[nugget]

The SFBA runs on a gold rush / lottery model. You can move there as an "ordinary" person and make millions or tens of millions of dollars within a few years, i.e. a winning lottery ticket. It's probably better than a lottery because there's enough of a skills-based component that people convince themselves their odds are higher than a pure lottery would be. As long as that dream remains alive, young talent will swarm like locusts and care relatively little about living standards or quality of life. And to be fair, at least for now, there are a lot of people in SFBA hitting the jackpot - good for them - so when I say dream, it's a dream at least loosely tethered to reality. But if the tide turns and millionaires in their 20s stop being minted, then the whole ecosystem is in for a readjustment.