Yes, there are exceptions to the rule. Palo Alto, home to one of the biggest wealth booms in human history, is one of them.

This applies to any west coast market.

You'll encounter it yourself if you ever shop for a home out here.

Yep, anywhere within a 2-hour drive of San Jose or San Francisco is crazy. You're lucky to get a single-family home for under a million, or a condo for under about 600. It's a big question of "do you have the right to live in a city you grew up in if you can no longer afford to live there", property tax laws, etc. It creates a situation where people are buying run-down houses I'd consider unlivable for close to a million dollars, and have neighbors who couldn't afford the smallest apartment in a 30 mile radius, but get to stay there and inflict their blight upon the neighborhood from which they are now very much priced out of.

One would think it's a kind move to not tax them on the actual value of their property, but everything else gets more expensive too, so now a quesadilla is $15 at the corner store and they can barely afford to eat, and their options for other housing are in a different state. It's very strange to me that people aren't taxed out of their homes, since if they can no longer pay for anything else in the area, their quality of life goes down dramatically , in a community who mostly just wants them gone, fighting against the merciless tide of economic "progress" just because they grew up there (and sometimes not even).

If you can't afford the rent, you have no say. Property tax is a form of city rent, from my perspective. Why are the rules different? It seems like people just like to pretend they can still afford to be in a place and resist the change for as long as possible rather than accept the world around them.

So let me get this straight...

You're saying that because they don't have the financial wiggle room to make their property something you want to look at they should GTFO?

As houses become less affordable, there appears to be much more demand at the "entry level" range of $1-1.4M out here. So you have much higher $/sqft often times on a smaller home than on much larger, nicer homes at higher prices. In fact, those have been leveling off lately as there are only so many buyers at higher levels.

Whew, in places near where I grew up, those are the prices for land by the acre

Yea, west coast real estate has become totally surreal.

New York, DC, Boston, are also insane.

Seattle, Austin, and Portland are quickly getting there as well. Denver kinda already is.