Let's talk about what's actually happening in the SF rental market. Rents have surged dramatically over the past year, fueled largely by the AI boom pouring cash and workers back into the city. As one local put it, rents have climbed "25%-30% year over year with the AI boom. It's like asking 'why are the houses so expensive' mid-2021 at the peak of the market." That's not hyperbole — it's arithmetic.

For prospective renters worried about credit scores in the mid-600s, the reality is more nuanced than the horror stories suggest. Smaller landlords — the kind who own a building or two in the Inner Sunset or Richmond — tend to weigh income and rental history more heavily than a three-digit number. Show stable employment, offer a few months' extra deposit if you can, and bring references from previous landlords. Corporate property management companies with online applications? They're the ones running hard credit cutoffs. Avoid the big complexes if your score is shaky.

But here's the bigger picture that nobody moving here wants to hear: the city's housing market is fundamentally broken in ways that a good credit score can't fix. One SF resident summed up the absurdity perfectly: "The average household earning $140k in San Francisco isn't renting a vacant, market-rate 2-bedroom. Instead, they are living in rent-controlled apartments they secured years ago, renting smaller studios, or splitting a 2-bedroom with roommates whose combined income exceeds $180k."

Read that again. A household pulling in $140,000 a year — solidly upper-middle-class anywhere else in America — is getting creative with roommates in San Francisco.

This is what decades of restrictive zoning, anti-development politics, and a rent control system that protects incumbents at the expense of newcomers looks like in practice. Prop 13 keeps property taxes absurdly low for longtime owners while new arrivals subsidize the difference. Rent control locks in below-market rates for people who got here first, while shrinking the supply available to everyone else and pushing market-rate prices even higher.

The solution isn't more regulations or more bureaucratic housing programs. It's more housing — full stop. Until San Francisco gets serious about letting people actually build, every boom cycle will squeeze newcomers harder, and your credit score will be the least of your worries.