> but will they rise to the current SF levels? Once you include salaries in the inclusion, it could be worse than SF. For example, Michigan's urban apartments

> but will they rise to the current SF levels? Once you include salaries in the inclusion, it could be worse than SF. For example, Michigan's urban apartments are already often more expensive than Seattle (when measured as percent of median income needed to cover average urban rents). The sticker prices are vastly misleading because many folks get SF-level triple-figure salaries, and can pull those anywhere in the world. They can shop across entire housing markets. They see a $600k condo in say, Milwaukee, and think "wow, that would be so cheap (on my San Francisco salary)". But 99% of regular people can't do any of that, they have to afford local housing using local wages. And regular people still need housing just as much as developers do. A $600k house might as well cost 6-million dollars, because they are both equally impossible to ever afford for a regular person. > If they don't, assuming that the pay also doesn't drop too much, then it might be worth it for some individuals, no? For a few individuals, yes absolutely. When we promote this idea of "fix housing affordability by spreading the problem everywhere", we do alleviate a little bit of pain for technology workers and give them a shot of home ownership (which is great). But we do this at the expense of permanently hurting housing availability for a huge swath of other people -- something vitally important, but often gets overlooked when people talk about housing by hyper-focusing on just San Francisco's problem, and ignoring the crisis happening in all of the other cities nationwide.