This is the place where a 25-year-old made national news in March for paying $400 a month to live in a wooden box in a friend’s living room,” writes Maria La Ganga of San Francisco. “Where a 99-year-old widow went to court in April to fight eviction from the flat she’d lived in since the 1940s. Where the cheapest home for sale in late July was fire-gutted, uninhabitable and still cost $228,000.” A battle is raging over whether tech wealth, population growth or political will is to blame.