This is what happens when a city neglects basic quality of life issues, and allows petty crime to thrive. It happened to New York in the 1970's and took roughly three decades to recover from. Good luck, San Francisco.
The thing with SF is that the media and a large portion of the US loves to hate it - theres a narrative that keeps getting the replay button. They always will, and it will always die just like Silicon Valley is over and the next Silicon Valley will be in (insert any city, or china). These stories have been around forever, and they will continue forever. Yes SF will go through a down cycle as a result of pressure being taken off of the rental market, and it will fill right back in when people want to live in the city again and the pandemic has passed.
Pretty sure college is going to be in person again (UCB, UCSF, Stanford) as are the National Labs.
The media has overhyped this ... of all sources Business Insider.
I know a couple of medium sized VC people who are going to start living outside of SF proper (not the Valley), but the people I know who live in the city love being in the city of San Francisco. The people who are leaving the bay area were probably always going to leave some day if they weren't happy there.
And you're dead on about schools and research centers that require in person. Hardware or R&D need a physical space for work and security. And some people do like a cool office experience.
Anyway, tl;dr I agree with you, ha ha.
The recent announcement by Goldman Sachs about moving a large chunk of their operations to Miami is not a good sign for NYC.
Of course, it's better to have neither exploding costs nor petty crime, but at the end of the day, dealing with petty crime is more affordable.
EDIT: Getting downvoted to oblivion but I'm not wrong.
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/12/21001080/san-francisco-sf-r...
"In 2010, a two-bedroom SF apartment on Craigslist averaged $2,893 (per historic data compiled in 2016 by Eric Fischer), or $3,396 after inflation. At the end of 2019, similar units on the same site sit at a median of $4,300, up 26.6 percent."
It would have taken a lot of petty crime to amount to that $12K per year in inflation-adjusted (i.e. real) increase.
(Technically, they've only enforced price controls which make made profitable renovation illegal, but it has the same effect.)
Why would that be?
Surely many developers would have made the bet anyway, at least in 2010-2019, but going forward it'll be worth considering whether building housing for people who are likely to leave en masse is worth the risk.
People are building houses in countries where they sell at 20x lower prices.
Unless construction workers in SV are paid 1 million $ / year, the reason for not building is not that it's not (hugely) profitable.
But you seem to be condoning that preference, and that preference is ridiculous. An economic boom should not be a bad thing. And tech is not raising rents, it is raising housing demand which could easily be met with a corresponding rise in supply that would limit the price increases, but new housing has been being actively blocked for decades.
You also leave out an important factor, most of the city that is supporting the policies that enable petty crime here have no skin in the game. They live in nice neighborhoods where they've owned their houses for decades making them massively wealthy and don't have to interact with the undesirables. It's easy to look the other way and ignore the downtown problems of homelessness and street crime, and to be so woke that you don't want any crime prosecuted, when it doesn't affect you.
You're right, but the reality is it has been a bad thing for many people. As long as they're being outmaneuvered by homeowners and landlords, having the boom simply end would work just as well as winning the housing supply fight. Few people are going to miss tech elites if they leave.
A minority of people can afford living in an expensive and safe area.
The majority is forced to choose less expensive, even if less safe, areas.