I have been working with web technologies directly (not through Java or some other language) full time for almost 20 years. Here is the problem:
* In the 90s sloppy was awesome. The web is driven by marketing interests and not by technology interests. The name of the game back then was "get big fast". You need incompetent developers (many of them) to work in the technologies for extremely low pay, which means the technology must be extremely forgiving. The technologies tolerate a tremendous amount of sloppiness and so become sloppy themselves.
* The education around web technologies is deplorable. There are a couple of reasons for this. The technology is moving, growing, and enhancing rapidly making it hard to keep up with. Because there is sloppiness baked in its hard for people to immediately jump in and know the best approaches and avoid the pitfalls. Web technologies are generally considered incompetent toys (in academia) compared to more entrenched technologies like C++ and its spawn (C# and Java).
* Don't break the web. This means old broken approaches (the sloppiness) will continue to be supported forever even after they are deprecated and killed. We know what the best approaches are, but making the technologies more strict and unforgiving is the enemy of all marketing and shames incompetent developers (most of them). It is one thing if your language of choice fails and yells at you during a build process, but it is something different when this happens in production because web technologies don't require a build process.
You can safely ignore the technology excuses from many of the replies on here. These opinions come from people who learn web technologies only after learning something else (unrelated) first. For example, JavaScript is not Java, and if you look at it through a Java lens it will be incompetent for all kinds of reasons, but really the developer is just wishing they were still writing in Java. JavaScript will never be language x, but that isn't a valid reason to call it incompetent.
You must live in the Bay Area or the East Coast. In the heavily cost inflated economies this is the reality. In the cost depreciated realities this is a complete farce.
For comparison I like to use Texas versus California because the demographics are often nearly equally comparable given comparison of various metros and distributions. The biggest differences between the two states are that in California the cost of living is about 8x more (or 12x more in more extreme comparisons) even though both locations have near equal employment capabilities, same currency, and often many similar laws. To be clear earning $100,000 per year in Texas is a far greater indicator of wealth than earning $300,000 per year in California.
Owning an apartment in California is the reality in a major metro with a booming economy. Housing prices cost so much that owning a house often becomes completely unrealistic for many people. Not that it matters since past a certain point an apartment becomes a better value per square foot than a house anyways.
In Texas the opposite is true. After the housing crash of 2008 many people who could not pay their mortgage were forced out of their homes. The costs of apartments dramatically increased and the cost of homes dramatically decreased. It has always been a better value to own a home than live in an apartment, but that value gap increased noticeably. I can remember spending about $1200 per month for a 1200 sq ft apartment at that time and moving to a 3000 sq ft house and paying less per month. This gap is less noticeable in my geography now with Facebook and various other companies setting up shop minutes away.
I have also noticed that working in Texas (at various employers) there is a huge demographic divide among home owners and apartment renters at the work place. Once you get past around 27-30 years of age generally everybody in the office who is an employee owns a house. For contractors (non-employees) the home ownership rate goes down slightly. For non-citizens the home ownership rate goes down dramatically. Generally, given the income rates associated with technology work price is not a primary discriminator from owning a home in Texas, but mobility is. Those who have a greater need for increased mobility are less likely to own a home.
The bottom line is that if you want to own a home with a yard close to solid jobs you absolutely can and it is absolutely within reach. You must be willing to sacrifice your geographic location to achieve it though.
I am not talking about the middle of nowhere. I am talking about actually within the boundaries of a city of similar population size. Houses in Texas are far cheaper than that in the middle of nowhere as well.
Must be a weird California problem. I simply don't see this problem in Texas. I have known several people who have fled California to Texas for exactly that reason.
EDIT:
Look through the data and ask yourself why you would want to pay more for what appears (according to the data) to be a less diverse, more expensive, and more dense area. What the data doesn't reflect is home size. I paid $125k for a 3000sqft foreclosure a few years ago that is now worth $200k. I couldn't get half a garage for this in the bay area.