Actually the real solution is not focusing on concentrating all technological development in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston but spreading it out across this great wide country (and world) of ours so that everyone can take part in and benefit from the modern economy.

Could you express that in concrete terms? For example, my suggestions would be:

* Remove height restrictions near public transit

* Make the building permit process more similar to that of a typical American city. Specifically, reform CEQA and the SF Discretionary Review process.

These are transit related, but good transit is intimately linked to urban structure.

* Get rid of free parking and "parking minimums" (not sure if SF has those, but many American cities do, and they're hugely destructive). When possible, get rid of on-street parking entirely in favor of non-car uses for the space.

* Stop widening roads (this mainly applies to more suburban areas). Start narrowing roads and widening sidewalks, adding separated bike lanes, etc.

* Bike infrastructure. This is not just good bike routes, but bike parking (which is orders of magnitude denser than car parking, and far, far, more flexible and easy to integrate into the urban environment without damaging it) near popular destinations and transit.

* Figure out why American infrastructure planning and construction is so dysfunctional (costs way, way, too high, planning often quite poor) and fix it.

* Allow transit agencies more flexibility, e.g. let them take advantage of the synergy real-estate/retail has with transit, the way east-Asian transit operators do.

I mean that instead of concentrating technology that the new economy depends on in places that have already reached their carrying capacity like SF, NYC, Boston, existing companies expand in smaller cities and towns, that telecommuting and the attendant improvements in management of distributed teams is encouraged, etc.

There are plenty of smart and creative people that want to live in "flyover country" that have to move to the coasts for any sort of opportunity to work in cutting edge tech, and its mostly because of the biases of executives, management, venture capitalists, investment bankers, etc.

This would take pressure off the unrealistic housing and cost-of-living in places like SF and the East Coast and would help lead to more prosperity in the rest of the country. You know, the part that gets continually glossed over by the media, government, and the "tech" industry in general.

Why am I getting downvoted? Nothing I said was offensive.

Because your 'proposal' isn't a proposal, it's just silly hand-waving. Explain, in concrete words (as the poster above asked from you but which you side-stepped), how to reach the outcome you propose. Otherwise, you might as well say 'yeah I think all cancer should be eliminated, that would reduce a lot of suffering'. No shit, Sherlock?

Bah. I call BS. You sound like a San Francisco real estate speculator or developer. "High density infill" projects are loved by the people who make money off the development of the property but no matter how much you weaken zoning protections to get there they somehow never manage to swing prices when demand, like it is now, is just so much greater. What you do accomplish with these projects, typically, is building very high-end price units, often of compromised quality (cheap materials, absurd square footage, etc.) Of course this does have the effect of reducing gentrification. On the contrary it steps up the pace while simultaneously leaving the city with a less desirable housing stock in the long run.

I call "math". Manhattan is 34 square miles and houses 1.6MM people. San Francisco is 49 square miles --- 1.5x bigger! --- and houses just 810k.

Working class people in SF aren't just upset that they're losing apartments they've lived in for years; they're upset that they can't predict where they're going to have to move to and where their kids are going to school; the whole city is crunched.

>but no matter how much you weaken zoning protections to get there they somehow never manage to swing prices when demand, like it is now, is just so much greater.

It doesn't make sense that they would, but that's okay because it's not the goal. In oversimplified microeconomic terms, new housing is built for the current price point, and can have the effect of preventing a price rise -- preventing demand from exceeding supply. Prices come down when supply overgrows demand, which doesn't happen by increasing supply, because the people doing so would lose money: demand has to decrease. tl;dr: high prices cause construction, but it's a negative feedback loop.

Concerns about housing quality seem misplaced. In a large majority of cases, new housing tends to be better than old housing, thanks to innovations in construction. High rises were popular in the '70s, which is why low-quality high rises are common: they're old.