These high prices are definitely not in tech’s interest. The way I see it, tech is the only way I can live here independently. Lucky that my brothers and I hav

These high prices are definitely not in tech’s interest. The way I see it, tech is the only way I can live here independently. Lucky that my brothers and I have the inclination for it. But even we have difficulty finding housing in this market. We look around, and it is the entrenched interests, the old money, that are holding us back, preventing new housing from being built. Despite appearances, techies are actually a small minority, especially in the voting population, and that’s how we still get pushed around. The market problem is that housing and transit have been growing very slowly, nowhere near what is needed, and not matching the growth in jobs and office space. The problem goes back decades, really taking off when Howard Jarvis passed Proposition 13, followed by Mayor, now Senator, Feinstein passing the rent control ordinance. The problems continue, as every significant housing development requires endless studies and community input before it gets built; in the meanwhile the market has risen again. When I was growing up, San Francisco was actually very anti-tech. Startups were always fleeing to the Valley when they became successful. Still, housing prices were high and rising; housing was ridiculously difficult to build. I remember the case of somebody buying an empty lot, just a normal-house-size rectangle in a normal-size block. It took many years of studies and litigation and multiple architectural plans before it could get built, and I don’t know if the owner ever succeeded. It’s hard to find the article again when the Google results are packed full of plenty of other, bigger, projects that are facing unfair difficulties. Likewise, there’s now a lovely new library building at North Beach, but Aaron Peskin (one of the politicians implicated in the Reason piece) used eminent domain to prevent that land from being turned into affordable housing, with the excuse that it should be a park. It lay fallow until he was term-limited out of the way and later supervisors at least built a library there. And then the old North Beach library is still sitting there, retroactively declared to be a historic landmark, so that is a suboptimal use of space. Tech only sped up an existing, broken process. If even the Huffington Post is posting about the multi-decade housing problem, then maybe, just maybe, it’s not the techies’ fault. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-crisis_us_5750a95ee4b0eb20fa0d682e http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-cr...