Is living next to your office actually worth it?
A ten-minute commute is the best amenity in the city. The area around a tech park is often the worst.
In a city where a bad commute eats two or three hours a day, living near work sounds like the obvious win. Often it is. The difference between fifteen minutes and seventy-five each way is not an abstraction: it is whether you exercise, eat dinner at a normal hour, and have any evening left at all.
The catch is that the area right beside a big tech park is often the worst mix of expensive and unpleasant. Rents carry an office premium. The roads are built for cars, not for living. And the whole place can feel like the office with beds.
One good connection away
The sharp move is often not "next to the office" but one good connection away from it: a locality fifteen minutes out by metro or a genuinely clear road, greener, quieter and cheaper, that beats the office-gate area on everything except the very shortest trip.
- Measure the real door-to-desk time at the hour you actually travel, not the map distance.
- Price the office premium honestly. Fifteen more minutes sometimes buys a much better life for much less money.
- Weigh the evenings and the weekends, not just the mornings. You are home far more than you are commuting.
- If your work is hybrid, weight the area over the office. You are buying the neighbourhood five days later.
The best commute is not the shortest one. It is the shortest one to a place worth coming home to.