Excellent points, about how some people live so far from work due in part to high housing prices.
Then a question is, why do they do it? Do they have some unique jobs in the Bay Area which aren’t found elsewhere? Are they in careers that can’t easily transfer to another less expensive place to live? Do they love the Bay Area so much that they can’t bear the thought of making their lives better financially by moving somewhere else? Were they born and raised in the Bay Area, and can’t imagine living anywhere else, even if housing and traffic woes make their lives difficult?
Everybody has a reason why they live where they live. And everybody theoretically could move away and avoid the problems. “Theoretically” being the operative word here. There may well be many “real world” reasons why they stay and tolerate the Bay Area problems.
Well in terms of the paradigmatical example, if you want to work for Facebook or Google or Intel or Apple any of 500 others and earn the killer money, you have to work in Palo Alto or Sunnyvale or Mountain View....on the peninsula. Most of those companies (obviously not FB) were established 20 (if not 40) years ago when the area was less dense. What you can buy in terms of housing for $1 million a reasonable distance away from that area is....almost nothing. That has spread to San Jose and all the nearby areas. [I just participated in selling a home in San Jose which was a total wreck which needed $150K in immediate repairs just to make it habitable and it went for $950K in about 3 days] I remember well, when Mountain House which is a “new” community near Tracy, better part of 100 miles away from the peninsula, was invented out of nothing just after Y2K and people bought homes out there for $600K in the middle of utterly nowhere because they could not afford $900K (then, now $1.7MM) homes closer to the peninsula.