13 ms·

San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

155 points by vector_spaces 8y ago

askafriend 8y ago
On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled to a one bedroom unit in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world. Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements. There are several reasons why the prices have gotten so high (lack of supply, politics, etc). But don’t expect to move your Texas ranch or Midwestern single-family-house lifestyle to SF with no compromises. But in return for your compromises, you will get quite a bit in return. Is it worth it? That’s a very personal decision. For many, it’s not. For many, it is.
- webo 8y ago
  >no one is entitled to a one bedroom I’m curious how do you mean this? There are a plenty of reasons as to why I wouldn’t want to have a roommate and a 2bd is not affordable.
  - thatoneuser 8y ago
    Basically if you can't afford it then you're not a victim...
  - abakker 8y ago
    Entitled is not the same as just getting what you want. If you can afford it, great. If you can’t afford it, nothing else entitles you to have it.
    - learc83 8y ago
      There's nothing inherent in that. Any more than it's inherent that in a system that awards apartments based on time on a waiting list, that time on a waiting list entitles you to an apartment in that system. The argument is whether we should somehow alter what entitles you to an apartment in our system.
  - Laremere 8y ago
    You cut off the important bit "in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world." It's about location, not living space.
- learc83 8y ago
  It's not about whether any specific person deserves to live in a specific place. There is a cost to society in effectively pricing out half of the population from an entire city. Is the benefit of mitigating that worth the cost? For what it's worth, I think that it probably is.
  - askafriend 8y ago
    > It's not about whether any specific person deserves to live in a specific place. I never said anything about if someone deserves to live somewhere. A 1-bedroom apartment is a very specific type of unit and that's part of what I wanted to point out. You can also rent studios, converted rooms, or get roommates in a bigger place with more rooms. There's a lot of other options I'm leaving out too, but I reject the premise that everyone in SF absolutely requires a 1-bedroom apt as an essential. It's nice to have certainly, and having roommates isn't for everyone...but there are tradeoffs to every place you live. You can absolutely make SF work if that was your desire and you knew the tradeoffs.
    - learc83 8y ago
      The price for a studio isn't going to be far behind a 1 bedroom, and rooms in houses aren't really an option for for people who aren't single in most cases. Even if you wanted to cram multiple people into one 12x12 room, most cheap rooms for rent are explicit about 1 person only. Look at median household income, San Francisco is effectively off limits to most people.
      - askafriend 8y ago
        Point taken. We definitely have a problem but I really don’t see any solution anytime soon. Even if we committed to building a ton of new supply tomorrow, it’d still take years to get approved and actually physically built. I’ll push back a little on your point back alternatives not being too far behind the price of a 1 bedroom though. I know several people with units <$1800. Some converted rooms go for <$1500.
        8y ago
- cft 8y ago
  Except for rent controlled tenants that is
- wycs 8y ago
  People are entitled to build whatever they want on their property. As Silicon Valley is ruled by rent seekers who make building illegal, people have every right to complain.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    > People are entitled to build whatever they want on their property Not in a world where zoning and nuisance laws exist, with good reasons.
    - jogjayr 8y ago
      No one's proposing to build a sewage treatment plant on this land. It's just more housing, in a city where people go without a roof over their head because it's too expensive. There's no "nuisance" here, only landowners trying to assert rights over their neighbors' property.
  - Cyclone_ 8y ago
    "Rent seekers who make building illegal"? I don't think it's the people seeking rent who would make building illegal.
    - isoskeles 8y ago
      "Rent seeking" is a specific term in economics referring to people who seek to extract wealth from the economy without adding to it in any way, e.g. "make building illegal" in order to force up the value of their own property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
      - Cyclone_ 8y ago
        Thanks for sharing, did not know of that term, but I must say it's a rather confusing choice of words!
        8y ago
- wbl 8y ago
  This is more expensive than Manhattan, Tokyo, every European capital, etc. It's more expensive because unlike most other cities San Francisco has very few residential apartment buildings. Make SF into Manhattan and watch prices fall.
  - omegaworks 8y ago
    >Make SF into Manhattan and watch prices fall. I don't see how that follows. Manhattan is Manhattan, and yet prices still rise, families and communities are still displaced, and there are still people that are un or under-housed. In America, housing is an asset that appreciates in value for the purpose of resale. For the middle class, housing has been the primary means of accruing wealth and for many is the entirety of their retirement savings. A society that guaranteed housing to every citizen would be fundamentally, structurally different than the one we live in today. It's not a simple urban planning problem.
    - Zenbit_UX 8y ago
      You don't understand how Manhattan optimized for density before prices rose this high? The parent is saying if SF had the housing density of Manhattan it would take decades of more growth before prices reach NYC levels.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  Gotta ask, because this issue comes up in many major cities: And what if the service workers who make substantially less than the higher earners who so rely on them? Does the cost go down that much for a 4 bedroom split between four people on minimum wage? In a lot of places it doesn’t.
  - ndnxhs 8y ago
    The service workers move somewhere else where they can afford to live. The ones that remain can demand a higher price for their work
    - afarrell 8y ago
      ...When they are actually working. But if you are fired from the job, you still need to pay rent for the time it takes to find a new job. Having high rent reduces your personal “runway”. This makes bootstrapped startups hard and it makes like as a lower-income worker very risky/stressful
      - ndnxhs 8y ago
        If you don't like the risk/stress there are plenty of other places to live. If you choose to live in SF when you can't afford it then that just not a wise decision. Eventually the prices will even out and you will just have to pay $30 for a sandwich.
    - 52-6F-62 8y ago
      Is that happening? Are service workers in SF paid a living wage? Or are people like fast food workers being paid minimum wage and commuting 2 hours?
      - ndnxhs 8y ago
