One of the higher profile efforts is Rise SF, a new nonprofit backed by tech firms including Facebook, along with labor unions and developers, to try and support housing construction in San Francisco. Y Combinator, the San Francisco-based “accelerator” that helps aspiring entrepreneurs get started and has helped to foster companies including Airbnb and Dropbox, said it has redirected its political efforts from issues like United States immigration policy to housing.

Those moves come in addition to various individual efforts. Several tech executives, including Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp and Emmett Shear of Twitch, have given money to housing advocacy groups.

Until recently, the tech industry has mostly steered clear of Bay Area housing politics. That started to change a year ago as upstart groups like the Bay Area Renter’s Federation and GrowSF started recruiting rank-and-file tech workers, and won donations from executives like Mr. Stoppleman. While rents have recently softened, over the past few years they have soared so fast that even well-paid tech workers have found themselves struggling with rising costs.

Laura Clark, the founder of GrowSF, a nonprofit that promotes affordable housing costs in Bay Area communities, is trying to turn the hundreds of thousands of engineers and product managers into a voting bloc. Ms. Clark, who worked for a tech company before becoming a full-time housing advocate, is leading an effort to enlist tech workers to participate in phone banking and distributing pamphlets to guide tech workers on how to vote for various propositions and candidates.

Her group plans to hand out material at the various tech shuttle stops around San Francisco.

“Tech is starting to recognize that this is purely a political problem and that they have to solve this by getting involved,” she said. “I think they thought they could like hack their way out of this somehow, but you have to do the old-fashioned work of organizing and going door-to-door canvassing.”