It continues to puzzle me how companies like Google, Facebook, etc., have yet to figure out that the higher wages and rents they have to pay tie back to this observation by Henry George:
Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege.
The higher wages they have to pay, as well as the higher rents or costs to acquire buildings and land, all go to the pockets of speculators. The high value of land is driven by the work performed on and around it, not due to any investment by the rentier.
Now we see that companies will punish workers for the temerity to make the choices that their employers can’t or won’t: to move to a place with a lower cost of living, less graft for the rentiers.
In cities like NYC, San Francisco, or Seattle, the rents — for commercial real estate and home purchases/apartment rents — rise with wages, not based on the intrinsic value of the property. You have to be there where the action is and the rentier is there with her hand out. If cities or employers realized that there was a whole industry skimming off the cream, the value of the location that they had no hand in creating, they might be inclined to do something about it. But that revelation is long in coming, even now, more than 100 years after Progress & Poverty.