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The San Francisco Rent Explosion Part III
- venomsnake 11y agoI don't understand. Why are there so many light colored areas in the city where rent is half/third of Mission. Non SF person here. Can anyone explain? With exploding demand it should have trickled there by now ( Bayview, Excelsior)
- cjensen 11y agoBayview has a reputation of having extreme amounts of crime. At least, that's my perception as someone who lives in the Bay Area.
- SandersAK 11y agoSF and the bay area in general have done an astonishingly bad job of updating mass transit to handle growth. I used to live in NY and thought the MTA was stupid and short sighted, but since moving here, they come off as geniuses compared to BART etc.
- resu_nimda 11y agoWhat large cities have mass transit that is not astonishingly bad, stupid, and/or short sighted, in your opinion? Maybe it's actually just a really hard problem?
- SandersAK 11y agoIt's a hard problem, but BART's issues come down to a bunch of fiefdom infighting among different counties. Paris and London have pretty fantastic transit.
- KingMob 11y agoWell, the MTA in New York is certainly stupid and wasteful. But they have slowly started building new lines again (the 7 expansion, the Second Ave subway), so they're not totally short-sighted. And as much I grumble, NYC is one of the few places in America I feel ok about going all around the city without a car. I think it's only a hard political problem, but not a hard technical problem at this point.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- shard 11y agoSeoul has a pretty fantastic public transit system. Busses and subways come every 5 to 15 minutes, are clean and fast (you better hold on tight!), and are still expanding year after year to the few underserved areas in Seoul and to the cities surrounded Seoul. There are digital signs giving you the time and location of the coming vehicle, and TVs showing news and entertainment segments. Strong cellular service so you're never without a connection. The busses and subways do stop running around midnight to 1AM, but there is always the choice of taking a taxi, which are also plentiful, fast, and cheap (a ride from the south part of Seoul to the north part is only about $10).
- sampo 11y ago> What large cities have mass transit that is not astonishingly bad, stupid, and/or short sighted, in your opinion? I'd guess any European city is better than NYC, which is the best that America has.
- sampo 11y agoKind of ironic, that one of the most degenerate and backwards-looking of the first worlds cities when it comes to urban planning and transport, happens to be the location the most forward-looking people in web tech and startups.
- ryanSrich 11y agoIf you work in SOMA, Bayview and Excelsior don't seem far at all. Why not just bike or walk?
- Decade 11y agoWalking to Excelsior? Are you joking? I work in SoMA and live in Excelsior, and it takes me half an hour to bike each way. And I'm a relatively fast biker, in a good location with major roads near my house. Most of Excelsior is narrow roads on steep hills. Parking is one of my less favorite activities there. Bayview is not very pleasant. My friend's home was burglarized. My brother was mugged and his G1 stolen, back when that was the only Android phone. There are noisy trains and a smelly sewage treatment plant. There are reasons people aspire not to live there.
- lnanek2 11y agoMission is where all the cool night life is. Big companies right on Market and in financial district like Microsoft's Yammer office. SOMA is where the startups are. There are some startups in the Dogpatch further that direction towards Bayview, but already the commute time for most employees is double if you do that due to having to switch from BART train to MUNI train which is much slower and less frequent, and god knows what serves most of Bayview. Buses where you would get mugged and stuck in traffic maybe? I'd be happier in the East Bay at that point as long as BART was near. The few times I've tried the bus system, half the time the bus is full or late. I own a car, but traffic is ridiculous, so I don't consider it usable for commuting.
- mdeeks 11y agoWe (MSFT/Yammer office) are most definitely NOT in the financial district (god I wish). We're in the tenderloin/civic area where you regularly see addicts shooting up on the stairs as you walk down to bart. It is one of the worst areas of the city. Though it is getting nicer now that many companies are moving in.
- eip 11y ago"I have never seen crack smoked so casually before." --Dave Chappelle
- fennecfoxen 11y ago> god knows what serves most of Bayview. Well, the T train runs down the edge of Bayview as far as the Bayshore Caltrain station. But it's reasonably slow and kind of awkwardly routed for the time being (it goes past the ballpark and along the Embarcadero before reversing down Market). Maybe that will change when they open the central subway in the future.
- lastofus 11y agoHunters Point (part of Bayview) is also a superfund site. That might be a bit of a turnoff as well...
