I've chatted with the few of the people involved in siting our remote engineering offices. They're solidly convinced that there's no point even trying to recruit in the US outside SF/NY/SEA, and are looking directly to the developing world. The satellite office strategy in the era of Trump is to the hire the H1Bs where they don't need visas.
> I don't actually know many people who think that access to Bay Area amenities is the highest and best use of a tech salary.
A lot of things are kind of hidden, they don't become an issue until they're gone. People may not think about the bay area weather or crime rate very much until they're pondering a move to Chicago or Detroit. They may not think about the bay area's cultural diversity or educational opportunities until they're considering moving to a small city in Nebraska. People take the things they already have for granted.
For example, I basically took for granted many American/west coast/bay area-n advantages before I moved to Munich and lost them: amazing restaurant scene (especially Asian/Mexican food), business hours are generally convenient, online selection of goods (especially Amazon) very strong, electronics relatively cheap, robust nerd culture, etc.
At my previous company, it was very easy to move from SF to Seattle, which would save a high income tech employee a lot (no state tax, lower housing costs). Maybe a dozen have moved; the vast majority haven't. These "revealed preferences" say a lot more than what people are claiming.
Honestly, at high enough levels in top tech companies, money isn't that limiting of a factor. e.g. at Google L7 level, an employee supporting a family (say spouse and kid) could have FIREd into a low-COL area after ~5 years of work.
Create the amenities and environment that would be enticing to a large % of affluent, highly skilled tech workers.
This is very much non-trivial, these workers actually can afford bay area/Seattle prices on some level, so just cost of living isn't gonna attract them if there aren't good educational opportunities, no good nature around, no other companies around with good jobs, a less tolerant/accepting culture, no public transportation or biking to speak of, etc.
Hacker News gets a lot of flippant comments suggesting this would be trivial for Google or Facebook or whoever to do, but it wouldn't be, at least not in a way that would actually make sense for their business. Businesses are fairly rational actors, you have to have such an expansion or move work in their interests.