It isn't a mistaken belief. If you got in early and own property in a place like SF then rising prices are going to be adding money to your retirement account.

Any real solution (build, build, build!) to the housing market in a place like SF would destroy a lot of value for a lot of people. Most of those people are middle-class, and the money they've stuffed in their bricks is their single biggest investment.

Of course if it all comes crashing down they'll also lose, but right now that's looking a whole lot less likely than them being able to keep riding housing bubble gravy train.

But it's just as likely that the lot next to them will be bought for development, and theirs will be passed over for the foreseeable future, or that the only reason anyone lives in their suburb is because of unreasonable prices where people actually want to live.

Now their property value will plateau or fall as demand for housing falls due to new development happening elsewhere.

In the long term it's likely that everyone involved will win, but many property owners just have a 10-20 year horizon before they'd like to sell, and might correctly foresee that a deregulated zoning policy might lead to a growth slump in that time frame if the supply doesn't continue to be artificially restricted.

The entire reason for why there's a problem is because the current state of affairs is awesome for some people (existing property owners) and bad for pretty much everyone else.

Saying it needs to be a state law is just setting up a different variant of the same intractable problem.

Who's going to care to lobby more when such a law is proposed state-wide in California? A bunch of property owners in SF/LA sitting on a million $ in assets, or potential future California residents who don't even live there because property prices are insane now?

The one thing that should perhaps be legislated is some up-front disclosure in employment offers of typical costs of living in the BA. Many prospective employees from elsewhere will not quickly realize that (absurd as it seems) you can't raise a family there on $200K/y.

Also people who own houses want the cost of houses to be high.

High home prices mean I can't move my family without incurring a substantial jump in property taxes (even if it's to downsize once the kids move out).

I'd also like my kids to have the option to live here without too much financial difficulty.

Houses are places to live, not investments. It's in all of our interests if they're as affordable as possible everywhere instead of pushing the equivalence of an arms race.

Prop 13 creates many artificial barriers to selling property and other market distortions, and folks not downsizing when they'd like to is one of the crazier ones.

The Bay Area has two things going for it that will make it hard to replace.

1. Non-competes are unenforceable. This means that the most talented engineers like working here because they can job hop with ease where in other locales they are locked into jobs working for lousy bosses.

2. Many of the most talented venture capitalists and seed investors like living here. They like it because it's pretty, you can escape the city in no time and be in nature and it's low density. I doubt the kind of people who live in Atherton or Woodside would pick up and move so easily to L.A or Manhattan. The Bay Area with its geographical boundaries provides a pretty good integration of ultra-rich neighborhoods with the middle class workers that make up the bulk of tech's working class.

Those places have COL problems as bad or worse than the Bay Area. At least Singapore (and to a lesser extent HK) deals with it via lots of public subsidized housing.

Tokyo rents basically haven’t moved in the last 30 years and the population has added 1.5m people. If you want to work in NYC there are many, many affordable options within 1 hours commute.