I'm sure we can talk about lots of bad reasons why rent is high, but the mere fact of high rent isn't itself bad, right? Why do we need to reform?
Cities are important for too many reasons for me to enumerate right now. Basically, if we can't keep cities healthy, then our civilization will collapse, and we won't be able to rebuild.
We have a problem when the option to spend less is not available. Then, to have access to the jobs and opportunities of the city, the workers have to spend inordinate amounts of money on expensive rents and time on commuting, which reduces the social benefit of having jobs.
https://medium.com/@laurafooteclark/how-do-we-avoid-another-...
It also reduces the real wealth, as value is diverted to past landowners (and tenants taking advantage of abusive laws, which are why I never supported the San Francisco Tenants Union) and not to the city as a whole. The Bay Area schools can't even hire teachers for all of their classrooms. We are awash in money, but experiencing poverty.
Apparently the issues experienced as a result of high housing prices aren't valued enough to drive prices of the homes down, yet.
I guess my point, if I had one at all, is that it seems like the housing market is absurdly high in such a way that will eventually self balance, one way or another. Either the city will continue to sustain itself on the backs of the long commuters who can't afford to live in the city, or the quality of life in the city will drop, which will in turn lower housing prices until the workers who make the city life appealing can afford to live close enough to again commute reasonably.
If, as you say, education is suffering, people will stop buying the houses, or they'll stop bringing kids to the districts. Either way, problem self-corrects, right?
With a tech salary it's possible to float above the rising prices, but everyone else gets driven out.
Housing prices will not "balance" because demand is extremely high and much of that demand has high salaries, and supply is extremely restricted (by NIMBY's and the laws they support).
2. The money goes nowhere. It gets captured by landlords, and plowed into making real estate more expensive, instead of buying goods and rewarding productivity, or buying entertainment and rewarding people.
3. You're talking about barring the less well off from an entire city. Are you surprised that this is an unpopular opinion?
Beyond ethics, a few things you may not have considered:
1. High rent is a systematic, generational wealth transfer from the young to the old (property owners); this is not good for society (eg, funding social security or even social stability).
2. It is an enormous drag on economic output and productivity for a variety of reasons.
3. High rents (coupled with rent control) result in really crazy inefficiencies.
I don't want to live everywhere. Unfortunately, my occupation has chosen to highly concentrate a ridiculous fraction of the jobs here. So I'm here. Moving is not impossible, but it's got a considerable "barrier to entry" if you will, and as someone still fairly new with the whole being-an-adult-with-a-job thing, it's not as simple as just getting up and going. Aside from the actual logistics of it, I've been with employers who look at resumes and think short gaps between jobs == bad, and so that means I can really only look if I manage to have held onto something long enough. There's also the fact that I might like my current work; finding a job that isn't soul-sucking (and isn't a startup with no hope of success) turns out to be tricky when it seems like 70% of the offerings boil down to "we sell ads".
For example, in my searches it appears that the Boston area has ~10% of the jobs that the Bay does.
Thankfully, I'm in a high-paying role. But surely the Bay Area needs janitors, transit workers, teachers, retail clerks, etc.? How are they to afford rent, let alone a home? Is the answer for them "sorry, you're priced out; commute 15-20 hours weekly?"
And, I know you're asking honestly, but when people out here say "high" w.r.t. housing in the Bay Area, they don't mean "it's above average", it means "it's literally insane". My father's current house was probably ~3 yrs of his salary; small houses are selling for ~$1.5M; an engineer making ~$100k (~starting salary) would need 15-16 years, and a very senior salary of ~$200k would still be ~8yr.
You can be an engineer and have tons of money to afford cool gadgets, but you'll never own a home.
To clarify, I'm not saying that it's just fine. I'm saying that your argument doesn't work without something more - either a reason why those people not being able to live there is a problem, or is morally wrong, or something.
What people want is pretty much the only thing that matters when it comes to politics (although there are limitations based in what's possible and what's not).