Or maybe it's just the market's way of telling employees and employers that it's a big beautiful country that doesn't begin and end with a small peninsula on the West Coast.
Housing in the Bay Area is like roads; build more and capacity will simply be soaked up. Either move elsewhere or accept the SV tax. No property owner in their right mind would vote for more building (depressing the value of, most likely, the largest asset they own).
TL;DR Vote with your feet, prefer remote first companies.
You must destroy demand. It is the only way out.
Building as much (and sustainably) as possible + a land tax to discourage speculation and people not actually living in housing might be a better solution.
There's only so much land you can build on, and only so high you can build (whether through physics or legislation).
Should workers vote with their feet for remote first companies? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean SF shouldn't also build more housing.
Saying you shouldn't build housing because people will just buy it all up it is like saying you shouldn't grow food in a famine because people will just eat it. The problem is that demand and supply are massively out of step, and that means you need to build a lot before it starts to even out.
And sure, there are political reasons it doesn't happen, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
I keep being surprised that major employers keep paying the SV surtax to employ engineers in the Bay area rather than in cheaper places. I understand these organizations need to keep people in the Bay area, sure. It's the center of the industry; it's where a lot of new things happen. But do they need so many people within a half-hour of HQ?
Seems like an obvious place to cut costs.
I expect it will all self-correct. There is new housing coming on line. There is some upper limit to the premium companies will pay and some lower limit to the squalor software engineers will tolerate to live in SF. Market corrections can certainly happen.