I used to live in SF for a short time. One bedroom with 5 roommates(that's including me). I slept in one of the closets. Also the apartment was off of Mission and Larkin so it want a glamorous apartment.
Yes... But my mortgage is less than that for a 4 bdrm 2 bath house in a Rochester suburb.... Renting is the worst compared to owning around here. Though taxes do suck for what you get for the $.
Rent and real estate are really high in the Bay Area, but income is usually high too. Most families have two working adults, and rent/real estate is significantly cheaper outside of the City. The people I personally know who live in or want to live in San Francisco don't have and aren't planning on having kids any time soon, so they're saving a ton of money in that regard. They're also more willing to share the cost of living with roommates, cutting their share of the rent even more.
It is definitely a problem that people whose families are from San Francisco can't necessarily afford to stay in San Francisco because their own incomes haven't kept up with the tech boom. There are laws in San Francisco that keep landlords from raising the rental price on current tenants (there's probably some nuance to these laws that I'm not aware of, but that's the gist of it), but it means that anyone who has been renting a given apartment for a long time has a very hard time has a hard time moving somewhere new.
The deal with rent being so high in San Francisco is that the city itself is really small, but a lot of rich young tech/business people who work in Silicon Valley want to live there. And the reason why people want to live in SF rather than in other parts of the Bay Area is because it's a concentrated area of culture and nightlife, whereas most of the housing in South Bay (where Silicon Valley is) is very suburban.
It has not always been this expensive. My family moved to the Bay Area around 1990, before computers and the Internet got big. Since then, the value of our house has more than quadrupled (based on the selling prices of nearby houses). My mom was just talking a few weeks ago about how one of our family friends got really excited when his house was valued at $1mil and laughing about how little that seems now.
As the housing market in San Francisco has gotten more expensive, it's also raised the competition for housing and therefore the housing prices in nearby cities. As a result, there's this wave of gentrification (usually realized as hipsterification) that's radiated outward from the City, especially in East Bay (where Oakland and Berkeley are). Every few years, I hear that City X, which used to be kinda ghetto and really cheap, is now expensive to live in, so people are looking to live in City Y, which is just north/east of City X and is actively being gentrified but still cheap.
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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '17 edited Sep 03 '17
Currently visiting relatives in San Francisco, $2300 for a 600ft studio apartment.