        That is their choice. The market will only correct if people make rational choices.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled to a one bedroom in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world. Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements. New York is the “human epicenter” in the US. San Francisco is in the same tier as Houston or DC: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2018t.html https://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2018t.html. Paying New York/London prices to live in a city that is not New York or London is just sad.
  - jdavis703 8y ago
    > Paying New York/London prices to live in a city that is not New York or London is just sad. I’m coming to this point. If I’m going to pay a New York level rent I might was well enjoy a 24/7 subway, a plethora of good restaurants and a beach that’s actually warm in the summer.
    - seppin 8y ago
      And actual culture.
      - oleganza 8y ago
        To the downvoters: I moved to SF/BA 3 years ago after living 8 years in Paris (France) and before that 20 years in St. Petersburg (Russia). There is noticeably more culture and diversity in both Paris and SPb than in SF/BA.
        joshuamorton 8y ago
        What is "culture" in this context? (I mean this sincerely)
        ascar 8y ago
        Not parent, but I would define it as "Monuments" to visit (e.g. Eiffel tower), history of the area, culture entertainment like museums or theaters (i.e. not just movies, but opera, plays, musicals or concerts) and maybe regional activities (e.g. surfing in CA, but Octoberfest in Munich). I haven't been to SF yet, but based on that Sankt Petersburg, Paris or NY seem more significant than SF.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Roommates and alternative living situations are necessary because our housing policy is to preserve the Texan/Midwestern single-family-house lifestyles of existing homeowners. And not just to preserve them, but to keep sightlines clear of evidence that someone else might be living a different lifestyle nearby. People are not entitled to 1BRs, but they are even less entitled to streets curated for 1-2 story detached houses at trivial distances from that human epicenter.
  - 420codebro 8y ago
    Type harder, we still don't care.
- slavapestov 8y ago
  > Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements. Is “alternate living arrangements” a euphemism for homelessness?
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  This only applies if you’re a single person. How is someone supposed to start a family and afford to live anywhere near that area? I think we are reaching a really depressing future if only the wealthy can afford to have a family. Bay Area is the most extreme example but we see it everywhere with no government mandated leave policies and childcare costs are insane. Again, only the wealthy get these services because they work at companies that use them for recruiting purposes and to retain talent.
cm2012 8y ago
For those who live in SF - what's the cost of a one bedroom rent 1 hour from most jobs in SF? I know in NYC you can reliably get that for around 1500.
- chucky_z 8y ago
  $3,689.99
- fermentation 8y ago
  I think part of the issue is that a lot of places outside of SF are places where people want to live and work (who also make lots of money). Lots of people want to live in Palo Alto, Oakland, Mountain View, etc so the prices don't really go down that much as you move further out.
- gesman 8y ago
  $4500-$5000/mo 3-4 bedroom single family house in San Mateo. Perfect, safe location right in between San Francisco and San Jose, close to good schools, close to Caltrain station, close to major highways - 92, 101 and 280. About 40-45 minutes from SF and San Jose time wise regardless of time of the day. That’s where the premiums comes from
- mavelikara 8y ago
  Walnut Creek is about 40m away from SF on Bart. So door-to-door that'd be about an hour commute. Safe, picturesque, good schools and vibrant downtown. The rent there would be about $1800 for a 1BDR. EDIT: As noted by the sibling post, the reason it is cheap is because Walnut Creek does not have very many tech jobs. Also, the peculiar thing about the Bay Area is that about 15 years or so the tech industry oscillates its epicenter between San Francisco and the South Bay. From Walnut Creek you can reach San Francisco in an hour, but if you have clients/partners/HQ etc in South Bay it is one bad commute.
  - cm2012 8y ago
    Thanks! So it's not that much more expensive than NYC.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sys_64738 8y ago
I always wonder how those who are not in the high paying jobs can afford to live there. I'm talking about police, fire, EMS, coffeehouse workers, etc.
- NTDF9 8y ago
  Policemen make six figures. Others commute from 2 hours in.
  - i_am_nomad 8y ago
    To be fair, police (and firefighters) make six figures because they have powerful unions who finance the campaigns of the very people who decide their salaries. Ironic that the people charged with protecting our communities are the ones destroying them.
    - NTDF9 8y ago
      I can't blame them. They need living income. The only people destroying this place are NIMBYs who won't allow faster construction of more units. Ultimately businesses have to relocate to find talent. Seattle, Austin, NYC and Boston are super well-positioned. Amazon HQ2 is important for this very reason. It is a gigantic churner of talent and can do wonders.
    - 14 8y ago
      I am very curious as to what they are going to do for revenue when the self driving cars take over and prevent the millions of dollars in fines drives acquire each year.
      - smsm42 8y ago
        I wonder how self-driving cars would change parking situation. SF profits a lot from parking tickets - about $300m/year - and the situation with parking is usually abysmal, which in turn enhances that income. But if you can just have you car drive somewhere by itself to remote parking and then have it come back when needed... that changes the whole equation.
dthal 8y ago
Note that Zumper is not a reliable source for median rent data. CityObservatory wrote an article about their data problems a few years ago [1]. Zumper's data is, of course, based on apartments that are for rent and doesn't include currently occupied units. That alone skews high, especially when there is a lot of higher-rent new construction hitting the market. Also, it looks like Zumper's data skews towards higher-end neighborhoods. For a broader look at the rental market, including occupied units and rent-controlled units, you could just consult ACS data. That says that median rent for all occupied 1-bedrooms in San Fransisco was $1912 in 2017 [2]. [1] http://cityobservatory.org/journalists-should-be-wary-of-median-rent-reports/ http://cityobservatory.org/journalists-should-be-wary-of-med... [2] https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25031&geo_ids=16000US0667000&primary_geo_id=16000US0667000 https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25031&geo_ids=...
- Zanni 8y ago
  My first thought, on reading the source of the data, is that the article was probably prompted by a press release from Zumper. I don't know this, but if reporting a record high gets them press for their app, they'll certainly be biased towards finding a record high. What a poorly sourced article.
  - dthal 8y ago
