Let's not pop the corks just yet. That microscopic bump still leaves the city roughly 4% below its pre-pandemic 2019 population. For context, San Francisco had around 881,000 residents before COVID sent remote workers fleeing to Austin, Boise, and anywhere with a backyard and a mortgage under seven figures. We're still tens of thousands of people short of where we were — and the tax revenue, small business foot traffic, and transit ridership gaps that come with that deficit are painfully real.

A 0.1% growth rate isn't a recovery. It's a rounding error. It's the demographic equivalent of finding a nickel in your couch cushions after your wallet got stolen.

The real question isn't whether people are trickling back — it's whether the city is doing anything to make them want to. Housing costs remain absurd. Downtown office vacancies are still hovering near record highs. The city's bureaucracy continues to operate like it has a monopoly on residents' patience (it doesn't — people have options now). And the Board of Supervisors seems far more interested in symbolic gestures than in the nuts-and-bolts governance that actually makes a city livable.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: cities don't have a birthright to growth. San Francisco spent decades coasting on its natural beauty, its tech economy, and its cultural cachet. But amenities only matter if the basics work — clean streets, public safety, functional transit, and a regulatory environment that doesn't treat every new housing unit or small business like a hostile invader.

Other cities are competing for the talent and tax base that SF once took for granted. A 0.1% population increase doesn't mean the bleeding has stopped. It means the patient has stabilized just enough to stop losing blood — for now.

If City Hall wants to turn that decimal point into something meaningful, it might start by asking a simple question: What would make someone choose San Francisco today, not based on nostalgia, but on what the city actually delivers? Until leadership can answer that honestly, 0.1% is about all we should expect.