The Salary Needed To Afford Rent in 10 of the Largest US Cities ---Good grief!!!!!!

[Warren DeMontague]

59. No, they just want a place to live close to work that isn't in Gilroy.

It's not "greedy tech bastards" any more than it is anything else, namely fairly obvious market forces- a highly desirable, small chunk of real estate- a peninsula, actually, so it is about as geographically contained as it possibly could be- combined with locals - including a lot of the supposedly lesser arty creative old-timers, who refuse to authorize new development.

It's like Marin- look, I love Marin, Marin is beautiful, like you in SF I lived in Marin decades ago when it was still relatively cheap and funky and doable; but I saw the writing on the wall even then. No one in Marin wanted to develop the headlands, thank God, but there is still a balance between protecting the character of a place and cutting it off entirely from the sort of thing which allows moderate income working people to live there, namely, increasing the supply of affordable housing.

If the Bay Area had behaved sensibly and with foresight, BART would have been run all the way up to Sonoma County, it could have been done on the unused lower deck of the GGB in an aesthetically acceptable fashion even, but the NIMBYs in Marin would have none of it.

So you're stuck with a situation where a highly lucrative bunch of multi-billion dollar industries which contribute mightily to the fact that California has the 6th biggest economy in the world- well, they hire people who need a place to live. And those people, understandably, have figured out that a million dollars for a condo in Santa Clara or San Jose with a view of a parking lot isn't the most inspiring thing to get up in the morning for.

San Francisco can either continue to become a tiny, ever-more-exclusive playground or it can (unlikely) change decades of antipathy to development, but one thing that isn't going to happen is the return of all the funky Tales of the City 1970s arty people.

They've all moved to places like Seattle or Portland, which soon enough will have something like the same problem. But one difference is, the attitude towards development within the urban growth boundary is different.