    From that CityObservatory article: Zumper has also made a name for itself through its “National Rent Reports” —more or less monthly press releases that claim to track median rental prices around the country. These reports have received copious media coverage, from the Bay Area to Seattle to Nashville to Chicago to Boston to LA to Miami to Denver, and so on.
  - johnvanatta 8y ago
    Paul Graham wrote a great essay on this: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html From what I've seen, it's definitely true, most "news" is at least influenced by PR firms. Part of why (now old school) blogs are so refreshing to read in contrast. I remember working at a startup, and our marketing person once asked the engineers to do some quick data analysis to get a soundbite just like this.
NTDF9 8y ago
I just visited New York on an extended trip. Most of NYC is better connected, more vibrant, more concerts, more sports, more universities, more housing, more international people, more business activity. Yet, NYC is affordable with a "functioning" commute system. People on all spectrum of income can live there. SF bay area has none of all that and yet is super expensive wasteland of suburbia. SF city is better but not even comparable to major cities of the world. The only thing SF has going on for it is weather, outdoors (for which you need a car and a parking spot) and tech companies. For any young padawans considering SF, it has its attractions but you won't know what a bubble it is until you get out. It's not worth spending one single life in the bubble.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  SF is not the Bay Area, the data often gets confused. And SF is oddly very, very different from San Jose or Palo Alto - they're literally different climates, like 10 degrees differential on most days! SF proper is a very small city, less than 1m people!.
  - NTDF9 8y ago
    That is true. That's why I wrote: >> SF bay area has none of all that and yet is super expensive wasteland of suburbia. SF city is better but not even comparable to major cities of the world. Most SV jobs are in the bay area. Even concerts, sports, shows in SF are in bay area not in SF proper. SF proper is smaller than Jersey City or Brooklyn, with lesser walking stores/restaurants, lesser community activities and anyone not in a rent controlled apartment cannot live a life without stress in SF proper.
- hindsightbias 8y ago
  NYC has something like 1M rent stabilized units.
yingw787 8y ago
I think high rent prices are bad for a number of reasons: Less flexibility in starting a company: You can't choose to bootstrap unless you do it as a side hustle at a megacorp, and it's hard to not compete with a megacorp because it does everything. You have to take VC funding and follow VC rules to some degree, and it may not be a direction you wish to follow. This is a feedback loop. Oligopsony employment conditions: If you wish to build savings and not spend all your money on rent, you can really only work for the largest and best funded companies, and even then you need to negotiate at a disadvantage, since they have far more information on the employment markets (because they're big) and they each know the other big players (because they're few) and can bound salaries through price leadership. This is also a feedback loop. I'm concerned we will see fewer "real" companies like Intel/Apple, and more Snapchat clones and e-scooter startups. Less meaningful bets, less drive, and more complacency -- borne out of the desire to cannibalize social trust (e.g. if you work hard, you earn shelter) and the societal fabric (e.g. all people deserve shelter as a basic human right) for privatized financial gain.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >all people deserve shelter as a basic human right I hear this a lot and it still makes absolutely no sense. Where will they get the shelter from? What if the builder doesn't want to build a house for that person? Is the plan to force the labor out of them? Every positive right that I have ever seen comes along with an implicit demand that somebody else become a slave.
  - timcameronryan 8y ago
    There's no shortage of builders. You can just compensate those workers with taxes. If you think taxes are also a form of slavery, that's a different discussion.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      You can't fulfill a basic human right contingent on enough taxes coming in. If it's really a basic human right, insufficient revenues or unexpectedly high prices are not an excuse. If your country ran out of money, if the builders all started working for foreign companies, and if housing was really being treated like a human right, you'd have to make builders work without pay, or at least involuntarily. Providing housing most of the time is just a program. Providing housing all of the time with no exceptions, like you would expect from a human right, involves some serious distortions of other values. That's the problem, people are using the word human right when they mean high priority. It's a high priority that I do my laundry, but if society were organized so that I did my laundry at all costs, if we were all convinced that a society where I did not do my laundry did not deserve to exist, then things would get pretty crazy.
superkuh 8y ago
And in addition to that because it's San Franscisco you don't really own your own home or apartment. You just have a set of things you are allowed to do on it on the whim of the city (ie, no airbnb).
refurb 8y ago
The data is suspect. Anecdotally, and throw browsing the Craigslist classifieds, the rental market seems to have softened some since the peak a year or two ago. Specifically looking at the Mission, there was a time that a sub-$3000 one bedroom was very rare. Now you can find plenty in the $2500-$3000 range and even some decent ones below $2500. There is also more inventory.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
It's an existential issue. "Peter Thiel: The vast majority of the capital I give companies is just going to landlords" [1] [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-vast-majority-capital-give-companies-just-going-landlords-134709786.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-vast-majority-cap...
- adrianN 8y ago
  He could try giving capital to companies in other locations. Rent in Berlin in less than a third of what you pay in SF.
  - gumby 8y ago
    True, but having lived in Berlin (Prenzlauer Berg) and Bay Area (Palo Alto) I have to tell you the scenes, and intensity, are very very different. SV in particular (Moreno than SF) is very tech oriented while Belin is more e-commerce and food delivery. Thiel in particular is German and has made some particularly scathing comments about the German startup scene (to the German press).
  - mavelikara 8y ago
    But that implies he might have to make trips to those places. Well, he's the one with the money, so he's going to optimize for his convenience.
  - ferongr 8y ago
    Maybe (most likely to be honest) his ROI is worse in those cases.
towaway1138 8y ago
When headhunters contact me about SF (or even Bay Area) jobs, I just scoff and shut them down. If you're fresh out of school, no family, and willing to live in a hovel for some interesting life experience, sure. But if you're an adult, it's no way to live. And putting kids through it is frankly unethical.
- stale2002 8y ago
