I did mention that. Again, I had to leave my own hometown too. And yes, we've argued, just like every major city, with history vs money. But at the end of the day, you're not entitled to live in the 0.01% richest square mileage because you were born there, or lived there a few decades. That's akin to birthrights.
Now you can live there, if you can afford it. Affordability is a large spectrum. For example, for years I spent about 50% of my rent there, and I had a great quality of life, I liked it. But at some point, especially if you want to buy a house, get kids, reduce risk of total financial collapse the moment your income dips, etc, that's no longer affordable. The solution for me was to move to a cheaper area.
In tech, wages vary quite wildly, but most people with ordinary jobs roughly earn the same. Facebook employs 17 thousand people. I don't really care much about them, relatively speaking. Walmart employs 2.3 million. I care about that number, relatively, loads more, as it concerns lots of people. Walmart salaries are pretty much the same across the country with little variance. So it just makes sense, from a quality of life perspective, for you and your family, to move to an at least somewhat affordable location. That doesn't mean sorting for price and picking the lost spot, there's lots inbetween. Lots of semi-expensive cities that can still be affordable. But SF? Come on. If you make $25k a year and have a family, that's just irresponsible. And if people need help moving, we should facilitate that.
What else is the solution at scale? Giving birthrights? Giving million dollar subsidies to poor people so they can buy a 1 bedroom apartment in SF?
There's ACTUAL huge issues that demands our government's resources. Look, if you live in an affordable city and can't make it on your own, need partial or full help, you should get all the help you need. But all these poor, but otherwise employable people with a decent brain and a decent body, who work hard but choose to live in a place among the richest on the planet... that makes no sense. In the same way I don't buy a BMW, or go to the four seasons, or pick the most expensive restaurant. At the end of the day, we need to pick our spending patterns based on our earnings for everything in life, living area included, and living in SF like some people do today is for many (not all) a (bad) choice.
And I'm all for shifting the wealth, progressive tax rates, helping parents with daycare, in every city, I've always voted for those programmes. But we're talking about people trying to live in a city where a tiny home costs $1m, with a minimum wage income. You'd need programs that take 10x the resources that our government affords to helping people in other cities.
I mean just extend the argument to the extreme... if all of the 200 million working Americans suddenly wanted to live in say Portland for some significant emotional bond... what would happen. Well there'd be homes for 10 million. The homes would skyrocket in price. There'd be jobs for say 20 million. So you'd have 200 million people offering their manhours for a tiny amount of jobs, and the wages would approach zero. You'd have affordability in the city crash, because rent and wages move in completely opposite directions at the speed of light. The solution then isn't for companies nor governments to pay/subsidise ever more than the market rate to a few million, while the rest are completely fucked. Nor is the solution to give a few people a birthright lottery ticket. The solution is for people to not choose to all live in Portland. SF is a bit like that, much less extreme. Affordability is dying, and the long-term solution probably is that some people improve their quality of life moving to places with 25% less wages and 50% lower expenses, and for the remainder to see their wages increase due to a drop in labour supply.