Comment by api

18-22

I've asked older people about this for this very reason, and they've generally agreed with me. There's always been an allure to big cities but it went into overdrive starting in the late 90s - early 2000s.

As for real estate prices, that's objective. You can easily look that up. RE prices went insane starting in the 2000s with the 2008 crash only being a brief pull-back in a long bull run. You can also clearly see the divergence with big top-tier cities appreciating at a much faster rate than smaller cities. You can see it in the numbers.

Look into the origin of early personal computers. They're from all over: Albuquerque (MITS), Dallas (TI, Tandy), Boston (DEC), Miami (IBM PC), Philadelphia (Commodore), Seattle (several), etc. In the early 2000s if we re-did the PC revolution it would all be from the SF Bay, because by then if you were doing anything cutting edge in computing it had to be in the Bay Area.