In a city that never stops complaining about a housing shortage, San Francisco may be on the verge of making it easier to convert multiple rental units into single-family mega-homes. The latest case making waves: four rental apartments consolidated into one $4.75 million mansion. And the Board of Supervisors might just make it legal.

Let that sink in. San Francisco — the city where median rent for a one-bedroom hovers around $3,000, where teachers and nurses commute from Stockton, where politicians regularly grandstand about the need for more housing — is entertaining a policy framework that could shrink the rental supply even further.

Now, before the pitchforks come out, let's be clear about something: property owners should generally be free to do what they want with their property. That's a principle we take seriously at The Dissent. If you own a building, the government shouldn't micromanage every nail you hammer.

But here's the tension. San Francisco's housing market isn't a free market. It's one of the most regulated, permit-strangled, NIMBY-captured real estate environments in America. The city has spent decades making it nearly impossible to build new housing through Byzantine zoning laws, endless review processes, and activist obstruction. When you artificially constrain supply for 40 years and then let existing units get consolidated into luxury properties, you're not championing property rights — you're just rigging the game for the wealthy.

The real fix isn't deciding whether to allow or ban unit mergers. It's deregulating housing construction so aggressively that losing four rental units to a mansion doesn't matter because 400 new ones went up down the block. But that would require the Board of Supervisors to actually confront the bureaucratic machine they've built — and we all know how likely that is.

If San Francisco wants to be taken seriously on housing, it can't play both sides: blocking new construction while greenlighting the elimination of existing rentals. Pick a lane, Supes. Preferably one that doesn't end at a $4.75 million cul-de-sac.