BROKEN PROMISES: THE HOUSING MARKET IN SAN FRANCISCO (AND TEN IDEAS TO FIX IT):

San Francisco is moving toward a dystopian future

If we do not change our current housing strategy, the natural result will be a type of cultural destruction. It’s easy to point to individual cases of displacement that pull on the heart-strings — a tech family is throwing out grandma to convert a duplex into a mansion (which is genuinely sad and should be prevented!) — but the real displacement is happening at a macro level. We are on a self-imposed path leading to only one place: a city that is entirely rich and, more or less, entirely white. That isn’t the fault of any one person on either side, but it is the fault of those that refuse to allow any rational policy response to people’s desire to live here.

In time, housing and everything else will become so expensive that we will price every working- and middle-class person out of the city. The gentrification wave will keep rolling. A bubble might burst here or there, but ultimately San Francisco is so self-destructively finite that all the regular people will be pushed to the East Bay, to Pacifica, to Daly City, etc.

No matter how expensive the left makes it to live amidst the squalor of 21st century San Francisco, they can’t drive out the Gods of the Copybook Headings.