Relocating from suburban North Carolina to the Bay Area has really opened my eyes to one fact: the majority of America has no f&#x27;ing clue what the problem is because almost no one (percentage-wise) has experienced both sides of the &quot;problem.&quot;  There just aren&#x27;t that many metros that are growing so fast they have the kinds of problems that exist here (SFBA).  I lived in a city of 150,000, where my beautiful 4300+sqft&#x2F;400m^2 home in a very nice neighborhood with manicured lawns, a playground, neighborhood pool, and 2mi&#x2F;3.2km of wooded walking paths can be had for ~$600,000.  In the majority of the country, that&#x27;s a high end luxury home price.  In the Bay Area, it&#x27;s a hovel price but -- even if you could find a house like it, which is very hard -- would be a $4m house on a postage stamp lot in a cramped neighborhood.<p>I <i>know</i> it&#x27;s impractical to build neighborhoods and homes like that in a place like the peninsula, but I would be lying if I said I didn&#x27;t miss it... a lot.  If you can&#x27;t afford to live near work out here, and if you don&#x27;t rent in an actual urban center, by the time you get home in the evenings the traffic has drained you so much it&#x27;s hard to be motivated to do anything besides eat &amp; sleep, rinse * repeat.<p>To your point, if you transplanted some of the nicer neighborhoods in Palo Alto or Menlo Park, for example, almost anywhere else in the country, and they&#x27;d just be slightly run down, mostly mediocre neighborhoods most middle&#x2F;upper class folks would pass up in favor of new construction.  And those are $3-5m houses here!<p>&lt;rant off.  Can you tell I&#x27;m frustrated by the auction-like homebuying process and stratospheric prices?&gt;