For a variety of reasons, your personal, physical presence in an industry cluster[0] is valuable. Managing a business is a coordination problem, and it's genera

For a variety of reasons, your personal, physical presence in an industry cluster[0] is valuable. Managing a business is a coordination problem, and it's generally the case that said coordination problem is best solved by having everyone in the same office. So an employee in Silicon Valley or NYC is, on aggregate, significantly more productive than the same worker in most of the Midwest, even if their individual effort is no different. Unfortunately, the dominant housing policy regime of restrictive single-family zoning and auto-oriented transportation, which significantly limits new housing production in the most productive areas of the US, causes high wages and growing populations to lead to lead to extraordinarily expensive, overcrowded housing. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster