Advertisement San Francisco hairdresser commuting from Arizona to save money For some, working in the Bay Area includes flight plans Share Shares Copy Link Copy

Maria Taide Maldonado is a 47-year-old native San Franciscan and the married mother of two sons. She is also my hairdresser, and recently she told me that her commute to work is about to undergo a dramatic change.Maldonado, her husband and her younger son are moving to a home they bought in Arizona. Their young son will be in school there during the week under the watchful eye of his grandparents, who are immigrating to the U.S. from Venezuela.Maldonado’s husband, a recruit for the San Francisco Police Department, will fly to San Francisco International Airport every Monday morning for his academy training. Maldonado will fly to SFO every Thursday morning and take BART to her salon in Burlingame. Both of them will fly back to Arizona every Saturday.Wash, rinse, repeat.“I have to plan ahead, but I can get round-trip tickets for $191,” Maldonado told me. “If I do that every week, that’s almost $800 a month. But I can stay with my mother here, and our mortgage in Arizona is $1,800. It pencils out.”I was impressed with the level of granular detail that Maldonado and her family had put into making this decision.I also thought the fact that they had to make this decision was really depressing.The Maldonados are solid, regular people — non-millionaires who work for a living, pick up their neighbors’ kids after school and buy pastries at the community bake sale. Every urban area needs this core population in order to survive.Yet the spread between housing costs and wages in the Bay Area has grown so wide that this is what they need to do to make it work.So that’s what I tweeted. More than two thousand likes and nearly 600 retweets later, I realized Maldonado’s situation was resonating with a lot of people who live here, or are struggling to live here. More than a few of them are making similar commutes.“I miss my kids, I miss my wife, I miss my family time,” Imran Rahman told me.Rahman, who responded to my tweet with a summary of his weekly commute — he flies from Orange County’s John Wayne Airport every Monday morning and flies back from Oakland International Airport every Thursday night — is a finance manager at an Internet startup in San Francisco. His wife also works in finance.Believe me, they did the math.There was no getting around it, Rahman said. What they could afford in San Francisco — a two-bedroom apartment for them and their two small children — made less financial sense than sending him on this insane weekly wander through the wilds of the TSA.“Getting an apartment in San Francisco would’ve cost more than the house we were renting in Irvine,” Rahman said. “When we added in the cost of buying (Southwest) tickets in bulk, BART trips to and from the airport, plus my rent for a room here in San Francisco during the week, it was still cheaper than it would’ve been for us to be here as a family. And that sucks. It’s painful that I have to do this.”The more I spoke to Maldonado and Rahman, the more I realized that their commutes aren’t as extreme as they first sounded.Yes, they’re dealing with pressurized cabins instead of bridge tolls, and yes, their carbon footprints are Exhibit A in the story of how the Bay Area’s housing crisis is contributing to climate change. But I know dozens of people who are commuting more than two hours a day to their jobs in the Bay Area. How much time do they get to spend with their families? How are their carbon footprints? How’s their quality of life?“I have several friends who live past Clayton, and they commute to work at Facebook every day,” Maldonado told me. “What is my hour-and-a-half flight compared to what some people here are doing?”Maldonado and Rahman are determined to make the best of it. Both of them told me that their new schedules meant they were willing — and able — to work very long hours when they’re in the Bay Area, and that when they were home they were able to be totally dedicated to their families.Both of them also told me they saw their situations as a reflection of what they were willing to sacrifice to improve their families’ situations.“What made this process easier for me was knowing that all of our parents and grandparents left somewhere to come here, so things could be easier for us,” Maldonado told me. “Now, I need to take care of them, but there’s no room to grow here. So I’ve had to get creative.”Imagine if the Bay Area put the same amount of energy into creating answers for the housing crisis that’s pushed these families out.Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Twitter: @caillemillner