The affordable-housing complex that opened this week at 730 Stanyan St. — 160 apartments on the site of a demolished Haight Street McDonald's — cost nearly $166 million and took nine years and four mayors to finish, a price and a timeline that the ribbon-cutting speeches mostly left out.

The city bought the McDonald's for $15.5 million, and on Tuesday Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed celebrated the result as proof San Francisco can still build. But the numbers behind 730 Stanyan — roughly a million dollars per unit, a design that grew from 120 units to 160 only after the developers invoked the state density bonus, and a decade of stops and starts — are exactly the arithmetic that makes affordable housing so hard to replicate here. Lurie told the crowd "bureaucracy has stood in the way for far too long." He was standing in front of the evidence.

For Mona Hamilton, the corner of Haight and Stanyan is where her life bent twice. She once slept there when it was a McDonald's; on Tuesday she stood outside the eight-story building that replaced it and described it as home. "I've been struggling all my life to find me a permanent home. I have one now, and I'm truly, truly blessed," she told KQED, which first reported the opening. Hamilton said she won a unit through the city's housing lottery, three decades after cycling through the streets and residential hotels.

Stories like Hamilton's are the reason 730 Stanyan exists. The arithmetic is the reason there aren't more of them.

All 160 units are affordable, with studios renting for around $600 a month and some three-bedrooms near $2,300, according to KQED's account of the grand opening. Five percent are reserved for families and transitional-aged youth who have experienced homelessness. The project is a joint venture of two nonprofit developers, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation and the Chinatown Community Development Center, and was designed by the internationally known architecture firm OMA with YA Studio.

What the opening-day program skipped over is what it cost. When the Planning Department approved the building permits in October 2022, the project was pegged at "just over a million dollars per unit," or nearly $166 million total, San Francisco YIMBY reported at the time. The building also got bigger as it went: permits filed in April 2021 described a six-story, 120-unit project; by the time it topped out, it was an eight-story, 160-unit complex that reached 83 feet — well above the site's 50-foot limit — because the development team used California's density-bonus incentives, a city press release said.

The timeline is its own indictment. Breed has said she pitched the idea of buying the McDonald's to the late Mayor Ed Lee, who died the same day the city finalized the $15.5 million purchase in 2017. TNDC's own records show the developers were still gathering community input on the design in 2020, the McDonald's wasn't demolished until that year, and groundbreaking didn't come until 2023. Nine years, and four mayors — Lee, Breed, Mark Farrell in his interim stint, and now Lurie — passed between the idea and the keys.

"Outreach, shelter, treatment, and services are essential, but those interventions must ultimately lead somewhere," Mike Levine, the city's executive director of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said at the event, per KQED. "Projects like 730 Stanyan provide that destination."

The destination is real for the roughly 160 households moving in, among them the Garapovas, a Kyrgyz family of three generations who entered the lottery in 2017 and now have a three-bedroom with views of Twin Peaks and Golden Gate Park. But the scale of the need remains vast. San Francisco's housing dashboard lists 18,206 affordable units in the pipeline, and 11,897 affordable units created over the past decade, KQED reported.

Lurie has bet on speed, pointing to his recently passed Family Zoning Plan as the fix for the delays he decried Tuesday. Whether that plan can deliver homes without the nine-year lag and seven-figure-per-unit cost that defined 730 Stanyan is the open question the champagne didn't answer.