But that's life in the city, and a growing number of SF residents are turning to professional organizers and decluttering enthusiasts to reclaim what little square footage they're hemorrhaging their paychecks for. One local recently floated the idea of offering organizing services to overwhelmed San Franciscans, noting that "so many people in SF are busy, burnt out, live in tiny apartments, and clutter starts building up fast."

She's not wrong. And honestly? This is the free market working exactly as it should.

Here's the thing nobody at City Hall wants to talk about when they rubber-stamp another round of regulations that make building new housing nearly impossible: when you artificially constrain housing supply, people end up crammed into increasingly smaller spaces. The median one-bedroom in SF still hovers around $3,000 a month. For that price in most American cities, you'd have a garage, a guest room, and enough closet space to never think about "storage systems" again.

Instead, San Franciscans are paying premium rent for apartments where the bedroom doubles as a home office doubles as a dining room, and then paying someone else to help them figure out where to put their stuff. It's a tax on top of a tax — the cost of living in a city that has spent decades making it virtually impossible to build enough homes for the people who want to live here.

None of this is a knock on the organizers themselves. Entrepreneurial people spotting a need and filling it is exactly how things should work. If you can turn someone's chaotic closet into a functional space and charge fairly for it, more power to you.

But let's not lose sight of the bigger picture: the best decluttering strategy for San Francisco would be a city government that stops cluttering the housing approval process with red tape. Build more units, let the market breathe, and maybe — just maybe — people could afford apartments where they don't need a professional to teach them how to stack their belongings like a game of Tetris.