SF does need to build, badly, but I'm wary of the term NIMBY-ism. It is descriptive, but I think it invites false equivalence. There are degrees of NIMBY. I actually think that some of the burbs, like walnut creek or mountain view (especially the latter) have engaged in genuinely shocking levels of refusal to build housing. Mountain view's NIMBYism is especially objectionable since it actually green lighted the corporate construction that brings many new workers to the area, while almost with the same stroke of the pen banned new housing around those places of business. There's NIMBYism, and then there's actually generating the problems that you push out to other neighborhoods.
I'm always a little bummed to read statements by people who, probably out of frustration that I largely share, start to disparage SF's architectural and cultural heritage. It is absolutely possible to grow, dramatically, without tearing down some of the oldest neighborhoods west of the mississippi.
This is out of date, and has been for a while. The voters of Mountain View responded to the housing crisis by voting in a much more pro-housing city council. There are now over 10,000 units planned for North Bayshore (the area around the Google and LinkedIn campuses):
http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2016/03/03/council-oks-plans-fo...
As a long-time resident and voter in Mountain View, it's exasperating to have people so fixated on the NIMBY narrative that they ignore the significant steps the city and voters have and are taking to address the housing crisis. Regardless of what Matt Yglesias said, or that article from the Washington Post said, the votes of the Mountain View citizenry, and the resulting choices of the City Council, should make it clear that we're not a bunch of anti-density NIMBYs.
That's why it's mostly brothels and growhouses (exaggeration).
Keep in mind, what I'm saying here is a thesis, not a conclusion.
SF is city that ranges from very high density to middle density, with a few expensive and relatively suburban neighborhoods west of twin peaks and/or near the coast (St Francis Wood, Forest Hill, Seacliff, etc)… It has also had a relatively stable population density for over 50 years, and in some of these neighborhoods considerably longer than that.
SF is also a relatively small geographical area that is a different municipality from the nearby cities. In many (most?) cities in the US, sections of SF and Oakland/Berkeley would be the urban core of a larger city, but those suburbs and even exurbs wouldn't be considered different cities in the same region, they would be part of the same municipality. As a result, construction in the hinterlands that doesn't count as growth within "San Francisco" does count in growth in a place like Seattle, where the "city" of Seattle encompasses a much larger geographical area.
So, hear me out - while SF can be excessively preservation minded, think about how people would react if you tried to bulldoze not just the French Quarter in New Orleans, but the garden district, Bayou St John, or even some of the shotgun houses in less famous districts. What would happen if you tried to tear down historic houses in Philadelphia or Boston, or replace entire city blocks of 100+ year old houses or apartments with modern high rises?
My thesis (again, not a conclusion, I'd need to see the data) is that if you identify regions similar to SF - medium density neighborhoods that have existed in this form for 60-100 years, it is very difficult to tear things down and build greater density in many places outside SF. I wouldn't be surprised if it's especially difficult in SF, but I suspect this would be a difference in degree, that SF would have an unusually strong preservation instinct, but that you'd find strong, similar preservation instincts in many other comparable regions - but that these similarities are not evident because we aren't comparing similar geographical regions, again because of the oddity of municipal boundaries in SF (which are a large contributor to the NIMBYism problem, to be sure).
