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While this is technically fine, the process strikes me as unnecessary. I suppose that's not too surprising for somebody new to the area and mostly experiencing

While this is technically fine, the process strikes me as unnecessary. I suppose that's not too surprising for somebody new to the area and mostly experiencing it from scary anecdotes. The list of "San Francisco" neighborhoods being searched are almost all more than 1.2 miles from BART. I'm sure it's hard to find an apartment if you have a robot excluding nearly all listings. FWIW, there's been an apartment vacant in my building for 2+ weeks, with very few open house attendees. Other nearby buildings are much the same. If you're willing to look slightly outside the most desirable neighborhoods, it isn't that hard to find an apartment. Affordable? Well that's another story; this is SF after all.

yarou 10y ago
> If you're willing to look slightly outside the most desirable neighborhoods, it isn't that hard to find an apartment. Not trying to be pedantic but "willing to look slightly outside" is pretty ambiguous for a city like SF. The Tenderloin is slightly outside of Nob Hill, a very upscale and posh/safe neighborhood, whereas the Tenderloin greets you with used heroin needles on the street, homeless crackheads running around, and the noise of constant sirens. I agree with you on affordability, though. Number one reason why I'm glad I'm back in the South Bay. Also, I'd rather enjoy the laid back nightlife of Los Gatos or Campbell over the Marina or Polk Street (20 year old sorority girls puking all over the place) any day.
- mcpherrinm 10y ago
  Sure, don't live in the Tenderloin. But that doesn't mean you can't live in Forest Hill, or the Excelsior, or Balboa Park, or West Portal. I find lots of people totally discount what I think are some of the nicer parts of SF to live in because they're not walking distance from the mission.
  - kelnos 10y ago
    I think that's just a matter of priorities and lifestyle. SF is an odd city in that there are some super residential, almost suburban, neighborhoods inside the city limits. I think it's personally reasonable to disqualify a neighborhood if it's not near one that you expect to hang out a lot in. I certainly don't mean to disparage any of the neighborhoods you mention, but I spend most of my time in the northeastern quadrant of SF, and love to walk everywhere, so those neighborhoods would be out of the question for someone like me. If I were a little more amenable to driving/riding, I could easily see myself living in a quieter neighborhood, given that I certainly value the ability to have a quiet(er) place to live and sleep soundly!
  - kbar13 10y ago
    how's the public transit in those areas?
    - uiri 10y ago
      Balboa Park has a BART station. The K, L and M lines of the Muni Metro serve Forest Hill, West Portal. The L line goes to the SF Zoo but the K and M (along with the J) lines terminate at Balboa Park station. Personally, I prefer the Metro over BART due to its cleanliness and frequency of service. I'm not sure about transit in Excelsior but I don't think it is that great.
      - mcpherrinm 10y ago
        Much of the Excelsior is a short walk to Balboa Park or Glen Park BART/Muni
kelnos 10y ago
> The list of "San Francisco" neighborhoods being searched are almost all more than 1.2 miles from BART. I'm sure it's hard to find an apartment if you have a robot excluding nearly all listings. They only filtered by BART distance for the listings outside San Francisco: "Priya and I knew we’d both be traveling to San Francisco a lot, so we wanted to live near public transit if we weren’t going to be [in] SF."
encoderer 10y ago
Trulia has a filter to find rentals within walking distance from a transit stop.
- DINKDINK 10y ago
  Trulia has even better tech than that: They have a time-commute topology map dependent on your destination
  - chrisan 10y ago
    For those interested: http://www.trulia.com/local/san-francisco-ca/driving:1|transit:0|position:37.775112;-122.419329|time:60_commute http://www.trulia.com/local/san-francisco-ca/driving:1|trans...
amazingman 10y ago
What neighborhood? I remember looking at quite a few studio(-plus) apartments in ... let's call it "difficult" areas about a year ago. None of them were under $2800/month. The bit in the article about timing resonated most with me. We ended up finding a place because I responded to a listing ~4min after it went up.
randomdrake 10y ago
> If you're willing to look slightly outside the most desirable neighborhoods, it isn't that hard to find an apartment. This is true for anything with less than 2 bedrooms. If you are looking for anything with 2 bedrooms or more (not a studio, one bedroom, or roommate situation) then finding an apartment within the northern Bay Area, including East Bay, downtown, or the peninsula, is quite difficult regardless of price. Edit: from the post it does look like they were looking for a one bedroom place. They're using python-craigslist[1]. From the readme it doesn't look like it exposes the bedrooms under "CraigslistHousing" but the code tells a different story in __init__.py[2] and does seem to snag "bedrooms" and "bathrooms" as well as additional properties. Just in case anyone was looking to fork this and add some handling for the number of bedrooms or bathrooms. [1] - https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist [2] - https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist/blob/master/craigslist/__init__.py#L320 https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist/blob/mast...
bayonetz 10y ago
Recently moved to SF and wanted to be able pick prospective apartments from Craigslist based on how close they were to BART/Muni stops...so I hacked together a little bookmarklet to help with this. Check it out if you are in the same boat: https://github.com/christopher-skeels/add-walking-times-to-transport-on-craigslist-sf https://github.com/christopher-skeels/add-walking-times-to-t...

