Obviously no one would rather pay 4x as much for the same thing. In that sense no one chooses the price of their house as they'd clearly pay $1 if they could.
But yes, you choose to pay a lot to live near work (you value your time), in a place with great weather and public schools and natural beauty (since we seem to be talking Bay Area here). The $300k house in BFE Ohio does not have these properties.
At one point in my life I chose to live in a basement for about 10% of my monthly post tax income. Why don't you choose that? Turns out you do, in fact, have agency in choosing your living conditions.
We have agency in that we could choose to renounce careers in tech. That’s it.
There is a price/quality tradeoff in every housing market; all complaints about price can be interpreted as insufficient willingness to compromise on quality. A cardboard box under a bridge is free! “You’re actually obscenely wealthy because you don’t live in a basement and drive 6 hours to work” is not the argument you think it is. Tech workers are telling you how they feel about Bay Area weather, schools, and transportation every time they complain about RTO. We all want nothing more than to get the fuck away from here. Nothing more except, perhaps, to do the work we were meant to do.
Moving to New York or Los Angeles for affordable housing is ridiculous on its face. Austin, Denver, and I would add Miami were basically flash-in-the-pan situations: first movers got some great deals, but the housing markets have priced it in by now & the forward-looking job market outlooks are uncertain.
Seattle is interesting in that it's clearly a durable tech job center and is meaningfully cheaper than San Francisco. It's still twice as expensive as a normal place ($862k vs. $400k) and its street conditions reflect a housing crisis every bit as severe as San Francisco's, but it's true that you could keep your career while paying ~30% less there. So I guess the delta between SF and SEA could be interpreted as a lifestyle splurge.
