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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

It's true; the more-affordable housing corresponds with the empty areas of this map: http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/105/2/4/San_Francisco...

I think techies just have a stronger desire to live near transit than the previous generation of San Franciscans did.

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Driving in the Bay Area is much, much worse than it was in 1998 when I moved here (and it was already pretty bad compared to the 80s, I imagine). I just spent seven months looking for a house within half a mile of a BART station because minimizing the need to drive is extremely important to me.

It's not just that techies yearn form public transportation. It's not practical to drive to downtown SF. San Francisco is certainly expensive, but much of that cost can be absorbed by not owning a car, not paying for parking downtown, and earning a higher wage.

For anyone working downtown and living in a place that itself doesn't have parking, a car is mostly a liability.

Proximity to transit options raises prices, which when you need "at least two" bedrooms is a sizable increase. Like pbreit said above, there are much less expensive parts of the city, but people mostly decide to leave once they feel they "must" have a 3 bedroom place or a private yard.

I think it's more that they must have proximity to transit, and the ones who can't afford that figure that if they're going to be forced to live a car-centric lifestyle, they might as well move out to the suburbs where the prices are somewhat cheaper than SF's transit-poor neighborhoods.

That's a good observation. For me it's an either/or thing: Either I'm going to live in an area with good public transit, or I'm going to live in an area where I can drive a car to work in less than half an hour with convenient, free parking on both ends.

Transit-poor SF neighborhoods are the worst of both worlds.

True. Also, many parts of North Bay are fairly affordable, but commuting time may be as much as ~1h with no public transportation.

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