"If I were looking for the 2 hr commute you refer to - Antioch would be my choice. Without traffic 40-45 mins/with traffic 2 hrs or less."
It's all relative... Antioch is cheap by CA standards... my friend just bought a 2000 s.f. home (fixer) just above $400K. For those coming from the midwest, this can be a sticker shocker as it can buy you ALOT more elsewhere...
Someone else mentioned the cycle of RE properties are bound to come back down, once interest rates go back up. It's a special case in the bay area... it has not and probably will not be affected by it... It's THAT desirable. Case in point: 4 yrs ago, RE was already outrageous, especially in the Silicon Valley... when the dot com economy burst, it created a stagnancy in the RE market. In fact, the LA market continued to rise, as well as the rest of the country, except for the bay area... only to be followed by another RE boom, thus the "auction" and "overbidding" type buying continued, and will probably continue to occur for a while, but prices will not be significantly low enough to allow affordability. It is strongly influenced by alot of Pacific and Asian money... and just to give you an idea of how it is to buy a property in Asia... it's rarely mortgaged... they pay in CASH... tough to compete with that especially if the future of China's economy continues to be very bright, so will the price of housing on the West Coast, as well as the major cities in the East coast. It has been that way for the past decade, and will continue to be that way unless a major catastrophe occurs... i.e. another major earthquake, terrorist strikes, etc.