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Gabriel Metcalf has spent a lifetime thinking about cities. He spent 21 years at SPUR, the Bay Area urban think tank in San Francisco, and led the organization for 13 years. Holding that job, he said, was “the honor of my life.”

He’ll be leaving town at the turn of the year, bound for Sydney, where he’ll be head of the Committee for Sydney, a planning organization similar to SPUR. In a way, he’s following a dream. Metcalf and his wife have always wanted to live and work abroad. So he was delighted when a job offer came from Australia, “right out of the blue,” he said.

He’d been in Sydney a few times.

“I fell in love with it,” he said, “It’s a great city.”

He said the same thing about San Francisco, when he moved here 22 years ago, “when it was still possible to come here without a job and figure it out,” he once said.

Metcalf thinks San Francisco is “the most progressive of American cities.” But problems are overwhelming the city and the Bay Area. “Something has gone terribly wrong,” he wrote in SPUR’s magazine.

The success of the region has also brought failure — and economics are the key, he thinks.

“The economy has changed fundamentally in the last 50 years,” Metcalf said. “We have made the transition to the knowledge economy,” with thousands of new people and new jobs. The Bay Area has become a player on the world stage, with an economy that is larger than Sweden’s. He calls it “the reluctant metropolis.”

The region has become so attractive and successful that no one can afford to live here. Economic studies show that the median price for a house in San Francisco is $1.6 million — twice what it was five years ago. And it’s not just San Francisco. Only 18 percent of Bay Area residents can afford a medium-price house.

Metcalf believes it’s our own fault. The current generation — the voters, the leaders, the ordinary citizens — are to blame.

“You know what they say, San Franciscans love innovation as long as it doesn’t mean changes,” he said. Every development decision in the city — and the region as well — involves endless meetings, public hearings and workshops. Not to mention a permit system of Byzantine complexity.

“We’ve really gotten good at preventing bad things from happening,” Metcalf said, “but we are not good at making good things happen.”

It’s no secret that the result is that the region’s supply of housing has been overwhelmed by demand. Restrictions on zoning, coupled with construction costs that are among the highest in the country, mean that only one housing unit has been built in the Bay Area for every six new jobs.

Metcalf thinks that more dense housing is an answer. But zoning regulations are in the way.

“In most of the Bay Area, it is illegal to build anything but single-family houses,” he said. “What we are doing now is not working.”

The housing crisis is behind the Bay Area’s terrible traffic, long commutes and inadequate transportation as people push farther out in search of places to live. Metcalf is worried about the lack of big transit projects. In recent years, the region’s only major projects to be approved have been the Sonoma-Marin SMART train, a couple of BART extensions, increased ferry service and plans to electrify the 155-year-old Peninsula commute trains.

BART is talking about a second Transbay Tube in the next decade, but so far it’s only talk.

And projects seemingly take forever these days.

“Look how many years it has taken to study faster buses on Geary Boulevard,” Metcalf said. In fact, the Geary bus project has been in the works for 10 years.

Metcalf thinks the region can learn from the past, “particularly the generation that built BART.”

It took leadership to build BART, he said, in the face of technical problems and political opposition, especially from so-called progressive groups that argued BART would benefit only big business and developers.

Like all urbanists, Metcalf looks to the future. The numbers are sobering: The most recent Metropolitan Transportation Commission study envisions 300,000 new jobs in San Francisco over the next 20 years, part of a growth pattern in a booming mega-region of 4 million new residents that stretches from Monterey to Sacramento.

“People are going to come here,” he said. “There will be new immigrants from other parts of the country and from foreign countries. Our job is to make the region better for the next generation.”

In the meantime, he’s off to Sydney, a city very similar to San Francisco, where a combination of natural beauty and growth has created its own problems. He sees it as a challenge and an adventure.

How will it work out?

“Ask me in a year,” he said.

Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column appears every Sunday. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf

Just north of Berkeley off San Pablo Avenue in Albany stands a housing complex called University Village, reserved for married students at UC Berkeley. Few realize that in the years after World War II, this complex, then called Codornices Village, was the site of one of the most racially charged housing battles in Bay Area history.

At stake: whether to tear down a public housing project that had been hastily erected to give wartime shipyard workers a place to live.

