning. That is not a compromise arrangement. That is a normal working relationship that happens to span a distance.

What that unlocks is not a discount. I want to be careful here, because the framing I object to most in this industry is the one where global talent is a way to pay less for the same thing. The reason our model is insourcing rather than outsourcing is that the person becomes part of your team, learns your standards, sits in your morning meeting, and grows with your firm over years rather than being rented by the task.

What geography-agnostic hiring actually unlocks is access. You get to select on the things that predict success, experience with your project types and a communication style that fits how you work, instead of selecting from whoever happens to be within commuting distance and willing to tolerate your local rent.

I will give you the honest limit on this, because Jackie named it herself and it is a fair one. Some roles genuinely do need to be local. She expects that eventually she will need a project manager with boots on the ground, someone senior who can be in the room, and she does not consider that problem solved. That is further out for her, and it is a different hire. What she solved now was production, which is what was actually strangling the firm, and she solved it without waiting for the local market to become something it is not going to become.

If your metro is pricing out the people you need, or exporting them, you are not going to out-negotiate a housing market. Take that variable off the table for the roles where it does not belong, and hire on fit instead.

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