Welcome back to peak San Francisco housing insanity.

The scene is eerily reminiscent of 2018 and 2019, when open houses resembled casting calls and landlords could treat prospective tenants like contestants on a reality show. But this time around, the pressure has a new accelerant: the AI boom. Tech money is flooding back into the city's most desirable neighborhoods, and renters without six-figure household incomes — or at least the appearance of one — are getting squeezed out of the conversation entirely.

One couple searching in the NoPa, Cole Valley, and Duboce Triangle corridor described a grueling six-month hunt for a simple one-bedroom upgrade from their studio. The result? Bidding wars they couldn't win, landlords who balked at their dog, and a three-year waiting list just to park a car at Kezar. They ultimately drained their savings to buy a small condo, trading rent anxiety for the joy of being "house poor" in the neighborhood they refused to leave.

Here's the thing nobody at City Hall wants to say plainly: this is a supply problem, and it has been for decades. San Francisco approved roughly 2,800 new housing units last year in a city of nearly 900,000 people. That's not a rounding error — it's policy malpractice. Every layer of permitting, every discretionary review, every neighborhood group that kills a project to "preserve character" is another family pushed to the financial brink or out of the city entirely.

You can blame AI. You can blame tech bros. But the landlord isn't the one who made it take four years and $500,000 in soft costs to build a four-story apartment building. That's your local government at work.

Until San Francisco gets serious about cutting the red tape that strangles housing production, those 40-person lines aren't going anywhere. The only question is whether you'll be in line — or already priced out of it.