As a newly-former SF resident and worker, what I witnessed over the past decade confirms your sad summary. The unintended consequences of misguided yet well-intentioned political policies.
All American cities are anti-growth. The hippie legacy is pretty thin at this point and the cities are closer culturally to each other than the stagnant areas.
The Bay Area/California simply had more relativd demand for growth than many other areas, and better weather than the Northeast re homelessness on particular, and this is the inevitable result.
NIMBYism is Houston, Atlanta, etc. buying one-way bus tickets to Seattle and SF. Locals who want the problem solved are not NIMBY's.
We're seeing that all over the world, especially in Europe with the remains of the Lumières ideals, ideals which don't scale nor work in our globalized/capitalist world