Bad housing laws have turned San Francisco’s tech boom into a crisis for Oakland

There’s been a lot of discussion over the last decade about skyrocketing housing costs in Silicon Valley and then in San Francisco proper. But as reporter Mike Rosenberg notes, the housing crisis has now reached the neighboring city of Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco:

It’s worth pointing out how backward the situation in the San Francisco Bay Area is. In most parts of the country, city leaders are desperately looking for ways to attract big companies to town — or, even better, foster the creation of new, homegrown businesses. Bringing a new business to town normally has broad benefits. Some people get jobs at the new company. Others get jobs providing services — restaurant meals, legal advice, medical care — to the new workers. A larger tax base means the local government can provide more and better public services.

So by normal standards, the San Francisco Bay Area has hit the jackpot over the last two decades. They’ve attracted not just one big new company but dozens of them. But for many people in the region, this feels like a crisis instead of a triumph.

The problem, of course, is the housing market. If a bunch of new companies came to Kansas City or Buffalo, rising housing prices would cause a big housing boom — creating a lot of construction jobs for low-income workers — that would help to bring housing costs back down.

But strict zoning laws in the Bay Area make it almost impossible to significantly expand the housing stock there. Indeed, some Bay Area politicians have been pushing laws that would make the situation even worse. As a result, the tech boom simply means that housing gets less and less affordable for anyone who doesn’t work in tech or already own a home.

A lot of people are blaming the tech boom itself for the Bay Area’s housing problems. But the technology boom is only a problem because the region’s housing markets are functioning so poorly. With better housing laws, the region’s tech boom could be accompanied by a construction boom. Then having successful new companies come to the Bay Area would be seen as a win for ordinary residents there, just as it is in most other parts of the United States.