[codingmess]

As if companies determine the price for housing. With Sillicon Valley wages, you could easily afford housing within 5 years somewhere else. It is not companies' fault that housing prices have gone up - it is politics preventing building of available housing. It is also an example that shows that no matter how much you pay the employees, housing prices will simply adapt if more housing is not being built.

[Apocryphon]

The companies are at least partly culpable for choosing to aggregate themselves in these insanely high CoL areas, contributing to the rent jumps, and failing to engage in the proper corporate social responsibility of working with their ambient communities to alleviate these living situations for both their employees and their neighbors.

[codingmess]

Well the people living there can vote, can't they? I don't see how it is corporate responsibility. Corporations can't vote.

Yes, the corporations are contributing to rent jumps, but that was part of the point: by paying higher salaries, as is being demanded by the pro union crowd here, they also increase the rents. So they can't simply pay enough so that "people can buy a house within 5 years", because housing prices rise along with salaries.