Scott McKenzie sang those words in 1967, painting a picture of a city bursting with love, community, and open arms. Nearly six decades later, the flowers have wilted, and the welcome mat has a price tag that goes up 40% without warning.

San Francisco still trades on that mythology — the idea that this is a city of dreamers, of radical hospitality, of come-as-you-are vibes. And look, there's still magic here. The fog rolling through the Golden Gate at dusk still hits different. But let's be honest about the gap between the postcard and the reality.

The city that once invited the world to show up with nothing but flowers now can't figure out how to house the people already here. Condos sit outside rent control protections, giving landlords effectively unlimited power to reset the terms. As one SF resident put it bluntly: "A 40% increase just means he wants you out. This is what I call a passive eviction." Another local was even more direct: "40%? Homie def trying to send you a message."

Meanwhile, the streets that were supposed to embody that Summer of Love ethos have, in some neighborhoods, become open-air crises. One Bay Area resident captured the frustration well: "In principle, we should be okay with small RVs and campers, but when the streets become literal dumping yards with rampant drug and bio waste that would warrant huge fines for any other tax-paying citizen, it gets absurd."

Here's the thing — nostalgia is not a housing policy. San Francisco's leadership has spent decades leveraging the city's cultural cachet while building a regulatory environment that makes it nearly impossible for regular people to afford to stay. We layer mandates on top of mandates — electrification requirements that cost six times more than the gas alternative, permitting processes that drag for months, and a bureaucratic apparatus that seems purpose-built to extract money from anyone trying to do anything productive.

The flowers-in-your-hair era promised freedom. What we got instead is one of the most expensive, most regulated, most bureaucratically strangled cities in America. You can still come to San Francisco. Just bring your checkbook instead of your flowers — and maybe a good lawyer.