There's plenty of blame to go around, but you're focusing on the wrong part of the equation. The Bay Area is what happens when you generate an enormous amount of wealth, but you don't have fiscal policy in place to redistribute it. This is the end game of conservative economic policy, and it's as dysfunctional as you would imagine.
If it weren't in SF, it would be somewhere else. The real issue is that we've been gutting the top marginal tax rate since the 80s because conservative politicians managed to sell people on the idiotic notion that slashing taxes is great for society. Coupled with the fact that stock buybacks were made legal in the Reagan era, and this is what you're left with. The Bay Area can't enact the kind of fiscal policy necessary to redistribute its immense wealth properly, and people are drowning in inflation as a result. California is trying to do its best, but the reality is that business interests are still trumping (har) the interests of normal people even here. (I'm looking at you Ellis Act)
This is a cautionary tale of conservative economic policy. You either end up bankrupt like Kansas, or you end up with massive poverty rates like SF. If the top marginal tax rates were still in the 70s, and if stock buybacks were still considered corrupt (which they are), SF would look like a very different place.
There's a reason why so many of us keep harping on the subject of taxes and income inequality. It's not "just" about doing the moral thing, it's also about enacting necessary policy.
Last edited by time4fun; 01-21-2019 at 05:07 PM.