I 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)
Non SF person here. Can anyone explain? With exploding demand it should have trickled there by now ( Bayview, Excelsior)
Paris and London have pretty fantastic transit.
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.
I'd guess any European city is better than NYC, which is the best that America has.
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.
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.
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.
I also walk down these streets frequently late at night to buy stuff from the Safeway. I don't think it's very dangerous.
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.
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.
http://inhabitat.com/nyc/wp-content/blogs.dir/2/files/2013/1...