That's pretty much exactly how most Americans ended up on this continent. Someone in your ancestry faced exactly the same question and made the choice to come here. It's been a good run but sometimes you have to make the hard choice.

I had to move from my hometown because it's a pit of economic misery where the primary industry is caring for a shrinking, aging population. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Oh man I feel so sorry for my artist friends who were forced out and can never move home again. One of them is slowly succumbing to depression due to ending up in Seattle and I really hope he can figure out how to get out of there before the winter blahs drive him to suicide.

Wow, Seattle! A punishment worse than death!

It isn't about the location, it is about being away from your family, your friends, and your community. That matters to some people.

Also 10 consecutive months of drab, gray skies and constant rain.

This sounds perfect.

for some reason, 50 degrees feels more like 35

Eleven months! Don't move here.

You'd be more convincing if you said "Don't move there."

Grey and rainy forever is really bad for people prone to seasonal depression. Rents following the same path that SF took for similar reasons don’t help either, it is no longer the affordable place for art scenes to flourish that it was in the grunge era.

I lived there for several years and got out, and it’s really nice to be living somewhere I know I won’t spend half the year with a little voice in the back of my head suggesting suicide as the solution to every other problem because I am tragically low on sunlight and vitamin D even with a 2’ square sun lamp and lots of pills, and I see the symptoms of the same shit in the friend I’m talking about who ended up there after SF’s insane rents pushed him out.

He should consider large doses of vitamin D, for a start.

He has. So did I when I was living there. It helps but it is by no means providing everything that Seattle lacks, in my experience of most of a decade living there with a body optimized for warmer climates.

Yes? Why not? I mean, if it no longer makes sense financially for you to be there and you don't like it anymore, moving somewhere else seems like a great idea to me.

New Orleans sits below sea level & oceans are projected to rise due to anthropogenic global warming. Should they move?

New Orleans lost more than half of it's population after Hurricane Katrina. So yes, people are moving.

The Dutch aren't moving.

They should, they really should. It's just "spitting into the wind" to live anywhere that is below sea level and near a coastline. Flooding is Nature's way of telling you to move.

Sure we admire their ingenuity and hard-work ethic and how they recovered the land from the sea but that same energy probably could have been applied with more productive results somewhere else. Look what the Mormons have done with Utah. Maybe the Dutch could have done something similar with Montana (or even Minnesota). I'm certain they would have done a better job with San Francisco than we've done.

They did make a place called "New Amsterdam" that turned out pretty well.

The Mormons fled to Utah after facing extermination in Missouri.

Sounds like you feel entitled to live in the Bay. Since we live in a capitalistic society, our actions are determined by what we can afford monetary wise.

But on a brighter note, trust me, there’s a lot of great places in the US! Many people from around the world immigrate to America to make it and I think those who are lucky enough to be able to stay in America due to citizenships (just cause you happened to be born on American soil) or via the Visa lottery should be grateful for the opportunities that they have.

If the free market was less constrained, there would be less of a housing problem, because the pursuit of money by developers would cause more housing to be built. Acting like the artificial scarcity of housing has nothing to do with it and telling people to just reduce demand because it's a market problem is a weird solution, since the first thing everyone learns about markets is that their is supply and demand which together affect prices.

This looks like there’s an assumption that there’s a lot of space in the Bay Area to grow in terms of houses which isn’t necessarily a correct premise. The Bay Area does have a lot of housing, there are always new developments being made around the area, and it is actually crowded. I don’t think an artificial scarcity is involved.

There are plenty of limits on what types of housing can be built in what areas. How many stories high can you build? Can it be multi-family housing (condos, apartments)? Can you subdivide a larger property into smaller ones, and what rules are imposed on that? These are the types of things that are used to limit housing. Sometimes there are good reasons for the rule, sometimes not. Sometimes there's a good reason for the general rule, but not the current limits it enforces.

It's not an issue of building out, or even necessarily of building up, but just allowing and/or encouraging more building and allowing some building to replace existing low-density housing.

I've lived an hour North of SF my entire life. I've seen how housing policies affects SF as well as where I live (which is also very expensive, but not quite to the same level). People don't like to allow too much change into a neighborhood because it changes the nature of the community. News flash, so does allowing housing prices to double or triple over a couple decades. The only difference is that the existing land owners get to capitalize on that, so it's not just about change, it's also about people controlling the flow of benefits of an area to maximize their own benefits.

Trust me you don't want to live in a city where developers are allowed to build as much as they want. This is how you end up in 2nd word megapolis which is hardly pleasant to be in. Past certain size incentives should exist to spread people across other cities/metro.

If we lived in a capitalist society, it would be easy to build more housing supply in the bay area.

Are you making a nativist argument?