@OP - the only hope of any of your reasonable solutions being reached is to empower the radical activists that you're antagonizing with this post: presenting reasonable reforms to zoning and development regulations ensures that whatever's enacted will be watered down to nothing, but if you present extreme reforms that specifically threaten all the yuppies that city & state officials consider their top priority, then you get zoning & development reforms that matter.

And on a more general note, I think we're beyond the point where anyone can expect housing to be a normal commodity that can be made to fit everyone's needs through toying around with supply and demand in a free market. Housing is a basic necessity, and should be subsidized and regulated in the same ways that food and water are.

(though for the record, I agree that the 'I have a right to live cheaply in capitol hill' goal of this group is a bit snobby)

Same sort of oddballs are doing the same to San Francisco Google buses, and Google buses go a lot further (San Francisco to Mountain View Googleplex is 50 miles easy)

Why don't they boycott Genentech's buses, which had been travelling from San Francisco to South San Francisco for a decade already, hmmm?

@105: Pretty much. The counter-argument is that the people moving into these new developments will be moving out of older ones that will then become available -- but that assumes they're moving out of other developments in the city. I think what's actually happening is the new low-cost options are mostly in the suburbs.

The fact that The Stranger has had their office in Capitol Hill for twenty+ years should tell you everything about how 'young, working class' the hill has been in recent memory.

Twenty something's working at the music store aren't working class, they're larval upper-middle/middle-class dinks.