So hard, I was paying the bills out of my retirement account, and when that wasn’t enough, I had to sell my home at a huge loss. With no income and no home of my own, I started couch surfing with friends.

Programming turned that around for me. I found a job writing JavaScript for Zumba Fitness. I was their first JavaScript developer hire, and I was in charge of cleaning up legacy code, mentoring other developers, and establishing code quality guidelines for the rest of the team.

Eventually, all tech careers seem to lead to the San Francisco bay area. As soon as I moved there, I was hit hard by the homeless problem. Having personal experience looking for shelter with no income, I could really feel the pain and the sense of helplessness. There’s a serious problem in Miami, but San Francisco’s problem is impossible to ignore.

Every day I passed hundreds of homeless people on my commute to work. Every day I wished I could do more to help. But San Francisco’s homeless problem can’t be taken on by giving strangers cash.

Photo: Aaron Anderer (CC BY-ND 2.0)

San Francisco’s homeless problem runs much deeper than that, and it’s much bigger than anybody seems to realize. The forces that caused it are still a strong presence in the bay area. San Francisco is basically the epicenter of the tech world in the US. People flock to it from every part of the globe to launch their tech startups in an environment where two city blocks in SOMA have more invested venture capital than entire states and countries, elsewhere.

With such a powerful draw, its no wonder that the bay area has exploded with tech business and tech talent. The opportunity is tremendous. There’s just one problem: This global tech magnet is situated on a peninsula with very limited land mass governed by people more concerned about trying to conserve what San Francisco used to be than by dealing with what San Francisco is now, and trying to control the skyrocketing rent prices.

It’s not tech that has hurt San Francisco. San Francisco’s blind resistance to change is the primary reason so many of its residents live on the streets.

San Francisco needs to face the fact that the only way to keep rents affordable in a city that draws so many residents is to build up. Lift the building height restrictions and stop forcing once middle-class residents into abject poverty.

The reality today is that San Francisco’s rent prices are 3 times the national average. Workers earning less than $100k / year struggle to afford moderate housing inside the city, and every area reachable by public transportation near San Francisco also suffers from elevated rent prices.

The home buyer’s market is dominated by investors who have priced middle class families out of home ownership, so even those who could afford to buy in another city can’t buy in San Francisco.

In my conversations with some of San Francisco’s homeless, I met young, able-bodied people who worked sometimes 2 jobs, but still couldn’t afford rent. I met a man with a limp who sold street papers for $1 each every day. He worked longer hours than me for pennies per hour. He was trying to save money to marry his girlfriend, who lived with him in a shelter.

Probably the most heartbreaking thing I saw was a family with very hungry young kids begging for food. My wife and I gave them a pizza. 2,200 public school students are homeless in San Francisco. Nationwide, 1.5 million children will be homeless each year.

The former middle class in San Francisco are no longer living above the poverty line. In 2008, tent cities sprang up around San Francisco and Silicon Valley. They got outrageously large. When the occupy movements broke out, some of those communities moved into the city’s public spaces. Occupy was still going strong when I arrived in San Francisco.

Many people don’t realize how many of the Occupy protesters in the bay area didn’t go home because they have no home. For many, those tents were their homes, and when the police forces chased them off with tear gas, they had nowhere better to go, so they stood their ground or returned in force, day after day.

The police clashes have since died down, but you can still find tent communities scattered throughout the East Bay and South Bay areas today, even though authorities frequently try to clean them up and disband them, they just keep coming back.

They keep coming back because rents keep rising. Because San Francisco has a limited land mass and completely unrealistic building height restrictions. Because many of the disenfranchised blame the tech community for what has happened to San Francisco, instead of looking at tech as an opportunity to improve their own situation.

Perhaps most of all, because almost all of the supposedly forward-looking tech companies in the bay area still require employees to live nearby and physically commute to an office every day.

For me, that last factor is the most frustrating, because if we could change it, a lot of pressure on San Francisco’s middle class would quickly vanish. It would provide immediate relief to thousands. It would ease the grueling commutes in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. And the companies who changed their policies would see immediate and dramatic benefits, as well.