Kim-Mai is leaving the Bay Area because of governance, land use, and taxation issues:

The first part is that I think any kind of real structural reform in California is still at least a decade out — if not longer than that. With the sell-off in public markets, there is some relief coming to the very high-end segments of regional real estate market.

But it’s temporary because the underlying structure of the region’s fragmented governance, restrictive land-use and taxation policies still favor ever-rising real estate prices. These patterns date back to the 1970s and they operate both at the hyper-local and California state levels. They are embedded in both the judicial and legislative arms of the state. They have withstood many boom-and-bust cycles. They will persist long afterwards.

They cannot be solved solely by the private sector. Changing them will probably require re-evaluating Proposition 13, re-considering single-family zoning and shifting land-use control from a neighborhood level to a regional level, especially in wealthier communities that have effectively pulled up the drawbridges behind them. All of these ideas are anathema to the older, property-owning generation. To put this in perspective, these policies either haven’t been touched in 40 years or have never been pulled off in the entire history of the state of California. Less politically controversial but still financially infeasible is the more than $10 billion of dollars of investment that is needed for both public transit in BART and Caltrain and a regional fund for affordable housing for low-income communities.

So I personally think one faster solution — which is already naturally happening — is to work with lots of other spaces and cities.

BART is literally breaking down, so public transit is getting worse too.

Kim-Mai has long talked about structural issues preventing housing reform in California.

And now she is taking action for herself.

Why SF can't have nice things: Budget has doubled from 2005 to pay people who used to work here.

https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler/status/710562811697614849

http://modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/san-franciscos-incredible-expanding-budget

Meanwhile, BART is having problems too:

http://pandawhale.com/post/71151/san-franciscos-transit-system-stopped-being-polite-and-got-real-about-complaints-on-twitter