No one made San Francisco the most expensive place in the country on purpose. That’s the tragedy.I disagree. I've worked for a couple "limousine liberals" in New York. So has my wife and so have many of my friends. Many of the limousine liberals are assholes (not that he's very liberal, nor is he wealthy, and he's also fictional... but think of Frank Underwood). Sure, they vote Democratic, but they're nasty, elitist people who will hurt your career for any reason or no reason at all, and who put a lot more stock into meaningless social prestige (connections, pedigree) than typical conservatives. Their liberalism is mostly an air they put on in order to make themselves socially acceptable since they can't hide their wealth. (That's not to say that all wealthy liberals are like that. The type certainly exists, though.) Frankly, it's at the point that I don't really care about a person's macropolitics. Some of my favorite people are conservative (I think they're wrong, but that's another issue) and some of the worst people are nominally progressive (and probably sincere in their support for left-of-center politics). As with religious belief, some expect a correlation between position and ethical character, but the actual correlation seems to be near zero.
Frankly, I think that this was intentional. It has nothing to do with being "a conservative" or "a liberal". This NIMBYism is about maintaining high house prices; it is about being a selfish piece of shit. It just gets a leftist veneer because these people are good at coming up with an argument that other people will listen to. End of story.
I think the progressive anti-growth sentiment is earnest; it’s people honestly trying to protect their city from unwanted change.
That's the opposite of "progressive". They're leftist, but that's not the same thing as being progressive. Kim Jong-Un is a leftist. So was Stalin. So are many of the Euro-rednecks
The U.S. is different from Europe in that our mouth-breathers, kooks, racists, regressives, and assholes are more numerous on the right of the economic spectrum... to the point where tropes are made of it. In Europe (and in NYC and San Francisco) the authoritarian nutjobs and the xenophobes and the anti-progress crowd is more evenly split between the left and right.
Some component of the Bay Area housing evil is ill-thought-out liberal politics (see: legacy rent control systems that don't allow rents to rise even with inflation) but much more of this stuff is exclusionary than people will admit to.