Yep you're right, it's just as much the fault of the corporations that are there. Startups are a big part of it, moving to SV just to form a startup locks a ton of qualified people out and unnecessarily jacks up your burn rate. You'd be far better off moving to Madison and hiring from University of Wisconsin where you still have Whole Foods and Trader Joes and a bike-friendly city and great public transport but your employees can buy their own house for $100k.

But people are part of the problem too. People move to SV to work for Google and Apple and Facebook but these aren't the only tech employers in the country. Sticking with Madison, Epic is huge and very high-tech. Ann Arbor MI has Duo, Arbor Networks, and Trove among many. And these places pay pretty darn well for the area, which means you're going to be taking home a lot more disposable income than you would in SV. The only downside is you won't be working for Google/Apple/Facebook, and you'd have to live in the Midwest which means dealing with other people. You might even have to shop at shudder Walmart.

"People" move there for the jobs... because that's where people just like them work. But I'll bet there's somewhere closer to home where they can work with people just like them but also experience other people frequently, make more money, work on just as interesting of projects, and come out better because of the experience.

>which means you're going to be taking home a lot more disposable income than you would in SV.

Rolling the dice in SV will result in much bigger winnings more often than it will in other areas. That's worth something, and obviously people are willing to pay for it (give up some things).

Rolling the dice as in founding a startup? For sure. But that's mainly because all the VCs are are in SV and some of them force you to be there too (looking at you YC...). Startups outside of SV need to be profitable from day one[0] because there aren't too many people out here willing to throw millions of dollars at unprofitable ideas.

The ones rolling the dice are the VCs. Everyone else, founders included, are just slot machines. Your odds of hitting a jackpot in SV are higher than anywhere else, but so are your odds of losing everything. Elsewhere, you might not hit a jackpot and become a unicorn, but is a focus on slow and profitable growth really a net negative?

San Fransisco never forgot their gold rush heritage, and just like back then, the miners come looking for a fortune but the only ones reliably getting rich are the tavern owners.

[0] https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-choose-profit-e511efc4dcb9

More often? No. The pay-off for a incredibly tiny minority of dice rolls will be much higher.