Let's be honest about what's happening here. The fee reductions were a step in the right direction, but they were a band-aid on a gunshot wound. You can shave a few percentage points off impact fees all day long, but when your permitting process is a labyrinth of delays, shadow studies, and discretionary reviews that go far beyond what the state even requires, developers will keep taking their capital to cities that actually want housing built.

Which brings us to Supervisor Myrna Mahmood's new proposal to streamline the city's absurd shadow review procedures — rules she says have "slowed or blocked housing projects for years." She's right. San Francisco is one of the only cities in America where a proposed apartment building can be torpedoed because it might cast a shadow on a park for 20 minutes in the afternoon. That's not environmental stewardship. That's weaponized NIMBYism dressed up in progressive language.

The math here isn't complicated. As one local put it, housing prices that seemed outrageous in the '80s — a three-bedroom in the Sunset for $229,000, roughly $700,000 in today's dollars — now look like a fever dream. Today that same house would run you well north of a million. Another SF resident summed up the mood: "They used to be more attainable," noting that income-to-house-price ratios have become almost comically disconnected.

The core problem hasn't changed in decades: San Francisco wants affordable housing without allowing the construction that would create it. Every new regulation, every additional review layer, every fee — even the ones they just cut — adds cost and risk that gets passed directly to renters and buyers.

Supervisor Mahmood's push to strip away gold-plated review processes is the kind of reform that actually moves the needle. Fee cuts are nice. Letting people build is better. Until City Hall figures out that the fastest path to affordability is supply, we'll keep getting reports that dress up failure as damage control.