In 1920, as a teenager, my grandfather immigrated to San Francisco from Greece with nothing to his name. He and his two brothers worked restaurant and grocery jobs before starting a store of their own, The Owl Market. They got married, started families, and bought an eight-unit apartment building in Nob Hill. My grandmother didn’t work; she cared for the children and finished her education. Later, the brothers sold the apartment building, and my grandfather bought a five-bedroom home on the cusp of Golden Gate Park.

Today, the idea of moving to San Francisco penniless, and of then being able to buy sizable properties and raise three children on a single salary—as a grocer, nonetheless—is laughable. The median price of a single-family home is $1.6 million, which requires an annual household income above $320,000, while the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,700. In the metro area, 81 percent of all homes cost at least $1 million.

Many blame the tech industry for creating tens of thousands of new jobs in the area each year without doing much to relieve the housing crisis. Walk down Market Street during rush hour and the wealth disparity is apparent: Techies buzzing inside offices designed like Apple Stores, looking out onto streets dotted with trash, human feces, and the city’s 7,500 homeless people. It’s enough to startle even the most hardened city dweller—and has lately become fodder for journalists.

“In a time of scarce consensus, everyone agrees that something has rotted in San Francisco,” Karen Heller wrote in a Washington Post essay last week titled “How San Francisco Broke America’s Heart.” She was clear about the source of that rot, describing a “wealth earthquake” that had turned downtown into “a theme park of seismic start-ups” where “streets are choked with Google and Apple employee buses, and 45,000 daily Uber and Lyft drivers, some commuting from hours away and unfamiliar with the city.”

In one way, Heller is right about the state of affairs in San Francisco today. The tech industry has birthed a new generation of uber-wealth in the city—one billionaire for every 11,600 people, according to Vox. But, ultimately, neither tech workers nor greedy landlords and developers are to blame for the housing crisis. The villain is much more amorphous.