On Sept. 2, Mayor Daniel Lurie retweeted a news story detailing a “surge” of AI leases in San Francisco.
“San Francisco’s office market is bouncing back,” he wrote. “New companies are arriving, and homegrown innovators like OpenAI are expanding.”
“The future,” he continued, “is being built right here in San Francisco.”
But that future does not look great for tenants. San Francisco rent increases over the last 12 months have been the fastest of any major city in the country, but eviction notices are also spiking.
Companies like OpenAI are shelling out millions or tens of millions to hire a single engineer. A month ago, employees there received bonuses alone that could be in the “millions.” Ordinary tenants are being crowded out.
Median rents reached $3,069 for a one-bedroom apartment in August, and $3,637 for a two-bedroom, according to data from the rental site Apartment List. Overall, rent prices are up 11.5 percent over the last year and edging towards pre-pandemic levels.
Though tenants received a brief reprieve during the pandemic, their rents were never cheap. Even when prices were at their lowest in January 2021, rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was still the sixth most expensive nationally, according to data from Apartment List.
Eviction notices, meanwhile, are at their highest rate since 2018, and have almost doubled in the last year alone.
The sheriff’s department has received an average of 84 eviction execution orders a month this year, which are issued by the Superior Court when a tenant loses an eviction case, compared to 88 a month in 2024 and 76 a month in 2023.
The Tenderloin, Financial District/Northern SoMa, and the Mission District saw the most eviction notices citywide. In each neighborhood, the number of eviction notices issued this year so far has already surpassed the total issued in each of the two years prior.
The most common reason for eviction notices was for nonpayment of rent.
Evictions for failure to pay have more than tripled in the past year: In 2024, landlords issued an average of 14 notices a month for nonpayment of rent, while in the first eight months of 2025, landlords sent 49 a month, according to data from the San Francisco Rent Board.
Landlords are not required to report notices for non-payment of rent, so the true number of notices issued is likely higher.
“Folks are struggling. COVID officially is over, but it’s not over economically,” said Ora Prochovnick of the Eviction Defense Collaborative. Prochovnick said that 70 percent of the group’s cases have to do with non-payment of rent.
Real estate agent Ken De Leon said that landlords who may have been more lax in the past are now “less flexible and forgiving of tenants not paying their rent.” With rental prices up, landlords have less incentive to cut tenants slack.
Landlords who gave concessions during COVID-19 “to keep their tenants because the rents had gone down.”
Now, they’re more inclined to push tenants out “because they now know that they can get more money from the new market rate,” said Rahman Popal, founder of the Law Firm for Tenants Rights. Other factors, like immigration crackdowns, could also affect a family’s ability to pay rent.
City officials tout AI boom as rents go sky-high
More than a third of San Francisco renter-occupied households are “rent burdened,” meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That includes 20 percent that are “severely rent burdened” and spend more than 50 percent of income on rent.
But for San Francisco City Hall, post-pandemic rising rents are a “bright spot” for the city’s economy, according to the city controller’s July report.
“It’s a sign of economic vitality. It’s clearly demand growing again — more people wanting to live in San Francisco,” wrote Ted Egan, the report’s author and the city’s chief economist.
Egan is not alone. A trend that might have brought unhappiness in past years is now seen by the business community and housing advocates as a sign of San Francisco getting back on its feet.
Pro-housing groups say those high rents are, paradoxically, needed: Without them, projects won’t pencil and developers have no incentive to build the housing they believe will ultimately bring rents down.
Corey Smith, the director of the Housing Action Coalition, said at a city hearing last year that “One of the challenges we face in San Francisco is we need the rent to go back up.”
De Leon, the real estate broker, pointed to the contradiction. “The increase in evictions is a negative impact of a positive trend,” he said. “San Francisco is coming back economically from a very hard time, and the rebound is both rapid, and perhaps just in the early stages, due to the likely sustainability of the AI wave.”
Many of the newcomers are AI apostles coming to work for places like Databricks, Anthropic and OpenAI.
“San Francisco has become the center in the country, and probably the world, of AI startups,” said Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst at Compass, a real estate technology firm.
According to the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies, a think tank, companies in San Francisco raised $34 billion in venture capital investment last year, compared to $11.4 billion the previous year.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which Lurie retweeted this week, AI firms leased “close to 1 million square feet” of San Francisco office space in 2025 so far, about a fifth of the total office space leased this year.
While downtown office space is still at about 65 percent of capacity — far below pre-pandemic levels — city officials are hoping AI will change that.
By 2030, an industry specialist told the Journal, AI firms could “occupy 12 million to 15 million square feet.”
