I more or less agree with you - living in SF "proper" is a luxury good, kind of like living in the left bank of Paris. So I definitely don't intend anything that follows to be interpreted as a disagreement, more just... well, a riff on the theme, I guess.

Part of the resistance to this comes from the very recent memory of SF residents. The transformation of an SF address into a luxury good is very recent.

I'm acutely aware of this having grown up here. I have a friend whose father was a professor at SF state. He (largely on one salary) raised his family in a pleasant 4 bedroom (!) house in the inner sunset. Another friend's parents were school teachers, one part time elementary, one full time middle school. The had a modest but pleasant place a little further out in the sunset.

It really wasn't until the late 90s that almost all of San Francisco detached from the middle class. I'm wishy-washy on the term almost here... there are still affordable corners, I guess... a modest house in nice shape in the excelsior probably could crack $700. Is that affordable?

I lament this a little bit, but I'm not that outraged. There isn't much to be done. I do think that a creative culture (which includes tech!) can't really flourish in such an expensive city. It just limits options too much when you have to make so much money just to live.

Some of the loss is long term residents who give up on living here (my brother was a professor at SF State as well, he was barely able to afford to share a 2br apartment with a guy he knew from high school - contrast that with the 4br house one generation earlier. They've since left SF, probably never to return as residents, and a good thing for them that they did, because they wouldn't be able to chart their own course in life with that kind of rent).

But this isn't about localism or resenting people who are moving here. Let me put it this way - Harvey Milk became who he was partly because he was able to move to SF and find an inexpensive apartment. SF was once a place where very creative people who didn't really fit in could show up and find their way in life, and interesting things emerged from that. I think that was worth much more than widely available tech talent of VC funding.

One last thing, though - this bashing of "tech workers" is pretty horrendous as well. Like someone isn't allowed to come out here, take a job, and rent an apartment?

I guess I just see it as a done deal. The innovation of life, the kind nobody even understands well enough to fund, that causes people to scratch their heads and say "what are those people doing"? Hard to believe it will come from SF anymore. I'm as bummed as the next guy, I just don't really see any villain here[1].

[1] I know, I know, some people will say building codes are the villain. I'm not prepared to present a long defense because I actually can't rule this out, but I'm highly skeptical of this argument... I guess I'd just ask if building lots of high rise dense apartment buildings would have "saved" manhattan or the left bank of paris from culture killing real estate prices. To me, the real solution is that the creative people will move, locally maybe to Oakland, or that other cities will pop up (austin seems like a prime candidate).