The "city" is already sprawling, and the outskirts are already far from where people want to live. A lot of my coworkers commute in from places like Fremont, an

The "city" is already sprawling, and the outskirts are already far from where people want to live. A lot of my coworkers commute in from places like Fremont, an hour away from the city in good conditions and who knows how long if BART or the Bay Bridge gets backed up. Meanwhile, I understand your point that "many people are unwilling to live in small apartments" but those people are by default not part of the demand in San Francisco itself - they're part of the demand in Gilroy and Freemont, perhaps, but not San Francisco. But "not being willing to live in small apartments" is not the same thing as not being willing to live in medium/large townhomes / row houses, which can accommodate vastly more people than live in most of the suburban expanse of the Bay Area. Just to make a dumbly over-simplified point, you could theoretically convert every ranch house in the bay area to two victorian townhomes and that would add room for more than a million new people, which I'm sure would make some dent in demand. Likewise, most of San Francisco's land area is occupied by 1 and 2 story buildings (Sunset, Richmond, Excelsior, etc.). Just going to an average of 3 stories would add a hundred thousand or more new homes. Regardless, while you may be right that demand is MUCH greater than supply and we'd need to add a million homes to make a dent, that's not a valid reason to do nothing. If we're not going to build more housing here, why not limit employment growth here and create some pretty major programs to move jobs OUT of the city and take some of the housing pressure with it. There's nothing stopping us building a big new city at moderate density between San Francisco and Sacramento, for example, and if the whole corridor was linked by reliable, fast transit service then it doesn't need to be a traffic nightmare either. TLDR; defeatism doesn't help, the economics here aren't THAT complicated we just don't seem to have the political will to do anything about it.