"is it politically meaningful to drive up salaries by new investments if the result is unaffordable housing?"
This is a very different thing from "is there a correlation", and I think what you're asking is: what's the use of investing in an area if that will only drive up salaries and thus housing cost?
The answer is YES it is definitely meaningful (politically or otherwise) to make new investments in an area that will (through market forces) drive up salaries. Driving up salaries will not drive up the cost of housing for a given level of quality unless housing development is artificially curtailed by government actions (which is very common). As salaries rise, over time higher-quality housing options will become available and will push up the average price of housing as a result, but the minimum price of housing on the market will not increase as long as housing development is allowed to keep up with population growth.
I would conjecture that the correlation you see in BKay's answer is due to higher-salaried people demanding higher-quality housing, and that the weakness of that correlation is due to differences in how difficult cities make it to build new housing.