Wtf? You hate SF RE prices? Make a 5 year plan to escape, get real good at your job, tgey dont promote you? vote with your feet. Make employers pay for your move. Be so good, they throw stock options at you. Take a look at living in the Central Valley, work remotely. Give SF your middle finger. You're too old for that shit? Then move.
Hipsters bidding up the rents and house prices for the privilege of living in a city with poop and needles on the sidewalks and dysfunctional useless K-12, with jobs that can be performed at a similar work station or desktop whether it's in Bangalore or Sacramento Valley.
Yes, the problem is mostly the artificial restrictions on supply.
You have a bunch of hardcore leftists with very weak knowledge of economics being used by some very rich people with an interest in keeping prices as high as possible.
It's a story pretty similar to the leftist crowd being used by very rich corporations with a huge financial interest in outsourcing manufacturing and insourcing illegals. Those corporations fund NPR and require non-stop stories about how great illegals are, and how everyone who disagrees is racist. Leftists do not for a moment consider the damage done by the mass influx of illegals, especially to the wages of the poorest US citizens.
I know this was probably discussed here, probably multiple times, but..
The more I ponder it, the more I like the idea of tax the land, not the structures. There should be zero financial penalty to improving property. Slash planning and building departments to the bone. Keep good, strong regulations and code compliance around safety and habitability, yes... but dispense with the rest of the red tape. Let market forces build housing where it is profitable.
It's an itsy bitsy postage stamp sized municipality of Smug Hipsters, poop and needles, with an economy becoming dominated by desktop/workstation jobs that can be relocated to anywhere else from Sacramento to Salt Lake to Singapore or Bangalore.
Mired in arrogant Self-Importance up to it's eyeballs in poop, needles and high costs, irrelevance is inevitable.
www.youtube.com/embed/ExgxwKnH8y4