Any human will, a rational agent won't.
But for a brief 40 years before the super-constriction of supply happened, it was a welcoming place to lots of people that couldn't find homes elsewhere, because there were at least some empty places to rent out.
What drives up the prices isn't that people with big salaries are there, they've always been there. What's driving up the rents is that the people with big real estate holdings have said that the people with paychecks can't build anything new. So instead of those big paychecks going to building more infrastructure and subsidized low-income housing, those big paychecks are going only to current landlords, and pushing out anybody without a big paycheck.
SF housing is a game of musical chairs, and all the people that found their chair in the 1970s and 1980s easily because there were lots of empty chairs have decided that there should be no more chairs. That provincial, close-minded, and ultimately xenophobic attitude is what makes the housing market so unfair.
But if you think that building enough housing for the people means unending population increases, that's really in line with the garden variety xenophobic anti-immigrant thinking I grew up with in the Midwest.
The zero-sum philosophy of a newcomer arriving meaning that a current resident loses out, or that the newcomer is "extracting" from the community rather than contributing to it, is also gaining popularity in SF, and is also a very common xenophobic trope.
If you don't think that, then there's a certain density level where it's considered fine to oppose it, and there are certain things one could prioritize above population increases that could lead people to favor restrictions. Maybe some of the people favoring restrictions think the high point of density has been reached, or perhaps they favor restrictions because of what values they place above population growth. It's worth at least considering before we simply dismiss them all as xenophobic.
And for me, this isn't about more or less restrictions. This is about meeting the needs of the people of a city. Not just the wealthy, not just keeping buildings the same, not just the people that have lived there the longest. The needs of the entire people. Which includes people that don't yet live in the city but need access to the economic resources.
So I definitely think that there should be density restrictions, but rather than maximums there should be density minimus. It should be illegal to build a single unit on a 5000 square foot lot anywhere in San Francisco. When somebody tears down a tiny Victorian, they had better replace it with many homes rather than just one. And if somebody remodels those exclusionary Pacific Heights homes, they better be adding more units, IMHO.
Instead of your wealth being transferred to a laborer who has less wealthy, it was transferred to somebody who is likely quite a bit more wealthy. And instead of your wealth being used to improve the city, it was all used for the profits of somebody els.
good luck using labour to generate a piece of land to which you can build on that's near where you want it.
Please, for the sake of your good content, don’t go hyperbolic. It makes you sound less credible.
Things that are horrifying: genocide, torture, slavery, famine, child abuse, elder abuse.
Things that are not horrifying: almost everything else. Maybe bad, really bad, destructive...but not horrifying.
Certainly not a personal view about The Zeitgeist of SF.
Calling the state of housing the Bay Area anything less than "horrifying" is sugar-coating it, and I would thank you not to tone-police others.
Hopefully with Covid forcing more sane remote work policies across the board, fewer people are forced to live somewhere they don't want to.