Here's a fun exercise: think about what you could buy in San Francisco for the price of a home in the year 2000. Now triple it. That's roughly where we are in 2025, with some neighborhoods blowing past even that mark.

Home prices in parts of San Francisco have more than tripled over the past quarter century. Let that sink in. If your parents bought a modest place in the city for $400,000 at the turn of the millennium, that same home could easily be worth $1.2 million or more today. A Presidio Heights address? Dream bigger — or rather, earn bigger.

Now, some will look at this and shrug. "That's just 4-ish percent annual appreciation," the spreadsheet crowd will say. And sure, on a compound basis, it doesn't sound apocalyptic. But when the starting price was already steep by national standards, tripling it puts homeownership firmly out of reach for an entire generation of San Franciscans who didn't have the luck of buying early — or inheriting.

So what happened? It's not exactly a whodunit. As one local put it bluntly: "The inevitable outcome when incumbent landowners don't pay the tax they owe, new housing developments are blocked en masse, and governments are held hostage to entrenched interests who will never allow housing prices to fall."

That's the whole story in three bullet points. Prop 13 keeps longtime owners paying property taxes pegged to decades-old valuations, meaning the tax burden shifts disproportionately onto newer buyers. NIMBYs and a labyrinthine permitting process strangle new housing supply. And City Hall — beholden to a coalition of neighborhood groups, preservationists, and public-sector unions — has zero political incentive to fix any of it.

This isn't a supply-and-demand mystery. It's a government-created scarcity problem. San Francisco has essentially told the market: "We will make it nearly impossible to build, punish newcomers with higher costs, and then act shocked when prices skyrocket."

The fix isn't complicated. Build more housing. Streamline permitting. Reform property tax incentives that reward hoarding over mobility. But every one of those solutions threatens someone's political rice bowl.

Until SF gets serious about supply, the tripling won't be the ceiling. It'll be the floor.