yarou 10y ago

> If you're willing to look slightly outside the most desirable neighborhoods, it isn't that hard to find an apartment. Not trying to be pedantic but "willing to look slightly outside" is pretty ambiguous for a city like SF. The Tenderloin is slightly outside of Nob Hill, a very upscale and posh/safe neighborhood, whereas the Tenderloin greets you with used heroin needles on the street, homeless crackheads running around, and the noise of constant sirens. I agree with you on affordability, though. Number one reason why I'm glad I'm back in the South Bay. Also, I'd rather enjoy the laid back nightlife of Los Gatos or Campbell over the Marina or Polk Street (20 year old sorority girls puking all over the place) any day.

mcpherrinm 10y ago
Sure, don't live in the Tenderloin. But that doesn't mean you can't live in Forest Hill, or the Excelsior, or Balboa Park, or West Portal. I find lots of people totally discount what I think are some of the nicer parts of SF to live in because they're not walking distance from the mission.
- kelnos 10y ago
  I think that's just a matter of priorities and lifestyle. SF is an odd city in that there are some super residential, almost suburban, neighborhoods inside the city limits. I think it's personally reasonable to disqualify a neighborhood if it's not near one that you expect to hang out a lot in. I certainly don't mean to disparage any of the neighborhoods you mention, but I spend most of my time in the northeastern quadrant of SF, and love to walk everywhere, so those neighborhoods would be out of the question for someone like me. If I were a little more amenable to driving/riding, I could easily see myself living in a quieter neighborhood, given that I certainly value the ability to have a quiet(er) place to live and sleep soundly!
- kbar13 10y ago
  how's the public transit in those areas?
  - uiri 10y ago
    Balboa Park has a BART station. The K, L and M lines of the Muni Metro serve Forest Hill, West Portal. The L line goes to the SF Zoo but the K and M (along with the J) lines terminate at Balboa Park station. Personally, I prefer the Metro over BART due to its cleanliness and frequency of service. I'm not sure about transit in Excelsior but I don't think it is that great.
    - mcpherrinm 10y ago
      Much of the Excelsior is a short walk to Balboa Park or Glen Park BART/Muni

kelnos 10y ago

> The list of "San Francisco" neighborhoods being searched are almost all more than 1.2 miles from BART. I'm sure it's hard to find an apartment if you have a robot excluding nearly all listings. They only filtered by BART distance for the listings outside San Francisco: "Priya and I knew we’d both be traveling to San Francisco a lot, so we wanted to live near public transit if we weren’t going to be [in] SF."

encoderer 10y ago

Trulia has a filter to find rentals within walking distance from a transit stop.

DINKDINK 10y ago
Trulia has even better tech than that: They have a time-commute topology map dependent on your destination
- chrisan 10y ago
  For those interested: http://www.trulia.com/local/san-francisco-ca/driving:1|transit:0|position:37.775112;-122.419329|time:60_commute http://www.trulia.com/local/san-francisco-ca/driving:1|trans...

amazingman 10y ago

What neighborhood? I remember looking at quite a few studio(-plus) apartments in ... let's call it "difficult" areas about a year ago. None of them were under $2800/month. The bit in the article about timing resonated most with me. We ended up finding a place because I responded to a listing ~4min after it went up.

randomdrake 10y ago

> If you're willing to look slightly outside the most desirable neighborhoods, it isn't that hard to find an apartment. This is true for anything with less than 2 bedrooms. If you are looking for anything with 2 bedrooms or more (not a studio, one bedroom, or roommate situation) then finding an apartment within the northern Bay Area, including East Bay, downtown, or the peninsula, is quite difficult regardless of price. Edit: from the post it does look like they were looking for a one bedroom place. They're using python-craigslist[1]. From the readme it doesn't look like it exposes the bedrooms under "CraigslistHousing" but the code tells a different story in __init__.py[2] and does seem to snag "bedrooms" and "bathrooms" as well as additional properties. Just in case anyone was looking to fork this and add some handling for the number of bedrooms or bathrooms. [1] - https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist [2] - https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist/blob/master/craigslist/__init__.py#L320 https://github.com/juliomalegria/python-craigslist/blob/mast...

bayonetz 10y ago

Recently moved to SF and wanted to be able pick prospective apartments from Craigslist based on how close they were to BART/Muni stops...so I hacked together a little bookmarklet to help with this. Check it out if you are in the same boat: https://github.com/christopher-skeels/add-walking-times-to-transport-on-craigslist-sf https://github.com/christopher-skeels/add-walking-times-to-t...