- bradleyjg 11y agoYou'd think so, but in Brooklyn they have a Whole Foods built right above a superfund site (the Gowanus Canal). Sufficiently hot real estate markets can make for some strange situations. http://inhabitat.com/nyc/wp-content/blogs.dir/2/files/2013/12/UGE-Lighting-Solutions-at-Whole-Foods-Side1.jpg http://inhabitat.com/nyc/wp-content/blogs.dir/2/files/2013/1...
- mmohebbi 11y agoThat's due to a combination of crime, local businesses (e.g. fancy coffee shops and bars), and access to commuter shuttles. You can see some of these in heat map form here: http://www.trulia.com/local/san-francisco-ca/ http://www.trulia.com/local/san-francisco-ca/
- arjie 11y agoI live in the Excelsior. I live just off Mission Street, and 10 mins on foot from BART, so it isn't all the public transit (the 44 and 52 go to Glen Park BART from where all trains are 10 mins up to Montgomery, the 14 is a slow alternative downtown). My personal theory is that it's because most of the places to hang out here aren't the kind that's popular in the Mission. I also walk down these streets frequently late at night to buy stuff from the Safeway. I don't think it's very dangerous.
- aetherson 11y agoI currently live in the Outer Mission and previously lived in Excelsior, and I second all this. Basically, these are the last places in SF that are: 1. Relatively affordable. 2. Relatively close to BART. I live a five minute walk from Balboa Park BART and my mortgage is $3,000 a month for a 2BR1BA house with garage that I bought two years ago. Previously I lived a 10 minute walk from Glenn Park BART and my rent was $2,000 a month for a 2BR1BA house with garage (albeit now a few years old, so I'm sure the rent is higher now). The area is pretty safe. It's not like a rural small town or like what I kind of assume Pac Heights is like, but it's probably safer than Inner Mission or SOMA, and both I and my wife (a small woman) feel safe wandering around singly after dark. So why is it relatively cheap? Well, first, inertia from a point when it was less safe -- you can see some of the progression of the neighborhood by looking at the houses. Recently remodeled ones do not have metal security gates on their doors or bars on their windows, but ones that haven't been touched in 15 or 20 years definitely do. But also, it's just not a very hip neighborhood and doesn't have the density of bars/coffee shops/bicycle stores that other neighborhoods do. It's a little farther from the nightlife centers of the city. Ultimately, I think these areas are rapidly gentrifying as well, but they're behind the curve of the rest of the city.
- choppaface 11y agoOne of the things missing on the map is elevation. FiDi & SOMA are effectively surrounded by Twin Peaks, Russian Hill, Pacific Heights, and Portrero Hill. Those hills contribute to increasing commute times as well as cultural boundaries.
- infecto 11y agoIts all to do with transportation and nightlife. Bart runs down market street and then south through the mission. A lot of people work near market street. Easy commute. The mission also has a strange mix of gentrification. It has a big mix of locals and new tech workers. With the influx of tech workers there is also a lot of nightlife. Now if you live in a place like sunset or anywhere in the southern part of the city you are kind of stuck. The southern part of the city you will have to take a bus. The bus can be a terrible experience, if you live on the edges expect a 1hr 1way commute. This is just a rough guideline, not always true. Sure sunset has muni trains but its still slow because the majority of the time muni is above ground on the road and does not have right of way. I live in outer richmond. I think the pricing data is skewed here due to seacliff. TLDR; transportation sucks. Most of the areas that look cheap require you to have a car and drive.
- Chanel_Bunnell 11y agoHerd mentality. Work in the same kind of startups, with the same kind of people, drink in the same kind of bars, live in the same trendy neighborhoods, date the same kind of chicks/guys. It's kind of amazing that every once on a while something original actually comes out of all this.
- 7Figures2Commas 11y agoInvestors who are pouring money into Bay Area startups might as well be investing in Bay Area real estate, because real estate is ultimately where a lot of their money is going. As San Francisco startups like this one[1], which has an all-in cost of $146,000/year per employee and an insane rent to revenue ratio of 15%, demonstrate, investors are largely footing the bill for the explosion in residential and commercial real estate costs that the boom they're funding has helped create. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10049808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10049808
- Dwolb 11y agoDo you know who the money is going to? Is the market heavily fragmented or consolidated? It'd be interesting to know the economics for the owners and then the city as well (with taxes).
