> But unless you have the potential to become an L8 at Google (or equivalent), it makes no financial sense to choose to live in the Bay Area instead of Raleigh. It's like somebody who works as a back office bookkeeper insisting on buying custom tailored Seville Row suits for his work attire, then complaining that the costs of clothes has gotten out of hand.

Buying a custom tailored suit requires extra/better labour and materials, so it makes sense that the costs associated with it would be higher.

For this analogy to apply to housing, the cost of constructing and maintaining housing should be higher in the Bay Area too. However, almost all the increases to rent in urban areas has come from increased land values. This isn't a result of the landowner putting in "extra work" to make it better; they get to extract the added land value that the community created while putting in no extra labour or capital.

The fact that private landowners capture all this extra value the community created is not inevitable! It's entirely a result of the economic system we've chosen to stick with. There are solutions that are both more fair, and economically efficient [0].

[0] - See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax