S.F. apartment rents fell again
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
If I am wrong/that narrative that's spread all over online isn't true, I'd love to learn why the rent falling here suggests something different/is actually due to something different. Otherwise it seems like a pretty simple (boring, stupid) headline/problem/observation?
"City that isn't that desirable to live in due to terrible flaw becomes less valuable"
Maybe I should be a journalist...
The great exodus that made The Narrative explode with how very dead and over the city is? A 0.15% drop in population. We have nowhere to put more people anyway. Where people gonna go if nimbys don’t wanna approve anything?
SF isn’t undesirable, it’s just full.
But also the place I moved 3 years ago was fairly medium density. Now there are 10 high-ish density brand new residential buildings within a 4 block radius. Where I used to live before built 5+ high density residential towers in a few block radius in the 4ish years I lived there.
Perhaps rents are falling because supply is increasing. Drastically and fast.
Potato potahto
I can’t vote so not much I can do about it myself, but I’m def not leaving any time soon.
And in the process making it undesirable for other people already living there.
Are you talking about California? Because SF's population dropped by a lot. SF's population hit 834,046 in July 2022. This is down 6.5% from 881k in 2019
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/popul...
I miss its grungy period and hope it returns. It’s a little too clean and fancy for me at the moment.
This page shows the population of San Francisco declined 6.72% from 2020 to 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco
Something like >300k people commuted into the city every day. That's increasing the population by like 50%.
Would be curious if anyone can find reliable data on this.
But that doesn’t mean the city died. People are still here, you just see them less. Especially if like me you’re one of those folks continuing to work from home and seeing the same few people all the time.
I mean if I judged from my personal experience I’d say there’s 500 people in the city. I even see all the same homeless folk on my runs and can tell who hangs around which block or street corner.
Of course, it might be different if we were actual citizens and owned property here etc. etc. but as long-term visitors, Sydney is hands down nicer than SF.
Going out further countryside - things get real nice.
Though - we are pretty lucky all that being said :)
Hard to get a coffee at night in the city even :(
Outside of 7-11, Starbucks, and Peets (even then COVID's put a hamper on this) It's nearly impossible to get a coffee past mid-afternoon here in the Bay Area.
To me the chatter seems like another round of the far-right panic over "San Francisco values", which has been recurring since the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_values
Especially considering how much tent space is still available off sidewalks and the like
There's hardly a scene for anything you're interested in either. Very small scenes for most things and a real lack of community feel for some strange reason. Maybe it's the lack of mobility around the city? The eccentricness of tech workers? In any case, it sucks.
Paradoxically, despite the lack of mobility, everything worth going to is also permanently crowded. Long wait times for food along with high prices, unnecessary taxes, and restaurants that look like they probably house some rats.
Weather is not bad compared to other cities, but still annoying. It's always just a bit too cold to walk around comfortably in a T-shirt.
It really reminds me of the experience of waiting to get into a nightclub with a mile-long line of dudes (also par for the course in SF, by the way). Walk in, take a look, wonder why anyone waited in the first place, and walk out like a revolving door.
One of the biggest things I saw in my work travels was how low vs high COL affects availability of scenes and community. Where in low cost cities like Pittsburgh and Rochester you have budding communities and scenes, but in places like Boston and NYC, those same type of scenes can't compete. So they shrink or disappear entirely, to be replaced by name brand chains/companies.
It's SFO that's expensive.
Scenes take land, and lots of it for people to live in and do things, and SFO would prefer to pack in more expensive tech workers than anything else
SF invented its way out of its own reason for existing. Companies like Zoom and Google made it possible to work remote, and as the city never diversified its economy, no one really needs to live there. The absurd political situation, where it's illegal to build a house but legal to poop on the sidewalk while smoking meth, has made it also a place no one really wants to live in. It's a story of hubris and the satire writes itself https://babylonbee.com/news/san-francisco-store-clerk-confus...
