Jobs? Jobs? Jobs?

Live in SF bay area and save up $50k (One year if you could make $120k(?) and live with your parents?). Buy two $25k houses, one to live in, one to rent out for your living expenses. Semi-retire. ?

That's great for the small minority of people like you or me for whom that ("just make $120k. just go save $50k annually.") is a realistic achievable plan.

Everyone else who's not in this small minority still has a right to complain about coastal/urban housing prices.

Yeah, just to be clear, the question marks in the original were my attempt at saying I was unsure of how realistic the proposition was. Certainly hanging around HN, you could easily come to the conclusion that $120k is essentially a starting salary for software engineers in the Silicon Valley area (and how that's not enough, since the VCs are always taking the bulk of the value). But I don't have a feel for how "true" that is. My own personal story is that I live on a large plot of land in a large house, and support a wife and 4 kids on a significantly smaller income in fly-over country.