Somewhere in San Francisco, a guy named Sam Devdhara figured out what City Hall has spent decades pretending doesn't exist: there's enormous demand for cheap, bare-bones housing in one of the most expensive cities on the planet.

Devdhara is reportedly making money at the very bottom of SF's housing market — think dorm-style living, shared spaces, the kind of arrangement that makes planners and neighborhood busybodies break out in hives. And honestly? Good for him. Because while the city has been busy strangling every mid-range and high-rise project with bureaucratic red tape, someone actually found a way to house people who need it.

Let's be clear about what's happening here. The state has removed many of the old excuses cities used to block housing. But as one local observer put it perfectly: "The state killed a lot of ways to say 'no,' but it didn't create a way to say 'yes, fast.'" SF still has its insane permitting timelines, its design review gauntlets, its appeals processes that let anyone with a grudge and a free afternoon delay construction for months. The machinery of obstruction is alive and well — it just wears different clothes now.

Meanwhile, over in Berkeley, developers who actually have permits are walking away from projects. One literally left a hole in the ground. When even the people who jumped through every hoop decide it's not worth it, the system isn't just broken — it's hostile.

And that's what makes bottom-of-the-market housing so instructive. One resident nailed it: "This is how a lot of your flight attendants, gate agents, baggage handlers and mechanics live. But no one cares until your college-educated son has to live like this." That's the uncomfortable truth. The service workers who keep this city running have been priced into creative arrangements for years. We just didn't have a name for it.

Another local pointed out that "we just reinvented tenement housing, something that should have never been made illegal" — and while that's a bit spicy, it's not wrong. San Francisco's housing regulations have been so restrictive for so long that the market is routing around them the way water routes around a dam. You can regulate the formal market into paralysis, but you can't regulate away the fundamental human need for a roof.

The real question isn't whether entrepreneurs like Devdhara should exist. It's why San Francisco's government has made his business model necessary. Every pod bed and shared dorm room is a monument to decades of permitting dysfunction, NIMBY obstruction, and political cowardice.

Fix the pipeline, or stop complaining about the workarounds.