It's a small thing. But it tells a big story about what happens when people are allowed to express themselves through their property.

San Francisco's residential streetscapes are a living museum of individual taste — sometimes gaudy, sometimes gorgeous, always human. As one local put it about a particularly striking grate design near their home, it "brings me so much joy anytime I pass by." That's the thing about organic, bottom-up creativity: it costs taxpayers nothing and makes the city immeasurably richer.

Contrast this with the direction much of the city's new development has taken. The Planning Department's labyrinthine approval process, combined with increasingly rigid design guidelines, has given us block after block of the same sterile, grey, soulless boxes. Every new multi-unit building looks like it was generated by the same AI prompt: "modern, inoffensive, forgettable." The bureaucratic machinery that's supposed to ensure good design has instead become a creativity tax — adding months and thousands of dollars to projects while producing aesthetic mediocrity at scale.

Those quirky garage doors? Many of them were installed decades ago, when homeowners could make changes without navigating a regulatory obstacle course. Today, even a paint job on a historically designated facade can trigger a review process that would make Kafka blush.

There's a lesson here for anyone who thinks more regulation produces better outcomes. The most charming, most photographed, most beloved details of San Francisco's residential architecture came from individual property owners making choices with their own money on their own time. No committee approved them. No design review board weighed in.

If we want a city that looks alive, maybe we should let the people who actually live here make more decisions about what their homes look like — and let the bureaucrats find something else to do.