That's not a dystopian writing prompt. That's just Tuesday in the Bay Area.

Fewer families are choosing to have kids here, and the ones who do are playing an impossible game of three-dimensional chess — juggling location, price, and square footage, knowing they can only pick one, maybe two. Parents are cramming into tiny apartments in good school districts or commuting absurd distances to find something with a second bedroom. As one local put it, "We ended up prioritizing schools over house size and commute. Everyone is doing this juggle to a certain degree."

Another resident was even more blunt about the long game: "All my friends who could afford to stay here had a serious conversation with their parents about how much they'd need to earn... so we all crushed our dreams and sold our souls to tech and medicine."

Let that sink in. The cost of simply existing here is so high that it's distorting career choices a generation in advance.

And the root cause isn't mysterious. It's not greedy landlords or tech bros or avocado toast. It's a decades-long war on housing construction waged by NIMBYs and their enablers on city councils and planning commissions across the region. As one Bay Area resident nailed it: "This is what banning housing construction for 50 years does. I sure love paying $1.5 million for a shack."

San Francisco and its surrounding cities have treated housing supply like something to be rationed rather than built. Every environmental review delay, every neighborhood "character" objection, every downzoned lot — they all add up to a region that has effectively implemented a family-exclusion policy without ever putting it on a ballot.

The fix isn't complicated in theory: build more housing. Dramatically more. Streamline permitting, reduce fees, and stop letting a handful of homeowners dictate regional policy for millions. But that requires political courage, which, unfortunately, remains the scarcest resource in the Bay Area — even scarcer than affordable two-bedrooms.

Your kids deserve better. So do you.