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 late evening edition — 1 September 2026
Artists bought a beach shack for $10K in 1966; it lists at a 43,000% markup amid an AI-millionaire mansion shortage.
As it ran on the front
RECONCILING THE COLUMN.
The filing on the beach retreat in Southern California shows a purchase price of $10,000, paid by a group of working artists sometime in the 1960s. The filing on the current listing shows an asking price consistent with a markup of about 43,000 percent. Run the arithmetic and the gap lands around $4.3 million on a $10,000 base. That is not appreciation in the ordinary sense of the word. That is a different ledger entirely.…
…(cont) Compare that against the filing on San Francisco housing stock this year, which shows a shortage of homes large enough, and priced high enough, to satisfy a new class of buyer — the reporting calls them AI millionaires, plural, overnight, which is its own kind of filing error nobody's correcting. The buyers are not waiting in the same line as everyone else. They are not competing for the same houses. They have created, according to the reporting, their own tier of scarcity, and the rest of the market absorbs the pressure from below.
Put the two filings side by side and the gap is the same shape twice. A coastal property bought by artists for less than the price of a car today lists, decades later, at a markup that outpaces inflation by a factor nobody in the original purchase agreement could have modeled. A metropolitan housing market, decades further along the same road, runs short of mansions — not apartments, not starter homes, mansions — because a wave of sudden technology money needs somewhere to land.
Neither filing shows a subsidy, a tax credit, or a zoning variance attached to either transaction. Both filings show the same math working in the same direction: the number goes up, and it goes up for the people already positioned to catch it. The gap between the artist's $10,000 and the market's $4.3 million did not close. It moved sideways, into a column with somebody else's name on it, hon.
Nobody's proposing anything be done about either filing. That's not this desk's job. This desk's job is just to run the numbers next to each other and note, for the record, that they rhyme.
“Artists bought a shack for ten grand because it was worthless dirt nobody else wanted, and now it's worth more than most people's retirement because somebody else's fortune needed a place to sit. Same story two towns over: AI money can't find enough mansions in San Francisco, so it bids the whole market up from the top. Nobody's building more coastline or more San Francisco, so the money just walks in and buys what's already there.”
“This is just market forces, supply and demand, the free market rewarding early risk-takers — the artists took a chance on that property, good for them, they earned that markup fair and square. And the mansion shortage, that's a success story too, that's job creation, that's — okay, it's also just twenty-something-year-olds pricing out families who've lived there for generations, but that's not really the framing we're going with.”
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.