You may have taken a risk in moving to a place that was less desirable 15 years ago, but part of that risk is that the neighborhood continually changes, maybe not always according to your ideal plan. Land (especially desirable land) is a scarce good. Allowing incumbent landowners absolute say in what happens to the surrounding area is not in the overall public's best interests.
I absolutely object to your view that people want to live here "cheaply". People want to live in SF _affordably_. As in, not having to put 75% of their income toward housing, which is an insane thing to have to do. I've been living in the bay area since 2004, the last 8 years of which have been in SF. I've been working hard to get to the point where I could buy my own place, but every year it becomes harder to justify buying over renting. At this point I do have the money, but it feels financially irresponsible to buy. But I love this city and want to put down long-term roots, and perpetually renting just doesn't seem to be the way to do that. Why don't I get a shot at helping to build the community?
It's not just me. I'm fairly well-off at this point, and many people, some who have lived in SF far longer than I have, are getting hurt by all this. Take service workers, who have been all but priced out of the city. More likely than not the cashier ringing up your groceries, the barista making your coffee, the person who comes to clean your house, the waiter at your favorite restaurant... they used to get to work by hopping on Muni or BART, but now they have to drive over an hour to get to work. How is that ok?
So yes, this is why I and others point fingers at you and say you embody the "FU, I got mine" attitude. You got in at a good time. I don't doubt that you put work into community building over the years, or that you took on some risk. But it absolutely floors me that people like you don't get how much of your current situation is completely down to pure dumb luck. And that's what this is all about: leveling the playing field for everyone, not just people who have money, or were lucky enough to be born at the right time or move in at the right time.
To be clear, I'm not raising up my pitchfork here or coming at you angrily. At this point I'm just extremely frustrated, disappointed, and sad. To echo your sentiments, I find it hard to believe that people on "your side" don't see the obviousness of what I'm saying. I mean, does SF seem like a healthy city to you? Do you really think that just ignoring these housing issues is going to make everyone leave and everything will go back to normal?
To address some of your points directly:
> Make places less attractive, demand goes down, and prices go down. There are huge swaths of the US other than San Francisco that are in dire need of industry and people. Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places?
Two reasons: 1) for a company, betting on an untried/untested job market to fill your needs is a ridiculously risky proposition. A company like Toyota (moved from Torrance, CA to Plano, TX) can take risks like that because they're a more mature business with a large margin for error and can absorb that pain. Most SF and bay area companies can't take that risk. 2) People such as myself just don't want to live in those places. I'm in my mid-30s right now, and I don't have the desire to spend 15 more years building a community as you claim to have done. I'm fine paying more than you did back then to enjoy the benefits of a more-established community, but the current situation is just ridiculous, untenable, and unsustainable.
> Wages clearly aren’t high enough to give workers salaries that allow them to buy properties. Raise wages, and some companies will naturally move elsewhere. Jobs will go with them, and demand will go down.
That's easy to say, but, again, similar to my point above, that's an incredibly risky proposition, way too risky for many (most?) bay area companies to take. And there's an inherent chicken-and-egg problem there: if the talent is in the bay area, no one wants to be the first to move to a new area and try to attract talent. And that's completely understandable. Large companies that have a need for low- or medium-skill workers can get away with that sort of thing, but most others can't.
Beyond that, whose job is it to raise wages? Why on earth would any company voluntarily do that? And good luck legislating that; this isn't just a minimum wage hike you're talking about. Do we really want the city to legislate the minimum salaries for salespeople, marketing people, developers, customer support, etc.? That's madness. Even if it was a min wage hike, if you push too hard on that lever, the service jobs are the ones that disappear, and that's not what you want. Who wants to live in a city with no ability to staff restaurants, bars, museums, and even grocery stores?
> Also, the elephant in the room is foreign buyers. I looked through SF tax records the other day. I picked a random street, and most of the homes were owned by foreign trusts. Why not try to stop that first?
I do agree that this is a problem, absolutely. It's unclear to me, though, how much of this ends up being vacant, or does get rented out. Obviously in my position I'd prefer that more housing stock be up for individual buyers, and not be locked into the rental stock, but I'm not sure legislating who can and can't buy property and whether or not that property can be used as rental property, or if it needs to be occupied a certain percentage of the year (how would you even enforce that?) is a great use of legislative power.
(Also, your sampling methodology is flawed: for a statistically significant result, you'd need to pick a representative sample of lots across the city, not just one random street.)
> ... they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair?
No one is forcing you to "give up" anything, but we are asking you to accept that cities and neighborhoods and communities are not static things that are etched into stone. They weren't when you moved in; the fact that you admit that you've worked to build a community is clear evidence of that. Why do you get to decide when that change stops? Just because you put some money down? Nope, sorry, I'm not buying that. People are just asking you to share the bounty of the region with them. No one is looking for a free ride; I expect new people to participate in the community just as you have. Obviously they'll be coming in at a different time, with different pluses and minuses, different challenges, but that's just how life is.