This week’s shocking but at the same time not-so shocking news that the long-contentious “Monster In the Mission” project on 16th Street is officially no more is the latest proof of a longtime truism that new housing in San Francisco is almost always housing delayed—sometimes to the point of its own demise.

The reason for the delays and cancellation vary. Usually neighborhood opposition scuttles a building; while other projects could break ground any day now but pointedly haven’t, with construction stymied by costs, politics, or the owners’ desires to sell instead.

But all of them are a product—or lack of product—of the sometimes baffling alchemy of San Francisco’s rules, its housing culture, and the dispositions of San Franciscans. In most other major cities, the following project would have been finished by now, for better or worse, but here in SF all we have to show for them is a story—thus far.