> My hunch is the people are competing for housing are mostly new AI sector transplants...

I've absolutely nothing against transplants [0], but transplants that treat this place as the "mining town" that the major landowners and Supervisors have made it to be definitely suck the life and the weird out of the city.

There may be be a bunch of people driving up rents for the city's criminally-scarce -and frequently substandard- housing, but that doesn't mean that the city's not in deep shit. I roam around the city a whole lot on foot, and I see so, so many shuttered businesses and empty storefronts... even in places that were going gangbusters ten, fifteen years ago. The only places that seem to be doing quite well are the places that serve the poorest in the city -such as much of the Tenderloin-, [1] which are places that these new transplants would probably never, ever set foot in.

[0] I'm sure that you don't, either... not in general, anyway.

[1] I can't explain why these places are still doing great. Perhaps it's because the landowners and business managers understand that there's absolutely no way that they can get anything other than a perfectly normal rate of return from these properties... so the batshit insane stuff we see in the fancier parts of town that keeps commercial spaces in fine locations empty for ten+ years and forces out healthy businesses that have been in their space for decades simply doesn't happen? [2]

[2] For folks who want to retort that I simply don't understand how any of this works: Remember that California has Property Tax Control (by way of the 197X "Proposition 13"), which means that a landowner's property tax increases by a very small percentage of its originally assessed value each year, rather than what would be that property's current assessed value. What this means is that as long as a property does not change hands, the property tax paid by that landowner pretty much never increases... and there are ways to redirect the profits from and effective control of that property to a new human or corporate entity while ensuring that that property fails to legally change hands.

San Francisco, AI capital of the world, is an economic laggard