+1 to the housing issue - this has led to a lost generation of the kind of young to mid-career professionals that would otherwise serve as the roots of the comm

+1 to the housing issue - this has led to a lost generation of the kind of young to mid-career professionals that would otherwise serve as the roots of the community. I moved there in 2014 for work out of grad school, had no money to buy when I showed up and despite doing well, costs rose faster than my income. I was open to putting down roots there, but just do the basic math with the assumption of a small family and an eventual retirement, and you come to the conclusion it's not going to work for you in that environment. The good friends I made there mostly came to the same conclusion, and by 2019 almost all of them were gone, the pandemic just finished them off, including me who left in 2020. It's not rocket science, if you literally make it impossible to invest and grow in the community you will have a transient population who leaves the minute it doesn't make sense to be there. I have also lived in New York City, and due to investments in transit and an environment that allows for development along this transit you have options to invest and grow in the city. Start out as a young professional 10 stops away from the city in Brooklyn, Queens or even the Bronx. When you're a bit more financially secure move to a neighborhood 5 stops away, keeping your community and family ties along the way. There are two quotes in the article, which are completely off: “To blame poor and displaced people for decline when you had a whole influx of people who came to mine the city’s wealth during the tech boom, drove the rents way up, got their money, and then, during covid, popped out? No,” We didn't get our money, we gave it to the landlords and property owners. What we did get was our experience, that we can now monetize elsewhere and have a chance to meet basic personal and financial goals, and we aren't coming back. The rents went up because the region created many new jobs, but completely resisted creating new housing. So then the question is: Who bites on cheap San Francisco housing? Is it students? Is it immigrants? Is it artists? Is it techies?” Housing is nowhere near being cheap, it's basic math. Median SF house cost is currently $1.2M or ~$8500 a month in mortgage, tax, insurance, which is down from prior years. Median bay area income is ~$120K, about $84k after taxes and so ~$7k a month take home. Students aren't buying these houses, artists and new immigrants aren't buying these houses, the mid-career professionals that were just displaced are your only possibility. San Francisco property owners leveraged their returns in boom years by restricting new supply, but increased the risks of exactly this scenario. I can only hope another shock doesn't hit right now, like the inevitable "big one". It's going to take time and doing things differently to build a more sustainable community and replace this lost generation. Start with building dense housing on the BART lines, again it's not rocket science.