Affordability is inverse to employability.

Places are affordable because they generally don’t have well paying jobs or good careers.

Conversely, places where it is easy to pick up a good career or earn a lot without much experience tend to be quite unaffordable.

The best flex is to have a job that allows you to work from anywhere. This allows you to pick and choose that environment that gives the best affordability level for you, personally, while earning as much as possible from a location-independent job.

Unfortunately, middle manglement desperate to justify their paycheques, and upper manglement who are over-invested in business real estate, seem hell-bent on rescinding the WFH opportunities that made employees so much happier and productive. They would rather have miserable, underperforming employees than change the way they do things.