That's not really going to fix it, I don't think. Quite a lot of people go to the Valley because they want to live, in the Valley. Until the days of Remote Coffeeshop'ing and Remote Dive Bar'ing, it's still going to be a highly desirable place to live with rents to match.
Right, and like Manhattan and Hawaii, there are more than enough people with lots of money interested in that kind of lifestyle, to jack the prices up like crazy.
It's ironic to hear the ones who just made that same lifestyle decision complaining about the high prices. If you just moved to SF for the city life in spite of the rents when you could have worked in Texas, you're kind of part of the problem.
(And then everybody else fusses about how it isn't fair they can't afford a flat on Wall Street or a 2br house on the beach in Kauai)
I grew up in SV, and there definitely is a generational divide though. Most of us (including my parents) moved to SV at some point in our lives, the only difference being whether this was in the 1970's or the 2010's.
The price of a house in SV has quadrupled (or more) in the last 25 years. Wages have increased,but not nearly as much. Newcomers have it disproportionately harder than the longtimers here.
Look up the 1989 earthquake. You'll see lots of photos of stick framed Victorians that failed. The highrises (which are designed to withstand earthquakes) are still here.
I've never thought of Tokyo as a tall city. The city-scape is generally max 6 story buildings. The tallest building in Tokyo is shorter than the tallest in San Francisco!
Tokyo achieves more density than San Francisco because the average street width is about 14 feet. San Francisco's is about 90 feet. That creates a lot more buildable land per block and less traffic.
The average building height is also about 3 stories instead of just over two in SF. The majority of housing is single family houses and owner occupied. And Toyko has much, much less parking.
The result is a comfortable, walkable city at double the density of SF without high-rises and with less traffic.
The key difference is that SF is planned, laid out, regulated, permitted, and platted very badly and Tokyo is planned well.
Also, the peninsula cities are required by law to sprawl at low density, constricting SF's ability to spread medium-density growth that would keep housing affordable. Any upzoning, even around transit stops, is blocked and housing supply remains severely limited.
The ones in SOMA and the new UCSF campus are all built on land reclaimed from the bay. In other words, rubble. When an earthquake hits, they are within a liquifaction zone. This is a zone that during earthquakes, behaves a little like a liquid.
The buildings they are putting up there, however, have foundations drilled down so deep, they are well in to the bedrock below. They aren't going to come down.
I don't know how I feel about being on the street if that happens, though.
