I agree, and the maddening thing for me is that my fellow people in the tech industry so rarely say, "Why yes, we are the problem. What can we do about it?"
Thinking the tech industry is the problem is pretty much like saying you get a cold because you go out in cold weather.
It's not true, but it sounds right if you don't look too close.
The tech industry isn't the cause of anything but growth. Growth isn't bad. Growth is totally manageable. It's not like these issues magically showed up in the tech boom of the 90s - it just made them worse.
However what DID cause this: bad urban planning, lack of ability to change, being systemically unable to fix the housing issues over the last 40 years.
Plenty of places cope with growth periods better than SF, but SF doesn't want to cope with them: it wants to have it's cake and eat it too. It can't, but it's been trying for a long time and failing horribly.
This is not a new development. It's not a new problem. The solutions have been the same for a long time but no-one wants to change to fix them.
Growth isn't necessarily bad, but neither is it necessarily good. Some growth is manageable; some isn't.
It appears we both agree that rapid growth is a proximate cause of the problem, and the tech industry is the main cause of that rapid growth. Where we differ is that you think a bunch of other people should immediately change to accommodate you, while you simultaneously refuse to acknowledge their perspective, which is that their previous system was working well enough for them until tech people came along in overwhelming numbers. And that maybe they were perfectly happy with how things are, and feel no particular need to change to suit you.
The rest looks like dickish handwaving to me. If you'd like to just keep yelling at people, stop bugging me. If you'd like to have an actual discussion, then start behaving respectfully.
> Were you even in SF 15 years ago, when the .com bubble popped and housing prices returned to a degree of sanity?
IIRC, one of the notable things about SF in the .com burst was that housing prices did not drop significantly (as they did in outlying areas of the Bay Area), the rate of increase just dropped, as the people who still had good-baying SF jobs moved in from the peripheries and replaced the people who could no longer afford SF because they fell off the gravy train.
My recollection is that housing rental was in between.
It's worth noting that the dot-com bust hit tech hard, but didn't do anything to housing nationally. So it's hard to separate the effect of the dot-com bust with the housing bubble that was starting to inflate at the time. And thinking about who I know who bought property right after the bust, it was people who made money in the previous bubble, which would also have a masking effect.
I wrote this more than a year ago: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-San-Francisco-residents-a...
As far as I can tell, the willful obliviousness is just as bad as then, and maybe worse.