> Taken to extremes you'll have all wealthy people living in California, and the rest of the country available to us plebs.

Which is exactly what people are afraid of happening, and what they mean by the crisis of housing affordability.

You can go and buy or rent a cheap house today in probably 90% of the localities of the USA. Of course, if you already live in those places, you probably don't have the money, because good work is very hard to find.

The problem of housing is that regular people want to live in NYC, and Chicago, and LA, and all of these places, and relatively near to where their jobs are, and they're seeing the rich own more and more of the space that could have allowed them to do so.