Benefiting The Haves At The Expense Of The Have-Nots
These, specifically, are the "have housing" people in San Francisco, versus those who'd like to rent an apartment, and ideally, one that is not four square feet and $4,000.

Michael Gibson opens his piece at NRO with news of the arrest of San Francisco's public-works director, Mohammed Nuru, on charges of fraud:

The plot thickened three weeks after Nuru's arrest when London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, revealed that she had dated Nuru 20 years ago and had recently received a small gift from him. Now the U.S. attorney may rightly decry the corruption inherent in giving gifts for favors, but we can hardly be surprised that an approval process that takes years set the stage for it. The bigger question is how the stakes for building anything new ever got so high.

San Francisco has virtually banned new housing. It forbids apartments of all shapes and sizes, limits the number of units per property, caps the number of small "shoebox" units to a few hundred, and has outlawed building anything higher than 40 feet in 80 percent of the city. What few skyscrapers there are cluster near the base of the Bay Bridge. There is no end to the stupidity and triviality of calls to preserve the character of a neighborhood and enrich its current inhabitants by limiting the construction of new apartments and houses. Unsurprisingly, because of this constrained supply and stoked demand, the median price for a one-bedroom rental is the highest in the nation, at $3,700 per month. To buy a single-family home, a starter home with flaking and rotting surfaces, a family needs $1.5 million on average and had better be paying cash. The cost to construct a single new apartment unit is over $700,000, nearly triple what it was a decade ago.

Rather than address the problem, however, the mayor, board of supervisors, planning commission, and land-use commission, together with a myriad of cracked, has-been community groups, have built for developers an obstacle course that even the most energetic minds cannot navigate. The permit process is fraught with trapdoors every step of the way in the highest-stakes game of Chutes and Ladders known to man. A shudder, a sense of fated financial ruin, passes across the face of any developer called to yet another hearing before the planning commission. Just about anyone anywhere has the standing to protest and cause delays. One constituent worries about a cast shadow or the preservation of a historic coin-operated laundromat and--crack!--the door opens and you fall back down all the way to square one. Meanwhile, you have lost years and spent millions. As Matt Haney, a member of the city's board of supervisors, recently admitted in a tweet, the city's process is bewildering "almost by design." The result, he says, "is that the insiders get through, if slowly, and everyone else waits. It's fundamentally broken and can breed corruption."

Here are a few by-no-means-extraordinary recent examples: It took one man 41 years--he started the process in 1978--and more than $2 million to get approval from the planning commission to build five duplexes in Bernal Heights.

...Land-use restrictions have hollowed out the middle class and extinguished the city's artistic ferment. The only poetry in North Beach can be found in a shabby museum about the Beat Generation that looks like a rotting convenience store in a bus station. More than 400 restaurants have closed in San Francisco in the last year, including, after 94 years, the famed Lucca Ravioli Co. in the Mission District and, after 47, Cafe Flore in the Castro neighborhood. Guitars, drums, and bass have fallen silent: You cannot have a garage band if the garage costs a million bucks. The Punch Line comedy club, where Robin Williams got his start, was on the precipice, saved only at the stroke of midnight by grants from the city and mercy from Google and Morgan Stanley. Nevertheless, the city's cultural pulse is dead, and what remains is on life support.

The city's policies have also prevented social mobility by pushing lower-income residents to areas with less opportunity and saddling them with interminable commutes or lower-paying jobs way out in the sticks. About 5 percent of the Bay Area workforce commutes three hours or more each day. Marginalized groups have been shouldered out. San Francisco's black community, which in 1970 accounted for 13 percent of the city's population, has now shrunk to 5 percent.

...By last fall, Google, Facebook, and Apple had had enough and decided to buy their way into the hearts of the locals. Together they have pledged $4.5 billion in aggregate to the region in investments in affordable housing and grants for nonprofits that help the displaced. As it turned out, the Google piñata had treats inside.

What is unique about this situation is how the tech companies have utterly failed to transform the wealth generated in this boom into any political power at the local or regional level. Tech companies appear to influence national elections and foment revolutions abroad, yet they can do little to change the land-use ordinances around their home offices. So powerful are these giants that candidates for the presidency are calling for them to be broken up, but they are also prohibited from building so much as one new home for one employee in a leafy suburb.

...According to [renowned urban economist Alain] Bertaud, Google's, Facebook's, and Apple's billions might be better spent lobbying city and suburban governments to relax their restrictions and free up the housing market.

The reality is that the chokehold will remain:

And so it is that San Francisco, now past the peak of its power and wealth, begins a new decade paradoxically richer than ever before yet also poorer than ever before. Bureaucratic gunk and sideshow cons have turned the city's impressive endowments into disasters. It continues to commit itself to outcomes no one can understand, through a set of processes all know to be corrupt. Nevertheless, year after year city officials run on and reach their arms out, their goals always receding before them. No matter! Tomorrow the city will pass even more restrictions, stretch rent control even further, until one fine morning . . .

What happened to New York City and to Venice's Abbot Kinney Boulevard will continue to happen in San Francisco. All that gave it character and made it an interesting, exciting place to be will disappear and disappear and disappear until all that's left is seriously expensive housing, seriously expensive restaurants, and urine, feces, and used needles.