The article mentions 68,000 units in the new development pipeline (essentially all condos/apartments) but, yeah. In the current environment, you could probably double or triple the planned building rate and not have much of an impact--beyond making it that much harder for people to get around.
Especially since the cost of living is providing a "cap" to how many people stay, relative to how many newly minted millionaires and lucky startup exit employees there are.
That is, those companies "overflow" into other cities/countries because it's too expensive and there's not enough supply, but the moment you build more and the price would go down, some people who would have left don't, and so the price won't move downward. You'd have to flood the market faster than the big companies hire and startups grow to make a significant change, and that's a LOT of extra capacity to create.
Realistically, making other cities more desirable, encouraging the big tech companies to open more satellite offices than they already do, and more focus on working from home for people who can is likely to make a bigger difference than anything SF itself can do on its own (bonus, it would help other cities like NYC and Boston too!)
I get the VC dynamics with startups. Well, sort of.
But, with the big employers, they're sufficiently big that everyone's no longer co-located in any meaningful sense anyway. Amazon seems to have already gotten this message with respect to Seattle (not just HQ2 but also, e.g., their Alexa building/hiring in the Boston Seaport).
I'm not sure how this plays out. Hopefully not with some massive tech crash. But I have to believe we're hitting (or have hit) peak salary for new hires in the Bay area and, at some point, most people are not going to live in a dorm to work for Facebook. And, if they are, that's sad.
The big employers, for better or worse, in may cases still favor their mothership. Give the choice they seem to favor the HQ if they can. The satellite offices are required for scalability, but as long as they have capacity in the main office, they'll try and fill those slots up first.
Oh. I don't disagree. I think it's hard to give up the mothership vs. satellite mentality. I work for a company that had two major locations fairly early on (not including SV) for historical reasons and that's doubtless one of the factors that's made it easier to be pretty distributed as time's gone on.
