No one today remembers the early 90s, when plenty of people did or almost lost their shirts in the Bay Area housing markets.

That's pretty insane if you think about it, even if it's an outlier. Workers in other industries couldn't cut hair fast enough, fill grocery bags, cook meals, wait tables or chauffeur people fast enough etc to generate that much value in SV. There's just no competing with the type of worker that can de facto service millions of customers every minute of the day like a Whatsapp engineer does.

Given that, and network effects and the gigantic pile of liquidity the US/world is sitting on right now (at bizarro low-inflation interest & rates the past decade), and it all just pools around one spot.

They'll put support staff in satellite offices, but they can easily afford to put the core devs in central locations. Facebook had about 15k employees up until 2016 or so, Walmart has 1.5 million (100x) on somewhat similar net income (same order of magnitude). These ridiculous salaries aren't the biggest deal to tech companies as insane as that sounds.

IIRC there's also some portability of proposition 13 tax basis within California, which would allow retirees to relocate intrastate, which would presumably create inflationary pressure in those secondary housing markets.

Sucks for the kids - as they won't get to inherit a really expensive home with extremely low tax burden (prop 13 continues the low tax burden to those who inherit the property). Banks are so happy to do these right now.