Let's be clear about something: this isn't just a sob story about mean landlords. This is what happens when a city spends decades strangling housing supply with byzantine permitting, activist-captured planning commissions, and a regulatory environment that treats every new building like an environmental crime scene. You don't get to restrict supply for 40 years and then act shocked when prices become unbearable.

The numbers are staggering when you zoom out. As one local resident pointed out, an 8-bedroom home in Bernal Heights sold for $145,000 in 1986 — that's about $443,000 in today's dollars. Try finding any home in Bernal for that now. A move-in ready 3-bed in the Sunset went for the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $700,000 back then. Today you'd be lucky to touch one for under $1.5 million. As another SF resident put it with a sigh, "They used to be more attainable" — and the income-to-price ratios prove it.

So what's the city's plan? More of the same, apparently. More below-market-rate unit mandates that make market-rate construction financially impossible. More affordable housing bonds that produce units at $700,000 a pop. More task forces, more studies, more vibes.

Here's the uncomfortable truth that neither progressive activists nor City Hall wants to hear: the single most compassionate thing San Francisco could do for tenants teetering on eviction is to make it radically easier to build housing. All kinds of housing. Market rate, affordable, dense, tall, boring, beautiful — all of it. Every unit that doesn't get built is another family in eviction court.

Eviction filings don't lie. The crisis isn't coming — it's here, and it's getting worse. The question is whether San Francisco will finally get out of its own way, or keep spending billions to manage the symptoms of a disaster it created.