It's amazing how, in a city full of so many supposedly socially conscious people, the government has been able to allow things to get so bad for the middle class.
It is the government's failure to reform zoning laws and its failure to create efficient public transit that are the basic problems here. For those with children, the school system is also subpar.
The private sector hasn't done anything wrong. In fact, the people of San Francisco and their government should be grateful that, in such dismal economic times, the tech industry has chosen to locate itself in a jurisdiction so viscerally hostile to the private sector.
Without tech, San Francisco might have become a Detroit with nicer weather (a situation that the hipsters would no doubt have thoroughly enjoyed).
Bullshit! The private sector is the same in the places the SF middle class are moving to. It's the selfish, short sighted SF government that's causing this.
Wow! Hiring people and paying them well is a problem?
SF has severely restricted supply for decades with some of the most restrictive planning and building codes in the US. In SF anyone can force a hearing on a building permit - after planning review, neighbor notice, hearings appeals, etc. This is unheard of anywhere else and is why it takes years to build new housing. Then there is the rent control ordinance that stopped new apartment building for a decade and keeps thousands of units vacant today.
It causes problems for the middle class being priced out of the market, yes. How is dropping rent controls supposed to anything but exacerbate that problem?
Price controls, like rent control, have the well know effect of reducing supply. Along with extremely restrictive building policies, SF housing supply has become inflexible and is unable to keep up with demand thus prices will go up. This is exacerbated by the various low income housing policies which also reduce the supply of market priced housing that the middle class occupies.
This was entirely predictable. There is no free lunch. You can't have cheap housing for some without raising the price for everyone else. SF is just a particularly extreme example.
BTW - Don't worry about rent control going away anytime soon - we are locked in politically. And planning restrictions are unlikely to ease either. So expect continued above inflation price/rent increases and a slow exodus of the middle class. Due to the poor schools we have already lost many families.