* Many people were previously forced to live there for jobs
* SF doesn't do as much pushing of the homeless out of the dense parts of town as other big cities (which to be clear I think is probably morally the right choice)
* Government is bloated and trying to do too much
* A motivated political narrative trying to tear the city down
On the other hand I think SF has a lot going for it:
* It's one of the prettiest cities in the country
* It's maybe the most walkable city on the west coast
* The rents are now down compared to some other major walkable cities in the US
* Some of the highest density of parks around, it's usually not far to some pretty nature
* The weather is decent most of the time
* Not as impacted by climate change as many other costal cities
https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+homeless+probl...
What's the truth/who is lying? You, or all of these pictures on the Internet? I'm not suggesting you're wrong. It's just that... in order for you to be right (that it's a worthwhile city), all of these pictures and articles about mass homelessness in/near/around San Francisco need to be wrong.
Or you just have a really high tolerance/aren't bothered by it or its nature/exposure is overstated?
> * SF doesn't do as much pushing of the homeless out of the dense parts of town as other big cities (which to be clear I think is probably morally the right choice)
Why pay to be near something unpleasant?...
> The United States of America is a country between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The land has a total area of 9,831,510 km² (four million mi²) and a total coastline of 19,924 km (12,380.2 mi). This land area is about 1.3 times the size of Australia or 2.3 times the size of the European Union.
Plenty of other places to live in America.
Here's some random photos I took in the past year https://imgur.com/a/Q0ZF1nH. Yes SF has some terrible bits, but just like the US I don't actually have to visit them all the time.
Just because something isn’t happening near you doesn’t mean you’re not part of it’s cause.
kthxbai.
- Public transportation is absolute garbage compared to great cities. Muni coverage is a joke, the fact that the Van Ness Corridor is the only real rapid transit bus line in the entire city is insane
- Nowhere near the prettiest city in the country. My balcony overlooks a good half of the city all the way out to across the Bay and there is so much ugly sprawl between major neighborhoods. For every breathtaking view on a hill overlooking the water there's 10 more that are just ugly.
- Bike unfriendly tracks running everywhere. I broke my leg and felt like I had done something stupid. Then every single person in the hospital was able to call out the street where I was hurt without prompting and confirmed they see people daily from the same few streets.
- The food scene is the worst parts of a major city food scene with none of the upsides. If you want diversity prepare for a pretentious reinterpretation meant to extract extra money from yuppies. For actual diverse food there are clusters of places in places like parts the Mission, but with such crappy transportation actually getting to those clusters is a massive pain.
- The city mostly shuts down at an absurd hour. Trying to run errands at 10pm feels like trying to run them at 3 am in most major cities.
- The general attitude about crime: The crime itself is a dead horse, but the actual general populace just seems to have such a depressing attitude about it, like people casually trading stories about how their homes have been broken into as if it's a badge of honor or something. NYC's loudest detractors are average New Yorkers, while SF's average populace almost seems to treat it as a taboo... I guess only fringe groups like rich people, politicians, and outsiders are allowed to hate on the situation in this city?
Overall, coming from NYC I'm used to expensive, but this city is just way too expensive for what it is. The rent is insane when you take into account the fact people are seriously asking for NYC money to live in this place.
If I had to describe this place in one sentence: Consolation prize of a city priced like it came in 1st. I really dislike it.
edit: and I'll add SF seemed actually significantly below NYC prices now. To get a similar level of apartment to what I have in SF I'd either pay 2-4 hundred extra or move out far enough that it doesn't seem obvious to me I'd have more amenities and public transit within say 30 minutes of me.
In general comparing cities will always be somewhat like comparing sports teams: everyone has a favorite, for different reasons, and there's no right answer. But too many times since I've gotten here I've seen people try to compare SF to places like NYC and LA. I don't even like LA, but I'm not going to try and compare SF to LA because that'd be like comparing an NBA team to a "G League" team. People keep asking me stuff like "SF is just like a mini-NYC right?!" upon hearing where I came from, and I humor them to be nice, but no. It's really not at all.
