I'm not making an argument for rent control, per se -- it's hard to dispute that it's a distorting influence on the market in San Francisco itself -- but it's hard to appreciate just how banana crazypants the housing market across this whole region is right now.
Basically, if we had the mass transit system of new york, the rest of the bay might actually not be that bad compared to walking to work.
If you're trying to save money, of course you don't live in those places. Are you going to list Woodside, Hillsborough, and Atherton as well?
There are plenty of other less expensive cities that have great access to public transportation and decent access to SF; like Redwood City, Fremont, Hayward, South SF, Daly City, Oakland, and others that are a lot less expensive (most of these places are also way more bike friendly than SF). Even really inexpensive places like Concord, Pittsburg, or Livermore have decent access to Bart.
> even most of the supposedly "cheap" East Bay will run you far more than most other metro areas across the US.
Well yes, but your salary is higher as well compared to the rest of the US; so the East Bay is very affordable. Is is still more expensive than the rest of the US? Of course, but that's what happens when a lot of people want to live in a specific spot.
You can also just rent out a room too if you want to save money in pricier areas. In the past even with an engineering salary, I've rented a room in a cheap area just so I could save up money for house later on.
I'll tell you why this YC thread is really annoying to me: Hacker News is a forum supposedly filled with thinkers who aim to solve problems. Yet with a good number of HN people in this thread, instead of looking for alternative solutions (i.e. cheaper neighboring cities), they seem to be focused on how the problem is unsolvable without legislation.