You can then move to a flyover state in the mid-west, and buy a palace for the $100,000/year you were stashing away.

This is the future. Silicon valley rent problems are a network optimization problem best solved by pushing resources to the edge of the graph.

Ya it has to be. We have so many square miles of underutilized cheap land between the costs it's crazy. The federal government owns around 60-90% of the land in the western states too. If only there was a way to communicate without being face to face.

Especially with the type of technical work that's so predominate on the west coast.

A lot of that work could be moved to cheaper interior parts of the country.

Yet for some reason tech giants insist on building more opulent, centralized megaoffices in unaffordable areas. Perhaps it is because they do not bear the brunt of these costs.

One reason is that the executives who make the decisions on office locations can easily afford to live nearby. And most of them prefer to live in fashionable areas.

Japanese real estate has been in a hole for a long time. It's significantly cheaper to live in Tokyo than in a major US city now.

Wages have to stagnate for a whole long time for our 200k+ salaries to lose their value.

I'll worry about that in 10 years if that happens. Plenty of time.