World War II brought about the most dramatic migration to the Bay Area since the Gold Rush. Drawn by high-paying shipyard jobs, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the area. Richmond, home to the Kaiser shipyards, saw the most explosive growth: Its population nearly quadrupled in three years, to 93,738 in 1943. San Francisco, Oakland, Vallejo and other cities also experienced big increases.

Many of the newcomers were African Americans from the South, an influx that radically transformed the region’s racial makeup. In 1940, there were 270 blacks living in Richmond; in 1945, there were 5,673. Oakland’s black population soared from 8,462 to 21,770, and San Francisco’s from fewer than 5,000 to 32,000.

There were also large numbers of whites from Oklahoma and the South, following the path blazed by the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s.

The population boom created a Bay Area-wide housing crisis. As Marilynn S. Johnson notes in “The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II,” Oakland’s vacancy rate fell to 0.06 percent in September 1942. Workers slept outdoors, in 24-hour movie theaters, in shifts in the same bed, in trailer parks, even in chicken coops.

For black workers, finding housing was much harder than for whites. Federal authorities, ideologically opposed to public housing, initially relied on private sector initiatives like the war guest program, which encouraged homeowners to take in war workers as tenants and boarders. Since few white homeowners would take them in or rent to them, African Americans were forced to squeeze into existing black neighborhoods like West Oakland, creating Eastern-style ghettos that had not existed on the West Coast.

When the private sector was unable to meet the need, the federal government decided it had no choice but to construct housing of its own. But under pressure from real estate interests that feared permanent housing would harm postwar construction, and clinging to the belief that most of the migrant workers would go home after the war, the government decided to build housing designed to be temporary.

“Guided by expediency … federal housing agencies created, in effect, distinct zones of migrant settlement along the bay flatlands between Richmond and Alameda,” Johnson writes.

In all, more than 30,000 public housing units, holding an estimated 90,000 war workers and their family members, were built in the East Bay. Among them was the 1,900-unit Codornices Village.

The projects, especially Codornices, ran into immediate opposition from whites. The Albany City Council warned of “an undesirable element” (i.e., blacks) that would bring integration to city schools and make Albany “like south Berkeley.” The city of Berkeley, not yet a liberal bastion, was also opposed, as was UC Berkeley, which owned 40 percent of the project’s land.

But the federal government overruled local objections and opened Codornices in 1943. Like nearly all wartime Bay Area public housing projects, it was racially segregated — white tenants ended up in the more desirable units on San Pablo Avenue, while blacks were shunted to the west side of the project, next to the Southern Pacific railroad tracks.

When the war ended, local governments had to decide what to do with their temporary housing and the people who lived there. The federal housing acts of 1949 and 1950 provided funding for 135,000 new public units nationwide to house displaced residents, and transferred title of all existing projects to local authorities. But the powerful National Association of Real Estate Boards, which had opposed public housing since the 1930s, mounted an all-out statewide campaign to block “socialistic” developments.

Red-baiting tactics led to one pro-housing city councilman in Oakland losing his seat; when he was subsequently fired from his job, he committed suicide.

Under relentless pressure, the liberal, pro-housing coalition collapsed. Between 1945 and 1965, Oakland built only 500 public housing units. In Richmond, many displaced black families, unable to move elsewhere because of racial covenants, crowded into south- and west-side neighborhoods bracketed on three sides by railroad tracks — creating the so-called Iron Triangle ghetto.

The black residents of Codornices Village eventually suffered a similar fate. Thanks to an antisegregation campaign led by future Assemblyman Byron Rumford and the progressive stance of the project’s federal managers, Corornices’ buildings had become largely integrated by 1946. But in a familiar pattern, white tenants who had housing options moved out, while blacks who lacked such options remained and other blacks moved in. By 1954, the project was almost 90 percent African American.

For local officials and citizens who feared they would be “overrun” by Southern blacks, integration had now gone too far, and they renewed their efforts to demolish Codornices. In 1954, with no local agency willing to take the project on, and the University of California washing its hands by saying it “would not get involved in the housing business,” the federal government announced its closure. By 1956, all the residents had been forced out.

But not all the buildings were razed. Despite its earlier claim, UC did in fact get involved in the housing business — taking over several hundred units and converting them to married student housing.

The last of the wartime buildings, within whose walls a brief attempt at racial integration failed more than half a century earlier, were demolished in 2007.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com