You're describing a 4 mile journey.
A comparable journey in NYC is SoHo to Central Park.
At best, that's a 30 minute commute in NYC on transit. Probably similar in a car. In LA it's a drive no matter what.
NYC distances just feel longer because they pass more stuff (which to be fair is an argument for NYC).
And this isn't some untouchable problem either: better signage and markings, better separation (I still wince driving past where I fell because people are riding just a couple of feet away from tracks that will injure them), rubber strips that trains can go over while preventing the tracks from swallowing wheels things like bikes and wheelchairs.
This honestly speaks to that problem with the attitude of most of the people who have been here for a while: they just seemed to accept that this awful problem exists, but it's almost treated like a rite of passage. In other cities I feel like there'd be real widespread outrage at the whole situation and something more would happen, yet it's absolutely effortless to find hundreds of cases per year where people are seriously injured and in some cases even killed.
In NYC you can live in an outer borough and commute in for your job, eat cheap (and tasty) in Chinatown, a bodega, a slice shop, or a halal cart, not waste time driving or parking… it all adds up.
In NYC you can live in an outer borough and commute in for your job
But if you leave at 8:30 thinking that you have a 30 minute ride, traffic backs up so badly that taking a bus 25 stops clean across the city to Market and Church, so you can then take a subway is the recommended option, turning it into a 43 minute ordeal.
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In no reality would you ever need to ride 25 stops to get to a subway station from an outer borough in NYC.
Midtown to wall st is 30 minutes of subway riding
You’re overcomplicating the commute. Take the 132 Southbound, about 15 mins during morning rush hour.
My guess, though, is you’re not really complaining about a specific commute as much as the paucity of rail in SF, and other faster commute options than bus. Relatively crummy public transport in SF is a valid gripe.
But in larger context, it seems you’re just not happy in/with SF. Could also be you’re just not happy.
If you’re looking to improve your experience, you might do well to consider that SF probably won’t be “fixed” inside our lifetimes.
I haven't had the opportunity to see let alone take that new line. I'll have to check it out.
That said, the route Marina to FiDi (mentioned in GGP) is at a right angle and about half a mile south of the Chinatown Rose-Pak station.
you have to take a bus backwards for 3 stops just to get to a subway entrance
In no reality would you ever need to ride 25 stops to
get to a subway station from an outer borough in NYC.
The NY subway does not have particularly comprehensive coverage of the outer neighborhoods.
Consolation prize of a city priced like it came in 1st. I really dislike it.
Muni coverage is a joke
the fact that the Van Ness Corridor is the only real rapid transit bus line
in the entire city is insane
For actual diverse food there are clusters of places in places like parts
the Mission, but with such crappy transportation actually getting to those
clusters is a massive pain.
The city mostly shuts down at an absurd hour. Trying to run errands at 10pm
feels like trying to run them at 3 am in most major cities.
If you couldn't piece it together, I'm tolerating living here for things other than the sake of my enjoyment...
> within ¼ mile of a Muni stop
So is that why half of your bus lines make so many stops that they're practically unusable?
Most of your comment is about detailed improvements and rationale behind that system... I'm not a transportation planner: instead I just look at the reality that getting 2.6 miles from my neighborhood by the Panhandle to the Mission is a 15 minute drive, but a 35 minute bus ride that takes 24 stops.
And it's not that's some unusual thing, I shared the example above, that Marina District to Financial District goes from a 30 minute with ~3 miles of transit a 40 minute ride ~7 mile ride across half the city to skirt around car traffic.
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That's what indicates to me that this city needs more BRT lines: Interruptions are one thing, but you're not going to find yourself needing to travel halfway across most major cities in the wrong direction because traffic messes up the direct route every single day
> I think you're conflating New York with most major cities here. Even the London and Tokyo metros don't run 24x7. Most cities, big or small, tend to shut down at night. New York is very much an outlier.
I think you're misreading the comment: The point is that for most major cities "at 3 am you expect a most things to be closed" is a such an obvious concept. But here in SF 10 pm might as well be "3 am".
