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It is in the interest of the entire country that these regions be forced to allow maximum housing development, because it will raise incomes across the entire country.
>Do the tax payers of SF not get a say in how their community is managed?
We know why zoning density restrictions exist, because their birth place was across the bay in Berkeley, whose proponents loudly extolled its benefits in pushing out anyone who was not White. This was the original intent of getting a say in development: to prevent undesirable racial minorities from moving in next door.
San Francisco weaponized housing density restrictions to push black people out of Haight-Ashbury, and to this day, continues to fight any and all housing development that might reverse this grave injustice.
If New York and the Bay Area alone relaxed their zoning, their GDP would be 33% higher, and US GDP would be 3.7% higher (as of 2009), and national average income would be $3,685 higher.
You can either get ahead of a state-wide solution and implement something where you have some control that works for your community, or you can do nothing and wait for the state government to begin to remove zoning from local control.
"High" rent is relative to the area, and rent is high across the entire country currently.
Lack of rental housing drives up rental prices. The lack of rental housing is largely due to unnaturally low interest rates. People qualified for oversized loans, and bought up the rental supply, converting them into homes instead.
Since cash was easy to acquire via loans, this resulted in an unprecedented period of time where housing prices were driven upwards with near-zero limiting factor. That was the market where people were overbidding asking-price by $50K+ without even seeing the house... that was/is a very unnatural market. This bidding process resulted in significantly overvalued homes, which made them inaccessible to lower-income people. So the rental market shrunk significantly, and housing prices went through the roof... then runaway inflation came knocking, making everything that much worse.
Which is to say, all of this is the creation of poor federal policy, and there isn't much your state or city can do about it.
Nobody has a "right" to live in SF. If you can afford SF, then nothing is stopping you.
You do have a right to live, but you do not have a right to live in a particular area.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/right#:~:text=A%20right%20is....