The AI boom, Carlisle said, “is pulling people in from all over the country” — and just starting. “That will continue to grow, and continue to add pressure to asking rents.”
With YIMBY insisting that rents need to rise to make market rate housing pencil out. YIMBY claim that these rent increases are supposed to create the economics to produce enough housing to push down price and CCHO unable to produce affordable housing that scales with the problem, San Franciscans are on our own before the ravages of the market.
Yet the top-down astroturf staffers at YIMBY and CCHO continue to get paid as circumstances for San Franciscans deteriorate.
During last year’s D5 supervisor campaign, then candidate Bilal Mahmood touted his tenant status ad nauseum, while many doubted his credibility because of his recent move to D5/the Tenderloin from SOMA, and because of Mahmood’s other false claims(neuroscientist, economist, philanthropist) on the stump and in the lit. Given that evictions and overdose deaths in the TL are tripling and quadrupling under his watch, what exactly is Mahmood doing about it? Stark data shows a link between eviction and homelessness.
Mahmood is partnering with Matt Dorsey to, per 48 Hills, ” improve the financial feasibility of development in the Market Octavia area but limit the City’s funding sources for community infrastructure and affordable housing.” In other words, facilitating more market-rate housing on Market Street.
Meanwhile…..in 1999 voters approved the building of affordable housing on the land opened up by the demolition of the Central Freeway. In 2003, the city bought Parcel K in Hayes Valley with funds designated for affordable housing. Candidate Bilal Mahmood promised “we” could do both: build affordable housing AND preserve outdoor space. Well?
Don’t forget Engardio personally removing rent control from ADU units, the entire advertised point of having ADU “streamlining” was to benefit low income renters and NOT PROPERTY SPECULATORS.
Sellout Engardio should go work for Breed. PR.
The rise of artificial intelligence in San Francisco, has become a gold rush for tech billionaires and investors. But it’s ordinary people who are paying the price. Landlords, blinded by greed, are weaponizing this economic shift to squeeze every last cent out of their tenants. They don’t see homes: they see dollar signs.
Evictions are not about necessity. They’re about unscrupulous landlords exploiting a moment of rapid change, forcing out long-term residents so they can jack up rents, and court wealthier tenants. These landlords are parasites feeding off the AI boom, enriching themselves while shattering lives and destabilizing neighborhoods.
Their actions are gutting San Francisco of its soul. Families are torn from their homes, seniors are left with nowhere to go, and entire communities are bulldozed so landlords can fatten their pockets. This isn’t just housing policy: it’s legalized greed, carried out by people who care more about profit margins than human beings.
San Francisco’s eviction crisis is not some natural consequence of “progress”. It is the direct, shameful result of landlords choosing to cash in on the AI surge, no matter how many lives they destroy along the way.
How many evictions are from rent controlled housing?
I find it hard to believe that “AI money” is pushing people out of rent controlled housing. Who are the people being evicted? Who is your story about?
But it is only rent controlled tenants that an owner would want to get rid of via an eviction. If the unit is not rent controlled then you simply raise the rent.
Greed. It all about Greed. AInwill bust too.
The AI techies should realize that they are coming here to work on something that will eventually put them out of a job, too. That’s what is not sustainable. Just ask all the Salesforce people that just got laid off. In reality, most people are only a paycheck or two away from homelessness.
This is a great time to remember an excellent piece of research by a few SF Fed Bankers from earlier this year, “Supply Constraints Do Not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities.” You know what their research found was a much better correlation with housing prices than supply? Income. You know what these AI tech workers are bringing to the rental market right about now in SF and the Bay Area? Huge salaries. Landlords are raising rents because they can because people are showing up who can pay.
SF’s most recent implosion was due to overindexing on tech and finance and chasing out every other industry to create a superfragile economic monoculture. When the environment shifted, as it did with Covid’s arrival, the house of cards came down.
Clearly nobody has learned a damn thing about putting all the eggs into the same basket every time. Fool me once, shame on you. But fool me twice?
I can’t wait for the AI bubble to burst so all these carpet baggers GTFO. Whenever rich people do well everyone else suffers.
Your headline says evictions are up. Your story says eviction *notices* are. Those are not the same. Eviction notices are a preliminary step that often results in no action. Your data indicates that actual, court-ordered evictions are down from last year.
