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. With San Francisco rent increases over the last 12 months the fastest of any major city in the country, 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
Over 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, 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 Open AI.
“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 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.”