Sure, but there are also valid pressures keeping people there that otherwise can’t afford the cost of living: Family and friends. Support networks are vital fo

Sure, but there are also valid pressures keeping people there that otherwise can’t afford the cost of living: Family and friends. Support networks are vital for every human. Familiarity with local transportation. SF/the Bay Area’s bus and rail network makes it possible to live without the expense of a car, a necessity in most other cities in the US Professional networks and contacts, which exist even for blue-collar workers, and, admittedly with no data to back this claim up, may be more localized for someone who doesn’t hold a college degree and hence doesn’t have a name or reputation to fall back on when starting from a clean slate. Demographics. Sure, many places may be cheaper to live, but most of them are definitely not as welcoming or safe as San Francisco for, say, a trans woman of color or a gay white male And, last but not least (unless you think everything must have some quantifiable value that is): sentimentality. Would you really like to be forced out of your home involuntarily? If you take one of these people out of their community they grew up in and throw them somewhere in the middle of the Midwest, do you really think they would thrive there lacking everything they had in San Francisco? Do you think displacing the problem until it's out of sight is both sustainable and humane? It's a fallacy to think the majority of people who can't afford to live there are the one's moving there – it's usually the peoples whose livelihoods were long established there that are being forced out. A much simpler solution to trying to tackle all of these problems at once is to, well, build more housing.