After weeks of obsessively refreshing Zillow and Craigslist, applying within hours of listings going live, enduring "encouraging" phone calls with landlords only to get ghosted or passed over, this person arrived at a dark epiphany: maybe they were supposed to offer above asking rent. Maybe someone wanted cash up front. "Do I bring an envelope full of hundreds and drop it next to their feet?" they wondered.

Welcome to San Francisco, where renting a market-rate apartment feels less like a transaction and more like a black-market organ auction.

This isn't a new phenomenon, either. As one local put it, "Back in the early 2000s, there would be dozens of people at showings with their checkbook and pen out, a sealed credit report, references, and sometimes even a dog resume — for a rundown studio in the worst parts of the Tenderloin." Two decades later, the fundamentals haven't changed. They've arguably gotten worse.

Visitors from lower-cost states are equally bewildered. One recent tourist from Georgia noted that a fast-casual meal for two regularly hit $55, with sit-down restaurants easily clearing $100. Groceries, rideshares, rent — all of it calibrated to a salary range that excludes most of the country.

So how did we get here? The answer is painfully simple and painfully slow to fix: decades of restrictive zoning, Byzantine permitting, and a political establishment that talks endlessly about housing while building almost none of it. As one SF resident noted, "It took 50 years to make this city as unaffordable as it is now, so don't expect it to turn around tomorrow."

Fair point. But the longer City Hall treats every new housing proposal like a five-year environmental impact study, the longer qualified, working people will be priced out of basic shelter. Building more housing won't make SF cheap overnight — think of it as a raincoat in a downpour, as one Bay Area resident cleverly put it. You'll still get wet, but at least you won't drown.

The real scandal isn't that San Francisco is expensive. It's that the people in charge have chosen to keep it this way — through inaction, red tape, and a regulatory apparatus that treats landlords and developers like enemies while offering renters nothing but sympathy and waiting lists. Affordability isn't some mystery. It's supply and demand. And until we get serious about the supply side, expect more desperate transplants wondering whether they need to show up with a briefcase full of cash just to sign a lease.