I feel like we’re talking past each other. In the section about labor costs, it cites at least the following:
1. Slow uptake of skills, lower productivity. Related to recession.
2. Hard to get bids due to uncertain approval process. Entirely caused by city policy. Now you say let’s condition on approved projects: however, given that it can take up to half a decade to gain approval (infamous historic laundromat was just under 5 years), controlling for approved projects is misleading. In five years, construction costs doubled and a project that might have penciled out at inception may no longer. The developer would have to propose a more dense, taller, etc. building for the project to make sense, but that would be another half-decade round trip through city planning.
3. City rules about prevailing wage, local sourcing, etc. limiting the available labor pool which directly drives up labor cost. This is entirely a local control problem.
Are you saying 2 and 3 are not consequences of local regulation?
Additionally, most of what you’ve cited is true across the nation. What you fail to provide is a reason these macroeconomic factors seem to have a disparate impact on SF’s ability to build which is evident in, e.g., the number of new housing units per capita it has delivered vis a vis a comparable city such as Seattle.