The IPOs are coming! The IPOs are coming!

So if you’re not already armed with millions of dollars and a debt-free home, you’d better run.

That’s the generally accepted story traveling around San Francisco these days.

The panic is understandable. Lyft went public on Friday and started trading at $87.24 per share, for a valuation of $25 billion. Uber’s initial public offering, expected to be the biggest of the year, could net the company up to $120 billion. It’ll land in just a few weeks. Pinterest, valued near $12 billion, has filed for an IPO in April. Slack is on tap for later this year.

Coming after a long, dry spell for tech IPOs (the last truly enormous one was Facebook in 2012), it definitely looks like we’re about to get hit with a tsunami of the tech money that’s already gentrified our neighborhoods, homogenized our economy and subjected every aspect of our lives to a relentless circle of surveillance and optimization.

It’s an overwhelming prospect, and people are running to their various barricades. Real estate agents are crowing about a market where all the homes cost more than $1 million. San Francisco Supervisor Gordon Mar is calling for an impact hearing. The last dregs of the city’s middle class are firming up their escape plans — with 44 percent of residents planning to move out of the Bay Area in the next few years, according to the latest Silicon Valley Leadership Group poll.

But what if I told you things aren’t going to be much worse than they already are?

Don’t get your economic perspective from real estate agents unless you enjoy living in a state of terror. If you want to have a cold, hard understanding of what we’re facing, ask the economists who actually work with IPO data.

Their conclusion? Things can’t get much worse.

“There are a lot of conflicting factors with a situation like this,” said Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who has studied initial public offerings for 40 years. “First, not everyone cashes out at once. Second, the higher housing prices go, the more pressure there is for companies to move their employees elsewhere. Third, most people who don’t work within these companies don’t realize that not everyone working there is going to be earning huge amounts from these events.”

That last factor is interesting.

Tech employees want to believe they’re going to strike gold with an IPO. In fact, plenty of them even accept lower wages to work at a startup in the hope that they’ll eventually get a big payout.

Now they’re about to remember that we live under capitalism. The people who are likeliest to get rich in an IPO are the same ones who always get rich: the people who are already at the top. Those are the firm’s founders and venture capitalists who gave them money. Labor — even highly paid engineering labor — isn’t on the list.

“It’s rare to see anyone other than venture capitalists or top executives (receive) more than 5 percent (of a company’s equity) in the S-1 filings,” said Michael Ewens, an associate professor of finance and entrepreneurship at the California Institute of Technology, referring to the registration companies must make with the Securities and Exchange Commission before going public.

These people have already bought their luxury properties in San Francisco. That’s part of the reason why three recent studies found that while IPOs do raise home prices near company headquarters, it’s only by about 1 percent.

Everyone who is likely to get a smaller payout will adjust expectations accordingly.

“Say you’re a non-founder, non-executive employee — you might get 0.5 percent or 0.75 percent of the company,” Ewens said. “With a $1 billion company, that’s still $5 (million) to $7.5 million.”

That’s an insane amount of money, of course. But consider that the median value for a house in San Francisco is already $1.37 million. Many of those cashing out with less than $10 million are going to look elsewhere. The city that really needs to be worried about next year’s housing prices is Oakland.

Then there’s the fact that not everyone who contributed to these companies is going to cash out at all.

“Say you were fortunate enough to be an early employee. Even then, what kind of bargaining position were you in?” Ritter said. “A secretary probably wasn’t getting a lot of stock options. If you were an engineer with lots of AI experience, you were probably in a good bargaining position. But the idea that every employee was in this position is not true.”

One of the more interesting wrinkles about the latest rash of IPOs is how many tech workers are developing self-awareness about the fact that even they can’t afford life here.

Silicon Valley’s burgeoning labor movement is sweeping up engineers for the first time. Last fall, the cloud-software company Lanetix paid $775,000 to 15 engineers the company had fired after they organized a union drive at their workplace.

Uber was abuzz this week after an anonymous employee posted a rousing defense of drivers’ strikes and noted the similarities between their situations. “As tech workers, we share more in common with the drivers that support the platform than the company executives,” wrote the employee in a Wednesday post on Medium.

The upshot?

Yes, things are going to get a bit worse due to IPO-mania, but only because they were already so bad.

Meanwhile, there’s still time to raise a ruckus, and not as many people are going to get rich as you’ve been led to believe.

Heck, the way things are going, some of these tech workers may be on the barricades themselves instead of ringing the Wall Street bell.

Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@caillemillner