"And this crushed the SF housing market."<p>As far as I know even in the previous dotcom burst the housing market went down just a little, something around 10%. In some neighborhoods rents have been increasing more than that per year in the last 3 years. So even if there is a tech burst the size of the 2000 dotcom burst, I don't expect real estate prices to suffer that much.<p>edit: here is a good analysis; <a href="http://www.paragon-re.com/3_Recessions_2_Bubbles_and_a_Baby" rel="nofollow">http://www.paragon-re.com/3_Recessions_2_Bubbles_and_a_Baby</a>
I think there is a fair bit of "how to lie with graphs" here going on. For instance, the 'housing construction boom' very carefully does not show any context before 2014, and although it rockets up from the bottom left of the graph to the top right, that's only a delta of 25%, because the bottom is not zero. It also doesn't show how many housing units ever make it /out/ of the pipeline -- a perennial issue in San Francisco.<p>It also seems to declare that employment is the only source of housing occupancy. This is less true if you consider, for instance, real estate speculators (and with China's economy as well as it is and is expected to be, I don't foresee that slowing down), and also if you consider the new short-term rental market.<p>So, maybe the housing bubble will collapse. But I'm not convinced that either of those forces are as powerful as the author claims, and the author doesn't really give any text considering and dismissing other known forces, so you can consider me unconvinced by this article alone.
As a counterpoint although the article also mentions Manhattan's alleged drop in condo pricing, one could argue that San Francisco is smaller and therefore more constrained. It's my understanding that much more real-estate in SF is under rent control, so overbuilding is also less likely. And if Vancouver is any indication there still seems to be plenty of money interested in real estate coming out of China.
When comparing employment and housing in San Francisco to predict future housing prices, I don't think you can consider San Francisco in isolation (like this article does). You need to consider it in terms of the surrounding metro, because a housing boom in Belmont can reduce the demand for houses in San Francisco.
The city doesn't have enough room to add many more jobs. This is like saying a restaurant that fills its tables every night must be in a bubble because it hasn't grown past its capacity. Right? (Not saying it shouldn't have more room (building). But as a descriptive matter...)