That's a headline worth celebrating — on the surface.

But before anyone at City Hall starts a victory lap, let's ask the question that actually matters to people paying $3,200 a month for a one-bedroom: what kind of jobs are these?

As one Bay Area resident put it bluntly: "Wouldn't know it with all the layoff announcements from major tech companies." And that's the tension baked into every rosy jobs report. Big Tech has been shedding well-compensated positions for two years running, while hiring has shifted toward lower-wage service, healthcare, and government roles. Aggregate job numbers don't tell you much about whether the economic engine is actually healthy or just running on fumes.

Another local raised the sharper question: "Is any data tracking the average salary of job openings vs. the average salary of jobs that were lost?" The answer, predictably, is that nobody in Sacramento or Washington is particularly eager to publish that comparison. A region that replaces $180K software engineering roles with $65K administrative positions isn't "growing" in any meaningful sense — it's downshifting.

None of this means the numbers are bad. Job creation is job creation, and it beats contraction every day of the week. California outpacing Texas is a genuine data point against the doom-and-gloom narrative that every business and worker is fleeing the state.

But the Bay Area's core problem has never been a lack of jobs in the abstract. It's been the relentless mismatch between the cost of living here and the economic opportunities available to regular people. Until job growth translates into wage growth — real wage growth, not inflation-adjusted accounting tricks — these headlines will keep feeling hollow to anyone actually trying to make it work in this absurdly expensive region.

Good numbers. Better questions needed.