What Does It Really Cost to Live in San Francisco?
citylab.com
citylab.com
It's like Beverley Hills. Nobody complains (or at least if they do, they don't get publicity) that it's unfair how expensive it is to live in Beverley Hills; if you can't afford to live in Beverley Hills you live somewhere cheaper.
An unfair comparison perhaps, since Beverley Hills has been super-expensive for decades whereas San Francisco has recently gone from fairly expensive to super expensive, meaning there's a lot of people who could previously afford to rent in San Francisco who no longer can. But that's life, and that's the risk you take if you choose to rent rather than buy.
Regarding SF. they ought to relax the building regulations to make it easier for people to expand their homes, build guest houses to rent out, re-zone areas to allow people to build in higher density etc. This can help increase the supply of houses and drive down the average price to rent.
Ah, but it really wasn't much less 20 years ago. It was STILL expensive compared to everywhere else.
NYC is bigger than Manhattan. The parts of Brooklyn and Queens that aren't filled with rich people (i.e. most of it), as well as the Bronx and Staten Island, are not nearly as expensive as what you might be used to.
Not to mention statistical sampling of rents is always going to skew lower than market because of rent stabilization and rent control - it measures how much people are paying, not how much they would be if they were on the market today.
NYC is 8.5 million people, only ~1 million of whom live in Manhattan.
I haven't looked at the data itself, but if their measure of NYC is the NYC Metro (rather than the city proper), rents will go down too, since now we're including most of North Jersey and a lot of Long Island.
The missing piece is that (relatively) cheap real estate is not advertised, you need to get it from a friend who's leaving SF. It can be frustrating sometimes that good apartments are allocated by seniority (how long you've lived here & who you know) rather then by the free market.
That said its interesting that a place like Mountain View would be both more affordable housing wise and transportation wise. Does anyone compute the local minimum of those three chunks?
And at the game last night (go Giants!) it struck me how the differences between San Francisco (mostly a live in night life kind of place) and San Jose (mostly a work a day not so much nightlife) had their residency cycles inverted from each other. Making me wonder if "urban bedroom communities with restaurants and shopping" will be a thing here in a decade or so.
"Let the city go to hell and then it will adjust" is crappy policy.
I live in Williamsburg, NYC. A lot of people want to live in Williamsburg, NYC. More people than the neighborhood can house. What's the solution to this problem? Preventing landlords from raising rents to what the market will bear seems unfair. Allowing rents to run wild and create problems for existing residents seems unfair, as well.
I know money doesn't at all indicate someone's worth as a human or how great of a contribution they're making to the world. But. In an economy such as ours, it does indicate what kind of TV you can buy, what kind of car you can drive, and what sort of home you can live in.
Oh, and I'm not saying I think housing prices should just be a free-for-all. Regulation is good. But it doesn't get us completely around what seems like the core issue...
Yes, it seems unfair, but that's what ought to be done, as they have made no investments, as compared to the landlords.
http://www.huduser.org/portal/datasets/fmr/fmrs/FY2014_code/...
[1] http://blog.zumper.com/2014/02/here-are-your-january-2014-me...