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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

A "nice place" is not a 1 bedroom for $3K/month.

You can't live comfortably in SF proper on less than $120K-150K/year.

There's no reason for this, either. San Francisco has to relax their brain-dead backlash toward high density construction. Los Angeles, too. Is it a California thing in general?

Well... it kind of is. This article (now dated, from 2007) shows the cost of the "right to build" in various US cities. 4 of the top 5 are in California: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o...

Feel free to be cynical in your answer, but why would a property owner who just paid a fortune to buy a single family house in SF want to rezone the neighborhood to see a large apartment complex built next door? Now that they've paid the heavy toll, they stand to lose the most.

It's a vicious cycle. Some behavior has to break it.

That is completely overshooting it. Rent in a safe area starts at $2k a month. At the 2.5% rule, that's 80k of income to qualify.

If you network and land in a rent controlled apartment (a friend of a friend has the 4th floor of a mansion in the haight for $900/month) you can do it for even less.

Maybe more.

A 1-bedroom in a building next door to the Mission Hotel - San Francisco's biggest SRO hotel, located in the Mission District - just went for $2800/mo.

And the building isn't rent controlled.

For trendy neighborhoods like the Mission, yeah $2800 or more is the norm.

I was talking about places like Sunset or Ingleside--not highly desirable, but not Hunters Point or the Bayview.

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