Shaken by the latest digital gold rush, San Francisco struggles for its soul.

Moreover, I don't agree with the restrictions on high rises to SoMa. Why not allow them to be built elsewhere? And who says that you have a right to live in SoMa anyway? If it were allowed, high rises would go up in other parts of the city, and you could live there instead.

If demand rises faster than supply, prices go up.

Demand is rising fast. Supply is being held down. Prices go up.

I come from Darwin, a wonderful little city clinging to the northern edge of the Australian continent. About 10 years ago a confluence of factors (expanded Defence presence and the early stirrings of the resources boom) meant that property prices took off.

At the same time, the hyper-local nature of politics in that part of the country (each member of parliament in the state-level government represents about 2500-3000 voters) means that infill doesn't happen because the margin of victory is easily less than two or three streets getting angry at you for authorising a new block of flats.

So: demand shot up, supply did not. Unsurprisingly, Darwin is now one of the most expensive places in Australia to live. If you can find an unoccupied flat, good luck renting a nice one for a price affordable on a normal middle-class income. And good luck finding a house for a price affordable on a normal middle-class income.

Supply and demand. It's the same everywhere for everyone. There are no exceptions. If SF wants to keep its middle class, it needs to make more housing available.

Especially high density housing for the wealthy, not the poor. Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power. Every rich person who moves into a $2 million dollar apartment is a rich person who isn't bidding the price of an older building up and driving out the middle class, who in turn will drive out the poor.

Another dumb policy: giving money for deposits or loans. It just drives up effective demand. Every seller knows you can get the $X thousand dollars and then, surprise, surprise! The price of every house just rose but ~$X thousand dollars. Everything that gets given to the middle and poorer classes to subsidise housing is in fact a wealth transfer to the landlords, via good old-fashioned populist policy making.

Are there studies on this bit playing out in practice? My impression so far, mostly looking at Manhattan redevelopment, is that building high-end condos typically does not reduce prices for other buildings in the area, but rather raises them: the presence of new high-end housing increases demand in the immediate vicinity by more than the new building's own supply provides, assuming the area (like Manhattan or SF) is rather desirable in general terms to begin with. That may be good if you want to raise the housing values in an area (each building provides a multiplier effect that raises the prices of neighboring ones, making the whole area more desirable). But probably not good if you want to lower the prices. Good statistics either way would be interesting, though: are there cases where opening new high-end housing actually lowered the other prices in an expensive urban area? E.g. when new condo towers open in Manhattan, does it produce an observable downward move in prices?

(The main point I'm getting at is that demand and supply aren't independent variables: demand for living in an area depends quite strongly on the housing stock in that area, so building more housing stock affects both supply and demand, in possibly complex ways, which need empirical data to tease out.)

Clearly your "advanced degree in Economics" hasn't taught you any common sense.

Is anyone saying that the housing that is built first has to go to lower income people? Is anyone saying that you cannot just build more housing? Do you understand that there is not an infinite supply of tech workers looking to move into expensive apartments?