As Super Bowl 50 and hordes of tourists and media descend on the city for Sunday’s game, though, there’s a sense in San Francisco that something is very wrong, that recent changes in this city have created intolerable inequities and made just living here too hard for all but the most well-off residents.

Eric Risberg / AP

Put simply, the city has gotten too crowded and expensive for all the people who want to live there. That’s driving up prices, leading to evictions, and changing the tenor of the much-beloved city on the Bay. Protesters may be chanting about racial justice and homelessness and tech workers, but at their heart, many of the protests are about what kind of city—and whose city—San Francisco will be.

The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment hit $3,530 in August of last year, a 14 percent increase from the year before (that contrasts to $3,160 for a one-bedroom in New York last August). The median rent for two bedrooms in August was $4,900.

The problem can be partly explained by supply and demand. The city has added 45,000 residents since 2010, but has built just 7,500 new housing units, according to a report from Paragon Real Estate. What’s more, the city has failed to build enough new housing for decades, largely because of restrictions of what can be built where. The planning and approval process is also a mess: Projects can be approved and can languish for years, tied up in lawsuits and as developers wait for permits from city staff. Gabe Metcalf, of SPUR, estimates that San Francisco has only built 1,500 new units a year for the past two decades, a time during which the population added nearly 200,000 people.

At the same time, people are flocking to the city, and it’s easy to see why. As the protesters chanted outside Super Bowl City, the sun was setting on the San Francisco Bay, casting a golden light over the hills of Marin, Berkeley, and Oakland. People walked and ran outside in the balmy weather, watching the ferries and sailboats gliding through the water. Workers hurried from jobs under the tall buildings of downtown, home to booming companies such as Salesforce, and meandered to the fancy restaurants that now line the city’s streets. This is a very appealing city, with lovely scenery and a growing number of jobs for the well-educated. But in an attempt to preserve the city’s current look and feel, San Francisco has failed to approve zoning changes that would allow developers to build enough units for all the people moving here.

“The economy of the city and the Bay Area is just so strong and the city is so attractive to people from all over the world that we are simply faced with a huge growing demand of people wanting to be here,” Metcalf said. “At the same time, we made some mistakes with regard to housing policy. It boils down to a very simple thing—we didn’t allow the supply of housing to increase enough to keep up with the growing demand to live here.”