Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

Yes.

Right before the first dotbomb I went on a tour of LoudEye/Encoding.com which had lots of Hollywood clients. The place was in a gorgeous antique building, wrought iron railings, full rack sized silicon graphics multiprocessors, and all of the front desk, office staff were Beautiful People (tm) and very busy and serious. It looked like a set for what a futuristic tech company would dream of.

We need that as the face of distributed remote companies so that the old money can have a nice artifact to look at while everyone is at home on IRC.

Well, if the Fed doesn't tighten, they're at a pretty high risk of introducing serious inflation into the economy. The high commercial rents are a form of inflation; so are the wages of tech workers, and people being priced out of the Bay Area. So far, this is local to a few industries and metropolitan areas, but if the Fed doesn't act you could see it start showing up in nationwide statistics.

That said, I'm not entirely convinced Yellen will tighten. She has a reputation as a dove on monetary policy and seems weak to me, overly afraid of the effect her actions will have on the stock market. It wouldn't surprise me if we end up with another 1997 situation, where some temporary economic instability makes the Fed put off tightening or even introduce additional stimulus, and this ignites a speculative bubble that raises prices beyond all reason and then bursts.

(The username is ancient, I've had it on various sites since college, and while I'd love to be thought of as a prophet, my track record isn't that good.)

Bugs in the system, inherent to the worker units. Turns out evolution hasn't shaped up to work for the collective good very well or for very long. Once there's an exploitable aspect to the economy, certain types find it and disrupt the system as a whole, causing a rebalancing of the economy.

There are already several comments on this Hacker News thread where people suggest things like remote work. Others suggest moving to less expensive cities. Someone mentioned Tennessee. "mooreds" made the suggestion "consider starting a company outside of San Francisco". But such comments ignore (are in denial? are in defiance?) what is actually happening, which is described in the 3rd sentence of the linked article:

"the migration of startups from the Peninsula to San Francisco have led to the lowest vacancy rates ever"

The big move away from the cities played out in the USA as automobiles became popular. The trend started in the 1930s and was at its peak during the years 1945 to 2000. It's worth noting that what we are looking at now is some re-centralization. That may be surprising or counter-intuitive, but since it is happening, it is worth investigating why it is happening. And all of the folks who think remote work is the answer might want to ask themselves why the ease of remote work is not offsetting the trend that's moving jobs into place like San Francisco and New York.