I have no experience with SF first-hand, but from what I hear it is extremely, extremely expensive to live in. In Tokyo you can get a 1 room appartment for $600 a month ( a kinda shitty one, but you can find one), and it's easy to find meager jobs (fast food joints or convenience stores) to make $10 an hour (comes out to $1600 a month). The jobs are more or less everywhere too, but the point is even in the downtown-y area you can live where you work.
It's possible to work there because the population density of the special wards of Tokyo (the actual "urban" part, there's a lot of mountain) is 3 times that of SF. I only have a cursory knowledge of what it's like, again, but looking at apartment listings, it seems like San Francisco has a pretty high amount of gigantic apartments. Like, apartments that could be cut into 4 separate apartments-type huge.
From the side of the people who are mad about this stuff, about the rent and the transportation:
Here's a guy who has an apartment that takes up half a floor, who takes his private bus to go work out in the countryside, asking me, the guy making his burgers/checking out his groceries, to go live out in the countryside and bus into work because he couldn't survive having an apartment with 200 sq feet less space.
Even worse, this is next to some of the most technologically advanced companies in the world. We're supposed to be the Jetsons. How is it that we can have a halfway-functioning public transit system in nowheres-bourg, France, population 100k , but we can't seem to get one running in an area with 3 times the density and 10 times the people?
I'm not necessarily agreeing with everything, but the rage is justified. And it can be solved by political means.
>but now there is a trend towards reurbanization, and as more people move back into cities, the natural result of that is an increase in prices unless supply increases.
Supply can be increased pretty easily: by having companies build closer to the city center, thus expanding the radius of "interestingness". I'm sure that if Google had built closer to san francisco proper that the area of interesting things would have increased immensly. Instead they built their own little disneyland way out , with a huge suburb in between it and SF.
Obviously square footage is expensive, but what is money when you're apparently rolling in it? Building the Googleplex closer would've made it smaller but at least it would have helped SF expand its area of interestingness.