Look, we're a city that loves to innovate. But buying land that's literally submerged feels less like innovation and more like the logical endpoint of a housing market that lost touch with reality somewhere around 2012 and never looked back.

The underwater lots story hits different when you consider what San Francisco real estate used to look like. In 1986, you could snag an eight-bedroom house in Bernal Heights for $145,000 — about $443,000 in today's dollars. A move-in ready three-bedroom in the Sunset ran $229,000, or roughly $700,000 adjusted for inflation. As one local put it with a sigh, "They used to be more attainable," pointing to income-to-house-price ratios that have ballooned beyond recognition.

Another SF resident noted something that should give today's speculators pause: "The wild part is that those prices were a bubble that popped a few years later, and prices were about the same 10 years later. They didn't start climbing sharply again until 1997 or so."

That's worth sitting with. Markets cycle. Bubbles pop. And buying submerged land as a speculative play is the kind of thing that tends to happen at the top of a cycle, not the beginning of one.

The real question nobody at City Hall seems interested in answering: why is the above-ground housing supply so constrained that people are literally looking underwater? San Francisco's labyrinthine permitting process, activist-captured planning commission, and decades of NIMBYism have made building new housing so expensive and time-consuming that apparently the ocean floor starts to look reasonable by comparison.

We don't need underwater lots. We need a city government that stops treating every new housing project like a hostage negotiation. Until then, enjoy your "unique opportunities" — just bring a snorkel.