Your last paragraph is something I wish more people understood. It is very eye opening to take a look at the salary information on US New "Best Jobs" for high

Your last paragraph is something I wish more people understood. It is very eye opening to take a look at the salary information on US New "Best Jobs" for high cost regions. For instance, while software developers typically out earn RNs nationally, registered nurses earn a bit more at the median in SF than software developers. Dental Hygenists also earn almost as much as software developers. Lawyers and Physicians, of course, earn vastly more. I've thought about this a bit. I think part of the reason tech workers are blamed may be scale. Because dental hygienists and registered nurses draw their salaries and economic value from the population they serve, they simply can't exist in sufficient numbers to displace the other residents. Tech workers, on the other hand, often draw their economic value from outside there region. While this means that tech workers are good in many ways (they bring wealth into a region rather than drawing wealth from it), they can exist in vastly greater numbers. In other words, there can only be so many $112k a year dental hygienists in SF (average salary in SF[1]), just not enough to cause displacement, whereas there really isn't a limit on how many $114k/yr [2] software developers there are in San Francisco. The salaries are roughly the same, but because software developers don't serve the local population, they can exist in vastly greater numbers. Other factors- there's no multi-billionaire backed PAC group out there trying to convince congress that there is a desperate shortage of dental hygienists in SF, but there is for software, so there is a cottage industry devoted to convincing the American people that software developers are extravagantly paid workers, when in fact they are paid on average nicely but no more or less than many other jobs that require moderate amounts of training and education. [1]http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/dental-hygienist/salary http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/dental-hygienist/s... [2] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer/salary http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer...