[rich_sasha]

I suppose a big change over the past 50 years is that we really boosted jobs that must be done in big cities. Wanna earn a lot of money? Take on a lot of debt and become a lawyer/accountant/etc. But we didn't create more cities. There's more people competing for the same small amount of commutable real estate, and the winners are the top earners.

I'm not sure how you fix it. The organic fix ought to be that businesses want to move out of the overpriced cities. But if that's also where their employment pool and investors are, that's tricky.

UK has had the same issue. The salary gap between London and anywhere else is huge. So everyone aspiring for a high salary wants to move to London. So prices are drastically higher. And there's no rebalancing in sight.

Maybe there's space for some government regulation? Tax cuts for companies hiring in lower CoL areas? No idea. But so long as an increasing pool of people is competing for a barely growing pool of housing, it's not going to get better.

[wilkommen]

The root cause of the dynamic you're highlighting here is wealth inequality. The more unequal the distribution of wealth in a society, the more concentrated wealth becomes geographically, because as wealth inequality grows, society begins to reorganize into a system which serves ever more lopsidedly to the needs of the wealth holders. The wealth holders, being few, and being social creatures like the rest of us, tend to congregate in fewer and fewer geographical areas. They have the money, so anyone who wants money must live near them to get some. So rents skyrocket in the geographical areas surrounding the wealth holders, which they ironically benefit from, as it creates a smaller amount of land that they need to buy in order to own all the economically significant land in the country, which only intensifies the cost-of-living crisis. Housing regulation cannot fix this, not only because housing regulators can become captured by the wealthy, but also because the root cause of the phenomenon is not addressable by housing policy.

[rienbdj]

Plus the only group with any disposable incomes increasingly becomes the super rich. So all the support functions of this… restaurants, high end boutiques, wellness clinics, tailors, … start to cluster. The servant class then push prices up further by trying to live a commutable distance to work.

[rich_sasha]

At some point, if there are enough incentives, you should see businesses and employees moving to lower CoL areas, as you saw the mini exodus from SV to Texas. What exactly is the government motivation for relieving the pressure on startup SEs, I'm not sure.

[sometimelurker]

interestingly in areas with higher average wealth there should be a sharper difference between the richest and poorest people in that area. consider Elon musk, and the ratio between him and the 2ed and 3ed up to the 10th richest people on earth.

[orangecat]

Maybe there's space for some government regulation?

The problem is largely due to government regulations that prevent people from building housing.

[rsynnott]

London's a bit different due to its sheer _scale_, and the degree to which it's already built up. San Francisco's a much smaller city, and in theory has a simpler problem. But it's not dealing with it.

I'm from Dublin, which has a housing and cost of living problem, and is on a more similar scale to San Francisco. The first time I visited SF, in 2018, it was kind of Dublin levels of expensive; that is, far too expensive, but not shockingly different to home. It has now really surged ahead. Now, there are lots of reasons for that, no doubt, but one stat stands out to me. Last year, 14,000 units of housing were built in Dublin. This, everyone acknowledges, is not enough... In 2024, 1,600 units of housing were built in SF. That seems catastrophic.

At the very least, it's hard to understand why areas south of San Francisco on the BART haven't really been developed; it seems pretty sparse once you get out of the city. But even in the city proper, space usage seems terribly inefficient; lots of semi-derelict industrial stuff and parking lots and so on.

[jltsiren]

Larger cities would help more, as the root issues are education and specialization.

A city should be large enough to have multiple potential employers to minimize the risk of getting trapped in a bad job. If you are single, a smaller city can be viable if there is a concentration of businesses in your field. But that won't work for an educated couple, if they are in different fields.

[sometimelurker]

> But we didn't create more cities.

be careful what you wish for. eventually we'll have a 'New San Francisco' and a 'New New York City'. Imagine the acronyms for these, NSF and NNYC. what if we just agreed to stop having kids and replace all the missing jobs with AI? then we could avoid these disastrous city names

[watershawl]

But people naturally want to live near water or other natural features and those areas are usually already developed.

I suppose one could cross-reference all of the places where highway meets water meats geographic feature, but a city does not yet exist - and then propose one.

[closeparen]

High CoL jurisdictions like having the offices there, they just prefer that the employees and their families be someone else's problem. I couldn't imagine anything short of a federal right to remote work really doing much.