SF Housing Crisis

Everything in this article comes back to housing. That's not the tech. industry's fault. The tech. industry would love to have more housing in San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area. Housing prices have increased so quickly, and are currently at such a high level that even highly paid tech. workers are thinking twice about moving to SF. We see it often enough in the comment threads right here.The problem is that the existing residents of San Francisco would like to preser

Maybe SF should've tried approving more housing so rich techies didn't drive up rents and displace existing communities.

People are moving to San Francisco to take high-paying jobs and there is not enough luxury housing to accommodate them, so they are out-competing poorer people for whatever housing they can get. If more luxury housing was built, those people would take it and leave the rest of the housing for other people.

Seems kind of silly to me, yes this means that many people have to leave the city, but there really is not much that they can do about it. San Francisco's city government is not going to be able to either (a) kick out the tech people nor (b) figure out a way to lower rent (and in turn tax revenue). It's in the cities interest to keep the rent/cost per home as high as possible and in turn keep the tech people around.I really don't understand why this bothers the others in t

It is a matter of supply and demand, and while demand in SF is high, it's nothing like say NYC or LA where there are millions of people looking for housing. SF is a medium-sized city as far as cities go. It's a growing city, unlike many, but in the last ten years it grew slower than Boston, DC, Portland, Seattle, San Diego, and Miami. It's not like developers can't build housing quickly enough to keep up with all the demand. It's that the city won't let them.

The situation in San Francisco is mostly due to NIMBYism and a refusal to build housing. Tech jobs don't magically make housing prices rise - shortages of housing make housing prices rise. Seattle is handling this better than SF, in large part because SF had messed with the natural interaction of supply and demand. Given what the above commenter wrote, Berlin looks like it is in the same situation as SF: trying to solve a housing shortage by discouraging demand rather than increasing supply

This is happening because a huge imbalance between supply and demand for housing was created by activist locals just like this. Anyone who seriously wants to address this will have to back off of the opposition and naysaying to development and get on with building more units for the many people who are moving to San Francisco.People in tech being successful and buying property is not the problem. The problem is a lack of available property to by caused by unreasonably restrictive policies t

San Francisco is more in its people than its buildings. By constricting the supply of housing, they've inadvertently pushed out the very 'weirdos' they were trying to keep; it's pretty easy for the rich to outbid the poor.

That's not even close to what it's saying. It's saying people in places like SF don't want others coming in/and or want to maximize their home value, so they stop new housing being built, which keeps supply of housing down and thus less people can live in areas where there are lots of work opportunities.

After living here since 2009 I think I've figured out the Bay Area and San Francisco. SF is a city that doesn't want to be a city. It just doesn't want to grow up. Silicon Valley has since spilled over into San Francisco and we have a combination of massive job growth, prosperity and extremely limited new construction. Every year more people arrive than we construct housing for.Compounding the problem are many local politicians. Serious local political players are divorced from