Take a walk through any San Francisco neighborhood where new multifamily housing has gone up in the last decade and you'll notice something: it all looks the same, and none of it looks good. Boxy, featureless facades clad in cheap materials, punctuated by oddly placed windows that seem designed by algorithm rather than architect. The city that gave us Painted Ladies now gives us painted-over particle board.

But here's the thing — this isn't a failure of imagination. It's a failure of regulation.

The biggest culprit you've probably never heard of? Dual-stairwell requirements. Current building codes force most multifamily structures to include two staircases, which eats up an enormous amount of usable floor space and forces architects into rigid, corridor-heavy layouts. The result is that developers build wide, squat buildings that maximize unit count around those mandated stairwells — aesthetics be damned. A push for single-stair reform, which would legalize single-staircase midrise buildings, could be a game-changer. As one local resident put it, the stairwell restrictions are "an obvious area to target" and the case for six-story housing units "makes so much sense" — especially for anyone who's walked the streets of Barcelona, where beautiful mid-height buildings line entire neighborhoods without a dystopian high-rise in sight.

Then there's the planning process itself. San Francisco layers aesthetic review requirements on top of an already Byzantine approval system, and the irony is thick: these design mandates frequently produce worse outcomes, not better ones. One SF resident nailed it: "Get rid of aesthetic requirements in planning. They have the opposite effect. And planning has worse sense of design than the people building buildings."

Hard to argue with that when you look at the evidence standing on every gentrifying block in the city.

The fix isn't complicated in theory. Streamline codes. Legalize single-stair midrises. Stop letting planning committees cosplay as architectural firms. Let builders and architects respond to the market — people want to live in beautiful buildings, and developers who build ugly ones will lose tenants to those who don't.

San Francisco desperately needs more housing. But "more" doesn't have to mean "worse." We just need government to get out of its own way long enough to let good design happen.