If everyone adopted this attitude, there'd be nowhere to live. All of the reasons you enumerate are people wanting to live in an area that makes it valuable for them; I think there's a fair number of people in the Bay Area that don't really care to live here particularly, but this is where the tech industry has decided to concentrate a ridiculous amount of its jobs. Job markets in other metropolises like Boston are a tenth the size of the Bay Area's. Not only is moving across a continent incredibly non-trivial, but finding a job at the other end is as well. And that's for populous areas like Boston or NYC where the land is cheaper, but not by much; you move to somewhere actually cheap and the job prospects are just simply not there. California also has better employment laws than other places. Not everyone here is here because we want to be "next to the Louvre": some of us just want to make a living.