After years of delays — because of course it took years — a major affordable housing project has finally broken ground in the Mission District. Shovels are in the dirt. Politicians are taking photos. Everyone's patting themselves on the back.

Let's not pop the champagne just yet.

The fact that it took this long to get a housing project from concept to construction tells you everything you need to know about San Francisco's development process. In a city where the housing crisis is treated as an existential emergency roughly every budget cycle, the actual machinery of building anything moves at the pace of a MUNI bus stuck behind a double-parked delivery truck. Permitting, environmental review, community input sessions that stretch into infinity — the bureaucratic gauntlet is designed to make developers weep, and it works beautifully.

We're genuinely glad this project is moving forward. More housing supply is good, full stop. Affordable housing that actually gets built is even better. But the timeline here should be a source of embarrassment, not celebration. Every year of delay meant more people priced out, more families displaced, more pressure on an already strained district.

And then there's the uncomfortable question nobody at the groundbreaking ceremony wants to address. As one SF resident put it: "Are we going to make sure this community is thriving in an intersection that currently has so much drug and crime activity? I'm sure residents there will want to be safe just like anybody else."

It's a fair point, and it deserves more than a press release. Building affordable units is meaningless if the surrounding blocks are plagued by open-air drug markets and property crime. Future residents deserve safety — not just a roof. You can't claim to care about vulnerable communities while shrugging at the conditions they'll be living in.

So here's what we'd like to see: the same energy City Hall brings to ribbon-cutting ceremonies directed toward cleaning up the immediate area, streamlining future projects so the next one doesn't take half a decade, and being honest about the real cost of bureaucratic inertia.

Housing built is better than housing promised. But let's stop pretending the process that got us here is anything other than broken.