Paying engineers more will most likely increase rent prices accordingly. The solution seems to match recruitment objectives with available rooms.

Lower rent will come with increased capacity. Part of the reason rents are so high tis that california does not add capacity very quickly because the permitting process is very burdensome and californians are the original NIMBYs-- yes even about housing developments.

Thus there are rows and rows of 3-4 story buildings instead of high rises full of apartments.

The conversation on this is incredibly hypocritical. The area where there are "rows and rows" of 3-4 story buildings is the 2/3 of SF where tech people don't want to live. Places with names like "the Sunset" and "Ingleside", that consist mostly of single-family construction.

No, when tech people talk about "building up", they're almost universally talking about replacing tenement buildings in the Mission with high rises. This has the unique property of displacing extremely poor people, and allowing tech people to live in luxury buildings in a small neighborhood that has recently become trendy, but was historically desirable only to poor people.

The problem isn't permitting or NIMBYs...it's that a relatively entitled population of recent arrivals have lost their fucking minds, and expect to be able to cram into the same 20 blocks of SF and not have to pay for the privilege. When they don't get what they want, they blame the laws for not allowing them to get what they want.

The "real" solution is for the city to "incentivize" tech companies to locate elsewhere, but given that our local politicians have fallen in love with this bubble, I don't see that happening.

Building housing doesn't displace poor people.

It does when you're knocking down older, cheaper buildings and replacing them with luxury units.

San Francisco has knocked down almost no older cheaper residential buildings in the last several years. And the one that they did that I can think of (Trinity Place) deals were made to allow the previous tenants to live in the new building at their old rents for the rest of their lives.