Bay area's housing shortage is entirely self inflicted by its residents who refuse to allow more housing to be built. All this to maintain some arbitrary idea of character. A character that is frozen at some random point in time.

There is no good reason for most of the bay area to be strip malls apartments and 2 story apartment complexes. There are more than enough examples of cities(Barcelona, Paris) with character, history and more vertical housing.

Preaching to the choir, but reality is it won't change anytime soon. I voted with my feet and left, I miss the area but I couldn't justify anymore how much of a hassle it was living there lately.

Do you have any stats to back that claim up?

yes. In 2015 it was more than 50k people. Even if they all share rooms, it's a lot of demand on an housing stock that grows slowly.

One more datapoint: between 2013 and 2014 the net change in population in the bay area was 100k, we can assume things are more or less the same as before meaning that H1B immigration counts for ~50% of the total change. If you can find more recent numbers (took me 30 seconds to find the links I added) then we can redo the math and see if there's major problems with my statements, but I really don't see how that could be the case.

https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/26/youre-not-crazy-the-bay...

From your link:

> About 10 percent of the LCAs approved last year, or 53,500, were for jobs in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

But, it also adds that:

> More than one employee can be attached to an LCA, and there’s no limit on how many a company can submit. As a result, the number of LCAs accepted by the Department of Labor often far exceeds the number of H-1B visas issued.

Furthermore, when a person on H-1B already living in SJ or SV change jobs, they file a new LCA. This gets counted in the 53,500 number from the article.

Thus, IMO, it is incorrect to claim that "more than 50k people" moved into Bay Area on H-1B in 2015. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I think it's adventurous to think the number would much lower. Let's say that the number is 50% lower, that brings us to 25k new individuals just from the H1B program alone.

You're also skipping over the fact that H1B people have families and tend to bring family members into the area.

Overall I'm comfortable to say the number is still probably in the right ballpark until I'm shown evidence of the contrary.

> Overall I'm comfortable to say the number is still probably in the right ballpark until I'm shown evidence of the contrary.

We have to agree to disagree on this, I guess. I find no evidence to support the claim that H-1B workers have any significant effect on the Bay Area housing situation.

I forgot to add a link:

http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/visas/