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Comment by mycall | Hacker News Reader

Is that really true?

https://www.craigslist.org/search/subarea/sfc?cat=apa&max_pr...

Shared bedroom, Hercules (50 miles away), Santa Cruz (100 miles away), Shared housing, SRO, SRO, Microapartment, Low Income Housing

Yup, looks true from this

Almost all of these listings are scams... trust me, I have been looking for a new place for the last year.

You need to look for apartments on Facebook Marketplace or Zillow to have any approximation of real rent prices.

The current ask for 850 sqft and decent amenities (dishwasher, washer dryer, etc) in a quiet, central neighborhood is close to $5000/month.

Of those some immediate standouts are:

Scam listings.

One that is >$2k a WEEK.

A bunch of listings not actually in SF.

Anecdotally; A friend of a friend just moved into an awful building on Ellis and is paying $1650/month for a small studio. 1br in my building are renting for $3,300+ and I'm not in a particularly desirable neighborhood, a new building, or a rent-controlled building.

So yeah, it feels really true.

Not really sure how rents are skyrocketing when every 3rd person I know in tech has been laid off in the last year.

> Not really sure how rents are skyrocketing when every 3rd person I know in tech has been laid off in the last year.

Simple: the amount of available housing really is just that low.

I don’t think it’s that simple at all.

I see plenty of vacancies around me.

I think we need to build higher density housing and I also think there is some amount of market manipulation happening.

In SF, the apartment vacancy rate was approaching an absurdly low 3% earlier this year (https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-rent-surg...). Usual estimates put apartment vacancies at at least 5% just to accomodate people moving in and out of buildings in the first place.

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