  Well it depends. I'll agree with you that if you work at a rando tech startup, the costs of living are going to be quite high, and make it probably not worth it. But, the whole equation changes if you are working for a big 5 tech company, or hot unicorn company. These companies will pay you double what the rando startups pay. Who really cares if you are paying 40k a year on rent, if your total compensation breaks 250K. And getting 250k+ as an engineer, with a couple years experience, is only really possible in the Bay area.
  - moftz 8y ago
    But the cost of living is so high there that the inflated salaries are pretty much required to bring anyone out there. A company wants to have competitive hiring so they offer a little bit more than competition so what was a $200k job is now $220k. Prices increase to what these inflated salaried workers can afford and the cycle continues. It will be incredible to watch when SF finally starts to allow for more high density housing. Housing prices will fall and the salary bubble will pop. A lot of companies will start cutting back on starting salaries and as a result, experienced workers will start either taking paycuts to switch jobs or be first in line for layoffs because they cost the company too much.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      This gets causality backwards. Employers don't give a shit about whether employees can afford housing - if they did, we wouldn't have such a big homelessness problem, and our teachers/firefighters/policemen wouldn't live over the mountains in Pleasanton. Employers pay enough to prevent employees from going to a competitor. The reason FANG salaries now hit $300-400K is because Facebook refused to play ball with the wage-fixing cartel that Schmidt/Jobs/et al had worked out, then the DoJ cracked down, and so now that's what you need to pay to keep your software engineers from working for someone else. Then you have a lot of tech workers with extremely fat salaries and not enough housing for everyone who wants to live here, so they bid up rents & housing prices until they're unaffordable for all the middle-income folks who used to live here. If more high-density housing was built, then rents would fall, middle-income people could live here again, and tech workers could pocket their fat salaries as savings (or live extremely lavish lifestyles). They would still be paid a lot, because there'd always be another tech company around the corner willing to bid up wages to their current level. For the salary "bubble" to pop, a lot of these companies would have to go out of business at once. This was exactly what happened in 2001 and 2009, and it had the predicted results: unemployment spiked, wages fell, rents fell, and people moved out of the Bay Area back to wherever they came from.
pcurve 8y ago
"The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development said last year that a family of four earning up to $118,400 qualified as "low income" in the city. " For comparison, in NYC, it's $83,450.
- cm2012 8y ago
  Median household income in NYC is 50k, which is an interesting contrast.
ksec 8y ago
Excuse my ignorance. SF doesn't look anywhere like Hong Kong, possibly the most crowed places on earth, and it is not close to Tokyo or Seoul. It has plenty of Spaces, for many coming from Asia, most part of SF is like country side so to speak. What cant there be more housing development on the edge of SF, or taller building with many smaller apartments etc. Underground packing lot? Edit: Ok, is it because it is in an Earthquake zone?
- supermw 8y ago
  Why build more housing if people will continue to happily pay these prices to live here? The goal isn't to cram as many people as possible in a single pcity.
- bpye 8y ago
  Tokyo is certainly an earthquake zone as well so I don't think that explains it.
  - gotocake 8y ago
    Tokyo is an earthquake zone in a country with a total liveable land mass that could comfortably fit inside a single US state. In fact the totality of all land in all of Japan, including mountains, is smaller than California. A lack of options will drive people into close quarters, but no such pressure exists in San Francisco. Wanting to be close to venture capital isn’t as compelling an build a megalopolis as some people with vested interests seem to think, no matter how much they dress up the issue with altruistic claims about the homeless. The truth is that it’s prime real estate with a beautiful climate, and risks of earthquakes aside (and you can’t avoid natural disasters of some kind wherever you live) lots of people would like to live there. That’s no more an argument to build build build than it is to knock down any existing popular city or town and build high rises. While this argument is often derided as “NIMBYism” it is also true that it is in fact already some people’s back yard in the first place. A balance needs to be struck between the people and interests who’ve invested generations in a place, and people who want to flood in and change it to suit their desires.
    - 8y ago
gumby 8y ago
I do t want to install the app just to find out: hasn’t this been true in Palo Alto for some time? My ex pays more than that and her place is hardly de luxe.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  Palo Alto is particularly expensive because of how luxe the area is (from what I understand).
  - gumby 8y ago
    I first moved to Palo Alto in 1984 and can assure you that luxe it is not.
scarejunba 8y ago
You just have to pay attention. Last year this time people said it was $3400, but I rented for $2300 that May.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  It makes me mildly annoyed that people are getting cheaper rents than me in SF than I am near Boston. Are these luxury places?
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    They are not. It's just a standard 1 br. SF is a bit peculiar. There are some things I should call out which are different in most rentals in comparison to luxury rentals: * No Washer/Dryer in the unit. You'll usually share. * No parking spot. * No-one will be around to pick up parcels for you. * You'll have to put the rubbish bins out for the bin man. * The stove and fridge and heating won't be using the latest stuff. You're not expecting to have a Nest or a Viking but you won't get a nice stove either, it'll be very basic. Honestly, it's a downgrade in standard of living for me but not to the point that it annoys me. Those things were just luxuries. Really the washer/dryer being in my unit is the one thing I really miss.
seanhandley 8y ago
I have a 4-bedroom house in the country and the mortgage for it is 5 times smaller. Absolute madness.
Criper1Tookus 8y ago
Rampant homelessness accompanied by outrageous home prices only wealthy people can afford. California’s bubble will soon burst, you can only tax the rich so much...
ScottAS 8y ago
Where I live in Atlantic Canada you can rent the same for $550 USD, or just buy a brand new modern home for $180k USD. People here work remotely for companies like Google. The government will also help fund your startup’s product development through various programs (hundreds of thousands of dollars). Always wanted to move to San Fran but starting to feel pretty grateful about being here.
- shdh 8y ago
  How large is the remote ecosystem there?
arisAlexis 8y ago
Barcelona, Amsterdam. Same/better quality of life

