You're wrong about Tokyo, where housing prices have remained pretty flat for the last 20 years: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/lai...

Yeah, well...certainly another feasible option for affordable housing is a huge economic crash followed by two decades of negative growth and/or deflation.

That said, I fail to see how this makes me "wrong"...I said that most residential construction in Tokyo is under five stories, and that the city sprawls. Both are true statements. Tokyo has enormous, far-flung suburbs of low-rise buildings, and most of the population lives there.

It's better than SF, in that you do see taller (i.e. 5-10 story) buildings along major roads, and the buildings have a smaller footprint, but these things are details. Tokyo is a gigantic, sprawling city. It's something like 20 times the size of SF.

We need both. Prices are rising in desirable places all over the west coast because of the same NIMBY attitudes.

Prices will rise anywhere demand is concentrated. There is simply not enough land in most of the Bay Area for reasonable rents, as additional supply will be quickly soaked up (just as building additional road capacity is futile, and is quickly swamped with more traffic).

You can use either the carrot or the stick to promote tech companies to either deploy satellite offices across the country or enable remote work, but this is not a planning problem, its a tech sector externality.

With apologies to Sam Kinison, "Move where the land is cheap."

I have no problem with construction, but you're equivocating.

The SF housing crunch is an acute, hyper-local problem, obviously caused by a tech bubble. Rents were declining in SF as recently as 2009. Rents decline rapidly as you get further from the city.

The long-term price trends of homes in (say) San Luis Obispo, while interesting, is of little relevance to the discussion. The markets are so different that you can't draw any conclusions (except, perhaps, that Prop 13 is a horrible law, and that mortgage interest deduction is a disastrous public policy choice).

Rents were declining in 2009? On the back of the biggest recession in 80 yrs and a collapse of the housing market?

You shock me.

You're easily "shocked", I suppose. I'm not making a moral judgment, I'm pointing out that SF has gone from declining rents to a "crisis" market within a few years' time. The rent crisis is acute, and it's quite obviously due to a bubble on the demand side.

I could have just as easily used 2012 as the year, because rents were more-or-less flat in SF from 2010-2012, after some declines in 2009. Rent lunacy began concurrently with startup valuation lunacy.

It's not just a local problem though: there is a steady flow of people moving to, say, Portland because they have no hope of owning a house in the Bay Area in a place close to their jobs. As a consequence, prices in Portland are growing rapidly. Same thing here in Bend.

There is also a nationwide increase in housing prices going on: the Case-Shiller housing price index is back where it was in 2008, before the crash. But San Francisco's problems go above and beyond this macroeconomic trend.

San Fran is particularly bad, but it's a problem anywhere that is now 'desirable':

http://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2016/05/port...