Building A Few Houses Would Help

I don't think there's any place in the country where the housing situation is as insane as it is in the Bay Area. There are other expensive places, sure, and perhaps Seattle is heading in that direction, but even in NYC...well, you can always live in Newark, the point being that while housing is expensive all around you there are still places you can commute in from which aren't...insane.

Building a few more housing units would help! I really do not understand why people find this to be controversial. No building a few more housing units will not make it affordable for poor people (or even middle class, at this point). Yes you can believe this to be true and still have sensible reasons for objecting to any particular development. But building a few more housing units would mean...there were a few more housing units.

In housing, San Francisco added 4,464 units while 10,000 more people moved in, bringing the city’s population to 884,000. The city by the bay had the state’s third highest total population gain, behind only Los Angeles and San Diego. San Jose, which added 8,500 people, was fifth.

The amazing thing about the Bay Area is that the problem isn't really San Francisco, which isn't exactly building a tremendous number of net new units, but it is building some. It's everywhere else surrounding it, where practically nothing gets built. You might have noticed that there's a particularly hot job sector with a lot of growth in that area these days. The world has an unlimited appetite for new dating apps, it seems.