And it's not that's some unusual thing, I shared the example above, that
Marina District to Financial District goes from a 30 minute with ~3 miles
of transit a 40 minute ride ~7 mile ride across half the city to skirt
around car traffic.
I think you're misreading the comment: The point is that for most major cities
"at 3 am you expect a most things to be closed" is a such an obvious concept.
But here in SF 10 pm might as well be "3 am".
- The city mostly shuts down at an absurd hour. Trying to run errands at 10pm feels like trying to run them at 3 am in most major cities.
This threw me off so much. I feel like you have so many late night option choices in NYC... but that just doesn't exist in SF.
- The crime itself is a dead horse, but the actual general populace just seems to have such a depressing attitude about it,
I hate how SF doesn't try to enforce laws. Yes, we should be extending compassion to the less fortunate... but that doesn't mean we should embrace people committing crime and making it an okay behavior. I feel so unsafe walking around SF.
I wish Target stayed open past 6pm, but for nightlife if you go out on Friday, you don't have to go to sleep until midday Saturday (if your wallet is fat and you're a club rat). Not quite Berlin's Friday -> Monday morning, but that's too much for me.
I wish Target stayed open past 6pm
What does that even mean? Like, what has happened to say NYC or Boston as part of climate change that has made them less desirable, vs SF?
I didn't know this before moving here, I don't know if I'd call it _amazing_ weather but it's certainly odd to watch the rest of the country deal with insane heat and cold while SF basically just... stays at 60.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/back-bay-foundations-could-sink...
It's not just a moral choice. It's also legal issue in the ninth circuit, which has jurisdiction over all the western states. In these states, you can't just sweep the homeless out.
I could live in NYC. I couldn't handle SF.
Back in 2010 I used to work at roughly 7th and Harrison and was generally having a better time of commuting to and within the city.
It will be interesting to watch the progressive establishment switch gears from trying anything and everything to get the influx of money and especially rich migrants to turn the fuck around and go home, to wailing about "disinvestment" (i.e. people doing just that) and how unfair it is that you have to be even minimally responsive to your tax base in order to fund services.
The Fed chairman said the opposite today, it seems people believing that narrative have wishful thinking.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-rate-mo...
For all of the talk of the city being turned into an apocalyptic wasteland, it's still easily a landlord's market and the prices are still astronomical for what you get.
Reducing prices is a selling tool. There's no need to use it if you're already getting customers.
Most landlords will simply never charge less than the maximum they've charged for a building, no matter what. That's why you see inner city areas of most major US metropolitan areas have a ton of shuddered store fronts. I think the main reason this happens is because these landlord groups aren't really trying to maximize revenue, but are trying to validate that their "investment" was a good idea. Because it's a psychological/systemic hangup and not an economic one, we see urban areas become endlessly more expensive and simultaneously less occupied
I didn't realize a DA had the power to pull so many strings behind so many disparate things that made the city a horrible place to live.
Or that under his successor, any of the metrics that a DA is supposed to be responsible for are actually turning around. Are they? They haven't up here in Seattle, despite everyone insisting that a tough-on-crime DA will solve anything...
All of the city's serious problems were around long before him, and will persist in the exact same way, now that he's gone, much like they have in Seattle. You're getting needlessly political about your single pet issue.
Chesa certainly didn't invent the problems, prop 47 and other nonsense is typically Californian, and SF "deserved" Chesa in a way for harboring stupid anti-enforcement policies elsewhere, but he took to the job with gusto and enjoyed blaming things on racists and conservatives when people complained. He spent a year yammering on about how he was fighting anti-asian hate and then a largely asian coalition got rid of him - showing how little even the target of his "benevolence" thought of him.
He specifically took the position of DA because he planned not to do the job. He was "looking for alternatives to prison and incarceration" which is not the job of a DA. His job was to prosecute criminals and let others decide on policies.
Yeah, he shit on SF.
