If every major tech company in the Bay Area switched to remote work, allowing employees to work from anywhere they wanted to as long as they stayed on the same schedule as those who remained in the Bay Area offices, my guess is that there would be a large exodus.
If I weren't constrained by work, I'd be looking for some place where • houses are far enough apart that I rarely hear my neighbors and they can't hear me if I decide to watch an action movie or listen to music at a good volume in the middle of the night, • there are enough trees, bushes, wild plants, and lawns in my neighborhood that plenty of wild critters hang out and are visible from my living room window, • it is not a long drive to reach some place with dark skies, • it is warmer than where I now am (Western Washington, west side of Puget Sound).
I currently have the first two (sonic isolation, wild critters). Here's the view out my living room window from my computer desk [1].
Yes, but the problem is that many companies have found that remote work is significantly less efficient.
So if you need to cluster your work force somewhere, the Bay Area is probably where you'll have to given the desires of your top people to live there.
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-sac...
https://www.selectsacramento.com
Close to Tahoe, Sonoma Coast and Silicon Valley VCs.
Some lively discussion: http://www.city-data.com/forum/city-vs-city/991635-austin-vs...
From there you can grow. This is sort of the logic I'm going by here.
You can't just shackle them up and put them on a train though. Plenty of people don't want to live in Detroit, and have other opportunities in the Bay Area or elsewhere. Perhaps they prefer the climate in CA, or perhaps they want to be someplace where there are plenty of other opportunities if the one job doesn't work out.