It's truly amazing to me how much elitism is oozing in this thread from people who just keep repeating as though it is some well known fact that good people only want to live in big cities, hence suffering cities clearly are only suffering because there is something fundamentally, immutably undesirable about them.
People need to drop these elitist attitudes. A huge number of tech workers would love to leave SF, NYC, etc if only the damn jobs would let them.
If more companies offered such terms, the labor pool would spread out more.
Edit: In my experience I have more net money if I work in place with high cost of living and high comp compared to the opposite.
See, there's no logic to it once you unpack it. If the company is willing to pay $X for a given person in one location, they can obviously afford to pay $X to them in another location - they're not any worse for that, since they get the same productivity in return (quite possibly more, because less commute time == happier employees).
But yes, in practice, they will lower the pay - and then complain that they can't hire anyone in those locations...