Cities up and down the peninsula -- MV, PA, etc -- have far more jobs than housing supply and that ratio continues to grow. viz MV approving 3+ million square

Cities up and down the peninsula -- MV, PA, etc -- have far more jobs than housing supply and that ratio continues to grow. viz MV approving 3+ million square feet of office space for linkedin, palantir, and google -- and then maybe, possibly, potentially authorizing up to 5k homes. Maybe. It's being discussed. So whenever SF builds housing, some goes to people from SF, and a lot of it goes to people previously renting in very supply constrained markets on the peninsula. Because of the foreign-to-sf buyers, and because new condos are generally of higher quality than much of sf's existing housing stock, and because these new buildings are cheaper than available houses on the peninsula, building more increases demand by bringing in such exogenous buyers. Much of the increase in supply is in condos costing $1.2k +/ft2, ie more than $1mm, which exacerbates the above effects. They also don't help for people who can't afford to spend the roughly $5.5k or so that a $1mm property costs (after $200k downpayment, inclusive of tax and hoa fees.) If you want to bring down house prices in sf, you have to build enough to satisfy pent-up demand from the peninsula, and outrun continued population movement from the whole US into SF. Or force the peninsula to build housing. 5k or 10k homes isn't going to to outrun demand, particularly after years of building virtually no housing in sf.