&gt; Were you even in SF 15 years ago, when the .com bubble popped and housing prices returned to a degree of sanity?<p>IIRC, one of the notable things about SF in the .com burst was that housing prices <i>did not</i> drop significantly (as they did in outlying areas of the Bay Area), the rate of increase just dropped, as the people who still had good-baying SF jobs moved in from the peripheries and replaced the people who could no longer afford SF because they fell off the gravy train.