“You can’t just build more luxury housing and expect working and middle-income people to be there,” he said.

San Francisco is an expensive place to live. This was true before the recent technology boom, and the tech boom before that. But the city gets more unaffordable with each up cycle, and it is now nearly as expensive as Manhattan.

The typical San Francisco home is worth $1.1 million, up 60 percent from five years ago, according to Zillow. Real estate agents are trying to invent fake neighborhoods like “The Quad” — which includes parts of Noe Valley, the Castro and the Mission — and billionaires are moving onto streets that only a generation ago were middle-class.

Longtime San Franciscans love to debate with the newly arrived as to when, exactly, the city became a playground for the rich. The enduring story of San Francisco is that each new generation of migrants feels as if they are the first people to discover the city’s beauty and its quirks, as well as the first people to discover that lots of other people want to live there, too.

But however and whenever the transformation happened, the days when a regular family could raise children here are probably over. It would take an economic cataclysm — one that would have to be much more severe than a bursting technology bubble — for home prices to get anywhere near affordable.

This election, then, is about what, if anything, can be done about it. Or in some cases, it is just an opportunity for residents to voice their anger.