The median home price in San Francisco has hit $1.7 million, which means the city has officially entered a new phase of real estate pricing: one where you are paying premium dollars for the idea of a bedroom rather than an actual one.
AI workers, freshly minted with salaries that would make a hedge fund manager weep, have discovered that money talks — and what it is saying is: “I will pay seven figures for a studio apartment with a view of someone else’s fire escape.” These digital philosophers, trained to recognize patterns in data, have somehow failed to recognize the pattern of their own financial absurdity.
The mathematics are delicious. A software engineer optimizing language models can now afford a $1.7 million property that, in any other American city, would come with a guest house, a tennis court, and possibly a small vineyard. Here, it comes with the privilege of saying you own something in San Francisco, which apparently is worth more than the actual structure itself.
Meanwhile, regular workers — teachers, nurses, people who fix things when they break — have been gently nudged into a 90-minute commute to Modesto, where their money still buys actual square footage. The market has spoken. It has said: intelligence (or at least the salary that follows it) is worth more than space. It is a perfectly rational outcome of supply meeting demand, which is to say it is completely insane.
The Bay Area’s housing crisis is no longer a crisis. It is a feature. A very expensive, very exclusive feature designed for people whose job title contains the word “neural.”