Well, this Gawker piece on San Francisco's housing crisis feels familiar:

[San Francisco] is the most in-demand epicenter of an entire in-demand region, none of which has any affordable housing.

Tell us more, Hamilton Nolan:

Look, we all like complaining about people who moved somewhere more recently than us. They are the worst! Are they not? So corny! I highly recommend this as a lively topic of conversation. I love talking shit about people other than me! But then, when it is all done, it is grown-up time, and people need a place to live, so the grown-ups need to figure out a place for people to live.

Nolan's conclusion: San Francisco needs to build a lot more housing.

San Francisco needs a skyline redefined by construction cranes building new apartment towers. San Francisco needs a building boom. San Francisco needs to pour new units onto its insanely priced housing market. Even if they build new housing mostly for the wealthy, the benefits will accrue to renters far down the line. And if they build enough, eventually, years from now, there might be such a supply of housing in this in-demand city that middle class workers can actually live in it again. Imagine that.

But there's a problem:

The city’s regulations make it incredibly difficult and cumbersome to build large new projects, and rental laws encourage renters to stay in place and discourage some people with extra space from entering the rental market. These restrictions are, ironically, driven by longtime residents—often those who already own their own homes—who adopt the mantle of progressive preservationists, fighting the big bad developers and rich newcomers. Their efforts have the effect of driving up housing prices. Not a bad thing, if you already own a house!

Seattle has done better than San Francisco when it comes to building more housing. But people blocking new housing under "the mantle of progressive preservationists?" That's a storyline playing out here too.

As a way of driving down housing costs, Mayor Ed Murray's housing affordability committee, known as HALA, has recommended less design review and less authority for preservation boards. That's because those types of review processes can make building new housing slower and more expensive. But preservationists—remember those Pioneer Square residents I wrote about?—want developers to go through more process, not less, before they're able to build projects. And last week, the Pioneer Square Preservation Board asked the city for more regulations about the scale of buildings.

Making it easier to build housing is not an evil giveaway to developers. It's a necessity. Over the next 20 years, 120,000 people will move to Seattle—whether we like it or not—and they will need somewhere to live. If we want to stay ahead of San Francisco on this front, we must continue to build. And that includes buildings that feel "out of scale."

So, amen to this:

Acting in a way that prevents everyone else from living in your pretty little city because you already have a place that you like does not make you a progressive. It makes you greedy.

Build some housing, assholes. A lot!