I don't see your point re: housing. The current situation is where the equilibrium has naturally ended up. SF is much more expensive than small cities, but people still get enough value from it (or think that they do) to pay the higher cost and live there. If some of the people on the margin moved to a cheaper second-choice place, they'd be slightly worse off, otherwise they would have already done that. So telling them to move to Louisville doesn't make them any better off.
However, if more innovative ways of building (and getting approval to do it) could make housing twice as plentiful and half the price, that would make them much better off.
Land is expensive in SF, and it is hard to get approval to build new housing. But it's not the only problem. Just building can be insanely expensive, like this project where it's going to cost almost $900k per unit to build affordable housing [1]. It's not clear if some of that is land cost, but it seems to imply that is not the case because it sounds like this is land that is already owned and dedicated to affordable housing.
However, if more innovative ways of building (and getting approval to do it) could make housing twice as plentiful and half the price, that would make them much better off.
Land is expensive in SF, and it is hard to get approval to build new housing. But it's not the only problem. Just building can be insanely expensive, like this project where it's going to cost almost $900k per unit to build affordable housing [1]. It's not clear if some of that is land cost, but it seems to imply that is not the case because it sounds like this is land that is already owned and dedicated to affordable housing.
[1] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/supes-question-890k-per-unit...