If that explains most/all of it, why don't we see more tech companies moving into areas of the US with low housing prices?

I guess some of it is the "captive" effect for an individual - if you leave the expensive property market for somewhere cheaper with a lower salary, it becomes very hard to move back to the expensive place. But is that a strong enough effect?

Surely an efficient free market should theoretically make tech companies much more geographically distributed?

Many expanded to Texas, for example. Also Hollywood left LA. There aren’t any/many desirable locations left in the US that have low housing costs.

People perhaps don't like the word desirable here. What I meant is not just pretty streets, but many other factors, such as nearby industry, infrastructure, educated workforce (in the thing you need), reasonable weather/sunshine, etc.

Yeah, you can find something cheap, but often it is cheap for a reason. Especially when the whole country has a housing shortage. I'm sure Alaska is beautiful, for example.

Alaska is beautiful, but the polar opposite (no pun intended) of where someone should be looking for LCOL. Alaska is outrageously expensive for myriad reasons, and it is also not exempt from the nationwide housing crisis / greed crisis.

There are also cultural differences in these low cost USA areas that will make it hard to find educated techies there and/or get them to move there. Like it or not, the socially-liberal urban-California culture has become a sort of "Defacto Standard Culture" for tech, and a company is not going to be able to simply move all these people to rural Alabama because the cost of housing and living is cheaper there.

When work-from-home became more widespread, my spouse and I did the whole "Oooh, where could we live to maximize our income/expense ratio!" Zillow fantasy-exploration, and we concluded that even though many places in the country are significantly cheaper than where we are, we would be miserable in these places.

Reminds me of that story that made the rounds on HN a few years ago about that techie who moved to Bumblefuck Arkansas and bought an insanely cheap office for his tech enterprise, and regretted it for years due to the place otherwise being a total shithole.

What could we do to produce educated techies in these low cost areas?

It seems like a USA specific problem because from my understanding low cost areas in much poorer countries produce many highly skilled educated techies. What are they doing differently from the US?

Here's an idea, better education?

Replace the Bible with a science textbook.

There's plenty of science textbooks in our public schooling from what I've seen.

Not enough apparently, else you wouldn't see Texan schools debate about creationism vs evolution.

Those areas are producing educated techies. Those record them move to better areas.

Because low housing price areas are low priced for a reason.

US housing is pretty much mega fucked. The price is close to the maximum people are willing to pay. In many areas, it's well over that maximum.

There's also the small matter of healthcare and education costs.