It makes no sense to me, for example, that we should be giving tax incentives to developers to convert buildings on Market street into office space. Why not apartments? Or how about the fact that we're incentivizing large companies to hire more employees in the city? Or that we're looking the other way while startups colonize all of that shiny new residential construction? (Aside: one of the under-reported scandals of this boom is the number of market-rate apartments that are being used as offices. Who can afford a $6,000 one bedroom? A startup office.)
It's hard to argue that these are intelligent responses to the growth crisis.
I think this is a bubble and it will eventually pop. But we could be doing more to manage the explosion in the meantime.
The fix is easy: If the folks using that apartment as an office aren't also using that apartment as their living quarters, call City Planning.
If they are also living in that apartment, who cares? Tolerance of low-to-no foot traffic commercial activity (such as programming work) inside one's apartment has been a thing for a very, very long time.
As for tolerance: what is acceptable in small doses becomes pathological when taken to extremes. Just like AirBnBs, it's not an issue when a handful of apartments are being used for commercial activity in a healthy market. When you have a huge percentage of renters doing it in a housing crunch, it's a concern.
Right now, tech workers want to live in SF. But if they see hatred and protests against them at every corner, then at some point those tech workers won't want to live there anymore.
Similarly, if tech workers arriving drives up prices which drives up the homeless rate, making the city less and less pleasant to walk around in, then at some point those tech workers won't want to live there anymore.
A third way to decrease demand is if the city increases taxes on the well-off, making it much more expensive to live in San Francisco if you have a software engineer's salary.
I think all of those are sad, but if we don't build a lot more housing, things will get a lot worse. Either things will spiral out of control, or they'll get so bad that demand starts to fall.
It seems to me --- and I'd welcome an argument to the contrary --- that simultaneously protesting tech and opposing new building is, in effect, a strategy to concede the whole city to the wealthy.