The core of the problem is housing. The passage of recent bills that grant homeowners the right to subdivide their lots and potentially put 4 houses without obj

The core of the problem is housing. The passage of recent bills that grant homeowners the right to subdivide their lots and potentially put 4 houses without objections from their neighbors is a good step. But it's too little, too late. The two main groups of people who have built wealth: (a) Highly skilled immigrants who came here in droves and (b) Young people who came here in pursuit of their dreams are both utterly unwelcome here. Existing residents who own housing are open in their disdain for these groups of people, and wish that tech had never exploded, threatening their "lifestyle". The dysfunctional politics at the national level treat highly skilled immigrants as a nonentity, focusing all their efforts on appeasing or amnestying illegal immigrants, because their sizable numbers guarantee that they will be a significant source of support for them. The worst outcomes are for the young immigrants, who see that they have no future here because they can't make long-term plans because of neverending waits for permanent residence and citizenship, and can't own even modest homes because of the utter indifference of locals to the housing needs of others. Add to this the neverending turf wars of the dozens of jurisdictions that prevent mass transit from ever built (which enable other large conurbations such as the NYC/Northern NJ area to provide housing to much larger numbers of workers), and it's a miracle tech and the workforce that drives it is still here. Something's gotta give, and the pandemic has made the other shoe drop. It remains to be seen if the past two years and perhaps the coming year are just an aberration, or whether the changes are permanent.