In the 90s I remember hearing this too. Use the high salary and property value increases to build a nestegg, but keep an eye out for other geographic opportunities because the locals are determined to keep you out, as a class, even if they are friendly one to one.
These days, the property value scam has been going so long that new high wage workers are often locked out for many years, to the benefit of all prior arrivals. But same story otherwise.
What, that due to the fact that we're all working from home because of a global pandemic, and my employer says I can WFH long-term, I'm thinking about moving out of SV?
You must run with a different crowd than I do, because I don't recall a single person saying that in the 90s.
Edit: also, check out Raldi's link to a 1993 post for complaints about housing costs and more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23181981
(That said, the housing costs are far worse now then in 1993 on a wage to land price basis, I hear!)
There needed to be an outside force to push large scale testing of remote to convince people to try it. That's the pandemic. It wasn't going to happen on large scale without it.
Now that it's been proven in many fields to be viable, it's got a much higher likelihood of sticking than before.
After San Francisco and the East Bay have started saturating, other places were put on the map like Seattle, NYC, Austin and Pittsburgh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox is probably the answer: Non-idiotic land use would make the cost of floor area decrease, but the cost of land increase.
If, instead, we hadn't massively down zoned everything in the 20th century, an upzoning wouldn't be "giving away" lots of value, because there would be an abundance of locations that could be used.
This is why small focused upzonings like those that happen in NYC and SF are so disastrous and destroy neighborhoods. Instead of gradual city-wise change like what happens in more affordable places like Tokyo, SF and NYC are super expensive because they set zoning so almost everything is "built out." Any area that is "built out" has reached complete failure in city planning, in my opinion. Which is pretty much all of the Bay Area.
But housing prices are affordable in comparison to places that have restricted use in less efficient ways.
"Higher" is a relative term, and the question of what the baseline should be is quite complicated. They are also quite variable depending on what you can do with the land; if use is extremely restricted it can keep a plot of land down in price, even while it inflated the cost of land overall in the market.
It’s an incentive problem, and a lot of people are incentivized to keep supply down.
Housing can be affordable or it can be a long term investment, but it can’t really be both.
If a lot of people are desperate to have their property grow in value, they will fight anything that threatens that.
I think it’d be interesting to revoke prop 13 in a staged way. You can either build some large X amount of new housing each year or you can accept a 10% increase of the property tax on your property each year until it reaches the market value rate.
If you’re going to constrain supply you should have to pay the cost.
Though for the same power reasons this could never pass politically.