On social media, San Francisco’s housing warriors are trading AI-generated pictures of upzoned neighborhoods like barbs — either in furtherance of urbanists, or to mock them.
The posts are occasionally serious, and more often than not ragebait. The Marina — but make it Miami. How about an apartment super-complex along Golden Gate Park? What if everywhere but downtown was more like Barcelona? “Here’s my best slop at what that might look like,” one anonymous X user wrote.
The strange new medium for San Francisco’s decades-old debate between growth and preservation has, if nothing else, amused the professionals.
“It will come up in conversations at work. I’ve certainly seen all this on X, Bluesky, and even Instagram to some degree,” said Mark Hogan, an architect and principal at OpenScope Studio in San Francisco, which redesigned Victorians in the Mission for transitional housing. “Most of these AI images don’t reflect what’s feasible, financially or structurally.”
There’s a long history of image manipulation in environmental decision-making, said Sarah Jones, the director of Marin County’s Community Development Agency. Architects and developers are generally known to render their projects in the best possible light, highlighting the proposed buildings and not always their context, she added.
A fluid technology that can start conversations about what’s possible for communities can, at the same time, pose more polarization: a “confirmation bias” of attitudes based on made-up scenarios, Jones said.
“If you’re inclined to be opposed to more density, you’re going to see an AI-generated picture that embodies what you oppose and that will make you more opposed,” Jones said. “If you’re inclined to think it’s fine, you’ll see the same picture and think it’s great.”
In April, an anonymous X user who regularly posts about San Francisco politics submitted an AI image of the Marina neighborhood as a hyperdense stretch of high-rises, mockingly endorsing it in the voice of a YIMBY caricature. A collection of actual YIMBYs rallied around the rendering with enthusiasm, calling it an improvement over the neighborhood. Some even tweaked the image with their own ideas.
Kat Scott, an open-source software engineer living in the Sunset, said she doesn’t identify as a YIMBY or NIMBY: “I see the world both ways. Obviously, cities have to grow, that’s normal.”
But for months, her X timeline was dogged with YIMBYs dunking on her neighborhood’s lack of density. She found the posts annoying, but inspiring.
On Monday, Scott posted two AI renderings of San Francisco: One as a collection of Vienna-style social housing, and the other with every building replaced by a single-family home. The next day, she posted another of the city as a proliferation of luxury five-over-ones, corporate chain stores and AI billboards. The purpose was — you guessed it — to trigger the YIMBYs.
“If you just say the word YIMBY, they appear,” Scott told Mission Local. “I don’t know if it’s exactly productive. But it’s funny; these AI images are meant to poke people and get eyeballs. And look — I can do that too. It doesn’t really mean anything.”
A string of pro-growth stalwarts flocked to Scott’s posts. Among them was YIMBY activist Armand Domalewski, who responded with sarcastic despair over the prospect of new homes.
“The funny thing about this is it’s not anything new — I’ve been doing housing activism since 2015, and long before AI generation got decent, you would have NIMBYs create stuff with Photoshop,” Domalewski told Mission Local. “AI is a new tool for a longstanding tradition among people who fear change and support it.”
He said it’s too early to tell how it’s changing the debate, if at all.
“I think all political arguments in general are not for the benefit of the people arguing but the audience,” he said. “I also feel like we’re being so spammed by AI representations of everything that people could be tuning it out entirely.”
