As someone forced to move away from the bay area because of housing costs, as soon as housing comes down many of us expats (who have been able to build a sizable nest egg by NOT living in the bay area) will also compete to return. So plan for enough new units for current need + people forced to leave.
At some point increases in density will change the character of the city enough that some won’t want to return. If the Bay Area becomes Singapore it won’t be the Bay Area anymore.
Sure but the inevitable consequence of this is higher housing costs. If there's only 800k housing units, and a million people want to live there then 200k people are going to fail to find housing. There's no escaping the mismatch between supply and demand. If you don't build more housing, the character of the city will change too: it will become uniformly high-income since that's the only people who can afford to live there.
It's already on that path, and they either need to embrace it (pay janitors in San Francisco $150k a year) or change.
My personal suspicion is that the "desirable type" of town that San Francisco was is actually an unstable state, and the only way to permanently have it is to regularly move.
I don't think that will work. There's very little elasticity in the market, so to first order every dollar pumped into wages will be turned around and put into housing and drive up prices even further. There's only two ways out of this hole: you drive people away or you build more housing.
