Pedestrians walk past a “For Rent” sign in a doorway on Hayes Street in San Francisco in October 2020. Since this photo was made, rental rates have soared, creating the latest in a string of rent emergencies in the city and elsewhere in the Bay Area.

Last week, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced a new policy and funding package in response to the increasing costs of housing in San Francisco.

“For thousands upon thousands of San Franciscans, the most immediate pressure right now is rent,” he noted somberly at a press conference, “and that pressure is rising rapidly … Rents are rising here faster than anywhere else in the country.”

Mayor Lurie is absolutely right that San Francisco is in a rent emergency. The rent is too damn high! This hurts working people, families, young people, seniors — all of us.

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But this rent emergency shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has lived in the city for more than five minutes. During the 1990s dot-com boom, post-2008 tech boom and current AI boom, we created thousands of high-wage jobs and very little housing, each time driving a vicious spike in housing costs.

We’ve been in this exact rent emergency before, and we will wind up here again and again unless we change how we respond to this crisis.

This isn’t to say the solutions that the mayor put forward as part of this package to help protect tenants aren’t sound. Funding for........

© San Francisco Chronicle