> Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place

It's not the individual regulations themselves, it's the mass of regulations that's slowing things down. I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing. You can point to each rule and give a very good reason for why that rule is there. In fact you can go through the entire list of hoops developers go through the justify every single hoop.

And now you have an apartment building that's built to the standards that everyone agrees on, except there's just one problem, no one can afford it.

And that's the larger issue. All these regulations individually and on the surface to a service to the community by making sure that X or Y edge case never comes up. But they do arguably a massive disservice to the community by driving away affordable housing and business.