The new labor crisis is fairly wild. All the really nice places to live are becoming so expensive that there is no local labor pool. Many of the wonderful mountain towns of Colorado for example are also suffering this fate.
Lots of people are quick to blame Californians but it actually seems a small percentage overall, but it’s a convenient bogeyman.
Doesn't need to be this way either. We've come up with a number of ways to lower real estate prices on this very board that simply aren't being implemented by local communities. I have to believe that 2024 is going to be a massive turning point for a lot of US cities.
There really aren't.
The upward pressure caused by the need to keep property values increasing will always, in the long run, outweigh any other policy that you can use to attempt to reign in cost-of-living. You can play tricks to delay the effects or slow them down, but adding drag resistance doesn't stop a falling leaf from trending downwards.
Mathematically, you cannot lower cost-of-living while also insisting that the price of the single largest living cost (housing) keep increasing.
The only alternative is to lower the price of housing, but you can't do that without lowering real estate values for existing landed property owners, so they fight that tooth and nail, in nearly every locality across the board.