You're over thinking SF. SF is landlocked so there's always going to be steep housing costs...The real problem, as far as I can tell, is that homeless drug addicts are given free money by CAAP and have ample access to hard drugs. Anybody who's seen what hard-drugs do to a person or a family can attest that this is NOT good. You have probably seen something similar in Germany (I have) but the difference is in Germany they actively enforce the criminal code. You can't walk into an Aldi in Koln with a trash bag and make off with a hundred dollars in random goods...In SF this is happening. Which requires another conversation on America's far-left and their response to crime and their views of an unjust system. That being said there's a toxic environment in SF and it's not changing anytime soon.
Urban sprawl is hardly the only solution to increasing density.
You could easily massively increase density by simply building more 4-8 story apartment complexes in the style of several cities around the world like Paris.
SF isn't an island. It's not landlocked. Just build up.
How is it land locked? There are lots of single family homes. If you replace them all with apartments there will be 10-40x the amount of homes available.
Land is usually not the issue unless you're at Tokyo, Hong Kong or Singapore levels of dense.
Way to absolve tech of any blame and blame those dirty poor homeless addicts. Clearly there's absolutely no reason for these people to exist! They just do!
The dirty poor homeless addicts aside, what exactly did tech do? Tech didn't come up with the truly brain-dead housing policy that makes it so difficult to build new housing, so that supply can catch up with demand. Tech isn't handing out drugs on the street.
I'm not a tech worker in SF so I'm not taking anything personally. But I struggle to establish a causal relationship between tech and what's happening in SF. Usually, it's a good thing for a community when there's a local high-income cash cow.
You're right that it's nothing inherent to tech, it's about the money coming in and displacing the existing communities. It just so happens that that money came from tech.
People are talking as if this is the city's problem, but it's our industry that caused the problem. We have to acknowledge that so we don't keep causing problems.
And as the cash cow, our industry has the ability to influence policy to prevent these issues from happening.
Part of the reason rents are high in SF is BECAUSE of rent control (regulating rents). You're just creating scarcity. Developers aren't going to want to take massive losses and haircuts (and neither would you) to build in rent-control areas. It drives up prices all around because there's less real-estate. They've studied this to death. It's a terrible idea
Rent control regulation is great for tenants, which means it's great for keeping people housed.
If that means being a landlord isn't lucrative enough, that's fine, the government can absorb that capacity and build social housing instead. There's no reason the private market should be allowed to monopolize rental housing.
