[ng12]

Oh -- do you mean to ask how state/national politics play into San Francisco's housing crisis?

California state law is a big part of the problem: it gives individual cities way too much power to decide what gets built and what doesn't, severely restricting supply. For example, neighborhood associations can filibuster new development into nothingness, even for contradictory reasons like not having enough parking but also not being public-transport friendly enough. Additionally, California has wildly skewed tax law that disincentivizes people from moving or downsizing (look up Prop 13). Add in a lack of public transportation, zoning restrictions, and massive corporate subsidies and you've got a housing crisis brewing.

[btilly]

More than that, Prop 13 incentivizes cities to have commercial real estate instead of residential. Thereby forcing housing to be ever farther from workplaces.

[mikevp]

But before Prop 13, people on fixed incomes were getting taxed out of their paid-off homes they'd lived in for decades.

[redis_mlc]

Downsizing as you get older is a normal thing in the other 49 states.

Also, Prop 13 inexplicably applies to commercial real estate, and inherited property.

[Gibbon1]

Nothing inexplicable about the application to commercial real estate. The major backers of the law were corporate interests.

Also the inherited property bit was a separate amendment. And there is no limit either.

[ng12]

Which is in itself a symptom of the housing crisis. Instead of fixing the root problem they accelerated it.