155 points by vector_spaces 8y ago

On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled to a one bedroom unit in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world. Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements. There are several reasons why the prices have gotten so high (lack of supply, politics, etc). But don’t expect to move your Texas ranch or Midwestern single-family-house lifestyle to SF with no compromises. But in return for your compromises, you will get quite a bit in return. Is it worth it? That’s a very personal decision. For many, it’s not. For many, it is.

webo 8y ago
>no one is entitled to a one bedroom I’m curious how do you mean this? There are a plenty of reasons as to why I wouldn’t want to have a roommate and a 2bd is not affordable.
- thatoneuser 8y ago
  Basically if you can't afford it then you're not a victim...
- abakker 8y ago
  Entitled is not the same as just getting what you want. If you can afford it, great. If you can’t afford it, nothing else entitles you to have it.
  - learc83 8y ago
    There's nothing inherent in that. Any more than it's inherent that in a system that awards apartments based on time on a waiting list, that time on a waiting list entitles you to an apartment in that system. The argument is whether we should somehow alter what entitles you to an apartment in our system.
- Laremere 8y ago
  You cut off the important bit "in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world." It's about location, not living space.
learc83 8y ago
It's not about whether any specific person deserves to live in a specific place. There is a cost to society in effectively pricing out half of the population from an entire city. Is the benefit of mitigating that worth the cost? For what it's worth, I think that it probably is.
- askafriend 8y ago
  > It's not about whether any specific person deserves to live in a specific place. I never said anything about if someone deserves to live somewhere. A 1-bedroom apartment is a very specific type of unit and that's part of what I wanted to point out. You can also rent studios, converted rooms, or get roommates in a bigger place with more rooms. There's a lot of other options I'm leaving out too, but I reject the premise that everyone in SF absolutely requires a 1-bedroom apt as an essential. It's nice to have certainly, and having roommates isn't for everyone...but there are tradeoffs to every place you live. You can absolutely make SF work if that was your desire and you knew the tradeoffs.
  - learc83 8y ago
    The price for a studio isn't going to be far behind a 1 bedroom, and rooms in houses aren't really an option for for people who aren't single in most cases. Even if you wanted to cram multiple people into one 12x12 room, most cheap rooms for rent are explicit about 1 person only. Look at median household income, San Francisco is effectively off limits to most people.
    - askafriend 8y ago
      Point taken. We definitely have a problem but I really don’t see any solution anytime soon. Even if we committed to building a ton of new supply tomorrow, it’d still take years to get approved and actually physically built. I’ll push back a little on your point back alternatives not being too far behind the price of a 1 bedroom though. I know several people with units <$1800. Some converted rooms go for <$1500.
      - 8y ago
cft 8y ago
Except for rent controlled tenants that is
wycs 8y ago
People are entitled to build whatever they want on their property. As Silicon Valley is ruled by rent seekers who make building illegal, people have every right to complain.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  > People are entitled to build whatever they want on their property Not in a world where zoning and nuisance laws exist, with good reasons.
  - jogjayr 8y ago
    No one's proposing to build a sewage treatment plant on this land. It's just more housing, in a city where people go without a roof over their head because it's too expensive. There's no "nuisance" here, only landowners trying to assert rights over their neighbors' property.
- Cyclone_ 8y ago
  "Rent seekers who make building illegal"? I don't think it's the people seeking rent who would make building illegal.
  - isoskeles 8y ago
    "Rent seeking" is a specific term in economics referring to people who seek to extract wealth from the economy without adding to it in any way, e.g. "make building illegal" in order to force up the value of their own property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
    - Cyclone_ 8y ago
      Thanks for sharing, did not know of that term, but I must say it's a rather confusing choice of words!
      - 8y ago
wbl 8y ago
This is more expensive than Manhattan, Tokyo, every European capital, etc. It's more expensive because unlike most other cities San Francisco has very few residential apartment buildings. Make SF into Manhattan and watch prices fall.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  >Make SF into Manhattan and watch prices fall. I don't see how that follows. Manhattan is Manhattan, and yet prices still rise, families and communities are still displaced, and there are still people that are un or under-housed. In America, housing is an asset that appreciates in value for the purpose of resale. For the middle class, housing has been the primary means of accruing wealth and for many is the entirety of their retirement savings. A society that guaranteed housing to every citizen would be fundamentally, structurally different than the one we live in today. It's not a simple urban planning problem.
  - Zenbit_UX 8y ago
    You don't understand how Manhattan optimized for density before prices rose this high? The parent is saying if SF had the housing density of Manhattan it would take decades of more growth before prices reach NYC levels.
52-6F-62 8y ago
Gotta ask, because this issue comes up in many major cities: And what if the service workers who make substantially less than the higher earners who so rely on them? Does the cost go down that much for a 4 bedroom split between four people on minimum wage? In a lot of places it doesn’t.
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  The service workers move somewhere else where they can afford to live. The ones that remain can demand a higher price for their work
  - afarrell 8y ago
    ...When they are actually working. But if you are fired from the job, you still need to pay rent for the time it takes to find a new job. Having high rent reduces your personal “runway”. This makes bootstrapped startups hard and it makes like as a lower-income worker very risky/stressful
    - ndnxhs 8y ago
      If you don't like the risk/stress there are plenty of other places to live. If you choose to live in SF when you can't afford it then that just not a wise decision. Eventually the prices will even out and you will just have to pay $30 for a sandwich.
  - 52-6F-62 8y ago
    Is that happening? Are service workers in SF paid a living wage? Or are people like fast food workers being paid minimum wage and commuting 2 hours?
    - ndnxhs 8y ago
      That is their choice. The market will only correct if people make rational choices.
rayiner 8y ago
> On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled to a one bedroom in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world. Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements. New York is the “human epicenter” in the US. San Francisco is in the same tier as Houston or DC: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2018t.html https://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2018t.html. Paying New York/London prices to live in a city that is not New York or London is just sad.
- jdavis703 8y ago
  > Paying New York/London prices to live in a city that is not New York or London is just sad. I’m coming to this point. If I’m going to pay a New York level rent I might was well enjoy a 24/7 subway, a plethora of good restaurants and a beach that’s actually warm in the summer.
  - seppin 8y ago
    And actual culture.
    - oleganza 8y ago
      To the downvoters: I moved to SF/BA 3 years ago after living 8 years in Paris (France) and before that 20 years in St. Petersburg (Russia). There is noticeably more culture and diversity in both Paris and SPb than in SF/BA.
      - joshuamorton 8y ago
        What is "culture" in this context? (I mean this sincerely)
        ascar 8y ago
        Not parent, but I would define it as "Monuments" to visit (e.g. Eiffel tower), history of the area, culture entertainment like museums or theaters (i.e. not just movies, but opera, plays, musicals or concerts) and maybe regional activities (e.g. surfing in CA, but Octoberfest in Munich). I haven't been to SF yet, but based on that Sankt Petersburg, Paris or NY seem more significant than SF.
closeparen 8y ago
Roommates and alternative living situations are necessary because our housing policy is to preserve the Texan/Midwestern single-family-house lifestyles of existing homeowners. And not just to preserve them, but to keep sightlines clear of evidence that someone else might be living a different lifestyle nearby. People are not entitled to 1BRs, but they are even less entitled to streets curated for 1-2 story detached houses at trivial distances from that human epicenter.
- 420codebro 8y ago
  Type harder, we still don't care.
slavapestov 8y ago
> Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements. Is “alternate living arrangements” a euphemism for homelessness?
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
This only applies if you’re a single person. How is someone supposed to start a family and afford to live anywhere near that area? I think we are reaching a really depressing future if only the wealthy can afford to have a family. Bay Area is the most extreme example but we see it everywhere with no government mandated leave policies and childcare costs are insane. Again, only the wealthy get these services because they work at companies that use them for recruiting purposes and to retain talent.

