Last month, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced on a sunny Thursday morning in San Francisco that he was going to fight the city’s AI-driven housing crisis. As he stood in Alamo Square Park, with the downtown skyline and Salesforce Tower, the iconic symbol of the city’s shift to being a tech hub, looming in the distance, he declared that “San Francisco is in a rent emergency” and his new package of laws would help fight it.

“Rising rents are making it harder for the people who built their lives here to stay here,” he said, mentioning teachers, nurses, artists and restaurant workers, all of whom he said are the fabric of the city: “The people who make San Francisco what it is. ... There is no recovery without them.” 

Lurie made it clear that the city also “must build more housing” to truly fight the rising rents, but he still doubled down on his positive message: “There is no doubt –– no doubt –– that our city is headed in the right direction.”

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Lurie’s news conference was covered by outlets across the country as a sign the widely liked mayor was taking the crisis seriously. But a housing expert, tenant advocates, city supervisors and the city’s landlord lobby all told SFGATE Lurie’s emergency package will leave the core problem untouched: Apartments will still remain unaffordable. 

A view of homes in North Beach on June 30, 2026, in San Francisco.

“This does nothing to lower rents at all,” Jason Ward, an economist and the director of RAND Housing Center, a nonprofit that finds housing policy solutions, said of the mayor’s rent emergency in a phone call with SFGATE. “This is really about keeping people from being evicted from housing or keeping some very vulnerable people housed.”

Lurie declined SFGATE’s interview request for this story. Shelby Weiss, a spokesperson for Lurie, did not directly answer whether or not the mayor is going to lower rents, and instead referred SFGATE to the September news release from the mayor’s office and quoted Lurie’s saying at the news conference, “We are protecting renters from sudden spikes in housing costs.”

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Astronomical rent spikes

Lurie’s rent emergency comes as the AI boom and 50 years of anti-density housing policies in San Francisco have combined to spike rents for the few housing units available. The AI boom is bringing an influx of new renters, and prospective renters are waiting in lines outside for apartment showings, outbidding each other with their tech salaries and leaving many renters scrambling........

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