[the_cyber_pass]

Ok so first off, rent in Tulsa is 12k at most for a full house.

Second off a lot of the high cost of living has nothing to do with solving hard problems, if it did the civil engineers would have solved the hard problem of fixing the housing market in SF. What you are essentially arguing is Tom Cruise 2.0 makes 6 million a film after a few years in the industry so therefor everyone else sucks which you can tell because they don't make 6 million. Being generous I would claim it's a survivorship bias.

[vostok]

> Second off a lot of the high cost of living has nothing to do with solving hard problems

Actually, it's directly related. People who solve hard problems at companies that value that sort of thing make a lot of money. Generally, people who make a lot of money want to live in nice areas. Nice areas become expensive as housing gets bid up by high earners.

[the_cyber_pass]

Nice is relative. People who make a lot of money want things relative to their interests. Areas become more expensive due to poor planning from civil servants more than Google salaries. NYC, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Austin, London, Brussels and Berlin are all cities which are also working on "solving hard problems" but they don't have nearly the cost of living problems that SF has.

[JimboOmega]

Also, people who make a lot of money, especially in a given field (like tech) tend to want to live with each other, which really exacerbates the problem in markets that resist change (like SF).

Of course, allowing huge office towers to go up but refusing residential development doesn't help.