A look back at 1986 housing prices is enough to make any millennial weep into their $7 cortado. A move-in ready three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath in the Sunset went for $229,000. A Victorian in Noe Valley? $318,500. An eight-bedroom in Bernal Heights could be had for $145,000. Even adjusted for inflation, those prices land between $443,000 and $974,000 — numbers that sound almost quaint compared to today's median home price north of $1.3 million.

Now, before the "it was always expensive" crowd chimes in — yes, it was. As one local pointed out, "salaries were much lower, interest rates were higher, and even then, people thought the cost of housing here was ridiculous." Fair point. But there's a difference between "expensive" and "economically delusional," and San Francisco has firmly crossed into the latter.

Another resident put it more bluntly: the income-to-house-price ratios and inflation-adjusted square footage costs have gotten dramatically worse. It's not just nostalgia — the math confirms it.

Here's what's wild: those mid-80s prices were actually a bubble. They popped, flatlined for nearly a decade, and didn't start climbing again until around 1997. One SF resident noted that in 1986, "condos at Opera Plaza were $99,000 and they could not get anyone to buy them." Imagine that sentence existing in the same universe as today's market.

So what changed? Decades of restrictive zoning, bureaucratic permitting nightmares, and a political establishment that talks endlessly about "affordable housing" while making it nearly impossible to build any housing at all. The sunsets are still free, but the homes they illuminate are locked behind gates of red tape and seven-figure price tags.

The solution isn't more subsidies or more regulations. It's less — less permitting friction, fewer zoning restrictions, and a city government that stops treating housing construction like a privilege it gets to ration. Let people build, and maybe the next generation can watch those famous Sunset sunsets from homes they actually own.