Housing scarcity is about theft from lower wage workers

The Times published this as part of its ongoing campaign to shame the San Francisco area into building more housing at higher density. Guess what? They are right. We need a lot more affordable housing.

But what ought to be equally obvious is that this illustrates that the distribution of goodies in the tech economy is out of whack. That guy in the suit is simply taking too much of the pie. (Note they make him a lawyer who presumably adds some recognizable value to the ecosystem rather than a tech bro peddling his latest brain fart.) As long as society requires janitors and gardeners and bus drivers and nurses and teachers ... the capitalist bargain has been that the winners would pay them enough to live. Not to live like the high flyers, but to live.

If you are going build an economy where new millionaires are minted every minute, you are going to have to pay the support staff enough to participate, at some level, in the necessities of life. Companies won't like that, but it is the cost of soaring entrepreneurial opportunity.

Solving the housing shortage in the Bay has to include redistributing some of the new wealth among a broader community. That should be obvious, but the chorus of critics routinely skip that part of the equation.