The latest chapter is playing out in the Marina, where a proposal to build housing on the old Safeway site has sparked months of debate. On one side: people who think adding homes to a city with a well-documented housing shortage is, you know, a reasonable thing to do. On the other: community groups arguing that new construction threatens the soul of the neighborhood.

But here's the thing San Francisco keeps refusing to learn: the arbitrary power to block housing is far more destructive than any individual building could ever be. Every vetoed project is a collection of families who won't live there, workers who'll commute from farther away, and rents that stay inflated because supply never catches up to demand. That's the real moral crisis — not a new apartment building's roofline.

The aesthetics argument is particularly thin this time around. As one local resident noted, the proposed development "basically just extends what the Safeway looked like in the first place." We're not talking about dropping a glass tower onto a Victorian street. We're talking about replacing a grocery store with housing that largely matches the existing built environment. If that's enough to trigger a neighborhood-wide freakout, the goalposts aren't just moving — they never existed.

San Francisco has spent decades perfecting a system where virtually anyone with enough time and institutional knowledge can delay or kill a housing project. The result? We have some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and a population that's been shrinking. These two facts are not unrelated.

Fiscal conservatives and liberty-minded folks should be especially alarmed. This isn't the free market at work — it's government-enabled gatekeeping by incumbent property owners who benefit directly from restricted supply. It's protectionism dressed up as community engagement.

If we're serious about making San Francisco livable for the next generation, we need to stop treating every new housing proposal as an existential threat and start treating obstruction as the costly policy failure it actually is.