No doubt bringing in tech workers will likely cause prices will rise, but will they rise to the current SF levels? If they don't, assuming that the pay also doesn't drop too much, then it might be worth it for some individuals, no?

Glancing at Denver, downtown 1 bedroom ~700 sq ft apartments seem to run ~$1500/mo. That's ~$500/mo cheaper than way out in the suburbs of SF; and in my experience at least $1000/mo cheaper than SF itself. And the Denver area has houses for less than $1M, so home ownership might even be an option, whereas in the Bay it's been rendered all but a pipe dream.

> but will they rise to the current SF levels?

Once you include salaries in the inclusion, it could be worse than SF. For example, Michigan's urban apartments are already often more expensive than Seattle (when measured as percent of median income needed to cover average urban rents).

The sticker prices are vastly misleading because many folks get SF-level triple-figure salaries, and can pull those anywhere in the world. They can shop across entire housing markets. They see a $600k condo in say, Milwaukee, and think "wow, that would be so cheap (on my San Francisco salary)".

But 99% of regular people can't do any of that, they have to afford local housing using local wages. And regular people still need housing just as much as developers do. A $600k house might as well cost 6-million dollars, because they are both equally impossible to ever afford for a regular person.

> If they don't, assuming that the pay also doesn't drop too much, then it might be worth it for some individuals, no?

For a few individuals, yes absolutely. When we promote this idea of "fix housing affordability by spreading the problem everywhere", we do alleviate a little bit of pain for technology workers and give them a shot of home ownership (which is great).

But we do this at the expense of permanently hurting housing availability for a huge swath of other people -- something vitally important, but often gets overlooked when people talk about housing by hyper-focusing on just San Francisco's problem, and ignoring the crisis happening in all of the other cities nationwide.

Honest question: can you think of any examples that are not already trendy cities (as the case has been with those three) where large tech companies have made serious investments that led to a big, negative social outcome?

On the flip side, I can think of two success stories. I'm a Pittsburgh native, and my family is still there. The influence of CMU has long been beneficial to the region. The recent fight for AI talent by the likes of Google and Uber have been a source of pride for Pittsburghers generally (though I'm sure folks in academia have concerns) when things like the Uber self-driving experiment launch on their roads first. My grandmother - who has never been on the internet - called me when she read it in the newspaper.

After undergrad, I worked for a large tech company that put an outpost in the Detroit area. There had been rumors this company may leave town (which did not happen), and the local papers and city were deeply disappointed at this possibility. When they ultimately announced they were actually expanding their office, it was considered a big win in the media.

So yeah, this is a very different cultural and economic experience than my current one in the Bay Area. I do agree with you though -- going into cities with competitive housing markets and trendiness probably just puts you on a crash course to similar problems in your new locale.

Fortunately, there are a lot more cities in America that do not have those issues and actively seek business development.

> (See Portland, Seattle, Denver for examples)

Intel relocated a lot of their engineering to Portland (well, Hillsboro) a few decades ago. The strategy seems to have worked for the most part. Housing only got really expensive here in the last 5-6 years with the latest tech bubble out of SFBA.