SAN FRANCISCO — John Elberling has a drastic plan to address the city's housing crisis: no more new skyscrapers.

Or at least a trade off. The city of San Francisco allows for a yearly allotment of new office space based on how much affordable housing gets built. No new housing? That allotment goes down.

"There clearly has to be a balance, where you don't grow faster than you can handle it," he said.

It's the newest effort by San Franciscans to draw a line in the concrete over the growth that has made it a global hub of technological innovation but also the archetype of what a sudden influx of well-paid tech workers can do to a city.

And Elberling, a local advocate who is the head of a nonprofit housing organization, has support for his plan. He put the measure, Proposition E, on the local ballot in Tuesday's election, and although the final result won't be known for days as mail-in ballots are counted, preliminary results showed it getting support from 55 percent of the voters.

The result, if it stands, would be a jarring wakeup call to the tech industry that its future inside the city limits of San Francisco — where it's not always welcome, anyway — may be more limited than it realizes.

Longtime residents are celebrating. Business lobbyists are predicting a local recession. And venture capitalists are taking to social media to vent their frustration.

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"Genius city, facing down a possible pandemic-driven recession, passes special interest initiative that city economist says will reduce the GDP by $23 billion," Kim-Mai Cutler, a venture capitalist and a former tech journalist, said on Twitter on Wednesday. (The figure is from a report by the city's chief economist.)

San Francisco, a city that's hemmed in by water on three sides, has been the scene of a multidecade battle over who gets every available square inch. In 1986, Elberling successfully pushed a proposal to limit major new development in the city to the equivalent of one skyscraper a year, then heralded as a significant success in pushing back against the encroachment of corporations on the city.

"That era is just gone, and that's quite remarkable, but it's been replaced by this new 21st century tech economy," he said. "Like everybody else, I'm kind of amazed."

The tension between San Francisco natives and the tech industry is all too familiar. There have been protests over corporate bus fleets, rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, sidewalk e-scooter confrontations, fights over condo buildings and upzoning, city attempts to regulate office cafeterias and the occasional dispute over a soccer field.

And while there has been broad agreement on the problems that tech companies have created in the city, a solution has been elusive.

Now the question is whether a ban on future towers is just another battle in a long war filled with the same themes and repetitive arguments, or a watershed moment for tech in a city that relishes taking big corporations down a notch.

Skyscrapers are a particularly visible target. The Salesforce Tower, which became the city's tallest building when it opened in 2018, stands as a monument to tech's new dominance in an increasingly one-industry town, but it's a building residents love to hate. One local editorial writer called it "show-off ugly."

"San Francisco is FULL GO HOME!!" reads one bumper sticker in town.

There are signs that tech companies are taking the sticker's hint, inching away from San Francisco for surrounding areas and even other parts of the country. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told investment analysts last month that he planned to distribute more of the company's workforce elsewhere, saying, "We have to build a company that's not entirely dependent on San Francisco."