Renting a 1-bedroom apartment near BART in the Bay Area | Hacker News Reader

Renting a 1-bedroom apartment near BART in the Bay Area

blog.onradpad.com

49 pointsjedberg45 comments

I find this data very 'surpising'. Average rent in Rockridge: 1775, Average Rent in Fruitvale: 2300. For those not familiar, Rockridge is probably the fanciest, most expensive neighborhood in Oakland, whereas Fruitvale is a 'hood where you won't find a lot of people walking around after dark.

Looks like it could be a geocode problem. A search for "Fruitvale BART Station" on RadPad lands you in Old Oakland / Civic Center area.

Agreed, I think their data must be sparse for some areas but it would be nice to see them post at least the number, mean, median and standard deviation for each region. Also be interesting to grab data off craigslist to compare.

See my reply below, but the main issue is that they didn't use walking or driving distance from the station but a straight 1/2 mile radius, which is grabbing neighboring not-so-good neighborhoods.

Also Orinda being one of the lowest priced stops makes no sense.

Founders, if you are reading this: When I click on the top left http://d.pr/i/JLux , please take me to the main site. It seems a bit counter intuitive, but I wanted to know what you guys do and there was no way other than to edit the URL (I’ve made the same mistakes).

Great post!

It only gets harder if you happen to have kids and are looking for decent schools. Would be interesting to see an infographic like this with both rent and school quality included.

The bay area is great when you're young with no kid. As soon as you have kids it's better to move.

I think you mean the San Francisco area, which, yes, is terrible once you have a family. South Bay (Cupertino/San Jose) and deep East Bay (Fremont/Castro Valley) are relatively safe areas with several good schools. I don't have kids or live in the Bay Area anymore, but I know many people who grew up there and still have younger family growing up there.

...and commute time. The mission and 24th price quoted at $2.8k is a 15 minute commute to downtown SF compared to a 51 minute commute from the Milbrae at $1.8k. That's $12k over a year compared to 37 work days of extra commute time, which is more than a month and a half of work days over the course of the year. Starting tech salary for a new college grad is what, $110k? With all the free time in the world, it might be worth it, but go up from there and it quickly gets questionable.

Although commute by transit isn't entirely wasted. Turning some time into dedicated "you should be reading now" time is almost worth paying for.

You are still broadly correct, though - people underweight the importance of a short commute.

If you have kids and want decent schools you do what I did.

Leave the bay area. I'm up in Yuba City now. Full time work from home bay area job.

If that's the case, Millbrae is a great stop. It has good schools, a safe downtown with many local shops, and a library. These are all within walking distance of the BART station. As an added bonus the station is the only station that also houses the Caltrain.

The only draw back is that a ride to/from say, the Embarcadero can be fairly long at times, sometimes approaching 45 mins off peak. Yes, I know it's only supposed to be 35 mins, but from my experience it's always a bit longer.

I'd like to see school quality and rent prices broken out by demographics as well, particularly race and ethnicity.

As European, I'm usually astonished about the massive salaries that IT companies pay. When taking the rent into account, though, then it's a vastly different picture - I'd even say that in some of the mentioned areas the renters will have less income after rent and taxes than I have in Munich, Germany's 2nd expensive city.

Same impression (from Brussels, Belgium). + as a freelancer, it's actually quite possible to get rates in Brussels that are around 80% of what you can get in California (500€/day is totally possible).

For the record, for the rent of a 1 bedroom appartment in SF, you can get a 240 square meters house in the center of Brussels.

For the metric impaired, that's about 2400 sq feet, which sounds like a king's palace and in the center of the city to boot!

And I forgot to mention that it is to pay a mortgage on the house, not renting it. (Renting would be a bit less expensive).

Others consider programmers underpaid, even at these salaries. This makes some sense when considering that Google has a revenue of around $500k/employee (saw this number a while ago in a comment, don't remember exactly which one).

Germany is pretty great for rent and general cost of living in some lovely cities. London is probably even worse than San Francisco, though.

Which companies pay that, though? I just spoke to a company in Hamburg that was offering me about 1/2 what I'd make in SF after calculating the cost of living difference and conversion to USD.

Another thing to remember is that US salaries are also quoted before taxes while I've noticed European usually quote income after taxes

In which European country did you see salary after taxes? In France is usually before taxes.

There's also the issue that there's not just one group of taxes: there's what your employer pays, and then there's what you personally pay. In at least France and Belgium, salaries typically include the former, but not the latter; whereas in the US, most people get their employer to withhold towards their personal taxes.

A couple folks have mentioned some of the numbers being off and not passing the sniff test. It's important to look at the methodology. All they did was calculate the median for all rentals within 1/2 mile of the station, as the crow flies.

Glen Park is a perfect example of how this goes wrong. It's right next to a freeway, and the homes right on the other side in the not so good neighborhood, while far away from BART, are counted because as the crow flies they are very close.

Also, actual Glen Park[1] has almost no apartment buildings -- it's almost entirely single-family homes.

So if you're only looking at apartments-for-rent within the given radius, your data is going to be almost entirely dominated by places in Sunnyside, Excelsior, and Diamond Heights.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Glen+Park,+San+Francisco

RadPad is a company with a sexist and inappropriate launch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kXTual0lfk

Probably worth watching before making up your mind about the startup.

I didn't notice the sexism. It is extremely cringeworthy, though.

Median posted rental prices may not be a great metric. Some comparisons don't pass the smell test - West Oakland should not be more expensive than Glen Park or Berkeley. Berkeley should not be cheaper than Fruitvale or Lake Merritt.

They're using too large a radius for their pricing data, so e.g. the weirdly low Glen Park number includes a good portion of Excelsior.

Or too small. In some cases, I bet there might just be one new luxo-lifestyle super expensive apartment building right next to the station, and nothing else.

Does anybody have children in SF? How is it possible with these rent prices?

About 80% of folks I know with kids leave San Francisco before they turn 5. The big issues are high rent, variability of school quality and logistics getting kids+gear around. City has done some great work to upgrade the kid's parks but the rent, schools and logistics make it very expensive to raise kids in SF.

In 2012, at least, SF had the lowest percentage of children of any major city in the country:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/families-flee-san-f...

It depends if you mean SF or are including the surrounding area.

The few people I know with kids in SF proper are either dual-income or did well on a startup. Some people live in the Sunset, which is more suburban -- still expensive but at least a little more kid friendly.

Most everyone else I know leaves the city for a suburb. Essentially having kids means your commute gets longer!

(Although in my case it actually got a lot shorter because I also got a job a lot closer to home in the South Bay instead of working in SF).

Dual income. Very little left over.

I think there has to be an error for that Orinda number. There's no way anything is that cheap in Orinda.

These costs are highly biased by the fact that most older apartments are multi-bedroom dwellings. Single bedroom apartments in the Mission or SoMa are newer buildings charging higher rates. A room in a 3 bdr apartment in the Mission is ~$1,000 - 1,400 / month.

I'd like to see the followup post, "how we spent time and money creating a useless infographic". If the data is just bad (see HN comments here), how is it in any way helpful? You have to start with valid data.

Bad title. None of the Bart stops / communities they discuss are "in" San Francisco.

Agreed, but HN requires me to copy the title exactly. Otherwise I would have changed it to appeal to a more global audience.

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