Astronomical rents, rampant evictions and tech-shuttle protests have recently shone a spotlight on San Francisco's housing crisis. Rightly so - low-income communities of color in San Francisco (and Oakland and San Jose) are struggling to survive an unprecedented wave of gentrification.

The trouble with spotlights, though, is that while focusing attention on one thing, they obscure everything else. Lurking in the shadows of the Bay Area stage, suburban cities maintain an enormous jobs-housing imbalance, creating housing and commute patterns that strangle urban neighborhoods and leave low-income people nowhere affordable to live.

Sara Garcia is one of those people. She wakes up daily at 1:40 a.m. so she can make it to her job cleaning offices of a leading Silicon Valley corporation by 4 a.m. Garcia was priced out of San Jose two years ago and forced to move to Los Banos (Merced County). Not only did this burden her with a three-hour car commute, it also limited her son's access to nearby public colleges, which could dash his dreams of higher education.

Census data show that most suburban job centers in the Bay Area have a housing shortage: Pleasanton (home to Safeway) imports 90 percent of its workers, San Ramon (Chevron) 91 percent, Mountain View (Google) and Cupertino (Apple) 93 percent, and Menlo Park (Facebook) 95 percent. In contrast, just 60 percent of San Francisco workers commute from outside the city.

These suburbs open their doors to corporate giants but cling to regressive land-use policies that result in both an inadequate number of homes and neighborhoods that are out of synch with market demand. Whole cities of pricey single-family houses with two-car garages meet neither the needs of highly paid engineers nor underpaid workers like Garcia who clean their offices. That leads them to seek homes elsewhere.

Well-paid workers who can choose where to live - like my friends who moved here from the East Coast for jobs at global tech companies - are choosing urban centers over suburbs. They don't want to spend three hours a day commuting between their San Francisco homes and Silicon Valley jobs, even on cushy private shuttles. But they endure it because they think it's worth it to live in mixed-use neighborhoods where they can walk, bike or bus to restaurants and bars, bodegas and boutiques. They're also committed to raising their kids in racially and economically diverse communities, the kind suburbs often outlaw.

For lower-paid workers like Garcia, the question isn't about housing choice but market realities. Historically, they've found relatively affordable rental homes in more compact neighborhoods that provided better social services, public transportation and community networks. But as suburban land-use policies drive high-paid workers to seek homes in urban neighborhoods, the region's working poor are being displaced to the fringes of the Bay Area and beyond. In Santa Clara and San Mateo counties alone, 70,000 low-wage workers join Garcia in commuting more than 50 miles to their jobs, most without the aid of corporate shuttles. This is an environmental disaster as well as a huge burden on workers and their families.

Which brings us back to the suburbs. Suburban cities often use zoning and approval powers to prohibit exactly the type of vibrant contemporary neighborhoods that highly paid workers want and underpaid workers need. In the past few years, Silicon Valley cities have approved enormous corporate campus expansions while turning down proposals for housing nearby, scuttling public transit and bicycle infrastructure, and killing affordable housing developments.

Why the mismatch? Suburban residents get a vote on land-use and development decisions, but suburban workers don't. It's understandable that suburban residents want to preserve the "quality of life" of the towns they love. But their decisions are wreaking havoc on both suburban workers and urban neighborhoods. Suburban residents enjoy the corporate tax dollars that flow to their cities. We cannot afford to let them shirk their regional responsibilities.

Any realistic effort to address the Bay Area's collective housing crisis must replace the spotlight on urban neighborhoods with a floodlight on inequitable systems and policies region-wide. We need both to illuminate the proper role for suburbs and remove the artificial focus on cities.

Because the spotlight comes with heat as well as light. When all you can see is San Francisco, it's easy to think it must hold the solution to the affordable housing and displacement crisis. This false framing is leading some commentators and policymakers to argue for essentially unfettered market-driven development in the city, which would be harmful and unfair to communities there.

San Francisco alone cannot ever build enough to alleviate a regional housing shortage. The Bay Area's housing and transportation crises are regional, requiring regional solutions. Until suburbs as well as cities are in view, we'll be unable to see our way to a viable solution.