The goalposts sure have shifted over the past decade, now that there's a particular political creature that can be blamed...
The reality is that he wasn't the cause, and his successor won't be the solution, but he has been an excellent lightning rod for the frustration everyone feels.
> also vkou: You mean "totally different stuff"
No. The first things, not the second set of things. Do you feel a need to be this way?
> The goalposts sure have shifted over the past decade
Yeah, that stuff was charming when that's all it was. It was old and crowded and expensive because nothing was modern or planned to be upgraded. How quaint.
> The reality is that [Chesa] wasn't the cause
Yeah, like I already said. But he doubled down on it long after it was clearly stupid and killing people, and he did it ideologically which meant he'd never see facts even if his nose was rubbed in them, and that ideology was based on missing his parents as a child because they were in prison for murdering police and security in an armored car heist. It combines to make him the spokesman for toxic progressivism.
> tons of petty crime (Most metrics of which peaked in the 2016-2019 period, by the way
Everyone in SF knows that's because they don't take reports of petty crime now. They literally don't even log calls - the same way poop on the street became.
CVS and Walgreens have been planning to close stores for years now; they're making big noises about shoplifting etc. in order to deflect blame.
Crime used to be less brazen and more limited to certain areas.
This article says that San Jose is also the more expensive city to rent in.
Can we please redirect our ire toward San Jose as the out-of-touch, overpriced, misgoverned city that no one sane wants to call home?
That's not a selling point for people that are looking for city living. There's a tiny walkable downtown area but that's it. (Though I haven't been there in years and years and years, so maybe that's changed.)
San Jose is, however, significantly more focused on legacy corporations (Oracle, Cisco, IBM). It's also the city of subcontractor companies and rent-a-developer jobs. It has basically zero "tech enthusiast" culture of meetups, reading groups, hackathons, and tech communities.
My experience with people from San Jose is that they like beer and church.
That's an odd stereotype for one of the least-religious places in the US.
As in, as recently as last Friday, I spent an entire dinner night out eating steamed dumplings and overhearing this exact conversation. I've heard it in restaurants and I've heard it in cafes and I've heard it from people just chatting outside. Discussing their admiration for their pastor, or comparing notes about the churches their friends attend. I can easily expect to overhear a "church conversation" by just going to a social place on any given day.
It must be some kind of little-known secret that South Bay is really, really churchy.
Yikes.
Where are all the sub-$2100 places that make this the average? Are they counting rented bedrooms?
So thats partially why you can't find any cheap rents despite the numbers.
Source: I live in a $1800 1200sqft 2br with a garage, in Noe valley - rent controlled. Can't be evicted, can't have rent raised, can't ever afford to move.
Maybe I should start looking around for these rent controlled places…
Most places will be rent-controlled, if they're older buildings (so your master-bedroom situation is probably rent controlled). If the landlord can't provide an exemption certificate from the city, you can assume its rent controlled (you can also ask the city to provide the status for an address).
The best way to find under-market places are to look for for-rent signs and craigslist. Think anything cheap and easy. Again, this landlord isn't making money and doesn't want to spend money. Anecdotally, avoid anything that has changed hands recently, because that landlord just bought the property to profit (and probably has an active loan to pay off). My landlord thought he could buy a property, evict poor residents (illegally) and jack up rent - and its sheer luck someone caught it. It is explicitly illegal to evict a rent-controlled tenant with the intent of increasing rent.
Rent control doesn't determine price once it hits the open market (with some exceptions), but it limits price increases and limits the ability of the landlord to evict you to find a higher-paying tenant. This incentives staying where you are once you find a good-enough place instead of moving around a lot - the goal is to provide a way to keep long-time residents as alternative to home ownership.
So now you have people who are no longer compelled to live in SF by high pay, and SF itself has deteriorated in quality of life due to political decisions. Compared to a "nice place where I have to be", a "crappy place I don't have to be" isn't going to have folks paying the same rent, because they're moving out.
I don't quite understand why this isn't manifesting in NYC yet, but it must happen at some point.