Great blog post. Sounds like it was good for Pete to get out of his bubble. Hope this means he'll become more active on the blog again.
As a former Bay Area resident and worker for most of my life, I'll say he barely scraped the surface of the phenomenon. A lot of families are dual income just to make ends meet, but in reality this is often funding a lifestyle that is seen as "normal." Traveling sports teams, spendy vacations, very expensive bikes, luxury vehicles, tech gadgets, high end clothing, and other silliness. Then many families end up spending more on childcare than housing because VHCOL means all services are significantly more expensive. This again is understood as normal.
When it comes to issues like homelessness (which is really an issue of lack of affordable housing), it's shocking to hear Bay Area folks claim that it's the same everywhere else. In other words, this is fine, it's normal. Actually, it's not. Many cities with much higher rates of poverty, such as in the Midwest, have significantly lower rates of homelessness because they have an abundance of affordable housing. The actual solution to homelessness -- building a lot more densely -- is unacceptable so people have become fatalistic, believing nothing can really be done about it.
RE the car thing: Most CA cities are designed around the car. Parking minimums are/were a big component of this. In most places it was (until very recently) impossible to build housing without also providing parking spaces, which is nuts. So in a dense city like SF you couldn't build apartments w/o assuming that all residents also had cars. This jacks up the cost of housing and perpetuates car culture. SF finally dropped parking minimums a few years ago, and other cities are starting to follow their example, but the effects will linger for many years.