It is the responsibility of government to ensure a well functioning society.
It appears clear to me that the government is failing its responsibility. The governments could have averted this crises by not zoning their municipalities for 3x, 4x, 5x more jobs than housing units within their borders. Its not like many of these offices have existed forever, they willingly allowed the creating of new offices, with out the requisite housing to support. (See, New Apple Spaceship HQ, Facebook campus, and expansion in Menlo Park, Google's constant expansion, the numerous new office parks that have sprung up in every city on the peninsula in the last 10 years).
Much of this is jobs/housing imbalance is a result from prop 13, which disincentivized housing construction by making the development of commercial property more net tax advantageous (taxes in minus services provided) when compared with housing.
Democratic governments should serve everybody, not only the people that voted for them. Of course they'll have some obvious preferences, but neglecting or even crushing a sizeable group of people because they're not their voters is not what democracy is meant to be. It's not even wise.
Each municipal government is correctly pursuing a local optimum by doing this. The life of an existing homeowner gets no worse for the presence of a tech company office in their municipality, and the tax revenue from the company can be used to fund better services and/or lower taxes for locals.
Night-time populations, on the other hand, require water and sewer and education and policing, more wear on the roads or staggeringly expensive public transit buildouts, etc.
Each city is pursuing the best interests of its home-owning electorate in signing up for the tax revenue without the responsibility.
Ignoring property values and aesthetics, the first municipality to liberalize housing construction will get to pay all the scaling costs that the whole region should have shared.
As Bernie said: govt doesn't regulate business - it's the other way around. Businesses dictate what they want. Blame shareholders, and boards of directors? But I don't expect them to change -- they're having a great run.
Suddenly? This has been going on for close to 30 years. We haven't "created" a problem.
> had we chosen some other place
It's not as though some gigantic hive mind suddenly just put their finger down on a map and decided where to locate a tech center.
And any other place they picked would be going through the same issues right now.
[0] https://medium.com/@mccannatron/1979-to-2015-average-rent-in...
And you can see this empirically in SF as well. If you were in the city post dotcom crash, housing was easy to find and also reasonably priced for CA. It's only been in the last 10 years or so that everything got out of control due to the new tech boom.
That's taking inflation into account? Las Vegas seems to have kept steady, which makes sense. http://www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/las_vegas.html
So has Tampa. http://www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/tampa.html
Why not? Tampa has nice weather and no state income tax, and Las Vegas is a fun place to live.
Without real, objective measures on "desirable location" you're basically stating a tautology. The only places with rising real estate prices are desirable locations, which are evincing desirability by rising real estate prices.
It's not really a tautology when we could take a simple poll of our target population and find out which cities they would and would not want to move to. I'd be willing to bet that neither LV nor Tampa would be very far up that list. I wish there was better data on median rent prices over time per city so we could do a comparative analysis with real price info.
Of course everyone will still end up stuck in traffic.
Urban areas need to densify rapidly if we hope to avoid financial catastrophe in the US, and many areas need to be returned to agricultural use instead of suburban sprawl, as with sprawl we have essentially covered our most fertile land in low density, high maintenance housing & support infrastructure. http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-...