Mission Local39%
Who killed housing affordability in San Francisco? 17%
By Joe Eskenazi53%
8/3/2026, 4:00:00 AM
Keywords: Housing Affordability, San Francisco, Development, Nimbyism, Yimby, Tech Industry, Housing Crisis
BS Summary: This article contains 11 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Negativity Bias, and Straw Man, with Unattributed Quote as the most egregious example at 16.9% saturation with 265 hits. Analysis detected 768 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,569 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 25.1% and a BS Rank of 17% (25,503 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 83.40% of the article peer group.
In late July, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter’s photo of a legion of older, white people attending a neighborhood meeting regarding the towering housing development planned for the site of the Marina Safeway became the latest touchstone for rancorous online debate about San Francisco development.
These old people, we were told by charming internet housing warriors, are the reason your monthly rent exceeds the asking price of a decent used Lexus.
These obstinate old people are the reason you can’t afford to live here.
Before we dissect this broad claim, it warrants mentioning that community meetings like the one depicted in the snapshot that launched a thousand quips are now merely a repository for performative outrage: Thanks to state law, resident complaints can’t really derail housing developments anymore.
The online blowback?
Reciprocal performative outrage.
But, to address the matter at hand, are greedy old people the reason you can’t afford to live here?
Your humble narrator talked to around a dozen developers, architects, development professionals and land-use experts and the consensus is: They might be a reason.
But not the reason.
“Housing costs,” says one former longtime Planning Department official, “are the compounding of at least three separate policy failures: federal affordable housing defunding since the 1980s, exclusionary zoning with racist roots, and a permitting process that legislated NIMBYism.”
“Picking one villain lets everyone off the hook.”
The online vitriol directed at a roomful of old people nonplussed at the idea of a housing development bearing no small resemblance to the stern of a Princess Cruise ship largely came from young, pro-development, “common sense” moderates — YIMBYs, “Abundance” types, and others in the “Build, baby, build!”
arm of the Democratic Party.
Of note, Mayor Daniel Lurie and Supervisor Stephen Sherrill are both relatively young, ostensibly pro-development, “common sense” moderates.
They also oppose the project proposed atop Armistead Maupin’s “Social Safeway” site.
And not just them: Yes, San Francisco made it unduly burdensome to build here.
Until last year, vast swaths of San Francisco were height-restricted to 40 feet, with density controls that wouldn’t realistically even let you go that high.
But this was, spoiler alert, a “Murder on the Orient Express”-type problem: Everyone was guilty here.
To single out older people on folding chairs and fail to indict a top-down, byzantine governmental building and permitting system makes for a hell of a hot take.
But, again, it lets everyone else off the hook.
Not that long ago, remembers one development professional, simply being assigned a city planner to go over elements of the California Environmental Quality Act on your project could require almost a year.
That is: almost a year of waiting to get the person who would then determine if you would have to wait even longer while undertaking endless studies and mitigations.
“That had nothing to do with old people,” he laughs.
“Getting your building permits issued?
It wasn’t little old ladies slowing that down.
That was corruption that slowed that down.”
“The No. 1 impediment to building in San Francisco is the cost of land,” he continues.
“No. 2 is the cost of capital.
Then it’s the cost of materials and labor and then the time the government makes you take.
I don’t know that I’d put cranky old neighbors in the top four or five.”
Yes, you can partially turn your ire on intransigent neighborhood people over the fact that, until recently, every permit in San Francisco was discretionary and could be challenged.
But it’s harder to skewer neighborhood folks regarding the decades of scleroticism and corruption within the building department, which benefitted connected fixers.
Agonizing hard costs, meanwhile, are the result of factors well beyond the municipal level: “All the copper and switchgear,” says a longtime city developer, “it’s all going to these fucking AI data centers.”
Local builders are competing with everyone else here.
And not just in hard costs: Private equity could put its money into housing or oil futures or frozen concentrated orange juice.
Developers tell me that a project generally needs to pencil out to 20 percent gross profit to attract equity investors.
