I suppose a big change over the past 50 years is that we really boosted jobs that must be done in big cities. Wanna earn a lot of money? Take on a lot of debt and become a lawyer/accountant/etc. But we didn't create more cities. There's more people competing for the same small amount of commutable real estate, and the winners are the top earners.

I'm not sure how you fix it. The organic fix ought to be that businesses want to move out of the overpriced cities. But if that's also where their employment pool and investors are, that's tricky.

UK has had the same issue. The salary gap between London and anywhere else is huge. So everyone aspiring for a high salary wants to move to London. So prices are drastically higher. And there's no rebalancing in sight.

Maybe there's space for some government regulation? Tax cuts for companies hiring in lower CoL areas? No idea. But so long as an increasing pool of people is competing for a barely growing pool of housing, it's not going to get better.