Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

> conservative housing policies

Rent control is conservative now? All of SF policy is leftist and pro government intervention. I wonder why it fails...

Poor choice of words on my part. I meant "conservative" in terms of NIMBYs' aversion to change and development.

In many ways rent control is a conservative policy. It's a nativist policy that decreases social mobility into the cities that enforce rent control. It doesn't jive with the traditional view of conservatism as advocating lesser government control over the economy. But does fall in line with conservative thinking in the more recent view of conservatism as advocating a more closed society (which arguably became mainstream in the 2016 election. TPP and immigration were center stage).

So rentcontrol can be considered conservative if you define conservatism as everything that causes failed government policy. Got it.

Use of liberal / conservative in this context is muddled at best and misleading at worst.

It’s not muddled, it’s used according to the definition of the word.

And in truth, SF’s housing policy does fall in line with typical conservative values. It protects the interests of the establishment, in this case those who are either long-term property owners or wealthy enough to buy their way in a high premium.

Liberal / conservative are usually used as shorthand for specific political philosophies.

Many mainstream American conservatives refer to themselves as classical liberals, and they are correct. Liberal, in the American parlance, on the other hand covers a wider gamut, from centrists who favor technocratic regulatory regimes and government nonintervention in personal affairs all the way to progressives who favor income redistribution and widespread social engineering policies. (Clinton and Sanders camps in the Democratic party respectively.) There's also an emerging hard-right anti-immigration / "nationalist" fringe. I take no issue with your points but object to the terminology which masks the complexity of the situation at hand.