This spring, Bay Area housing prices flattened out for two months in a row. After years of heady, month-over-month price appreciations and rental spikes, this rare break created an opportunity for price-exhausted communities to take a closer look at the trends of our local housing crisis.

Sadly, those trends are as grim as they ever were.

On Thursday, Curbed SF released the results of its compilation of five years’ worth of reported median rents in San Francisco from five rental platforms. It found that San Francisco’s median rent on all of them reached its highest-ever height at some point in 2019.

On Zumper, a platform that also tracks national rents, the most recent median rent in San Francisco — $3,700 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in June — is the highest it’s ever recorded for any city in the country.

The results varied for each site, and no single source represents a full picture of San Francisco’s market rental prices.

Still, the overall trend was both clear and stark: Rent has never been higher in San Francisco, and it’s going to take a lot more than a couple of months of flat prices for the Bay Area to dig out of this historic housing crisis.

It’s going to take courage, vision and a keen understanding of how the region reconfigures its balance between housing and jobs.

On the latter, there are deep concerns brewing in San Jose after a new economic analysis this week showed that Google’s proposed expansion in downtown San Jose could cost that city’s renters an additional $235 million in higher rents every year without a significant increase in both affordable and market-rate housing production.

The analysis, conducted by Beacon Economics on behalf of a San Jose nonprofit, Working Partnerships USA, found that Google and San Jose would need to subsidize 5,284 affordable housing units and help produce 12,450 market-rate units to prevent these dramatic rent hikes.

What adds to the depressing nature of this report is the fact that San Jose voters recently rejected a $450 million affordable-housing bond.

City officials have said that San Jose provided housing for the rest of the region while other cities, particularly on the Peninsula, attracted corporate campuses without building their fair share of homes. This claim has merit.

Unfortunately, we now need every city in the region to focus on home-building, and there are still too few that are willing to do so.

For this week’s example, we need look no further than Berkeley.

UC Berkeley has been trying to build two new buildings for classrooms and housing on its campus. In exchange for this perfectly sensible and badly needed project, it was sued by a neighborhood group on Wednesday.

The group’s contentions read like a “Greatest Hits” NIMBY compilation: neighborhood character, supposed California Environmental Quality Act violations, the terror of increased trash and noise.

But the unoriginality of their gripes shouldn’t detract from the very real problems this behavior has brought to the Bay Area — this crisis affects us all, and no local governments are fighting hard enough to make a difference for their increasingly stressed residents.

Small wonder the last two months of “flat prices” haven’t felt like a reprieve.

This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.