There's a new building going up at 750 Golden Gate Avenue in the Western Addition, and on the surface, it's hard not to cheer. What was once a parking lot is becoming dedicated housing for San Francisco teachers — educators who've been priced out of the city they serve. Construction is underway, applications are open, and teachers might finally catch a break in one of the most absurdly expensive housing markets in the country.

Good. Teachers deserve to live where they work.

But let's not confuse a symptom-management strategy with a cure. The fact that San Francisco needs to build profession-specific housing is a damning indictment of decades of failed housing policy. We didn't get here by accident. We got here through restrictive zoning, endless permitting delays, activist-driven obstruction of new development, and a city government that treated every proposed apartment building like a constitutional crisis.

As one local resident put it bluntly: "It is a failure of this city that so little housing has been built that we now need to build specific housing for some groups of people. I want to see enough housing for everyone that it becomes affordable for everyone. It shouldn't need to be this complicated or interest-based."

Exactly right. When you choke supply for long enough, you end up rationing — picking winners and losers based on occupation. Today it's teachers. Tomorrow it's nurses, firefighters, restaurant workers. Each group gets its own carved-out program, its own bureaucratic application portal, its own set of rules. And what happens if a teacher living here quits or changes careers? Another layer of administrative complexity on top of an already bloated system.

The real solution has always been straightforward: build more housing. Lots of it. For everyone. Cut the red tape, streamline approvals, and let the market actually function. When supply meets demand, you don't need City Hall deciding which professions deserve a roof over their heads.

750 Golden Gate is better than a parking lot — no argument there. But every dedicated housing project like this should remind San Franciscans that their leaders chose this mess. A city that actually allowed housing construction at scale wouldn't need to play favorites.