I'm not so sure there. There seems to be an almost certainly causal relationship between the cost of living in an area and the economic potential in that area.

I'm not so sure there. There seems to be an almost certainly causal relationship between the cost of living in an area and the economic potential in that area. When people come to an area because there is potential to make lots of money, the cost of living is going to inevitably skyrocket. This is absolutely the Bay Area in a nutshell. Recession is not about population growth, but economic growth. The reason Japan became a [relatively] affordable place to live is because its economy has been doing very poorly for decades now. To take things to an extreme, Cairo is growing incredibly rapidly and has a huge density yet the cost of living is negligible, and that's because the economic potential there is quite awful. By contrast Hong Kong is still booming and so costs will continue to increase. When economies do well you get economic migrants, in the sense that people move to a place because it's economically desirable. And this is the bay area in a nutshell. Let's imagine in some crazy world that the Bay Area makes it possible to regularly find housing for let's say $1500/month. $1500 month with the regular availability of 6 figure salaries for development means you're going to get pretty much every developer in tech looking for a job moving there either until the price of housing starts becoming unaffordable, or the city is no longer economically desirable.