San Francisco will take ‘124 years’ to fix housing armageddon despite sweeping YIMBY initiatives

Not a single San Francisco resident alive today will see the city fix its housing crisis, a new study suggested.

The study said the city will take as long as 124 years to solve its housing crisis despite sweeping YIMBY initiatives.

That’s even if the city increases it’s housing supply by 1.5% every year, much quicker than the city’s current rate. It would take a minimum of 18 years for a median one-bedroom apartment to become affordable for a person earning the median wage of a non-college graduate.

“Both scenarios require enormous, localized shocks to the housing stock,” the report says. “This simple exercise clearly illustrates that interventions focused on market-race supply alone are unlikely to generate widespread affordability in any meaningful timeframe.”

YIMBYs, hopeful that their approach to weakening zoning laws and cutting red tape will help the area’s housing problems, have been stymied by the study. The executive director of YIMBY Action, Laura Foote, waxed poetic in quoting a proverb in a statement to the San Francisco Standard.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in,” she said.

Contrary to the YIMBY focus, the issue isn’t housing supply, the study’s authors say, it’s wage disparity. The tech boom has drawn in high-earners to the Bay Area, who are competing with lower-wage workers for housing. Tech companies themselves leased a record amount of space in 2025: 10.2 million square feet worth.

One example of the surge in high-earners is that the median household income in San Francisco County nearly doubled from $69,354 in 2011 to $137,184 in 2024, according to census bureau data. For comparison, the median household income in Los Angeles County, also an expensive housing area, increased from $52,239 to $90,757 in the same time period.

Others have also redirected the issue away from zoning and back to costs.

“The issue is not zoning,” developer Bora Ozturk told the San Francisco Standard. “Nobody is starting construction until the costs come down.”

Max Buchholz of UC Berkeley, the lead researcher of the study, said the YIMBY movement’s success is because it’s easy to understand.

“The appeal is that it offers a really simple explanation and a solution that doesn’t require any on-budget spending,” Buchholz told the San Francisco Standard. “My view is that it’s much more complex than that, and it probably will require some public financing and intervening in a lot of other ways.”

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has sought to modernize the city’s permitting system, which until recently required in-person visits for permits.

“This launch builds on a year of reforms to modernize our permitting system—saving San Franciscans valuable time and money. In a city known for innovation, interacting with City Hall should feel just as modern, and PermitSF is an important step toward a fully digital permitting system and more responsive government,” he said in a statement.

The study was conducted by researchers from UC Berkeley, UCLA, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Toronto.

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