Silber says that apartments in some neighborhoods that would have rented for between about $800 and $1,000 when she first got to the Bay two years ago can now go for as much as $1,800. Her original hope of finding a spot for $500 a month? Laughable. Silber doubled her planned monthly rent—and even then she says she was still pretty limited when it came to finding available rooms.

“I didn't realize in addition to the expense, there's just so little space, there's such a density of people who want to live here and so little space available,” Silber says.

High-priced rent, picky landlords, and difficult roommates aren’t a story that is unique to San Francisco and it’s surrounding areas. But what makes the Bay Area’s housing shortage so problematic is the confluence of a growing population and the historically slow pace of building, which exacerbates rental price growth. “The problem isn't with the job creation, it's with our failed housing policy,” says Metcalf.

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In San Francisco, the speed of construction in the area is one of the slowest in any of the 100 major metro areas. Since 1990, the city has allowed construction of only 117 units for every 1,000 units that existed in 1990. In nearby Oakland, the pace is similarly sluggish, 216 units for every 1,000. Seattle’s pace is double that and Raleigh allows for 1,118 new units for every 1,000 that existed in 1990. Why is it so slow? Building regulations around the city and its surrounding areas can make it hard to get plans for large residential projects approved. Zoning restrictions prevent residential building in some areas near large tech campuses. And the city also has height restrictions in many locations, which limits the number of floors, and apartments, that can be created in any single building. To get around such rules, changes to regulations or approval by government entities are generally required.

San Francisco’s mayor has set a goal to build 30,000 housing units within six years, which would represent slightly less than 10 percent of housing in the entire city, according to Ted Eagan, San Francisco’s chief economist.

That, along with recent uptick in apartment building will help, but the relief won’t be immediate.

Does the mining industry have a solution that could work for Silicon Valley? In areas with growing fracking operations mining companies have erected so-called “man camps”—often made up of trailer parks, or blocks reserved in nearby motels.

A couple of big tech companies have attempted Bay Area-style adaptations of this model: In 2013, Facebook announced that it will add a 394-unit apartment building near its headquarters in Menlo Park. But just a year earlier, Google’s proposal to build almost three times as many apartments near its Mountain View campus fell apart. Why?

"We've created rules designed to protect neighborhood character in communities all across the Bay Area. The unintended consequences of those rules is that we have disallowed new housing in huge stretches of the Bay Area," Metcalf told me in an interview. Google's plan was nixed by city council members who compared the doomed plans for company-owned housing to dorms and outdated mining towns, according to local paper, the Mountain View Voice.