[closeparen]

Commute for hours every day and live in crappy shared housing for a couple decades so that eventually you can walk away from all your friends and colleagues and start over somewhere worse.

Seems like a pretty obtuse way of obtaining a Midwestern house. You could also just mortgage one, like everyone else does, while working any white-collar Midwestern job.

[oihoaihsfoiahsf]

You think all or even most of your friends and colleagues are still going to live in the Bay Area in a few decades? :( Sorry, that ain't gonna happen. And it doesn't take decades to save up enough money to be financially independent elsewhere if you're getting paid in the Bay.