Somewhere in the city, a $10,000 treasure remains buried as part of SF's annual treasure hunt, and the grassroots scramble to find it is the most entertaining exercise in free-market cooperation you'll see all year. One enterprising SF resident put out a call to arms, rallying strangers to pool their brainpower and split the prize — reasoning, delightfully, that if they don't, "the circlejerk bros" will find it first and "drown in margs at Taco Bell Cantina."

Honestly? This is community organizing we can get behind.

Think about it: no permitting process, no environmental impact review, no $1.05 million per unit price tag. Just a bunch of people voluntarily cooperating, pooling resources, and competing for a reward. Adam Smith would shed a tear.

The contrast with how the city handles actual money is almost painful. As one local pointed out in a recent housing cost discussion, affordable housing in SF "has to be done at large scales so that the unit economics pencil out better," yet the city forces developers to minimize project sizes — which makes each unit more expensive and less affordable. Another resident put it more bluntly: any affordable housing construction is "going to be ass backwards expensive, and the public has to pick up the tab."

So here we are. The city can't figure out how to build a studio apartment for under a million dollars, but a bunch of strangers on the internet are self-organizing a treasure expedition with a cleaner incentive structure than anything City Hall has produced in a decade.

If you're out there hunting, godspeed. And if you find the $10K, maybe skip the Taco Bell Cantina margs and put it toward first month's rent. In this city, you'll need it.