The image captures a San Francisco that was barely a decade removed from the 1906 earthquake, a city that had literally rebuilt itself from rubble in record time. No environmental impact reviews. No decade-long permitting processes. No Board of Supervisors hearings where neighbors complain about shadows. Just a city that needed buildings and built them.

Naturally, the conversation turned to housing costs. As one local put it, even back in the mid-1980s, "condos at Opera Plaza were $99,000 and they could not get anyone to buy them." Another SF resident ran the inflation numbers and found that a move-in ready three-bed in the Sunset would have cost about $700,000 in today's dollars — roughly half of what comparable homes actually sell for now. An eight-bedroom in Bernal Heights? Under $450,000 adjusted. Today you'd be lucky to get a studio for that in some neighborhoods.

As one resident summed it up 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."

Here's the thing — the gap between inflation-adjusted historic prices and today's reality isn't some mystery of economics. It's a policy failure. San Francisco strangled its own housing supply with layers of regulation, zoning restrictions, and a permitting apparatus that would make a Soviet bureaucrat blush. The city that rebuilt from an earthquake in a few years now takes longer than that to approve a single apartment building.

That 1915 photo isn't just a charming relic. It's an indictment. It shows what happens when a city actually allows things to get built. The San Francisco of 1915 didn't have better technology or more resources than we do — it just had fewer people standing in the way.

We could have that energy again. But it would require something this city's leadership finds genuinely terrifying: getting out of the way.