Based on title alone, sounds like cities where remote work is going to play a prominent role.
Sounds like kind of a disconnect between the business community and the government as well as the geographic realities of a city crowded onto a little peninsula, albeit of course with many suburban towns nearby but very heavily developed already.
I couldn't imagine being lured to the bay area for a job even for double my current salary (standard software engineer very low 6 figs). I have maybe $210K of equity in my current home; how much of a house is that going to get me there? I'd never afford a million dollar mortgage. Would have to be full time remote.
Well if HN is to be believed, $350K of total compensation isn’t out of the ordinary for FAANG, so that would get you in a million dollar house.
Never seems to occur to anyone that crazy high salaries might be driving crazy high housing prices, not the other way around, though...
It's the only logical conclusion. Married couples, each making well over $100k, competing with each other will obviously result in higher home prices, unless you increase the supply of the homes that those married couples desire. If you look at a map of recent home sale prices on Redfin or the real estate websites, you can easily see where all the doctors/programmers/business owners live in a town.
Really it is demand/supply with a ceiling limited by ability to pay and ability to add new stock that rougly determines the limit.
If the current supply is one remaing for sale house for $5 million when with a per house and land cost of at most $350k but anyone willing to wait could get new land and build it in a year for $500k there won't be any takers unless that are in a major hurry.
That something can take many forms from access to customers, the "prestige" of an area being an effective requisite where those who don't pay the expense are judged as second tier regardless if it is true or not, or simply that the location is a literal prerequisite like minerals in the area for an extractive industry. Let any relevant to the instance specific quality or quantity over others be termed "edge" as it is about relative difference mostly.
For a concrete example it would be Lewis Carrollian madness to set up a gold mine the next town over without any precious metals because the no matter how much the land and wages are cheaper for the mine towns have the infinite edge for gold mining over one with literally none.
Establishing a mine in the third world with lesser deposits to get half of the gold per mine for a tenth of the wage and real estate costs would still win in spite of the weaker gold veins.
In thie case locally biggest threat to wages and housing price value other than literal anhilation would be the loss of an edge to justify it. The edge in this case is fuzzier, partially the prestige and partially the talent of "performers" measured in outcomes. Those are also in somewhat circular feedback loops. The prestige attracts the performers and the success of the performers maintains the prestiege. A slip in performance will cause eventual collapse of prestige if they fail to justify their expense. Damage to prestige may limit income of new talent or lead to an exodus.
How about, population rose but land area stayed the same. All the land got developed (it used to be orchards, remember?) so the only way to get more land for housing was, to pay more for existing plots. So the prices go up.
No need to imagine a class of evil plotters, trying to make everyone sad.
The growth in jobs is not necessarily in the skilled ones. And those are definitely not the jobs poorer people who cannot afford to rent or own do.
And there is very strong opposition to going fully remote. When you have to be in office even once a week or every two weeks, you need a temporary place still...
It isn't only prop 13 that is to blame for the bay areas particular housing crisis, but encouraging towns to not approve residential starts cannot help.
This isn't true. Prop 13 applies to commercial property also. There is a growing movement to repeal that aspect of it in 2020.