&gt; The Bay area seems to have a positive-feedback loop going on. Highly-paid programmers have bid up the cost of housing to astonishing heights.<p>This... is not the primary driver of the insane housing costs in the area. A survey from a year or two back found that tech workers make up ~8% of SF&#x27;s population.<p>For a variety of reasons, [0] it&#x27;s nearly impossible to build new housing in San Francisco. I get the impression that the situation is similar in much of the Bay Area.<p>In San Francisco, for the past decade or so for every new unit of housing created, roughly five people have entered the city. [1]<p>Add supply to take care of the backlog <i>and</i> meet expected medium-term demand, and you&#x27;ll see prices stabilize (and maybe return to less-insane levels).<p>[0] The <i>least</i> of which is Rent Stabilization. :)<p>[1] You <i>could</i> make the argument that &quot;If noone was able to pay the insane prices, the prices wouldn&#x27;t be insane.&quot; This is true, but -frankly- there are <i>lots</i> of <i>very</i> highly-paid people out there. As far as &quot;highly-paid&quot; people go, tech workers really aren&#x27;t all that highly-paid. :) (I know of decent-to-good engineering sales [2] folks working at bigcos that make between 2 and 10x what I understand mid-level Google engineers to make.)<p>[2] That is, salesmen that <i>also</i> have a technical background, can handle crunchy sales and configuration questions, and can even do <i>real</i>, deep troubleshooting of the product they&#x27;re selling.