They are not a "city" and they are not attracting talent and or companies' which create the demand. San Francisco is but, while they advertise themselves as a city, promote growth, grant tax breaks for cachet employers, etc., they do very little, in terms of creating and building housing for those workers. They demand others do what they themselves are unwilling to do.

Now, imagine the opposite, Brisbane demanding San Francisco become more suburban because San Francisco is to city-like for their liking.

They are in fact planning to do just that - put more office space in that zone, which will create demand for housing in SF (the nearest major residential area) rather than adding housing. And in the past, they've blocked a proposal that would have added 70K residential units.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-small-city-control...

The attitude is essentially, "I've got mine, let's pull the ladder up after me and deny anyone else affordable housing."

To be fair, unlike the Baylands proposal, there were very valid environmental reasons to block that 70k units of housing on San Bruno Mountain.

It also has ensured that residents of San Francisco have very easy access to wilderness - I'm certainly better off being able to go hiking with just a 15 minute drive.

That's fair. But it's also worth recognizing those 70K units may mean that some middle-income SF resident had to move to Pleasanton or something instead due to affordability, so our nice hiking proximity is their 90-minute commute.

You emphasize the 70K, but the Brisbane Baylands proposal in your link is for 4,400 units.

Sorry. The link was to support the first sentence (and my main point) which is to refute the parent post's statement that "they are not attracting talent and or companies' which create the demand". Brisbane is planning to do exactly that in this case.