What I keep saying about SF's housing crisis is that it's this: "Economic growth, affordable housing, NIMBYism, pick two." The Bay has picked the first and th

What I keep saying about SF's housing crisis is that it's this: "Economic growth, affordable housing, NIMBYism, pick two." The Bay has picked the first and the last. I also get the sense -- though I don't live there -- that the people protesting the explosion of rents and house prices are the same people who insist that nothing too tall or big be built and that every new construction be subjected to a whole slew of restrictions around how "green" it is, how it will "impact the local community," etc. While these concepts aren't bad in and of themselves, when applied at the civic scale in this way they typically just provide opportunities for obstructionists who want to keep prices high. So in the end it ends up being a kind of Baptists-and-bootleggers alliance -- in this case greens and preservationists with slumlords and banks working hand in hand to keep rents and costs high. Activists of virtually every political persuasion tend to be horribly naive about the ways their interests and concerns can be twisted to serve agendas they may not otherwise support.