cm2012 8y ago

For those who live in SF - what's the cost of a one bedroom rent 1 hour from most jobs in SF? I know in NYC you can reliably get that for around 1500.

chucky_z 8y ago
$3,689.99
fermentation 8y ago
I think part of the issue is that a lot of places outside of SF are places where people want to live and work (who also make lots of money). Lots of people want to live in Palo Alto, Oakland, Mountain View, etc so the prices don't really go down that much as you move further out.
gesman 8y ago
$4500-$5000/mo 3-4 bedroom single family house in San Mateo. Perfect, safe location right in between San Francisco and San Jose, close to good schools, close to Caltrain station, close to major highways - 92, 101 and 280. About 40-45 minutes from SF and San Jose time wise regardless of time of the day. That’s where the premiums comes from
mavelikara 8y ago
Walnut Creek is about 40m away from SF on Bart. So door-to-door that'd be about an hour commute. Safe, picturesque, good schools and vibrant downtown. The rent there would be about $1800 for a 1BDR. EDIT: As noted by the sibling post, the reason it is cheap is because Walnut Creek does not have very many tech jobs. Also, the peculiar thing about the Bay Area is that about 15 years or so the tech industry oscillates its epicenter between San Francisco and the South Bay. From Walnut Creek you can reach San Francisco in an hour, but if you have clients/partners/HQ etc in South Bay it is one bad commute.
- cm2012 8y ago
  Thanks! So it's not that much more expensive than NYC.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sys_64738 8y ago

I always wonder how those who are not in the high paying jobs can afford to live there. I'm talking about police, fire, EMS, coffeehouse workers, etc.

NTDF9 8y ago
Policemen make six figures. Others commute from 2 hours in.
- i_am_nomad 8y ago
  To be fair, police (and firefighters) make six figures because they have powerful unions who finance the campaigns of the very people who decide their salaries. Ironic that the people charged with protecting our communities are the ones destroying them.
  - NTDF9 8y ago
    I can't blame them. They need living income. The only people destroying this place are NIMBYs who won't allow faster construction of more units. Ultimately businesses have to relocate to find talent. Seattle, Austin, NYC and Boston are super well-positioned. Amazon HQ2 is important for this very reason. It is a gigantic churner of talent and can do wonders.
  - 14 8y ago
    I am very curious as to what they are going to do for revenue when the self driving cars take over and prevent the millions of dollars in fines drives acquire each year.
    - smsm42 8y ago
      I wonder how self-driving cars would change parking situation. SF profits a lot from parking tickets - about $300m/year - and the situation with parking is usually abysmal, which in turn enhances that income. But if you can just have you car drive somewhere by itself to remote parking and then have it come back when needed... that changes the whole equation.

dthal 8y ago

Note that Zumper is not a reliable source for median rent data. CityObservatory wrote an article about their data problems a few years ago [1]. Zumper's data is, of course, based on apartments that are for rent and doesn't include currently occupied units. That alone skews high, especially when there is a lot of higher-rent new construction hitting the market. Also, it looks like Zumper's data skews towards higher-end neighborhoods. For a broader look at the rental market, including occupied units and rent-controlled units, you could just consult ACS data. That says that median rent for all occupied 1-bedrooms in San Fransisco was $1912 in 2017 [2]. [1] http://cityobservatory.org/journalists-should-be-wary-of-median-rent-reports/ http://cityobservatory.org/journalists-should-be-wary-of-med... [2] https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25031&geo_ids=16000US0667000&primary_geo_id=16000US0667000 https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25031&geo_ids=...

