What a typical Bay Area NIMBY. Instead of fucking building more housing, he's just sitting there hoping for a bubble burst to reduce rents.
https://shelterforce.org/2019/02/19/yimbys-friend-foe-or-cha...
You may wish to do more research on their alignment before declaring them NIMBY.
They're not exactly NIMBY, but also not exactly YIMBY. They opposed SB50, which was the most ambitious measure to allow new housing construction in San Francisco, and they're apparently known for objecting to other developments to build affordable housing (generally because any new development in a city means displacing or impacting at least a few people).
The way housing becomes affordable is that high-end new construction displaces demand for yesteryear's construction turning it into mid-end housing. Which then in turn displaces demand for the previous mid-tier which now becomes low-tier affordable housing.
In effect rich consumers subsidize poor consumers by insisting on continuously replenishing the housing supply with new modern housing conforming to the latest hip trends in architecture and design. The car market is a very good example of how this works absent arbitrary supply constraints. Arguably the used car market is the biggest single vector of wealth redistribution in America. The poor benefit from a massive oversupply of cheap but reliable used cars, because the rich insist on getting a new car every two years.
HRC refuses to acknowledge this dynamic. So they may be "YIMBY" in the sense of having some sort of vision about new construction. But that vision, mass construction of new affordable housing, is completely unviable. That makes them YIMBY in principles, but NIMBY for all practical intents and purposes
You describe HRC as opposing the the construction of high-end housing regardless of location — thus, whatever else it may or may not be, it certainly isn't NIMBY.
(The outcome may end up being that not enough housing is built, and that's of course terrible, but that's still not NIMBY, nor is it NIMBY-ism. It's some other form of idealism that isn't derived from the NIMBY principles.)
Anecdotally this is the case right now here in central Indiana. Fiance and I are starting to look for a house, we can get something 20-50 years old for 150-180k or the new construction physically across the street with the same square footage (and much smaller yards) is starting around 200k headed well past 300k (because, apparently, fancy counter tops and stainless appliances are worth an extra 100k eyeroll).
There's a half dozen new additions going in where we're looking and the cost for a tiny 1 bedroom house will get you 2-3 bedroom house with 0.25-0.5 acres within a 1/2 mile drive door to door purely because of all of the 'features' which are almost entirely cosmetic.
His goal is reducing evictions, and if there's less money providing an incentive for landlords to evict their tenants, then that reduction is more likely to happen.
Whether or not it's the result of a bubble bursting is a matter of opinion, but if the luxury dwelling builders are wondering where their tenants are, it's fair to say there's at least some air coming out.
Many people arguing for more housing in the Bay Are are doing so because they want prices/rents to come down, and most NIMBYs want prices/rents to keep rising.
How far are software engineers really going to commute? If they don't commute, are they going to move to your 2nd/3rd tier town?
I'm not a city planner so I don't know anything but what I see, and what I see is infrastructure at capacity -- gridlocked streets, BART completely full at commute times, etc
Edit: I made an incorrect comment on permitting for a minute because I was looking at the area, not just SF county.
This is a function of the infrastructure that's been built, not anything fundamental to San Francisco. Building more transit capacity, reducing incentives for city dwellers to own and take cars, et cetera would alleviate these problems the same way they have in much-denser cities around the world.