It includes two of the world's top ten universities, incredible natural beauty there and nearby, excellent weather (locals complain, as locals do, but it's wonderful), and all the resources and people are gathered there. It's hard to imagine the return on investment of moving.
There are many places on Earth with nice weather and scenery (depending on taste). There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families. None of these things are unique selling points intrinsically required for a tech hub. And if remote work becomes the norm (and yes I know all the arguments for and against) you can live in your dream town with the right mixture of scenery/weather/nightclubs/schools without paying the premium.
The one thing SF has is inertia : tech happens there because it happens there. But Detroit used to have inertia, too.
I think it's the opposite; what changes more slowly? How has the list of elite universities changed over time, unless we are talking about centuries?
> There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families.
People like to find others with their interests. Very smart, highly educated, intellectual, creative people gather in SF, NY, LA, Boston. It's all the people who were bored and felt limited elsewhere. You want talented people to work with, to talk to, to challenge you. All those people who wanted to get out of their small town go to these places.
Companies won’t keep increasing total comp for junior engineers in SF when they can grow their offices in other cheaper cities instead.
You need a robust pipeline of junior folks and SF is increasingly strangling that pipeline and other cheaper cities are as attractive as SF once was.
The US has an __abundance__ of places that fit this description.
People - yes, currently the state of the people is well tuned in favor of SF (SFBA). But the question still remains.
You may even ignore this particular ranking, but it really doesn't matter, because neither Honolulu nor Miami, with all due respect, have anything close to either school, let alone both (or half a dozen of UC's in driving distance)
Also, very subjective, but I can't bear the humidity in FL and HI for more than a week, so saying it's all similarly good weather in all those places doesn't make sense to me.
But really, it's a combination of all of these things in one place.
And the combination is likely the product of people, gradually accumulated in the area. So, yes, the intellectual potential is great. But that could be moved some hundreds miles away relatively easily, or at least replicated to a high degree - partially because of the sad situation with housing.