Yet again the housing fallacy, this time from a guy at a real estate startup.
The houses in Silicon Valley are not sitting empty because they're expensive. In fact, it's not merely false that SV's high housing prices prevent people from living here, it's necessarily false. The fact that a house cost $x means someone was able to buy it.
One of the reasons I was happy to return to Italy in 2000 was that most towns there seem to have a mix of young and old, rich and poor that seemed much more real to me than San Francisco, which especially in those days was like living on another planet in terms of how weird it had gotten with all the money and craziness.
You can get that in the bay area... you just have to head way out in the east bay to find more 'average' housing and people, I suppose. SV is pretty much full, and zoning regulations, american attitudes and earthquake laws apparently prevent density from going up too much.
The fact that the median is higher means that there's a smaller slice of society that can afford it.
That is an illusion. To someone poor it might seem like everyone in Silicon Valley is "rich" and thus the same. But that's just an illusion caused by being an outsider, like the feeling children often have when they see people from some very unfamiliar society: how do they tell one another apart?
You'd feel there was even less variation in the people around you if you moved to a city in China, because the people there would be way more like one another than they were like you.
But from what I understand, in Palo Alto, much of that scarcity is artificial. The city, in the process of fending off the rapid, misshapen development of the rest of the Santa Clara Valley, passed a number of zoning laws which restricted height, imposed 'setbacks', and limited the subdivision of lots. While this did work to preserve the community to some extent, the population density is forced downwards.
At some cost to the residents who already live in Palo Alto. Berkeley was lain on an older pattern, with much influence from works such as 'a pattern language', and latin american towns. Consequently there's a high enough pedestrian density to support a town that's much more pleasant to walk in.