Doing the simple math, the developer continues, if it costs $600,000 to $700,000 per unit to develop, the necessary profit is $140,000.
So, that’s a lot.
And, in the present day, high interest rates have thrown off that equation.
To spur development, the city has slashed the percentage of affordable housing required in mid-sized to large developments from 15 percent to 5 percent — but still very few are building.
Labor and construction costs in San Francisco are high and, in the end, so are the rents and/or purchase prices required of new construction.
“People build based on maximum rent,” says a longtime city developer.
Most builders, he adds “will hold units vacant until they can get those rents.
The only way to get more affordable housing is to finance it and subsidize it.”
Something YIMBYs get right: A theme that emerges again and again talking with land-use experts is that the city put itself in a bad place with downzonings in the 1970s.
To buy into San Francisco, you presently need a pile of cash, a time machine or both.
But if you could use that time machine to go back several generations and enable regional developers and mid-sized contractors to build the unremarkable 12-unit buildings that so many people desire to live in, it would’ve made a difference today.
But how much more affordable would San Francisco be if we’d built more?
The answer, again, is more complicated than bros on Twitter would have you believe.
In 2001, the Planning Department commissioned a study tackling the question of what might happen to the cost of home ownership if, by some alchemy, 10 percent more units were dropped into the city overnight.
The answer: It would knock an estimated 4.1 percent off the price of buying a house.
If you found this much money in a sack it would be like a gift from the leprechauns.
But, in terms of real-estate purchasing, it is not transformational: Let’s say the median home sales price in San Francisco is $1.7 million.
This would lower that by around $70,000 — to $1.63 million.
That 2001 study, however, looked at more.
It also estimated that if the city’s per capita income were to jump by 10 percent, it would lead to a 7.5 percent increase in house prices.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about this because, while you’d need to be a conjurer to add 10 percent to the housing stock instantaneously, adding vast wealth to the city at a moment’s notice is hardly the stuff of magic.
Since 2001 it has happened again and again and again — and the cost of housing has gone to infinity and beyond.
Rents in San Francisco last month were up 26 percent from July 2025 — and they were already obscenely high in 2025.
A tsunami of cash is about to wash over San Francisco, once more.
And, here we come ‘Lizbeth, it’s The Big One: The Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs promise perhaps $2 trillion of tech stocks in the next year, much of which will be convertible into cash for young engineers to throw around like King Jaffe Joffer and outbid anyone and everyone.
This is an order of magnitude more than San Francisco, or any city, has ever dealt with.
If San Francisco had built more, it figures that this would have slowed down the rise in housing costs and helped us deal with the tech deluge.
But the Planning Department’s own study indicates that it would only have mitigated the surge in costs, not actually lowered them — let alone kept housing “affordable.”
Sadly, we haven’t built all that much, and even City Hall’s best-laid plans won’t help a great deal: The city controller estimated that, in the most optimistic scenario, Mayor Lurie’s recent upzoning would usher in only 14,600 extra units over the next 20 years — and decrease rents by a maximum of $125 a month.
Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick but, again, not life-changing stuff.
Even if this city had an efficient and rational development process — which hasn’t been the case for quite some time — it would have been vulnerable to a housing crisis.
Tech and AI are not manufacturing or even biotech: By and large, you don’t need warehouses or labs or factories and you’re not bound by supply chains.
One VC can have an epiphany and decide an app is the wave of the future and 2,000 well-compensated people can be expediently summoned to San Francisco.
The problem of the massive and economically fortuitous Baby Boom generation holding the lion’s share of the state’s housing stock is one that is going to resolve in the coming years — gradually then suddenly.
In the next decade, a tremendous amount of housing may yet come on the market.
You all know why.
It’s not talked about enough how beneficial it would be to open more quality senior housing in this state; most every older person who moved in would open up a home for younger people.
So, again, it’s complicated.
Meanwhile: Demonizing old people on the internet is fun and easy.
Here’s a hot take about that photo of the Marina meeting: There is nothing new under the sun.
Speakers
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