That's apparently what happened at the Cole Valley Neighborhood Garage Sale, where among the secondhand treasures and someone's abandoned bread maker, old SF housing ads surfaced — and promptly sent the internet into a grief spiral.

The numbers are staggering even after you adjust for inflation. One local crunched the data: a move-in ready three-bedroom in the Sunset listed at $229,000 in 1986 works out to roughly $700,000 in today's dollars. An eight-bedroom in Bernal Heights? $145,000 then — about $443,000 adjusted. Try buying anything with eight bedrooms in Bernal for under half a million today. You'd have better luck finding a unicorn at Ocean Beach.

As one SF resident put it with a sigh, "They used to be more attainable. Looking at income-to-house-price ratios and square-foot price adjusted for inflation vs. current prices."

But before we drown in nostalgia, some context matters. Another local pointed out that "salaries were much lower, interest rates were higher, and even then, people thought the cost of housing here was ridiculous." Fair point. Your 1986 mortgage rate was probably north of 10%. Nobody was living easy.

Still, the trajectory tells the real story — and it's a story about what happens when a city spends four decades making it nearly impossible to build new housing. Restrictive zoning, bureaucratic permitting nightmares, and a planning process that treats every new unit like a constitutional crisis have throttled supply while demand has only grown.

The garage sale find is charming. The underlying lesson is not. San Francisco didn't stumble into a housing crisis. We regulated our way into one, approval hearing by approval hearing.

Maybe next year's garage sale will feature today's listings. Future residents can weep over those too.