I agree with all of your arguments except the last one.

1) you should be able to be housing secure from your job

2) $200k+ is an absurd amount of salary

The solution isn't paying MORE salary to further inflate real estate costs and price out ever more service workers that you depend on as a city. The solution is opening offices in one of the many LCOL tech hubs and/or having a remote-first culture.

Open an office in Kansas City (for network infra secret advantages) or Baltimore (for ed/med/gov/NYC access at low cost) or, if you're hiring new grads anyway, any random "big university" town, and see what kind of crazy talent you can attract and retain with 100k.

Real estate prices should not be driving costs for a software company. It's insane.

The prime parts of the Bay Area have long been relatively expensive. I was recruited a few times in the mid 90s and one reason I ended up deciding to stay put was that, even with higher salaries than I was making, I'd have taken a net hit overall.

Of course, neither the housing prices nor the salaries on offer were anywhere near today's levels.

Situations like this make me wonder how much money there is to be made by going remote.

I live in Germany and work for US companies, which is quite lucrative.

I only work a few months a year.

Are you a consultant? How specialized are you, and how do you find projects?

I'm blogging for 3 years now and wrote a book about React, so projects are mostly coming to me.

At the moment I try to make a living by blogging (mostly ghostwriting) less risk than software development, okay-ish pay and flexible work. I also got a teaching gig at a university here, teaching frontend and mobile development.

When I started, I found projects by simply looking online for offers and write emails to companies.

Mind elaborating on this?

With US payments Germany is rather cheap.

If you make >100€/hour and only need 20k€/year you can calculate how much hours you need to work a year to pay for everything.