The other cultural and pay issues seem a bigger deal to me, if true. So many of the best people I've met over the 10+ years in the valley care about things other than owning a home, for example.
Owning a home is nice but it can't be emphasized enough that their heart was in the work, and everything else followed.
I understand that that attitude may be one of privilege but it is what it is.
What is tech culture — at least the bits that other people want to replicate? It's about being at the edges, pushing what's possible. Or the value-add, if you're an economist. :P It's worth noting that even in the Bay Area, it's just a minority of the scene that truly aspires to this ideal. There's a lot of hanger-ons, even here. What's different about the Bay Area is that non-conformism allowed those weirdos to actually lead.
The US is headed that way. Uber, etc. Trump's new Secretary of Labor is a CEO from the fast-food industry and wants to abolish the minimum wage.
5. Pollutions etc.
Yes, China's big cities look like US big cities circa 1970. It took the US about ten years after the Clean Air Act to clean that up. Li Keqiang claims that fixing this is one of his top priorities. He has the authority, and the technology is known.