The Corey Smith quote gets brought up by the NIMBYs a lot and it’s frustrating that San Francisco housing politics is so insular and crazy that it can’t see what it’s saying. There are many of cities in the country with rents far below S.F. that outpaced S.F. in housing completes. Oakland was producing as many units as S.F. pre-pandemic yet Oakland’s rents are much lower. S.F. imposes tremendous costs onto new development: high property taxes, 20-33% affordable (i.e. unprofitable units), impact fees in the tens of thousands. Additionally, S.F.’s pipeline is concentrated in areas requiring extensive clean up and EIRs like Treasure Island and Hunter’s Point shipyard. The cost per unit in S.F. is so absurdly high, probably clearing $1.5 million per unit that only luxury housing can charge rents that exceed the cost of construction. Back in the 1980s, when rents were down and drug-fueled gang wars were raging in the Mission, developers were erecting apartments all over San Francisco. But they weren’t anywhere as regulated and penalized in fees and requirements, and they in the neighborhoods not former industrial places requiring environmental clean up.
S.F. could really look outside of its bubble on housing economics.
Is that chart right? 20 evictions so far in the Mission, and you’re going to write this diatribe? Let’s add a couple more zero’s to that before we make this big of a deal about the economic boom stealing housing.
Respectfully… Jackie Fielder, Dean Preston, Aaron Peskin, Hilary Ronen and the like have blocked any housing getting built for decades so much so that from the last tech boom to now we have no housing to show. They can face the consequences of their constituents getting evicted and cry all they want pretending they care.
What really matters is REAL rates . Rents are down 25% from pre pandemic rents . Better to look at the cup 1/2 full and stay optimistic . Let’s all stay positive and enjoy the reduction on rents . Hopefully people are out spending more money … no better time to be a renter in S.F. in the last 40 years then now . Worst time was 2008-2013
The simple reality is that many folks who live in SF probably should not be here, as they lack the job skills to be able to afford to live in what is again the world leader of growth businesses like AI.
90% of the population of the Bay Area live outside of the City where, at least to the east, there is boundless land and cheaper housing costs. Many who live in SF are only here because rent control immunizes them from their true cost of living. And such an approach is not sustainable – financial reality always win in the end.
We need to see migration out of SF of those who cannot contribute. The Peter Pans need to go, to be replaced by wealth creators. Only by such an expansion of the tax base can the enterprise flourish and prosper.
@David – I’ve worked in tech for decades, AI included, startups and big companies, through several boom and bust waves. The “skills” argument is hype and is especially ludicrous in an era of vibes coding and AI slop.
Even if it were true, the city needs a working class to function, and the idea that they can live somewhere else and drive back and forth is far more unsustainable than the your arrogant proclamations about “wealth creators.” Workers create wealth.
as someone else who’s worked in tech here in SF for decades, Jym is 100% correct.
100% naive and transplant anyhow. “Workers create wealth.” WORKERS drive cars and trucks, Jym. Actual WORKERS don’t have the option of SSH’ing into WORK Jym. They have to bring goods and services to a location that isn’t served by BART or high speed rail, no matter how much your transit nerd propaganda asserts it possible, nope.
“As an urbanist cyclist yuppie I don’t understand why everyone isn’t e-biking.”
Javascript/PHP is no longer considered tech, thanks for the rant boomer.
Driving back and forth in electric vehicles is what SF is all about.
Ask your paymaster.
Thanks for the self-involved entitled yuppie transplant perspective anyhow?
The people who move to San Francisco for tech jobs are workers, and most of San Francisco’s working class lives in Tracy because the city reserves apartments for the bon vivant gay couple that doesn’t want to let go of their rent controlled pied e terre.
But the fact remains that we have a large underclass of people in SF who can only survive because of the artificial system of rent control, which in turn suppresses the provision of rental housing and deters the new build of homes.
Those renters crowd out those wishing to move here for job opportunities and drive up rents for new arrivals. Most of these subsidized tenants could live somewhere like Oakland and commute to SF. And that does not have to be by car – there is BART, ferries, buses etc.
SF does not have a shortage of homes. It has a surplus of people who cannot really afford to be here.
Exactly there’s no crackdown on unscrupulous Private Equity groups owning 40% of the housing stock via LLC’s and no-list sales, instead Wiener focuses on bulldozing existing affordable long-term rent controlled housing and putting up the opposite on all counts. It’s disgusting, YIMBY is a complete machiavellian charade being pushed by the industry using PAC money. The opposite of grassroots, grass seeding.
You think people who already live here and have spent decades creating and supporting the infrastructure you want to enjoy should leave the city so a nomadic group of meritocracy bros chasing unicorns can maximize their housing cost margins until the AI equivalent of Dutch Elm Disease wipes out their urban monoculture? That’s like walking into a restaurant and telling people who are already dining at their favorite local spot that they should GTFO and give you the table because you think your fit is better for the ambiance. It’s a city, not a theme park.
I was certainly happy to see Elon Musk leave town.
Wow thanks David for taking a break from your endless rereading of Ayn Rand books to share an opinion.