> that's a San Francisco problem
What's your excuse for the hundreds of places that aren't San Francisco but still have ridiculous ratios between income and housing prices? Your own sources identify some. The absolute last thing this site needs is more SF-centric tunnel vision.
There aren't "hundreds" of places. Here's a list of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) by population -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
In the top 10, only 3 have experienced a dramatic increase in income-to-home-price multiple -> https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/home-price-income-ratios
Of those that have experienced a dramatic increase, the root causes are common: restrictive land use policy that prevents us from building more housing. One may call that "tunnel vision", but others may call that "systematically isolating root causes".
Yet again why the arbitrary limitation? Your own source shows about a dozen areas going from the 5-8 band to the over-8 band since 1990. More than two dozen going from the 4-5 band or lower to the 5-8 band. When each multiple represents most of $100K. When the entire graph should ideally remain about the same color overall but is clearly getting worse. Buy hey, let's look only at the top 10 out of 392 and ignore the fifth of the population that's not in an MSA. That's totally the way to "systematically isolate root causes" ... so long as the root causes are the ones we find convenient. Otherwise not.
In the top 20 most populous MSAs, only 7 experienced a substantial multiplier increase.
In the top 50, it's even less.
The further down the list you go, the less likely there has been a dramatic increase in home-price-to-income ratio.
There's a whole collection of "Fine, American cities" (https://twitter.com/jmhorp/status/1221828340656431105) where multipliers have either not increased, or decreased.
Indeed. Canadian here -- you Americans have it good! In Canada, there aren't so many metros to choose from. Moving away from the city you grew up in generally means moving much, much farther away, and adapting to a very different climate. For any given profession, the number of places with good opportunities is also a much more limited selection.
But the value in this data is in helping us understand what the root causes are, and what the solutions should be.
> Arbitrarily excluding certain metro areas because "you're a techie and can live anywhere" is just counter to reality, and just seems like a way to skew the numbers.
The goal behind "arbitrarily" analyzing the data per-metro is not to skew the numbers, but to help us understand that the root cause is largely local, rather than a global systemic one. Everyone knows that housing is way more expensive than a median income can afford in San Francisco, but that's a San Francisco problem, not an America problem. It's also one that's generally well understood: they're not building enough housing due to exogenic limits.