SAN FRANCISCO — When a transportation agency said two years ago that rush hours were a thing of the past on a major highway in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was not good news.

“For the first time on record, the morning and evening peak periods have merged,” said a spokesman for the agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, “creating a continuously congested freeway from 5:30 in the morning until nearly 8 o’clock at night.”

It has only gotten worse.

California’s economy has soared into the stratosphere, but not without inflicting some pain. Paralyzing traffic is one symptom; the increasingly absurd price of putting a roof over one’s head is another.

One person from the Midwest devised a quick formula to calculate the price of a house in the Bay Area: See how much a similar house would cost in Minnesota and then add a million dollars.