Let's start with the headline-grabber: a home in the city where a murder-suicide took place just sold for $2.2 million. And honestly? The most unsettling part isn't the grim history — it's that $2.2 million barely raises an eyebrow for a San Francisco property anymore. When the market is so insane that buyers are willing to overlook literal tragedy to secure a home, maybe the problem isn't buyer psychology. Maybe the problem is that we've created a housing environment so scarce and so expensive that any available property starts looking reasonable.

Meanwhile, SF's chief economist Ted Egan is pointing fingers at the AI boom, remote work, and tech layoffs as the culprits behind rising housing costs. That's a fascinating triple threat — apparently both the presence and absence of tech workers is driving prices up. Remote work pulls demand outward, AI money floods in, and layoffs... also somehow make things worse?

Here's what's conspicuously missing from the chief economist's analysis: the city's own role in strangling housing supply through decades of Byzantine permitting, restrictive zoning, and an approvals process that treats every new unit of housing like a constitutional crisis. Demand-side explanations are convenient when you work for the government that controls the supply side.

As one local put it, the city "actively seeks to cut public transit funding from its budget year after year" — and the same pattern holds for housing. San Francisco talks a big game about affordability while slow-walking the approvals that would actually produce it. The Board of Supervisors will hold ten hearings about displacement while blocking the construction that would ease the pressure in the first place.

You want to know how people "make it work" renting in SF? They get roommates, sacrifice savings, commute from Oakland, or — apparently — buy the murder house. None of that is a policy success story. It's an indictment.

Stop blaming market forces for problems that City Hall built. The AI boom didn't create our permitting backlog. Remote work didn't write our zoning code. Until San Francisco gets serious about actually building housing at scale, every explanation from the chief economist's office is just expensive cope.