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It's pretty commonly accepted that the housing issue is caused by restrictions on building new housing. It's been Democratic leaders like Scott Weiner and Gavin Newsom that have been pushing hard to remove these restrictions. Trump's party on the other hand has been actively fighting against this, calling it some kind of war on the suburbs.
However, I get the impression that being priced out isn't what you (or the original poster) are mainly focused on here, rather this demographic change. Well, that's easy to address---contrary to what you might think if you spend a lot of time in places like this forum, most Americans and definitely most Californians care that people have similar values and ideals as them rather than that they look superficially similar. "Why aren't more people being radicalized because my personal and unpopular aesthetic preference isn't being satisfied?"---that question answers itself.
I'm sorry, but this is just sloppy demagoguery. If you're being priced out because supply is artificially restricted to such brutal extremes as housing in California, you don't blame the other people who are similarly being screwed over, you blame the people causing the artificial restriction! Anyone telling you otherwise is probably manipulating you.
This is putting way too high of a standard. Buildings are demolished and replaced all the time! If you don't allow this, you get nonsense like the "historic laundromat" in San Francisco. Putting all the cases like this together, there's a ridiculous amount of space in San Francisco itself for more housing when so much of the city looks like this.
The entire sunset district could look like Manhattan. It’s not like we don’t know how to build buildings that are taller than two stories. It’s a completely self-inflicted space constraint.
Well, the appeal of living in gigantic skyscrapers does diminish a bit when you're living in an earthquake zone. Even being in a fourth floor apartment during a 3.2 a few years back was a deeply unpleasant experience, and I say this as someone who slept through the '92 Northridge quake as a kid.
That depends on the quality of the skyscrapers. High-rises in Taiwan can easily withstand magnitude 7 or higher quakes that had they occurred in Chile, Turkey, or the Philippines would have devastated thousands of one or two-story buildings.
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