> And of course you need a car since public transport isn’t a thing there.

Are we talking about Seattle? We definitely have public transit here.

> Sending children to a good colleage is probably 50k+ a year just in tuition.

If they don't get into UW you mean? UW in-state tuition is only $11,745 (I say "only", but it is much higher than when I went there). However, it is a very competitive state university to get into.

> We definitely have public transit here.

I suppose this light rail train I am watching go by outside my window is just a mirage or something. Same for these buses, obviously a plant.

Never been, but imagined it to be like SF where everyone complains about 3 hours of daily commute driving the car.

> And of course you need a car since public transport isn’t a thing there.

What? Seattle has one of the most utilized public transit systems in the US.

Not to mention University of Washington is like $12k/yr and is a great school for CS. Literally a signing bonus at a large tech company is enough to likely pay off that amount assuming you went without scholarships or other tuition reductions.

Doesn't Amazon provide a shuttle service for employees? Microsoft does, so does Google I believe. There's also a reasonably good bus system here, and they're working on light rail.

Yeah, shuttle service is pretty good, buses are pretty good, and light rail is getting better.

It does

It's comical though - the reason the pay is so high is because the housing prices are so high. The housing prices are so high because the pay is so high. It's a never ending cycle.

Housing prices are high because the supply of housing is very low relative to demand from people who have the ability to pay a high price.

If you took the same amount of high earners and dropped them in an area with five times as many equivalent utility houses, then prices would not be high even though there are the same number of high earners. Hence high housing prices are not a result of a population of high earners simply existing.

As an example, I can afford and am willing to pay $5 for an apple, but I will not because I can easily find an equivalent one for $1.5.

Well that doesn't happen. High earners aren't "dumped" somewhere by some magical god that moves people around. There's often some reason a bunch of high earners are somewhere and when it happens the tap doesn't turn off. It just keeps going until there are no homes left. And at that point there's high pressure for low income people to sell because of the ability for them to get $1.5MM for their $200K house.

My target comp here in chicago is $250,000 for the level below senior software engineer and average home price here is $303,559 [0].

Pay is usually max(COL, local market rate). You don't need a super high COL if the local market is very competitive, but COL can raise the pay because you still need to convince people to move to your location and most people won't do that if it has an abnormally higher cost of living without a corresponding pay increase.

The reason house prices are high in Seattle is because geography limits how well they can sprawl to build new houses and lots of people don't like higher density housing.

[0]: https://www.zillow.com/chicago-il/home-values/

...with an interesting "side effect": it allows most people in those cities to buy plenty goods and services made by people in poor countries. And not the opposite.