- Balgair 11y agoBingo! This is the real reason rents are bananas. The question is: when will investors stop this? Anyone with some brains can figure out Oakland, or heck, American Canyon is just as good a place to start-up. At these rents, even Portland is looking good. The 'community' of other entrepreneurs that SF expounds as the reason to start-up there has it's price and its possible all the smart money is leaving it behind. Let the other investors pay the landlords while you sell the next big widget.
- Xcelerate 11y agoI've always wanted to live in San Francisco for at least a few years, but this data (combined with the fact that my girlfriend steadfastly refuses to move outside of the south) is slowly turning my interest towards places like Chattanooga. Is San Francisco really the only serious place for startups, or are there other options that I might be happy with ("settle for")?
- adventured 11y agoNo, SF isn't the only serious place for start-ups. NY, Seattle, Boston, Northern Virginia / DC, Los Angeles - are all excellent start-up destinations depending on your needs. There are second tier start-up locations as well that can be quite nice, such as the research triangle in North Carolina or Dallas - Fort Worth. If you're in energy, perhaps Houston (it continues to boom); if you're in biotech / pharma, perhaps San Diego. Denver and Portland can be nice for lifestyle purposes. And so on.
- killerdhmo 11y agoAustin is probably the only place that's considered "the south" to the previous commenter's point.
- kelukelugames 11y ago
- tibbon 11y agoWhile not to the exact same scale, rents in NYC and Boston have been doing similar. In Somerville, apartments are roughly double what they were 10 years ago by my estimates. Salaries for the average person haven't kept up. My partner and I clear 160k/year, and affording a 2-3BR apartment is still not easy given student loans, saving for a 20% home down payment, etc. We are currently in a 1BR to make that happen, but the lack of space is killing us. The only way I can see ever owning property is if my options at some company end up being worth something. My question is not if things are going up (they are), but what can we do about them. We are going to destroy our neighborhoods, culture and opportunities (yes, even for us software developers) if these things keep going up like this. Unless none of us ever want to have more than a 150 sq/ft bedroom that we rent (no kids, room for hobbies, etc), we need to find a solution. I'm really sad for my friends who aren't developers, because its impossible to keep up. I don't want everyone to be a developer. I don't think that is culturally good, or a solution. I want artists, academics, electricians, caregivers, medical professionals, and people of all walks of life in my city. Look, we've got some incredibly bright minds on here. What is a realistic, forward looking and innovative way we can work on this? We're aiming for the moon, hyperloops and self driving cars... but maybe a few people can try to figure out how to make it so that cities aren't absolutely terrible cost-wise to live in? NEW THOUGHT: Yes, it is supply and demand. I wonder if someone can start a company whose mission is to quickly create scalable affordable housing in major cities? Something involving tricks for greater density, new building techniques, focus on efficiency but also quality of life... and doing it fast. We need this in 2 years, not 20. How can we build 20,000 units of housing within reach of someone in their 20's in the middle of the income range in each Boston, NYC and SF?
- evanpw 11y agoIncrease supply (e.g., build more housing) or reduce demand (e.g., find a way to make it less important for people who want to work together to live nearby). Those are really the only two choices.
- tibbon 11y agoIn Camberville, we're increasing supply... of luxury condos. So far, I haven't seen it make a dent in the market. Fort Point in Boston went from having almost no housing to hundreds of new units... yet I called one of the buildings and found their 1BRs to be $3,200/month. The public transit infrastructure, and road infrastructure, in Boston and SF is insufficient to make living further away ok for most people. But again, that basically just creates neighborhoods of software/biotech people and nothing else, which feels terrible.
- Animats 11y agoFirefox/Mozilla now has a new location on the Embarcadero facing the Bay Bridge. They must be really profitable.[1] (Go to the Google Maps link below, and take a look around.) Those deals with Hello and Pocket must be paying off big-time! [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895641,-122.3885496,3a,19y,267.19h,93.54t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sigSMX7SmQMKmDrBG8efoYw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895641,-122.3885496,3a,19y,...
- paulpauper 11y agoThat's why it's smart that millennials are living with their parents longer, using the saved $ to eventually buy a home instead of making the landlord rich. It's not immaturity - it's adaptation.
- myth_buster 11y agoWow, this got dropped from front page pretty fast. I thought the discussion was engaging. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8174583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8174583
- seiji 11y agoSometimes HN seems to have an anti-interseting-topic filter doesn't it?
- myth_buster 11y agoEspecially controversial topics... I think there may be a factor based on points to comments ratio...