There's something a visitor from Paris recently reminded us of — something we San Franciscans walk past every single day without a second thought. Our houses are weird. Beautifully, defiantly, gloriously weird.

A French observer recently marveled at San Francisco's aligned rowhouses — those tightly packed, shoulder-to-shoulder Victorians and Edwardians that march up and down our hills like a box of mismatched crayons standing at attention. Coming from Paris, where the Haussmann aesthetic means block after block of elegant but uniform cream and grey limestone, the sheer color of San Francisco hit different.

And they're right. It's easy to forget what makes this city architecturally special when you're busy dodging e-scooters and stepping over broken glass. But those painted facades — the Painted Ladies and their thousands of lesser-known cousins — represent something deeper than just aesthetics.

They represent individual expression within a shared structure.

Think about it: the rowhouse format itself is uniform. Same setbacks, same lot widths, same basic Victorian or Edwardian bones. But each owner, across generations, chose their own colors, their own trim details, their own personality. It's liberty within a framework. No central planner dictated that one house should be teal and the next one mustard yellow. People just... did it.

Contrast that with what we're building now. The new developments going up across SOMA and the Mission are largely indistinguishable grey-and-glass boxes — the architectural equivalent of a government memo. Efficient? Sure. Soulless? Absolutely. Ironically, the more regulations and design review boards we pile onto the building process, the more homogeneous our new construction becomes. Paris's uniformity was at least intentionally beautiful. Ours is the byproduct of bureaucratic risk-aversion.

San Francisco's rowhouses weren't the product of a master plan. They were the product of individual builders making individual choices in a market that allowed creativity. There's a lesson in there somewhere — if City Hall is willing to learn it.

Maybe the next time we debate housing policy, we should spend less time in committee meetings and more time just walking down Alamo Square.