Housing is not just an app...

I'd like to see someone mass produce stackable prefabricated units out of pieces and assemble them into multi-floor apartment buildings, increasing the number of aparments on offer very fast and driving costs down. Unfortunately, I think the problem here comes down to regulations. It's hard to acquire land. Much of the bay area has laws preventing you from building new housing much higher than a few floors. The property taxes are very high, which also makes it difficult to offer low cost housing.

My general impresion is that the bay area does not want to grow... Or at least, much of the existing homeowners, the NIMBY crowd, don't want it to grow. They want tech people to get out and for things to go back to how they were in the 1980s, while maintaining the price of their own homes as high as possible.

Like this? http://www.abc10.com/news/local/sacramento/modular-apartment...

Yes, like that, except I think you could make the process even more efficient. Make the modular units more "plug-n-play". Maybe even make them replaceable, so if an apartment is old and damaged, a new unit can relatively easily be swapped into its place and the old one recycled.

Housing prices depend on availability, and housing density is controlled by regulation. No amount of innovation can fix a zoning problem.

That is why a startup is needed. Airbnb and Uber showed how to get past regulations.

Sorry you aren't going to build a multi-unit dwelling in Palo Alto in secret.

On a similar note, I find it profoundly ironic that the hub of "technology will save the world" ideology hasn't fixed other local issues like homelessness.

You have to admit that the bay area has a higher class of homeless though. Where else do you see homeless people with brand new $300 REI tents and iphones?

Startups solve problems where a small but clever resource commitment (some programmer-hours) can have an outsized impact.

There is no elite team of 10 or 1,000 that can press the right buttons on their Macbook Pros to bring more land into existence in desirable areas.

Being a landlord is pretty much the opposite of being a startup.

Does the problem scale beyond Palo Alto and San Francisco? Do residents of Topeka or Detroit have similar issues with housing affordability?

The problem in the Bay Area is that since 2010, we added about 500,000 jobs and only 50,000 housing units. Roughly speaking, jobs gives you a sense for demand and housing units give you a sense for supply. Our jobs-housing ratio is completely out of whack. That's what makes the Bay Area so expensive. I actually don't believe any of the nonsense about this being a "destination area" or that there is "insatiable demand" - the demand is directly driven by job growth and you can see that plainly. People are not moving here from Nebraska and taking on housing that is multiple times more expensive just because it's pretty here- they're doing it because they got a job offer here. So no, Topeka and Detroit don't have this problem because their jobs growth isn't so far out of whack from their housing growth.

Yes: California is exporting a steady stream of people to Oregon, which displaces locals and irritates some people. We're not building fast enough either and may simply not have the capacity, short term.