It comes down to your definition of "we." People who live in the Bay Area and would like to stay have an obvious reason to care. And since the tech industry is

It comes down to your definition of "we." People who live in the Bay Area and would like to stay have an obvious reason to care. And since the tech industry is so concentrated in the Bay Area, there's a very large contingent of HN posters who care. I'll also say, I moved to the Bay Area, with my family of 4, from much more affordable North Carolina, to take a very good engineering job. It's been a huge boon for my career, and basically everything about it -- except for housing -- has been great. That said, it is frustrating to make solid six figure incomes and work the kind of awesome job that is very hard to find elsewhere, and yet not be able to afford what would constitute a "nice middle class home" anywhere else. Note that I don't mean a suburban house necessarily, I just mean 3-4 bedrooms and 1200-1800 sure feet or so, reasonably new and well maintained. You pretty much need to be a millionaire to get that in the BA. Or to put it another way: it's nuts to think that you'd go to work every day in a beautiful city with an amazing job surrounded by interesting people making great money, and still find yourself wondering if you'd rather ditch it all for a third bedroom in another state. Surely we could find a way to build more housing here and make this place work, couldn't we?