I was sad I had no shoes, but then I met a man who had square feet.

Good one.

In case it's not obvious, that's an annual number.

(Doubles down on $10 per square foot.)

As you fucking should. I tried renting commercial real estate and it was an absolute joke. Like $3k/mo total NNN for 1ksqft of crumbling cement cube in the shitty part of town.

A typical NNN lease (what businesses use) is priced in terms of dollars per square foot per year. A reasonable number would, in fact, be $10/sqft/yr plus the NNNs (insurance, utilities, taxes, another ~$5 maybe) but the land owning class insists it's closer to $25 all in for a crappy shack and whole number multiples for anything "nice".

What are the inputs that go in to $10 being the "right" price? SF's minimum wage? Tax rates by bracket? A desire for things to be cheaper?

The $10 number is the base rent, the triple nets are the $5. As such the base rent just represents the cost of money when the structure was built, which most of the time was decades ago. It's been paid off many times over and so the "right" price is what the market will bear.

This is, for lack of a better explitive, fucking awful for the economy. If you have a restaurant district and everyone's paying "maximum sustainable rent", the customer is getting the "minimum sustainable product". If you spend $10 on a salad, more of that money that could be going to fresh local lettuce is being spent on rent so you get a worse product for that $10. The existence of the landlord isn't making the economy bigger better faster wherever, they're...literally just rent seeking.

$0.01 per sq ft. Final offer.