He's not alone. Another neighbor — a guy who doesn't even live in his house full-time because he's renting it out on short-term leases at $6,000 a month — is equally livid. The ADU might shade his vegetable garden. A vegetable garden at a house he doesn't occupy. You genuinely cannot make this up.

This is the San Francisco housing crisis distilled to its purest, most maddening essence. The people who benefited most from decades of rising property values — paying maybe $3,000 a year in property taxes on a home worth several million, thanks to Prop 13 — are the same people wielding every bureaucratic tool available to prevent anyone else from getting a foothold.

As one local put it, "Dude with eight houses complaining about someone building one ADU is peak Bay Area energy." Another SF resident shared a similar story: "My neighbor questioned the height of my ADU saying it blocked her view. Because we all know she owns that view."

Let's be clear about what's actually happening here. These aren't concerned citizens protecting neighborhood character. They're property hoarders protecting their portfolios. The "character of the neighborhood" argument has always been a velvet glove over an iron fist — a polite way of saying I got mine, and I'll make damn sure the drawbridge stays up behind me.

San Francisco needs housing. Not in the abstract, not eventually, not after a decade-long permitting gauntlet — now. Every ADU that gets built is one more unit of supply in a market that's been artificially strangled for decades. The fact that it takes someone with a city insider connection just to share these stories anonymously tells you everything about how entrenched these dynamics are.

If you own nine houses and your reaction to one new dwelling unit is outrage rather than self-reflection, you are not the victim. You are the problem. And if our housing policy continues to prioritize the comfort of multi-property owners over the basic shelter needs of working San Franciscans, we deserve every bit of the crisis we've built for ourselves.

Well — the crisis they built. The rest of us are just paying $3,000 a month to live in it.