Well, what it really is is families and non-millionaires looking to buy. I mean, you can buy studios/1br's for around $300k-$400k (my wife and I have a close friend doing this). But for the most part, it's all cash everywhere and a lot of it.

We are contemplating the exodus in a few years but not so much because of prices, but schools. Before I had kids, I was in step with SF politics / justifications of how things are done here. But, of course, after kids you're like "hey, wait a minute". The school lottery is a family bug spray here. It's not just the fact that you're kid could be:

a) bused to a different area of the city away from the possible school right across the street from you b) bused to a crappy school across the city

but also that this destroys neighborhoods. When I grew up (in southern california), I went to school with all the kids in my neighborhood. Not here, that would be too simple. So what this does is forces you to east bay or north bay if you don't want to partake in this social experiment and can't afford private school (I won't even mention the fact that even if you can afford private school, there's massive competition to then get into one).

All in all, this puts huge pressure on parents and they have to ask the question "do I want to be part of a social experiment where my kids won't even go to school with other neighborhood kids or do I just want them to go to a good school so they can grow up and then have some sort of normal life"?

So, the reality I see consists of 2 groups (of which we have friends in both): those that can't afford to buy or our outbid on everything and those parents that can't afford or are out-competed on private schools.

That said, I love SF. I've live here for 20+ years. I'll always love it here. Do I hold a grudge towards the city? Nope. I see it mostly as just the way things are and even if some people did have a short time where they were able to stall growth, it won't last forever. The city has to expand and it will. If it doesn't it will die and I just can't see that happening.

I agree 100% with you about the schools problem (and I'm facing it myself.) I've lived in a number of cities and SF has stunned me at the near total lack of school-age children. It's stunning - especially in my neighborhood (SOMA) you just never see kids walking to school in the morning. This has to be the largest drawback to living in SF, and one of the biggest reason middle-income to upper-middle-income families move out of town.

Nice bait-and-switch. The article isn't "The San Francisco Net Exodus", it's "The San Francisco Exodus". Just because there's no net outward migration doesn't mean that the outward migration occurring isn't notable. Note that I'm taking no position on whether the current overall migration situation is good, bad, or insignificant, just that migration of a certain part of a population (in this case, income level) can be worth studying/discussing, even if they're more than replaced by others.

As an example, if migration between Canada and the US increased a thousandfold, but the net migration stayed the same, you can be damn sure I would think it was interesting and worth looking at. Big changes in demographics and migration patterns are always interesting (for better or worse), and net migration is never the whole picture.

Fair enough, but even then, he has nothing to support the idea that the current exodus is any different from the normal inflow-outflow of population that goes on every year in any major city. "People sometimes move out of SF so they can buy a house elsehwere" is considerably less compelling.