Zanni 8y ago
My first thought, on reading the source of the data, is that the article was probably prompted by a press release from Zumper. I don't know this, but if reporting a record high gets them press for their app, they'll certainly be biased towards finding a record high. What a poorly sourced article.
- dthal 8y ago
  From that CityObservatory article: Zumper has also made a name for itself through its “National Rent Reports” —more or less monthly press releases that claim to track median rental prices around the country. These reports have received copious media coverage, from the Bay Area to Seattle to Nashville to Chicago to Boston to LA to Miami to Denver, and so on.
- johnvanatta 8y ago
  Paul Graham wrote a great essay on this: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html From what I've seen, it's definitely true, most "news" is at least influenced by PR firms. Part of why (now old school) blogs are so refreshing to read in contrast. I remember working at a startup, and our marketing person once asked the engineers to do some quick data analysis to get a soundbite just like this.

NTDF9 8y ago

I just visited New York on an extended trip. Most of NYC is better connected, more vibrant, more concerts, more sports, more universities, more housing, more international people, more business activity. Yet, NYC is affordable with a "functioning" commute system. People on all spectrum of income can live there. SF bay area has none of all that and yet is super expensive wasteland of suburbia. SF city is better but not even comparable to major cities of the world. The only thing SF has going on for it is weather, outdoors (for which you need a car and a parking spot) and tech companies. For any young padawans considering SF, it has its attractions but you won't know what a bubble it is until you get out. It's not worth spending one single life in the bubble.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
SF is not the Bay Area, the data often gets confused. And SF is oddly very, very different from San Jose or Palo Alto - they're literally different climates, like 10 degrees differential on most days! SF proper is a very small city, less than 1m people!.
- NTDF9 8y ago
  That is true. That's why I wrote: >> SF bay area has none of all that and yet is super expensive wasteland of suburbia. SF city is better but not even comparable to major cities of the world. Most SV jobs are in the bay area. Even concerts, sports, shows in SF are in bay area not in SF proper. SF proper is smaller than Jersey City or Brooklyn, with lesser walking stores/restaurants, lesser community activities and anyone not in a rent controlled apartment cannot live a life without stress in SF proper.
hindsightbias 8y ago
NYC has something like 1M rent stabilized units.

yingw787 8y ago

I think high rent prices are bad for a number of reasons: Less flexibility in starting a company: You can't choose to bootstrap unless you do it as a side hustle at a megacorp, and it's hard to not compete with a megacorp because it does everything. You have to take VC funding and follow VC rules to some degree, and it may not be a direction you wish to follow. This is a feedback loop. Oligopsony employment conditions: If you wish to build savings and not spend all your money on rent, you can really only work for the largest and best funded companies, and even then you need to negotiate at a disadvantage, since they have far more information on the employment markets (because they're big) and they each know the other big players (because they're few) and can bound salaries through price leadership. This is also a feedback loop. I'm concerned we will see fewer "real" companies like Intel/Apple, and more Snapchat clones and e-scooter startups. Less meaningful bets, less drive, and more complacency -- borne out of the desire to cannibalize social trust (e.g. if you work hard, you earn shelter) and the societal fabric (e.g. all people deserve shelter as a basic human right) for privatized financial gain.

whatshisface 8y ago
>all people deserve shelter as a basic human right I hear this a lot and it still makes absolutely no sense. Where will they get the shelter from? What if the builder doesn't want to build a house for that person? Is the plan to force the labor out of them? Every positive right that I have ever seen comes along with an implicit demand that somebody else become a slave.
- timcameronryan 8y ago
  There's no shortage of builders. You can just compensate those workers with taxes. If you think taxes are also a form of slavery, that's a different discussion.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    You can't fulfill a basic human right contingent on enough taxes coming in. If it's really a basic human right, insufficient revenues or unexpectedly high prices are not an excuse. If your country ran out of money, if the builders all started working for foreign companies, and if housing was really being treated like a human right, you'd have to make builders work without pay, or at least involuntarily. Providing housing most of the time is just a program. Providing housing all of the time with no exceptions, like you would expect from a human right, involves some serious distortions of other values. That's the problem, people are using the word human right when they mean high priority. It's a high priority that I do my laundry, but if society were organized so that I did my laundry at all costs, if we were all convinced that a society where I did not do my laundry did not deserve to exist, then things would get pretty crazy.

superkuh 8y ago

And in addition to that because it's San Franscisco you don't really own your own home or apartment. You just have a set of things you are allowed to do on it on the whim of the city (ie, no airbnb).

refurb 8y ago

The data is suspect. Anecdotally, and throw browsing the Craigslist classifieds, the rental market seems to have softened some since the peak a year or two ago. Specifically looking at the Mission, there was a time that a sub-$3000 one bedroom was very rare. Now you can find plenty in the $2500-$3000 range and even some decent ones below $2500. There is also more inventory.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

It's an existential issue. "Peter Thiel: The vast majority of the capital I give companies is just going to landlords" [1] [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-vast-majority-capital-give-companies-just-going-landlords-134709786.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-vast-majority-cap...

adrianN 8y ago
He could try giving capital to companies in other locations. Rent in Berlin in less than a third of what you pay in SF.
- gumby 8y ago
  True, but having lived in Berlin (Prenzlauer Berg) and Bay Area (Palo Alto) I have to tell you the scenes, and intensity, are very very different. SV in particular (Moreno than SF) is very tech oriented while Belin is more e-commerce and food delivery. Thiel in particular is German and has made some particularly scathing comments about the German startup scene (to the German press).
- mavelikara 8y ago
  But that implies he might have to make trips to those places. Well, he's the one with the money, so he's going to optimize for his convenience.
- ferongr 8y ago
  Maybe (most likely to be honest) his ROI is worse in those cases.

towaway1138 8y ago

When headhunters contact me about SF (or even Bay Area) jobs, I just scoff and shut them down. If you're fresh out of school, no family, and willing to live in a hovel for some interesting life experience, sure. But if you're an adult, it's no way to live. And putting kids through it is frankly unethical.

