A three-bedroom house in San Jose just sold for $1.75 million — and that's the going rate in a state where working families have been priced out of their own communities by decades of deliberate policy failures.

The 1,903-square-foot home on Colleen Drive, built in 1971, fetched $920 per square foot. It comes with a fireplace, a pool, and a two-car parking spot. The Mercury News, which reported the sale, generated the story using a bot that scrapes public records — because at this point, the housing market in Silicon Valley is so absurd it barely needs a human to narrate it. Three comparable sales within a few blocks over the past six months ranged from $1.75 million to $1.95 million. This is not an outlier. This is the market.

For context on just how distorted that market has become: in Salem, Massachusetts, a 4,670-square-foot, six-bedroom, five-bathroom Georgian home built in 1755 — sitting next to the world-famous Witch House — is listed at $1.88 million. That is roughly the same price as the San Jose ranch, for more than double the square footage and twice the bedrooms. The Salem property last sold in 2013 for $608,437, according to public records cited by the New York Post. That's a roughly threefold increase in 13 years — steep anywhere, but still a fraction of the per-foot cost in San Jose.

The agent for the Salem listing, Andrew Pike of the Persac Group, pitched the property as ideal for someone who "wants to live the Salem lifestyle" or run a short-term rental business, with a 30-minute train ride to Boston. In San Jose, there is no such pitch — because there is no alternative. You pay nearly $2 million for a 1971 build, or you leave.

The Mercury News framed the San Jose sale as a straightforward data point, stripped of context — the bot literally cannot ask why a modest three-bedroom costs more than a historic estate on the Massachusetts coast. The Post, for its part, treated the Salem listing as a quirky lifestyle piece, burying the more uncomfortable story: that a home purchased for just over $600,000 barely a decade ago now commands nearly $2 million, even on the other side of the country.

Here is the reality neither outlet wanted to name. California's housing catastrophe is the product of three forces working in concert: NIMBY zoning restrictions that choke supply, Federal Reserve money printing that inflates asset prices, and mass immigration that drives demand while the state builds nowhere near enough shelter. Every one of those forces is a policy choice. Every one is bipartisan. And every one extracts wealth from working Americans and transfers it to the asset-holding class.

A family earning the San Jose median household income of roughly $140,000 cannot qualify for a mortgage on that Colleen Drive home. The American Dream — own a home, raise a family, build equity in your community — is functionally dead in Democrat-run California. And the same pressures are spreading.

The question isn't whether the math works. It doesn't. The question is how long the people priced out of their own communities keep accepting it.