"SF Developers are by most definitions filthy rich."
So you're implying that it's unfair for a highly skilled SF developer making 2-3x the median wage across all professions (having dedicated years to decades of their life to attain that level of skill) to make that money in the first place?
And even then, most of the people I know who make that kind of money worked their butts off and sacrificed a lot to get to that income level. To be fair, I know some idle trustafarians too, but they are a tiny minority of the group it seems like you're demonizing for their hard work.
My unsolicited advice to people who can't afford to live in SF is DON'T LIVE IN SF! For what it's worth, I don't and for exactly that reason. That and my definition of filthy rich is a lot stricter: the top 0.1% and their $1M+ a year income.
Your definition of rich isn't really something I can argue with. But I would encourage you to take a look at salaries for various jobs in high paid areas, and use that as the bases for comparison. One source I've used is US News Best Jobs.
The median salary for an application developer in San Jose is 116k. For a registered nurse in San Jose, it is 122K. Dental hygienists in San Francisco earn about 109k a year (median), developers in SF, about 110K. Lawyers and Physicians, of course, earn considerably more.
Devs do alright by standards of skilled workers, but they're not really outliers. The widely held notion that devs are wildly overpaid and privileged workers has to go down as one of the great victories of silicon valley PR.
Now, I will agree that tech has create these salaries on a scale that didn't exist before, which may be part of why the resentment occurs. Dental hygienists at 109k a year simply can't exist in numbers sufficient to cause displacement, because they draw their salaries largely from the local population. That limits the ratio. Tech, on the other hand, sells outside the region, so 100k+ salaried tech workers really aren't limited in number by a local population they serve (and they can remain aloof or detached from that population). Again, I'm not saying this is bad (or good), I'm just suggesting it as one possible explanation for why people resent tech salaries so much more than dental hygienist salaries.
Sure, and what I'm saying is that resenting professionals like tech workers is like a guy with a single slice of bread resenting any guy who manages to get two slices of bread whilst completely ignoring that the root problem is another guy down the street with an entire truck full of loaves of bread whose hoarding created the bread shortage in the first place.
And IMO that's exactly how the guy with the truck prefers you think. Or to quote Stewie Griffin: "Dance! Puppets! Dance!"
That's roughly $712,340 per household. I am happy to consider anyone with that or more household wealth as rich. And anyone with that plus 2 sigma as filthy rich.
Instead, what we have is all the wealth concentrated at the very top, and it gets worse and worse every year. I am in no way suggesting any form of wealth redistribution here, but it's hard for me to consider some poor sap making borderline 6 figures in SF with less than $100K life savings "filthy rich."
Sure, by 3rd world standards they're loaded, but what does that say about the 0.01% and up?
a) You did seem to conflate wealth with unfairness.
b) I'm unsure that a simple mean is the best criterion. The median household income is about $50,000, for example. If an individual earns about $150,000, they're in the top decile of the US. I think being in the top decile is also pretty rich.
c) If an SF developer is earning $100k, it's not even that fair to compare it to household income distribution. If they don't have a family, they don't need to support children -- unlike many households with lower income. If they do have a family, it's reasonably likely they have a high-earning partner who'll boost their household income even higher. Rich people tend to marry rich people.
(I used household income rather than household wealth here, which is a weakness compared to what you wrote. But you get the idea...)
I think these are the ones that work the hardest* and because of that they'll be the last to sink into the muck created by the top 0.01% and up as they freely fund elections, buy politicians, and write their own laws.
Oh, and they'll also be the scapegoats who take one for team 0.01% when the income gap #$%^ finally hits the inequality fan.
*And if working hard didn't usually lead to them making more, there'd be no incentive for them to do so, no?
Yes, that's exactly what it's like here. Either you live in a 10,000 SF+ megamansion or you're on the street. Hyperbole much?