> I understand your point but you’d have to validate this assumption.
This is basically the efficient market hypothesis. If it was better to live in Mississippi then people would be doing it. Which allows housing in California to be overpriced by the amount that jobs in California pay better, before it starts happening. Which is bad, because then all of the people still in California are overpaying for housing.
> You’re also not accounting for the costs to build more housing in California.
Stop inhibiting it from being built and people will voluntarily pay to build it.
> Instead something you may want to look at is moving employers to Mississippi (or wherever).
But how? And is that even good? There are some benefits to having regions specialize in things.
> To take your point to its logical conclusion everyone in America would move to California for the highest paying jobs relative to housing.
The high paying jobs are for people in particular industries that are currently concentrated in California. Those people do live in California, or other similarly situated places like New York, rather than places like Mississippi or West Virginia.
The way you prevent everybody in that industry from wanting to move to the same city is by creating more housing in every city, so that it balances and the result is not net migration but rather just an increase in real wages at the expense of incumbent landlords.
