I don't know anything about Boston, but where I live in Europe that's not so easy; a lot of properties within commuting distance aren't cheap, either. Sometimes they're even more expensive actually. And living two hours from your workplace isn't cheap either: you pay either public transport costs or fuel for your car, never mind the enormous amount of time you'll spend commuting.

Consider a place like London. It's bloody huge, and much of it is quite expensive. At the end of the day, London is going to need people staffing grocery stores, and cleaners, and that kind of thing. Not the entire population can be software devs or whatnot working from home, and you can't push them all outside of London.