I'd love to be free to hack on interesting things. If I didn't have to spend so much on housing, I'd have more freedom. Of course, there are also tradeoffs in that, in the sense that I do not want to live in Cyanide Springs, Oklahoma just to have cheap housing...
It seems like there is a tendency to become occupied with obligations as you age, regardless of exactly how the discretionary time / money is eaten up.
I am all for reducing rent seeking, including in this case literally. However, my point is that the hippies became squares in the same way the hackers became squares. It's not clear that housing costs are causal; they might just be incidental.
I think it's one of those things where you'd want to look at it statistically, or 'at the margin'. Many - most - people will grow up and settle down some. But high housing costs kind of force the issue even more, and leave less room for people to have some more freedom to explore.
If we are thinking about this as a dynamic system, then: many people who moved to the valley before 2010 got some sort of windfall, whether through home equity or participating in a notable period of wealth creation. Why didn’t that mint a bunch of hackers on the margin, if disposable income is so explanatory?
