Welcome back to the Hunger Games, Bay Area style.

The reflexive explanation is the AI boom, and it's not wrong. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are handing out $300K+ compensation packages like candy, and multiple AI firms have been scooping up SF properties in recent months. That kind of money flooding into a 49-square-mile city with a notoriously constrained housing supply creates exactly the kind of frenzy we're seeing.

But let's be honest — this isn't new. One local who moved here in 2010 put it bluntly: "Post Dot Com Bust, Pre AI Boom, status quo demand for rentals in SF." Another resident who arrived during the original dot-com explosion in '97 remembers spending months couch-surfing and living in an SRO before landing a place with roommates. The booms come and go; the underlying problem doesn't.

And what is that underlying problem? We don't build enough housing. Period. As one SF resident nailed it: this madness will continue "until we build enough God damn housing for everyone at all price points. Not just subsidized housing and luxury housing." They added, with well-earned cynicism, "Fortunately, no one has the political will to make that happen, so the madness will continue."

They're right. San Francisco's planning and permitting process remains a bureaucratic obstacle course designed to prevent construction rather than enable it. Every layer of review, every discretionary hearing, every opportunity for a small group of neighbors to kill a project — it all adds up to a city that structurally cannot keep pace with demand.

Meanwhile, property management companies like Kenny and Everest are collecting $40-50 application fees from each of those thirty-plus applicants per listing. Nice work if you can get it.

The market will cool when the AI cycle corrects — it always does. But the core failure is political, not cyclical. Until City Hall treats housing production like the emergency it is instead of a process to be managed into oblivion, renters will keep lining up like it's a Supreme drop. The boom isn't the disease. The zoning is.