As Executive Editor Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian noted, Bay Area rents may be “too damn high,” but both rents and home prices have continued to increase drastically, even during the recession.
The Chronicle’s chart of housing prices throughout the Bay Area shows an increase in all counties, and even though the growth in San Francisco rents last month was not quite 3 percent, the city still had a median average rent of $3,100, the highest of all counties.
Scary stuff, and Mission Local’s reports on Mission District apartments and commercial rents suggest that the trend won’t be abating anytime soon.
When determining the “true” cost of a place in San Francisco you have to consider other variables as well. How far is it from work? How far is it from a grocery store? What kind of public transportation is available just outside my place? If you move into a neighborhood where the rent is cheaper than other place but end up spending money and time on commutes to the other side of the city then “cheap rent” doesn’t mean much. Here is a recently published guide I wrote to help renters pick a SF neighborhood to move into.
Renter’s Guide to San Francisco
It breaks down most of the neighborhoods in SF with pros and cons.
I assume your guide also covers:
How likely I am to be mugged at knife and gunpoint after dark?
How prevalent are junkies, bums, and driveby shootings?
How likely am I to walk out my front door and step in human feces?
Is the supervisor totally useless like David Campos?
etc.
Like every big city, there are the parts of SF which are what some would call “gritty”, however San Francisco as a whole is a beautiful city with great transportation, unique restaurants, awesome museums, creativity, energy, and lots of diversity.
Cheers.
We can thank the invasion of hipsters for fueling the demand for housing. I’m glad my dad bought a little place in the city. Ain’t no hipster kicking me out of my house! I will happily rent it for 3500.00 a month though… FU pay me!
So we can actually thank opportunistic property owners like yourself who will jump at the chance to cash in when tech money comes their way.
That doesn’t make any sense in context, please try harder.
Not my job to explain basic economics to you but Blaming any one factor–hipsters, tech, rent control, etc-is silly.
It’s hilarious how you don’t even realize you just did what you were complaining about. Good job!
Well, we can thank Rent Control for the high rents.
We can also thank the constant anti-developer mentality that stalls any new effort to create new high density housing, which is what is needed to decrease rents.
So, the progressive agenda is effectively making this a city only for the wealthy. kinda ironic.
Otherwise known as “The Law of Unintended Consequences”.
Now we have an inadequate housing supply, impossible rental prices paid by newcomers, and nearly the lowest homeownership rate in the country.
Muy alto precio de renta en San Francisco.
Desafortunadamente esos precios tan desorbitados estan cauzando el exodo de familias de bajo ingreso. Afortunadamente hay ciudades cercanas con una accecible vivienda. Quiero mucho a San Franciso y aunque ya no vivo ahi la mayor parte me la paso ahi, ya sea trabajando o paseando. Siento que con el BART disponible ahora donde estoy pareciese que es un barrio mas de la ciudad. Espero que pase mucho tiempo antes que aqui se eleve los precios como alla en SF.