Well, for those of us who live in those flyover states, it does make us feel a little better about our own situations, as well as mightily perplexed about what people in SF, etc, are thinking.

Where I live, a mid-sized metro in the central US, I had some graduate student coworkers recently outright buy a 1500 sqft 2-bedroom house within walking distance of our university for $30K (from foreclosure). Not the best area of town, but it was a perfectly fine house and you can't beat that price. Elsewhere, one can easily get a 2000-2500 sqft home with a sub-$1000 mortgage payment. And everything else, like food and gas, is much cheaper than CA, usually about half the price. And salaries, while lower, are still high enough for this to be a beneficial trade, not to mention the lower tax brackets from having a lower nominal income.

Now if you are pulling down $250K as a tech worker, of course it makes sense to live in the Bay Area. But all these housing insecure people working service jobs? They should come to the central US where they could have a much higher quality of life. And if they did, the housing crises in coastal metros would solve itself, because of decreased demand, and because the local authorities would be forced to make the cities livable for service workers -- assuming wealthier inhabitants want to have any Starbucks, bars, etc.

Another strange paradox is that zoning restrictions are much looser, and more sprawl is allowed in these mid-sized metros, than in places like Santa Cruz, despite the lower overall demand for housing. So there is a double-whammy effect causing a huge difference in housing prices between a few select cities and, well, everywhere else in the US.