stale2002 8y ago
Well it depends. I'll agree with you that if you work at a rando tech startup, the costs of living are going to be quite high, and make it probably not worth it. But, the whole equation changes if you are working for a big 5 tech company, or hot unicorn company. These companies will pay you double what the rando startups pay. Who really cares if you are paying 40k a year on rent, if your total compensation breaks 250K. And getting 250k+ as an engineer, with a couple years experience, is only really possible in the Bay area.
- moftz 8y ago
  But the cost of living is so high there that the inflated salaries are pretty much required to bring anyone out there. A company wants to have competitive hiring so they offer a little bit more than competition so what was a $200k job is now $220k. Prices increase to what these inflated salaried workers can afford and the cycle continues. It will be incredible to watch when SF finally starts to allow for more high density housing. Housing prices will fall and the salary bubble will pop. A lot of companies will start cutting back on starting salaries and as a result, experienced workers will start either taking paycuts to switch jobs or be first in line for layoffs because they cost the company too much.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    This gets causality backwards. Employers don't give a shit about whether employees can afford housing - if they did, we wouldn't have such a big homelessness problem, and our teachers/firefighters/policemen wouldn't live over the mountains in Pleasanton. Employers pay enough to prevent employees from going to a competitor. The reason FANG salaries now hit $300-400K is because Facebook refused to play ball with the wage-fixing cartel that Schmidt/Jobs/et al had worked out, then the DoJ cracked down, and so now that's what you need to pay to keep your software engineers from working for someone else. Then you have a lot of tech workers with extremely fat salaries and not enough housing for everyone who wants to live here, so they bid up rents & housing prices until they're unaffordable for all the middle-income folks who used to live here. If more high-density housing was built, then rents would fall, middle-income people could live here again, and tech workers could pocket their fat salaries as savings (or live extremely lavish lifestyles). They would still be paid a lot, because there'd always be another tech company around the corner willing to bid up wages to their current level. For the salary "bubble" to pop, a lot of these companies would have to go out of business at once. This was exactly what happened in 2001 and 2009, and it had the predicted results: unemployment spiked, wages fell, rents fell, and people moved out of the Bay Area back to wherever they came from.

pcurve 8y ago

"The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development said last year that a family of four earning up to $118,400 qualified as "low income" in the city. " For comparison, in NYC, it's $83,450.

cm2012 8y ago
Median household income in NYC is 50k, which is an interesting contrast.

ksec 8y ago

Excuse my ignorance. SF doesn't look anywhere like Hong Kong, possibly the most crowed places on earth, and it is not close to Tokyo or Seoul. It has plenty of Spaces, for many coming from Asia, most part of SF is like country side so to speak. What cant there be more housing development on the edge of SF, or taller building with many smaller apartments etc. Underground packing lot? Edit: Ok, is it because it is in an Earthquake zone?

supermw 8y ago
Why build more housing if people will continue to happily pay these prices to live here? The goal isn't to cram as many people as possible in a single pcity.
bpye 8y ago
Tokyo is certainly an earthquake zone as well so I don't think that explains it.
- gotocake 8y ago
  Tokyo is an earthquake zone in a country with a total liveable land mass that could comfortably fit inside a single US state. In fact the totality of all land in all of Japan, including mountains, is smaller than California. A lack of options will drive people into close quarters, but no such pressure exists in San Francisco. Wanting to be close to venture capital isn’t as compelling an build a megalopolis as some people with vested interests seem to think, no matter how much they dress up the issue with altruistic claims about the homeless. The truth is that it’s prime real estate with a beautiful climate, and risks of earthquakes aside (and you can’t avoid natural disasters of some kind wherever you live) lots of people would like to live there. That’s no more an argument to build build build than it is to knock down any existing popular city or town and build high rises. While this argument is often derided as “NIMBYism” it is also true that it is in fact already some people’s back yard in the first place. A balance needs to be struck between the people and interests who’ve invested generations in a place, and people who want to flood in and change it to suit their desires.
  - 8y ago

gumby 8y ago

I do t want to install the app just to find out: hasn’t this been true in Palo Alto for some time? My ex pays more than that and her place is hardly de luxe.

akhilcacharya 8y ago
Palo Alto is particularly expensive because of how luxe the area is (from what I understand).
- gumby 8y ago
  I first moved to Palo Alto in 1984 and can assure you that luxe it is not.

scarejunba 8y ago

You just have to pay attention. Last year this time people said it was $3400, but I rented for $2300 that May.

akhilcacharya 8y ago
It makes me mildly annoyed that people are getting cheaper rents than me in SF than I am near Boston. Are these luxury places?
- scarejunba 8y ago
  They are not. It's just a standard 1 br. SF is a bit peculiar. There are some things I should call out which are different in most rentals in comparison to luxury rentals: * No Washer/Dryer in the unit. You'll usually share. * No parking spot. * No-one will be around to pick up parcels for you. * You'll have to put the rubbish bins out for the bin man. * The stove and fridge and heating won't be using the latest stuff. You're not expecting to have a Nest or a Viking but you won't get a nice stove either, it'll be very basic. Honestly, it's a downgrade in standard of living for me but not to the point that it annoys me. Those things were just luxuries. Really the washer/dryer being in my unit is the one thing I really miss.

seanhandley 8y ago

I have a 4-bedroom house in the country and the mortgage for it is 5 times smaller. Absolute madness.

Criper1Tookus 8y ago

Rampant homelessness accompanied by outrageous home prices only wealthy people can afford. California’s bubble will soon burst, you can only tax the rich so much...

ScottAS 8y ago

Where I live in Atlantic Canada you can rent the same for $550 USD, or just buy a brand new modern home for $180k USD. People here work remotely for companies like Google. The government will also help fund your startup’s product development through various programs (hundreds of thousands of dollars). Always wanted to move to San Fran but starting to feel pretty grateful about being here.

shdh 8y ago
How large is the remote ecosystem there?

arisAlexis 8y ago

Barcelona, Amsterdam. Same/better quality of life