San Francisco's median house price just hit a record $2.15 million, and you can thank — or blame — the AI boom for it.

Let that number sink in. Two point one five million dollars. For a house. In a city where you still might step over a broken car window on the way to your front door.

The narrative is straightforward enough: AI companies are minting money, engineers are flush with cash and RSUs, and all that liquidity has to go somewhere. Apparently, it's going straight into San Francisco real estate, pushing prices past the previous peaks of the late-pandemic frenzy.

Here's the thing — this is genuinely good news for the city's tax base and for anyone who already owns property. San Francisco's coffers could use the revenue. But let's not pretend this is a sign of broad-based prosperity. For the vast majority of San Franciscans — renters, small business owners, service workers — a $2.15 million median home price isn't a celebration. It's a wall.

And this is where city policy has failed spectacularly for decades. We didn't build enough housing when times were good. We strangled new construction with byzantine permitting processes, neighborhood vetoes, and environmental reviews that could outlast a presidential term. Now the AI money is flooding in, and the housing supply is exactly where we left it: woefully inadequate.

As one SF resident put it, "Cool, so my landlord is going to see this headline and raise my rent again."

The fix isn't complicated in theory — build more housing, faster, at every price point. Cut the red tape. Stop letting NIMBYs run the planning process. But this is San Francisco, where we'd rather commission a study about a study than actually break ground.

The AI boom is real, and the money flowing into the city is real. Whether regular San Franciscans benefit or just get priced out depends entirely on whether City Hall can get out of its own way.

Don't hold your breath.