I understand the supply limitations, but we have the same problem, because we have a ton of traction towards higher-up professionals. The big difference lies within the political system. The housing/real estate market is completely free (and cutthroat) here too, but our more socialist oriented government interacts with it to help people in need.

Examples of that are "sponsored" apartments, that cities rent to their owners for regular price, and subside to people but with an adaptive price (much lower for lower income people, and a little higher for people who make more than average)

In more urgent cases, social services cooperate with people who own unused buildings, hotels during low season, etc, and pay a big price to keep people under a roof.

There's also a lot of work from associations to communicate with landlords and agencies, trying to help giving a fair chance and renting affordable places to people with regular income, students, etc, as many wealthy people are interested in cheap places too.

I feel like the people who control most of the market have a lot of political power, and they don't want a bunch of buildings popping out and lowering market pressure, making prices and their revenue drop. Money is not a definitive solution, but in the right hands it can help a lot. In turn it creates a nicer social climate, and things work out better for everyone.

A nicer social climate isn't in everyone's interest though, and a lot of people work very hard to make sure there is tension, because they profit from it, a lot.

>Weirdly, it's the very people that are protesting the current influx of tech workers and rising rents that most viciously oppose new high-occupancy construction in the "true" SF neighborhoods because it would destroy their character, so it's a tough nut to crack.

That's really unfortunate, I'd hope that people would realize that you can have good-quality high-occupancy construction(see loads of places in Europe, Japan).

I don't necessarily know if it's a zero-sum game though. If higher quality mass transit were in place, the cost of living out of the city would be lessened (both in cost and stress).

I think it would be really cool if San Francisco built a subway line that went down south. It would convince people to not live exactly in the city center (because you'd have relatively easy access by subway), so could ease real estate preasures downtown, and would generally encourage a better spread of the population. It's not that people want to live downtown, but that they want to easily get downtown.

Can you write neutral Java? :P