Silicon Valley has a multi-fold problem. 1. Housing is expensive because of the influx of people immigrating to the state from out of state and also out of cou

Silicon Valley has a multi-fold problem. 1. Housing is expensive because of the influx of people immigrating to the state from out of state and also out of country. (I'm one of them.) This causes a housing shortage which will naturally drive up price of housing. 2. The housing prices don't come down because California in general has very restrictive zoning laws, especially in the most expensive areas, that prevent building of sufficient housing density to cover demand. This in turn drives housing development further outside of the bay area forcing long commute times and highway usage. 3. Because of the high cost of living (primarily from housing, food/etc is not significantly more expensive) from the above problems the solution proposed is to greatly raise the minimum wage, now hitting $15 in many areas. This causes a drive to automate away simpler jobs (also providing an entry for further tech startups to automate these things) or more commonly, move the jobs out of the state via company acquisition followed by moving the administrative jobs to company headquarters located out of state or sometimes out of country. A high minimum wage reduces the available job market by putting an artificial job supply limit in place thus causing unemployment for these simpler jobs. 4. On top of this there's a loophole for illegal immigrants where companies abuse them by paying them below minimum wage because they are here illegally. (Another reason that giving a path to legal immigration for illegal immigrants would help things.) The first thing and most important thing that needs to happen is for the state to overrule local zoning laws (as opposed by the NIMBYs) and force generic zoning, allowing unrestricted housing development. Just look at the south bay area. The zoning is obvious even looking at satellite maps. Industrial areas are kept separate from housing which are kept separate from retail. This prevents natural intermixing of these causing a lot of need for road development to allow people to travel between these blocks rather than walking down the street.