The political class and a big section of the electorate (mostly boomers that have been living here for a while) have been hell-bent to squeeze all the juice out

The political class and a big section of the electorate (mostly boomers that have been living here for a while) have been hell-bent to squeeze all the juice out of the tech boom while providing little value to the rest of society. This mostly came in the form of insane real estate prices due to restricted supply, making the city residential market essentially an oligopoly and filling the pockets of the landowners. But it also came in outright extortion of the tech scene: gross receipt taxes, income taxes, etc. Every time they try to squeeze wealth out of tech they end up hurting the city. The most recent one was the so-called Amazon tax, where TODCO's John Elberling (a local crony) drafted a bill to tax large e-commerce companies. His motivation was to "tax Jeff Bezos' ass"[0]. But instead the bill would tax small and medium retailers in SF... and would not tax Amazon because the guy was dumb enough to spend $400k on the bill without actually estimating the intended impact of the bill, let alone secondary effects. Mike Solana writes about the extractive tendencies of the SF establishment quite clearly in his "Extract or Die" blog post [1]. I love San Francisco, and hate what the local establishment has done. I have hopes that the crisis will crater support for the establishment (perfectly represented by supervisors Aaron Peskin and Dean Preston) and boost support for serious organizations (e.g. GrowSF [2], Yimby Action [3]) trying to make this city as functional as it is beautiful. [0] https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-housing-todco-amazon-tax-prop-k-guaranteed-income/ https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-housing-todco-... [1] https://www.piratewires.com/p/extract-or-die https://www.piratewires.com/p/extract-or-die [2] https://growsf.org/ https://growsf.org/ [3] https://yimbyaction.org/ https://yimbyaction.org/