Let that marinate. Before you even walk through the door of an apartment roughly the size of a two-car garage, you need to prove you're basically mortgage-qualified for a house in a normal American city. As one SF resident quipped: "Props to any landlord who thinks tech companies don't have layoffs, or that they will see any of those savings/investments."
The absurdity isn't just in the ask — it's in what it reveals about the structural rot underneath San Francisco's housing crisis. This isn't a supply-and-demand problem the market can't solve. It's a supply-and-demand problem that city government won't let the market solve.
The state has tried. Sacramento has killed off many of the procedural tools cities used to block housing. But as one local put it perfectly: "The state killed a lot of ways to say 'no,' but it didn't create a way to say 'yes, fast.'" SF still has glacial permitting timelines, weaponized design reviews, and NIMBYs who treat every appeal process like a hobby. Meanwhile, across the bay, permitted projects sit as literal holes in the ground because financing collapsed when interest rates spiked. The pipeline is clogged at both ends.
The human cost is real. Bay Area natives are getting squeezed out of their own city. One lifelong SF resident noted that only about 20% of the people they grew up with still live here — the rest are scattered across the country. Another resident, born and raised in the Bay, described the special heartache of being priced out of home after taking a pay cut for a less toxic job, pushing back against the suffocating narrative that $150K "isn't even that much" in San Francisco.
Let's be honest about what's happening: the city has created an environment where landlords can demand investment-banker credentials for a studio, because bureaucratic dysfunction has strangled supply so badly that any landlord with a habitable unit holds all the cards. Every delayed permit, every frivolous appeal, every "traffic study" that takes another year — it all flows downhill to that absurd screening email in your inbox.
The fix isn't complicated. Build more housing. Approve it faster. Stop treating every new unit like an existential threat. San Francisco doesn't have a shortage of people who want to live here. It has a government that seems designed to make sure they can't afford to.
