Let that sink in: 46 people — many of them among San Francisco's most vulnerable residents — are now without homes because fire ripped through the walls of their building. Not a kitchen accident contained to one unit. Through the walls.

San Francisco spends eye-watering sums on affordable housing. The city's budget for homelessness and supportive housing programs has ballooned past $1 billion annually. We build fewer units than almost any comparable city, at costs that would make a Pentagon procurement officer blush. And yet when these buildings actually get built and occupied, are we maintaining them? Are we inspecting them? Are we holding property managers and oversight agencies to any real standard?

Those are the questions City Hall should be answering right now — not just issuing boilerplate statements about emergency shelter placements and Red Cross coordination.

The Tenderloin is already one of the most neglected neighborhoods in San Francisco. Its residents deal with open-air drug markets, violent crime, and crumbling infrastructure on a daily basis. They were told that affordable housing was part of the solution — a stable foundation from which to rebuild their lives. Now 46 of them are back at square one because the building that was supposed to be their safety net couldn't keep fire from spreading through its walls.

We don't yet know the cause of the blaze or whether code violations played a role. But we do know this: the city has a pattern of pouring money into housing programs while skimping on the unsexy work of maintenance, inspection, and accountability. If you're going to spend a billion dollars a year telling people you're solving housing, the least you can do is make sure the housing doesn't burn down.

Forty-six people deserve answers. So do the taxpayers funding the system that failed them.