The price of a two bedroom apartment in SF will get you a 3,000 sq ft house with a quarter acre of land elsewhere.
>double the rooms...for little tangible advantage.
I grew up in a mixed-class suburb, and many of my friends were the children of professionals (doctors, dentists, lawyers, businesspeople, etc.) with very large houses. So yes, I understand that some people think it’s important/useful to have a large house. None of them seemed to have a higher quality of life than my friends whose parents were professors, artists, teachers, etc. and lived in “normal-sized” 1000–1800 sq. ft. houses. In general, the large-house parents worked all the time, commuted longer distances, spent less time with their kids, and seemed generally less happy. On average the kids were probably also somewhat less happy. Having a big house, and having fancier material possessions more generally, isn’t really the most useful priority for most people to meet their primary life goals, in my opinion. YMMV.
At a world-wide scale, if every family needs to have a 3000+ square foot mansion on a separate lot, we’ll stay on track to wreck the planet.
Your opinion here really only matters on the order of 1/300millionth of the whole.....
It amazes me that Texas and Florida professional sports teams aren't overwhelmingly dominant, given that the contracts that they can pay athletes are effectively 10-25% better than other states, due to lack of state income tax.
To take a simplified example, if you lived in low-tax Nevada, but traveled to high-tax/high-population California to play shows, you're earning money based (at least in part) on the large audience in California. Why shouldn't you pay California part of that revenue?
That’s a hyperbolic exaggeration. If you pay for a 2 bedroom apartment, transportation, food (even if the SF person only shops at Whole Foods or wherever), utilities, comparable health insurance, etc., then the SF person on a $250k salary is going to have considerably more left over to spend on whatever else they want.