Relocating from suburban North Carolina to the Bay Area has really opened my eyes to one fact: the majority of America has no f'ing clue what the problem is because almost no one (percentage-wise) has experienced both sides of the "problem." There just aren't that many metros that are growing so fast they have the kinds of problems that exist here (SFBA). I lived in a city of 150,000, where my beautiful 4300+sqft/400m^2 home in a very nice neighborhood with manicured lawns, a playground, neighborhood pool, and 2mi/3.2km of wooded walking paths can be had for ~$600,000. In the majority of the country, that's a high end luxury home price. In the Bay Area, it's a hovel price but -- even if you could find a house like it, which is very hard -- would be a $4m house on a postage stamp lot in a cramped neighborhood.

I know it's impractical to build neighborhoods and homes like that in a place like the peninsula, but I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it... a lot. If you can't afford to live near work out here, and if you don't rent in an actual urban center, by the time you get home in the evenings the traffic has drained you so much it's hard to be motivated to do anything besides eat & sleep, rinse * repeat.

To your point, if you transplanted some of the nicer neighborhoods in Palo Alto or Menlo Park, for example, almost anywhere else in the country, and they'd just be slightly run down, mostly mediocre neighborhoods most middle/upper class folks would pass up in favor of new construction. And those are $3-5m houses here!

<rant off. Can you tell I'm frustrated by the auction-like homebuying process and stratospheric prices?>