The Board of Supervisors approved a new affordable senior housing project this week, and honestly? Good. Senior housing is one of those rare things in San Francisco politics that's hard to argue against — unless you're the kind of person who also opposes puppies and sunshine.

But the vote itself was almost beside the point. What's more interesting is the conversation swirling around it, because the broader affordable housing debate in this city is shifting — and not necessarily in the direction the YIMBY crowd has been counting on.

For the better part of a decade, the pro-development, deregulate-everything narrative has had a stranglehold on local press coverage and political momentum. Build, baby, build. Get government out of the way. Let the market work. It's a compelling pitch, and not without merit — zoning reform is real and does matter.

But a new study is complicating that tidy story, suggesting deregulation alone isn't the silver bullet its loudest champions claim it to be. Turns out, when you're dealing with the most expensive housing market in the country, loosening rules doesn't automatically produce units that working-class San Franciscans — let alone seniors on fixed incomes — can actually afford.

This isn't an argument for strangling development in red tape. Over-regulation is absolutely part of why a single apartment building takes a decade and a lawsuit to open in this city. That's a real problem that costs real people real housing.

But fiscal responsibility means being honest about all the tools in the toolkit — not just the ideologically satisfying ones. Public investment, land trusts, targeted subsidies: these aren't dirty words. They're how other cities have actually moved the needle.

The abundance agenda has done something useful: it broke the paralysis and shifted the Overton window. But if it calcifies into its own orthodoxy — immune to new evidence — then it's just another San Francisco political religion, and we've got plenty of those already.

Build more. Spend smarter. And maybe, just maybe, listen to the data.