This is a National Review opinion article offered as a news piece (as they are wont to do). It features a seamless conflation of SF's problems with Silicon Valley's somewhat corrosive lobbying effects on the urban expansion problems of SF, as if they're the same thing.
It suggests that San Francisco's housing problem is NOT directly at the feet of the folks who own the majority of the property, and instead implicates... uh, let me just check the article again... "Baby Boomer civil servants [acting] as urban taxidermists stuffing and mounting a dead city so it always resembles the past."
The implication of that paragraph is that it's democratic "regulation" that is halting SF's expansion, but if you live in the city you're looking at the recent unsuccessful public/private partnership building projects wondering why building codes aren't stricter (I'm looking at you, ridiculous Salesforce(tm) transbay terminal). The implication that it's bureaucracy and not a bitter generational argument between young and old residents about "preserving the city" vs. "meeting the housing demand" is likewise absurd; it's SF citizens as a whole that are debating how to proceed. A republican governance wouldn't be better off here, except it might find more alignment with property owners (who benefit enormously from this state of affairs) instead of less.
It suggests that SF doesn't have culture, but that's wrong. It has tons of culture, but it's not accessible to rich white people hoping to stroll through like tourists. You can still access it if you code yourself correctly, but if you roll up with merino wool shoes and $800 vest over a tech t-shirt and iWatch, you're not gonna make a lot of progress because people will avoid you.
But if you are that person, it's not like there aren't a dozen hopeful artists lurking around the edges of popular rich mission spots hoping to get your spare $20s. It's not like public spaces don't exist for you.
Most humorously, it features at least one nationally reviled industrialist who has increasingly had a hard time finding anyone willing to work with him anywhere where Software Engineers make good money. Thiel avoids popping up in SF because people don't like his politics here and would rather he retreat back to his bubble in orange county. We don't, strictly speaking, need his money. We have enough money, we need to build up the will to use it to solve the problems we have more acutely, but that are shared in kind with every city that's finding a way to prosper in an era where many other cities are struggling to recover from even more acute decline.
This article is everything I'd expect from a National Review piece about SF. It is confused about the geography, tone deaf to the politics, quick to blame local government for problems brought about by citizens, and steeped in the popular meme that "art is dead because I don't see marble busts anymore" memes that sound like they're fresh out of a PragerU video.