San Francisco's housing market has lost its mind

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/08/san-franciscos-housing-market-has-lost-its-mind/

by rdoherty • 2 months ago

4 4 2 months ago

A market is a place where you can, relatively freely, choose to buy, sell, consume, and produce.

San Francisco and many other North American cities only allow the first three of the four with any significant freedom.

Production is either banned outright on large majorities of the available land, or heavily constrained and focussed to ensure that any new production happens directly on top of tenants and the most vulnerable rather than on top of relatively lightly occupied single-family houses.

ericmay• 2 months ago

Market forces take time to do things, they're not instantaneous. If San Francisco becomes so unaffordable that employers can't attract talent, then they'll have to open offices elsewhere. I live in Columbus. I'd love to see Anthropic or any leading tech company who can't attract talent to San Francisco due to cost/prices to set up shop here. And no, politics isn't enough of a reason to avoid states like Ohio.

Part of the "problem" with San Francisco real estate is that to develop it you have to buy the land, then construct a building, and prices for both of those items have gone up drastically due to a few different factors (inflationary effects, supply/demand, wealth creation and jobs, climate, and more) and so even if new housing does get created it's going to be rather expensive because of those factors.

appreciatorBus2• 2 months ago

Columbus is capable of exactly the same dynamics, there’s nothing magical about San Francisco dirt.

Regardless of how long it takes, there isn’t any other choice. You have to start sometime so let’s start now. Collectivism doesn’t get us out of this either. If we have a revolution tomorrow, and reduce rent to $100, there will be a 50 year waitlist to live in San Francisco and the only way to get it down to zero is to build build build. Yes, it will take a long time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it or that we shouldn’t start now.

jerlam• 2 months ago

Great illustration of the K-shaped economy.

San Francisco's housing market has lost its mind

Related Stories