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Damn land developers.
Having said that, I think you have a point: there are benefits to more housing, but there are also costs. Those houses or apartment complexes have to go somewhere, the infrastructure to support more people living in an area has to go somewhere. The bay area can't keep on growing forever.
Why does everybody have to live there anyway? The country would be way better off if 25 million people left there for Tennessee, West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Michigan, Maine, Indiana, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
Tennessee is quite nice as is Maine.
The big moment will be when Twitter goes under. They're the most visible troubled "tech" company in SF. If Uber tanks as well, SF's housing problem will be over for a while.
(Twitter will live on, but it will probably be acquired by somebody like IAC, which buys troubled services at a discount and runs them cheaply. They own "about.com", "match.com", "dictionary.com", Vimeo, Ask, etc. If they ran Twitter, it would have far fewer employees.)
The intent of the bill isn't to force development where there shouldn't be any. It's to encourage it where it's needed most, but hasn't happened yet due to NIMBYism etc.
Supply and demand :)
The state can't tell cities to 'build' - as cities don't do the 'building'. Private contractors do.
Methinks they could make some state-level zoning laws or something ...
But if there's incentive to build people will build.
If there's not a not of building in the Valley ... it might be due to zoning and regulatory issues, perhaps they could streamline? :)
New buildings require a much longer minimum investment timeline because the building doesn't exist yet. It's also far easier.
So if you let the free-market write the rules here, you'd get essentially exactly what we already have, because that's essentially exactly what we've already done.
Instead, if you really want a free-enterprise approach that encourages better land utilization, you'd need to look before you leap. For instance, a conservative rent and property resell value control would guarantee a maximum ROI for the buy/hold and do nothing/dump strategy. Otherwise, you'd have to indirectly subsidize new developments through tax breaks and other financial incentives (which is exactly what is happening)
Alternatively, if you're willing to forgo the engineering and manufacturing of markets you could use community land trusts, which is likely a far simpler and less issue-prone model of execution. I've personally invested in a few and have seen a long-term, stable, dependable 3% ROI (which is better than other equally conservative vehicles) so this doesn't mean that capitalists and investors are gone - just all the messy parts.