Let the chips fall as they may? Animation by Keith A. Spencer; photo by edwardhblake (CC)

It’s an opinion so prevalent it’s pretty much become accepted as fact, something everyone just kinda knows: tech ruined San Francisco.

The long version goes like this: San Francisco was, at one time, diverse and glimmering and unique in all sorts of critical, intimate ways — made of melody and spunk as much as geography and steel — but then Ed Lee gave tax breaks to the tech industry, effectively selling out San Francisco’s once un-sellout-able soul, and promptly the city became something of a programmers’ playground, fenced off from the rest of the world by way of rents that only gentrifying tech employees can afford and policed by an eviction rate that feels Trumpian in its barbarity. Now it’s a city to be mourned, characterless and corrupted and unequal — an example to be learned from.

There are good reasons why this version of San Francisco’s history — this interpretation of its still-unspooling narrative — has won out. One is the regularity with which it is referenced. In the world of online journalism, the think piece on San Francisco’s tech-triggered demise has become something of its own subgenre, with essays on the topic as likely to be found on the home page of the New York Times as they are near the last page of the San Francisco Examiner. Name a magazine, and it likely has its own provocative headline on the topic, like “What Happened to San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City” (Paste magazine) or “The Tech Industry Is Stripping San Francisco of Its Culture, and Your City Could Be Next” (Newsweek).

And so there’s that. But the more consequential reason the “tech ruined SF” narrative won out is far more personal: lots of San Franciscans simply hate tech. Many look at tech employees, and they see these generally rich, generally similar-looking people gentrifying once-diverse neighborhoods, and they read those tech employees’ blog posts about how degrading it is to have to interact with homeless people, and they see the gleaming Google busses and sinking luxury condos, and they recognize how shitty this is, and damn it if when push comes to shove, blaming tech for ruining San Francisco doesn’t feel both logical and sort of elementally satisfying.

The problem with this conclusion is that it’s an incorrect assessment of what’s actually happened here, and prescribing to it actually distracts us from the task of addressing the very real and very dangerous problems that are, yes, currently ruining the city.

Does “ruining” feel a little dramatic? Well, consider this. Right now, in San Francisco County, not a single home on the market is affordable for the average public-school teacher, who — on average — earns $59,700 a year. For police officers, who make $80,000 a year, there is one affordable home. (Five years ago, police officers and teachers could have afforded 36 percent of the homes on the market.) Plus our homelessness epidemic is metastasizing as a result of eviction and displacement. Oh, and since 2011, nearly 10,000 San Franciscan families have been evicted from their homes.

Add to all this the fact that the evictions and medieval levels of inequality now feel weirdly, terribly normal, and it’s clear we have a problem.

Now, tech has undoubtedly exacerbated these issues — as much is impossible to deny — but that’s an important distinction: while the tech industry has intensified San Francisco’s problems, it is not the source of them. To get a better understanding of what is, I spoke with Sasha Hauswald, director of state and local policy at the Grounded Solutions Network. Sasha says the cause of San Francisco’s current malady is kind of an amalgamation of things, comprised largely by a mismatch between supply and demand. Relatively well-off people all over the world want to own real-estate in San Francisco. Investors do, too, since real-estate in the city is such a lucrative investment. Practically limitless global demand for property in our little 7x7 drives prices way out of reach for locals of modest means.

The most important solution is the least exciting one. We need to invest money in creating more permanently affordable housing.

Tech money influencing politics is a component of this, to be sure. But again, it is an element of a larger mess, one that can adequately be addressed only if those of us powered with the ability to change things possess a clear understanding of what needs to be done. I asked Sasha about that, as well.

“The most important solution is the least exciting one,” Sasha said. “We need to invest money in creating more permanently affordable housing. There are many ways to do this: You can acquire and rehab existing buildings; you can help tenants buy their own buildings and create limited-equity co-ops; you can preserve and rebuild San Francisco’s aging public-housing stock; you can build new apartments with permanent affordability restrictions. But all the solutions require money.”

The City of San Francisco has done a relatively good job of prioritizing affordable housing, through bond measures, revenue allocation and the Inclusionary Housing program that requires 12 percent to 33 percent of all new developments to be affordable. But it’s still not enough. And it remains that in order for us to come together and create the kind of momentum needed to actualize this sort of change, we need to take a step back and stop oversimplifying our situation — no matter how often writers of elite East Coast magazines tell us we should.

This is something Broke-Ass Stuart touched on in a column he wrote last month:

What somehow gets lost in all the finger-pointing and hand-wringing is that the bad guys in this housing crisis aren’t the people looking for a place to live. The real villains are the rapacious real estate developers, landlords, brokers and speculators making monumental fortunes, and the politicians who are in their pockets. The smartest thing these devils ever did was allow the general public to blame the city’s newest transplants for the mess their greed fed upon. It’s easy to blame your new neighbor for moving in when you can’t see the landlord who evicted your previous one.

This is important stuff, not just because a failure to act now could condemn our city to a tomorrow of even less affordability, less character, less diversity, more homelessness, etc., but because the San Francisco of 2016 is a microcosm, a peninsular liberal petri dish in which the urban problems of the major cities of the future are being brought into chemical, perfervid light. In these times of Trump, especially, what happens here really will be an example to other liberal cities around the world — an example to be learned from and, maybe, to be mourned.

But beyond that, as our home, San Francisco is a reflection of us, the people who live here, the people who walk to work through the fog and spend Sundays at Dolores Park and watch sunsets from Strawberry Hill and protest at City Hall and cram on Muni to get home at the end of the day—and thus it is we who should determine what life in this city is like.