Wealthy AI executives and workers are entering the city’s cutthroat housing market, driving bidding wars, record sales, and soaring prices as companies expand their local workforces.
Page F5From§Eachthe early evening edition — 1 September 2026
Artists' $10K beach retreat now lists at a 43,000% markup, while AI millionaires create a mansion shortage nearby.
As it ran on the front
Let's do the arithmetic once, plainly, because the number is the whole story. A beach property purchased outright for $10,000 sometime in the 1960s is now listed at a markup of 43,000 percent. That is not an estimate; that's the figure as reported, and figures like that don't require an adjective, they just require someone to write them down next to each other, which nobody with a listing agreement had any incentive to do.
At the same time, San Francisco is contending with what's being called a mansion shortage — not a housing shortage in the ordinary sense, a specific shortage of homes large enough for people whose net worth changed overnight because of an AI valuation. Two housing stories, same week, same coast roughly. One property appreciated forty-three thousand percent since a decade when a schoolteacher's salary could plausibly buy a home outright. The other market can't build mansions fast enough for buyers whose wealth was created, functionally, overnight, on paper, by a funding round.…
…(cont) I want to reconcile those two ledgers, because they're the same ledger. Every dollar of appreciation on that beach lot came from somewhere — it came from the gap between what wages have done since the 1960s and what real estate has done since the 1960s, and that gap did not close, it just moved into somebody's equity. The AI millionaires aren't causing a separate problem; they're the newest, fastest entrants into the same column, bidding against everyone else for a fixed supply of land, and the column that keeps gapping wider is the one belonging to whoever's paycheck is denominated in a normal salary instead of a funding round.
Nobody needs to call this a crisis, hon — the number does that on its own. A market where the entry price on a beach shack multiplies four hundred and thirty times over the span of two working lifetimes, while the same month's business page reports a shortage of adequate housing for the newly liquid, is a market that has stopped pricing shelter and started pricing scarcity itself. The people who get priced out of that don't show up in either headline. They show up later, in the vacancy rate, the commute times, and the rent.
“A beach shack goes up 43,000 percent while the new millionaires can't find enough mansions — that's not a market, that's a casino where the house keeps raising the buy-in on everybody who isn't already sitting at the table. Somebody's kid is renting further and further from the job that pays for the commute.”
“The market is simply reflecting demand — that's basic economics, home values appreciate, that's how homeownership builds wealth for anyone lucky enough to have bought in the sixties, which, to be fair, almost nobody currently renting was able to do — did I just undercut my own point?”
The receipts
Wayne and Barbara Chapmans didn’t simply own the house: They transformed it into a highly personal and living, breathing work of organic architecture.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.