The Brits have a good word for this: Gobsmacked. Yep, that’s the experience of realizing that condos at 3133 24th Street will go as high as $1.6 million. The former auto garage-turned-condo project once seemed like a quaint community project. Ah well.
The one-bedroom, two-baths is going for $969,000.
The three-bedroom, 3.5-baths is set at $1.695 million.
I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.
As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.
As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.
More by Lydia Chávez6 Comments
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housing is expensive because this city has not built enough in the last 20-30 years, largely due to the ease with with NIMBYS can block projects, and this misguided assumption that developers are evil and must be stopped. developers build homes, and if they are blocked, the results is that prices go through the roof like this.
also, just to be clear, it is not the filthy rich who buy $1M condos. It is hard working professionals — often two income, no kids, working long hours to try to pay the mortgage to own a home in this city.
the filthy rich buy the $10-60M homes up the hill.
there is an order of magnitude difference.
The million dollar starter condo in a working class neighborhood is a symptom of grave sickness in the society.
With incomes stagnant and prices rising, the majority grows poorer every day.
This is the new America – where the filthy-rich, who already have more than they could ever consume, use their control over the political and economic systems to take even more.
These gluttonous pigs need to be taxed back down to earth, or we are finished as a democracy and as a great nation.
No, a million dollars is not much above the average home price in SF. And since every home sells quickly and easily, there is nothing extravagant about such a valuation. Indeed, such values are only possible precisely because people are clamoring for homes in that price range.
Not everyone can afford the average SF home but it only matters that enough people can afford them for the price to be right. There are homes available for half that price just a few miles away. Not everyone can afford to live in the world’s favorite city.
It’s all about perception. For folks like you, it seems absolutely normal. For folks like me who grew up here and remember the dingy old body shop that was there and the young folks like DJ Domino who were killed right out front, it is F*ing crazy that this is happening on 24th street. When you say “Everybody that is concerned with gentrification should dedicate their time to push for sensible policies to help lift the less fortunate up”, several things come to mind: 1) you are NOT concerned with gentrification, so you must be benefitting from it, or facilitating it 2) you have no clue about the fact that those who are MOST concerned about gentrification ARE pushing for policies to lift up the poor, and always have 3) you are not proposing how those tax dollars can be reinvested back into the community, much less “pushing” for such policies. People like you make Native San Franciscans pray for earthquakes.
Kathy, to fairly assess these asking prices you’d really need to give the square footage numbers for those units. That is the baseline used by the RE industry.
PSF figures for new build in the Mission are around the $1,000 mark, or over for premium properties. If the units you cited are around 1,000 and 1,600 square feet respectively, then the prices are in line with the market, and not excessive.
Of course, if they don’t sell then, and only then, you will be proven correct and prescient in your allegation of gobsmacking.
Market forces will not be stopped. It’s a fool’s errand to try to do so.
Everybody that is concerned with gentrification should dedicate their time to push for sensible policies to help lift the less fortunate up. The high home values in this unit are going to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars of property tax in the next five years. How do we reinvest that back into the community? That’s a better use of everybody’s time than to gripe about how much some people are willing to pay to live here.