If I could buy a 3BR apartment at $1.5M or a 3BR single story 2000 sq ft hut for $3M, guess where my money's going. But it doesn't matter. The Bay Area region

If I could buy a 3BR apartment at $1.5M or a 3BR single story 2000 sq ft hut for $3M, guess where my money's going. But it doesn't matter. The Bay Area region is going to see serious emigration over the next 5 yrs and it'll be primarily the people that SV wants to keep around: younger people who can't afford to lay down roots in SV and furthermore understand it would be stupid to do so at these prices. Especially with engineers, I refuse to believe most under 30 aren't already well aware that the economics favor living cheap, saving up, and then getting out. Tech is very compatible with remote work (even at a low level when you think in terms of microservices and PaaS), and moving operations or starting fresh is relatively easy. Even the networking argument is thin: there are already concentrations of talented engineers in a bunch of major cities. Not to mention I've self-learned almost everything relevant anyway. Conferences and assorted other BS are largely pointless. So what's left? Investors and existing companies. I believe this is why we haven't seen a substantial exodus thus far. I think the argument about career advancement issues being in a non-HQ office doesn't really hold as much water for the large companies. I also think tech companies look at good engineers located outside the expensive SV bubble as a kind of subsidy: revenue isn't nearly as sensitive to geographical distribution of employees as is cost. With investors the story may be different. They want to keep a close eye on their companies and finding good engineers to take a chance on your startup is much easier in a high-density tech zone. But why would entrepreneurs want to suffer the incumbent costs? Assuming the same size of investment round, wise founders would choose to minimize their burn rate by locating somewhere closer to the midpoint on the spectrum of tradeoffs (e.g. Boulder/Denver, Austin, NYC outside Manhattan, Seattle, LA, etc). TLDR: It seems like the status quo is far too tenuous to continue to hold indefinitely.