The booshie libs are just taking a lesson from the rich liberals -- who are doing all they can to make sure that the tax structure prevents anyone they don't approve of from entering their ranks.
I've not a doubt that these folks are practicing the Dickensian " You must scramble up while simultaneously scrunching down", but we are losing sight of a couple of things here.
1. Consider the source: A self-admitted UMC liberal with an Arabic name, publishing in the ultimate conservative-hating online magazine, Slate.2. This is class envy all over again, just practicing on newly available data.
3. The people in the UMC are themselves perched on a slippery pole, as I and numbers of formerly well-paid, high-skilled "information workers" can attest. Management has been harvesting people like us with a McCormick combine for 25 years now, substituting younger people (using a "hand and fingers" org model -- one experienced hand who knows what he's doing, forging ahead as a "working supervisor" saddled with four, five, or eight noobs/babies/juveniles) or H1B/L1 green-card foreigners to cut wages, at least until the new people get closer to age 50. Then they get wiped out en masse by the requirements of the federal pension-benefit law of 1973, that impose sharply rising rates of pension contributions on employers in the "catch-up" phase of funding their employees' retirement plans.
Employers don't "catch up" on retirement contributions, they "fire up" instead, bellowing "corporate event!" (to cover their timely dismissals under federal law) as they slaughter their faithful long-term "knowledge" employees by the thousands.
I've known corporate senior managers who were comped largely on the basis of their efforts to "control out-year G&A expenses". They succeeded, firing almost their entire "knowledge-worker" base as of 1986, by the time they packed it in and sold the company in 1997, to minimize farewell packages due to over-50's as opposed to the 40-somethings who were left when the ball dropped. Neat, huh?
A house on my Houston street, more to the house price phenomenon in Houston that FRiend commented on above, that might have sold for $400K in 2005 was sold in 2010 for $650K, and just listed again (its elite PhD "knowledge worker" being sent God knows where by his S&P 100 employer) for about $850K.
Houston inside the Loop is being reserved now for "special" people who park Jags and Benzes in their portes-cocheres but whom one never sees at civic-club meetings; they're either still at the office at 7pm or they're wasted with fatigue and asleep in their racks.
They don't have time for kids a lot of the time, either, unless the wife gives up her career.
And finally, this phenomenon would not have happened without a rewrite of Houston "zoning" (Houston doesn't have zoning legally, but it does have land-use ordinances) a few years ago to allow "dense-pack" housing to be overbuilt on infrastructure designed for 1/6th-acre lots with 1500 Sq ft houses on them. Now it's 27 "units" (can you hear the rats squeaking in their cages?) per acre, with unknown consequences later for water, sewer, and power infrastructure. We've already established that parking is grossly insufficient, and the streets are too narrow, after people park on them up and down both sides, to admit fire trucks and such.... And are therefore grossly inadequate, with nowhere to go for more pavement, thanks to the developers who rampack-jampacked their condo blocks onto the old house lots.
In other words, the housing-price boom is entirely contingent on a piece of "New Urbanism" crony-capitalist market intervention by law, and the local District A representative who ramrodded the change through (a nominal "Republican", and we all know which kind) has term-limited out of office and has gone to collect his reward from the developers and speculators he made obscenely rich.
Or, as Mark Twain would have put it, "He has done absquatulated." With a sack of money, no doubt.