You know, it might just be a matter of perspective. Thank you for this.

I grew up in a small but nice suburban town about 20 miles outside of Chicago. Plenty of my friends are buying 3-4br houses in decent parts of Chicago for 250-350k. So maybe I just grew up in a "cheap" global city and am not used to what, say, Parisians have come to expect. I think it's just worse in the Bay Area.

In CA, "Starter homes" are $800K

It's not nearly that uniform. I live in Sonoma County (an hour north of SF), and my home cost a little over $500k a couple years ago, but that's for over 2500 sq ft and it's brand new (I bought before they built). There were smaller models in the low $400k's. There are plenty of older houses for sale for less than $400k in town that are fixers.

For obvious reasons, prices scale with proximity to population centers and higher paying jobs. CA is a big place and encompasses a few very different regions. If you want to live in say, Coalinga (which I just found through a map) in the Central Valley, I'm seeing houses on Zillow in the low $100k's and below.

But, to what's likely your point, in SF and the surrounding metro area, even starter homes are well out of the reach of most of the people that live there. Hell, starter homes here are out of the reach of a good percentage of people, and it's not nearly as bad as farther South.

Yeah, this, the problem is just interesting because everywhere within a 60-minute commute is almost a million dollars. At least in real cities with high density (e.g. not San Jose), the rent makes sense because it's close to things you want. In the suburbs of SJ and the greater Bay Area, the difference in rent between the "downtown" area, or even downtown SF proper, seems like way less of a difference between the rent in Manhattan vs the suburbs. My point is that the suburbs here are terribly over-priced and over-valued, but I guess we could argue based on the logic that got us to this point: "it's worth what people will pay for it".

Rent, and home prices, in downtown San Jose are lower than they are in the surrounding suburbs such as Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara. It's the reverse of the situation near San Francisco.