I guess some of it is the "captive" effect for an individual - if you leave the expensive property market for somewhere cheaper with a lower salary, it becomes very hard to move back to the expensive place. But is that a strong enough effect?
Surely an efficient free market should theoretically make tech companies much more geographically distributed?
US housing is pretty much mega fucked. The price is close to the maximum people are willing to pay. In many areas, it's well over that maximum.
When work-from-home became more widespread, my spouse and I did the whole "Oooh, where could we live to maximize our income/expense ratio!" Zillow fantasy-exploration, and we concluded that even though many places in the country are significantly cheaper than where we are, we would be miserable in these places.
Reminds me of that story that made the rounds on HN a few years ago about that techie who moved to Bumblefuck Arkansas and bought an insanely cheap office for his tech enterprise, and regretted it for years due to the place otherwise being a total shithole.
It seems like a USA specific problem because from my understanding low cost areas in much poorer countries produce many highly skilled educated techies. What are they doing differently from the US?
Replace the Bible with a science textbook.
Yeah, you can find something cheap, but often it is cheap for a reason. Especially when the whole country has a housing shortage. I'm sure Alaska is beautiful, for example.