Why we moved our startup from San Francisco to Berkeley
berkeleyside.com
berkeleyside.com
Plus if you want to live in the Downtown area, you'll be competing with students who want to be right next to campus. Since the spending power of a software engineer far outweighs that of a student, the students are going to get royally screwed on this.
Downtown Berkeley is already pretty close to San Francisco rents. I recommend getting out of the zone where you are competing with Cal students. Near Ashby BART to be closer to nightlife and Oakland/San Francisco, or near North Berkeley BART for a safer, quieter existence.
Those provided for by family will see their parents/grandparents get screwed, and some of those parents may well be part of the software community...
20% may not sound like a lot, but I'm pretty sure grad student stipends haven't gone up more than a few % over the same time. I wonder how much rent around a university can rise before the situation becomes unsustainable (the university either needs to provide subsidized housing, or it'll lose prestige as good students switch to universities that aren't surrounded by housing bubbles.)
Thanks for posting this. I have a nice sunny one bedroom apartment for $1000/month a few blocks away from UC campus, which I'm only getting for that price because I pretended to move in with my friend, when in actuality he was moving out of the building after living there for around 4 years. So our names are both on the lease, but only I live there [1]. The prices in the building have gone up over 30% in the past few years - the units now rent for $1350+, which is still pretty cheap for the city.
Anyway, my friend was thinking of moving out on paper (i.e., getting his name off of the lease), but now I'll have to convince him not to do that. I doubt I'd be able to afford an extra $350 a month in rent on my stipend... I think I'll have no choice but to stay here for at least my entire grad school program to milk the rent control as long as possible, because rent really seems to be exploding in Berkeley. (Not to the extent that it is in SF, of course.)
[1] Throwaway account because I'm not sure whether this is legal. It's not as if the lease says "All tenants listed must be present in the unit for at least X hours per month", so in theory it doesn't seem like it should be illegal, but it seems a bit...sketchy.
I believe if your name is actually on the lease, you are protected by rent control the same way as the original tenants. What a lot of landlords (like mine) do is deliberately avoid adding new housemates to the lease, basically treating them as subletters who then aren't protected by rent control.
See: http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/Rent_Stabilization_Board/Home/G...
> The new roommates are considered subtenants of the original occupants as long as they do not sign a lease or rental agreement with the landlord
> Thus, a landlord may implement a vacancy increase (i.e., establish a new initial rent) by giving 30 days' written notice if (1) there has been a complete turnover of original occupants; (2) none of the remaining occupants lawfully resided in the unit before January 1, 1996; (3) none of the remaining occupants has signed a lease or rental agreement with the landlord
Our office is based in Mountain View but lately a lot of coworkers have been going to Santa Cruz on weekends to play beach volleyball, surf, and kick back. Looking at Craigslist, I'm seeing a ton of office space centrally located in downtown Santa Cruz for around $1-$2 a square foot which is about 50-70% less than space in SF/Palo Alto and wondering why there hasn't been more of a migration there.
Apart from people like the CTO who had a fantastic place nestled deep in a small valley in between the nearby redwoods, or the CEO who had a huge house in Santa Cruz and had his sailing boat in the harbour.
(I'm sure the same is true in SF, of course.)
Berkeley has not coalesced as a software startup hub because city zoning policies discriminate against software companies. Large swaths of real estate are reserved for food production companies and some biotech space. Definitely start your food companies here, and there are small built out lab spaces available here if you're doing biochemistry.
Eventually zoning policy will change and then Berkeley can more firmly integrate itself into the greater Silicon Valley.