Photo via Civic Joy Fund
As San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has spent his first eighteen months in office focusing on improving public safety, an AI tech boom has rolled through the city. Along with this, crime and fatal drug overdoses have decreased overall and the money coming in has increased the occupancy rate of downtown offices and bolstered the housing and rental market that had previously been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.
These developments contradict the tired doom-loop narrative thrown around by right-wing political and media figures who blame Democrat policies for society's ills.
Unfortunately, in the wake of these improvements, San Francisco’s affordability crisis, a constant since the 1849 Gold Rush, has once again reared its ugly head, and this time, the numbers are staggering. According to a report from real estate marketplace company Zillow dated 30 June 2026, the average San Francisco home value climbed to just shy of $1.4 million, up 9.5% from the same time last year. According to the Apartment List Rent Report from July 2026, the overall median rent in the city jumped 3.2% last month, landing at $3,558. Over the past year, the median rent grew by 18.9%. At any rate, there's no way working 40 hours per week at $16 per hour after taxes is going to cover that.
In an interview with the San Francisco Standard at City Hall, Mayor Lurie declared, “I am the first one to say we are not where we want to be. We have to make this city more affordable, so that families can stay here and thrive here.”
As San Francisco navigates what local real estate agent Ruth Krishnan calls the “fastest [housing cost] increase…in a single season,” it has become unsustainable not only for working class people to live in the City, but also for higher-paid employees. Talking to the San Francisco Standard, Supervisor Bilal Mahmood remarked, “Every single person I represent in District 5 has said it is too expensive to live here.”
However, Mayor Lurie is aware that the City's affordability crisis is liable to undermine its recovery, and has devised a strategy to tackle it. One part of the plan is to recruit more universities to the City, including Vanderbilt, which has taken over the campus at 145 Hooper Street after the California College of the Arts ceased operations. He has also told the San Francisco Standard that he wants the schools’ curricula on arts, culture, and manufacturing in addition to technology. As expanding and diversifying the City's workforce will require additional housing, Lurie is set to rely on his plan to rezone large sections of the City for the purpose of constructing high-rise residential properties, which was approved by the Board of Supervisors early in December 2025. More recently, he also has teamed up with District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar to expand the City's Housing Trust Fund.
In addition, Mayor Lurie has expanded free and low-cost childcare to San Francisco families and has worked to qualify a local parcel tax for the November ballot to generate funding for Muni, which is currently facing the largest financial crisis in the agency’s history.
Despite the progress and the plans to alleviate San Francisco's high cost of living, Mayor Lurie admits his work will likely not be finished when he leaves office.
“When you have 30-plus years of not building enough housing, it’s going to take us years and years to get there, if not longer," he said.
That said, building housing simply for housing’s sake won’t necessarily impact the housing crisis unless there are laws put in place to compel landlords and developers to rent them out at reasonable rates. Currently there are tens of thousands of units sitting empty in San Francisco. Until there are laws that stop egregious real estate speculation and vacancy, there’s nothing to stop investors from buying up the housing that is built and sitting on it for as long as they want.
This all begs the question, if San Francisco is “back”, who is it back for? We all know the answer to that.
