San Francisco Reels from Office Space Crunch.

Byline: Michelle Quinn

May 2--Few things matter more in San Francisco than space. But the city's slow-growth ideals are on a collision course with the dot-com, venture-fueled, we-need-it-now economy.

In 1986, San Francisco voters, worried that the entire city would one day look like Hong Kong, passed Proposition M. It restricted creation of new office space to 950,000 square feet per year, making it one of the nation's most difficult cities in which to build.

But the commercial real estate market crashed in the late 1980s, so requests for new office space dwindled. The unused space rolled over each year, and not many people talked about Proposition …