[stephencanon]

Want cheaper housing? Make it possible to build more. The fact that quaint New England towns have taller apartment buildings than most of the city of SF pretty much tells the entire story.

The busses are basically the opposite of government intervention in a free market; instead of the government stepping in to correct for a market failure, private companies are stepping in to correct a public sector failure (to provide usable transit for their employees).

[tomkarlo]

This is a classic urban problem: the people who are already in SF and own places don't want more housing built, because the shortage drives up the value of their own homes (and anything that blocked their view would reduce it.) The best solution (which SF is kind of pursuing) is to add more high-density housing in post-industrial areas being converted to residential, where developers have big incentives to construct larger buildings.

SF always does a ton of hand-wringing about how white collar workers are driving moderate-income renters out of the city, but it also doesn't make it easy to construct the new housing stock that those white-collar residents would prefer anyway.