Speaking as "the other half": this is wildly condescending, ignorant, and ironic. The irony of declaring that HN doesn't understand "how the other half lives"...
...while also declaring that "used cars are a must" for poor people (if you can afford a car in a city, you're substantially above a huge number of people, and car ownership rate goes up dramatically with wealth. It rises higher than 1 car/person once you start hitting the single digits. A huge number of service industry people, not to mention students, get around on foot or bicycle. They just don't commute 9-5, and they don't live in your neighborhoods, so you don't see them)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalization about where transit does and doesn't go (in my city, poor people get busses, rich people get trolleys and light rail and commuter rail, and it's pretty clearly purposeful that it is very difficult to get to the rich residential parts from the poor residential parts)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalizations that working poor don't work downtown, and only work in "industrial" areas in cities. It really goes to show how invisible we all are to you....even when you're wagging your finger at the rest of HN for not understanding people like us, lol.
Downtown, who exactly do you think handles all the cleaning, maintenance, repair, delivery, food service, retail, etc in the "downtown" area of a city?
Who do you think delivers the paper towels and bottled water and k-cups? Everything around you in your office - every single fucking thing down to the carpet you're standing on - is there because a poor person put it there.
Who do you think is driving the busses and taxis and trucks and vans?
Who do you think works the "gig" "jobs" delivering everything from dry cleaning to laundry to a fancy lunch for to those "young healthy well-paid tech workers"? (and FYI, your boss/admin assistant/office manager, when they order that big lunch from the fancy place across town? They're shit tippers. And bad communicators. And take forever to show up to grab the order.)
Do you realize that even in the "boogie" (sic) part of the city, the guy running the cash register at that hip coffee joint is making as close to minimum wage as the company thinks they can get away with, which is likely, at best, a buck or two an hour more than average?
Who exactly do you think fills all the entry-level jobs, including in tech companies? What do you think the front desk receptionist is paid? The desktop support person?
I feel like you all think that someone who cleans the offices for the big dot-com or white-shoe law office...or someone who dishwashes or busses or does prep work for a fancy restaurant where a plate costs $50, is getting paid anything remotely proportional to the difference in cost from a restaurant a plate for $18 or the hourly rate of that law firm.
It's the opposite - the fanciest places and the biggest name corps squeeze people the hardest. That's how they got to where they are.