Assumption, I don't know how many tech workers there truly are.

Supply and demand gonna supply and demand. It's weird to "blame tech" for existing and injecting a massive amount of jobs into our economy; there's no metro region that could have handled that growth without the same effect on price, and there is no singular entity responsible for concentrating tech into a single city instead of distributed more evenly.

Maybe Houston could have come close to handling it without massive price increases, but I'm guessing Houston is too spread out to enjoy strong network effects, and probably would have become gridlocked with traffic to boot.

New York could have "handled" it, from a raw housing & transit perspective, but the region is already pricy and all of Manhattan (which has the best access to jobs and transit across the metropolitan region) has long since gentrified, so I don't know if that really counts.

(Of course, part of the reason no region could have handled it is precisely because of how Americans approach zoning and growth. Like our politics, our cities and neighborhoods seem to be static until there's an absolutely overwhelming force against the status quo, and even then sometimes that's not enough to change anything)

What we are seeing is cities eager for job growth and commercial business to call their city home, but the other half of the equation is given no thought. Upzoning residential areas to match commercial growth is not being done. Even when tech companies promise to build some housing with their new office space, it's never 1:1, so it too is a net strain.

When looking at the problem in those simple terms, it really seems like insidious profiteering on the local government's part, considering LA councilmen all own at least 1 property and therefore all stand to benefit from housing price surges.

It confuses the issue to anthropomorphize an industry category.

I don't think it's fair to blame rank-and-file tech workers. In today's scary economy, you can't blame anyone for entering a growth industry and taking a good job that's offered. Who wouldn't want a great salary, good benefits, a safe comfortable workplace, and a stable work-life balance?

The more interesting question is why are there so many tech jobs and why do they pay so well? Facebook had 35,587 full-time employees in 2018. What the hell are all of those people doing that Facebook can pay them so much?

My hunch is that this is a consequence of perilously low corporate taxes. Giant companies simply have more money than they know what to do with, so they are throwing it any place that seems reasonable. In particular, they're trying to build bigger and bigger moats to outcompete the other tech giants. The biggest moat of all is skilled humans since it takes so long to increas the supply of them. So they're throwing money at tech workers mostly to keep other companies from scooping them up.

Being essentially on retainer is great for the people who luck into that field, but it seriously screws up the economies of the few cities where it happens. Other job categories that aren't dominated by huge companies competing for each other's skilled workers don't end up driving up wages to the same degree so everyone else gets priced out.

I think the real answer is to start taxing these companies appropriately. You can look at their current behavior as wealth distribution that only trickles down to tech employees. If the wealth is going to be distributed, I'd rather some of it go to teachers, nurses, sanitation workers, and waiters too.