While I agree with a lot of what you say, this: Is delusional. Cheapest unit available in San Fran right now: 750sqft shithole, yours for $1500/mo with a $42k downpayment.$2k a month for a one-bedroom apartment is insane, that would buy a pretty nice pad downtown
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4675541420.html http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4666530716.html http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4664739228.html I was talking about renting, of course.
LOL. As one of the delusional fools trying to get into one of these spots for 6 months before giving up and going to Oakland, GOOD LUCK EVEN GETTING THE DAMN PLACE. at a minimum: -Have 6 months of paycheck stubs -at least 2 months of rent deposit (NOT including the first month's rent) -have the landlord/roommates (not even like, but) love you -Don't have a pet Have all this the day you go for an interview, stand around with 20 other people all equally vying for the place with better stories than yours, bring some damn baked goods, and you probably still don't get the spot. If you live in SF, you know this already, don' play. Your $800 a month would drive some people to murder.
Yes. Which is all of SF all of the damn time right now. I was doing this from Jan-August. I made no mistakes. Still moved to Oakland. You're arguing the wrong thing here. You found a cheap spot, you got lucky, good on you this doesn't work out for most other people. You're also touching on a thing that is a hella sensitive issue for a lot of people in the bay nowadays, and being rather obtuse about it, I might add.The biggest mistake people make is trying to rent when everyone else is as well.
I don't know what everyone else is doing wrong then, because my place certainly wasn't an outlier in my search. It was the best deal I found, which is why I took it, but there were plenty of other, even cheaper units I was looking at. Had I not gotten the place I did, I'm sure I would have wound up in one of the other, equally reasonably priced places I was looking at.
You're buying the neighborhood there. Also, there's this if you are looking to buy: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4124-Geary-Blvd-San-Francisco-CA-94118/2105682283_zpid/
You could reside the shit outta that pizza place! ...I was gonna try and play it off like I meant to do that but to be honest that was a total fuck up. Anyways, wages are higher here which offsets the enormous price of living, and expensive-ass houses are what we call "retirement plans". When you're ready to retire, you sell your house and move to Utah or some shit where a mansion costs the same as a cheeseburger and live off the profits.
This is becoming glaringly obvious.I grew up in one of those $1m+ suburban houses you talked about
Which was why I said that in the first place. It's useful to consider my perspective in this sort of a discussion. What isn't useful is throwing that back at me like an insult. I hold no illusions regarding income inequality and which side of the disparity I'm on, but I can't simply cast away my biased experiences and replace them with others' because I understand I have a bias.
Hey - I pay $2650/mo for 3 bedrooms near the ocean in Los Angeles. But that doesn't make it any less crazy. And if you're renting it, you don't get to sell it. Let's have a come-to-Jesus: You can go to Ikea. You can buy a shitty-ass Poang Chair. And you can sit it in your $2000/mo 400sqft apartment and it will take up nine square feet. $45 a month of your rent goes to having a place for that fuckin' chair to sit. It only cost you seventy bucks. Let's put it in San Fran terms: You bought a BMW 5 series. if you were spending as much on your parking spot, comparatively, as you're spending on the spot under your Poang chair, you'd spend $35k a month on PARKING.
Of course I have no intention of renting indefinitely. But if people didn't think the area was worth the prices, they wouldn't be so inflated in the first place. The prices are what they are because people will pay them, so either everyone's insane or there's something about the area that really is worth so much. I tend to agree with the latter premise.
To review: You, 22 hours ago: Me, 5 hours ago: You: Selection of $2000/mo apartments, all under 600 sqft, one without pictures Me: You said buy, and those are tiny shithole apartments You: Also, pizza place Me: Also, $2000/mo for tiny shithole apartments You: Buy now, shit on proles later Me: You said rent You: Location location location Me: your coffee table costs more to park than my Dodge You: location location location Look. Rent in San Fran is insane. You're trying to justify the insanity, not disprove the insanity. I ain't even getting into that. Fact of the matter is, fuckin' Bay Area rents are completely off the hook, which is why those who didn't grow up in million dollar houses are resentful. Buddy of mine paid $450k for a shithole bunker with razor wire off the Macarthur BART terminal in Oakland, which was f'ing insane until he sold it for $800k three years later. Not bad, considering the $450k came from his homegrocer.com severance package. but people without a homegrocer.com severance package resent shit like that. Because the prices are insane. Because of the trust fund kiddies and their severance packages who say "I rent a room for $800, don't know what your problem is" and then act as if San Fran weren't a case study in class warfare.$2k a month for a one-bedroom apartment is insane, that would buy a pretty nice pad downtown
750sqft shithole, yours for $1500/mo with a $42k downpayment.
Seem to remember hearing that you could get a place in, like, San Diego for not an arm and a leg. One of San Fran's problems is that its population is far outstripping the rate of new apartment construction. Reason being that San Fran makes use of a number of historical preservation laws that way restrict building code. So only a few new apts going up every year, and boatloads of eager twentysomethings trying to get their hands on them. So for rentals, not just a problem of gentrification, then, but also growth disparities. When it comes to buying, though, pretty sure that's mainly Silicon Valley gentrification. Got a couple friends there who gave up trying to live anywhere closer than Oakland because people were paying over asking price for 1.5 mil houses (which, no, doesn't actually get you much), and doing it with cash. Not much better in Oakland these days, from what I hear...
San Francisco suffers from a clean, well-laid-out, affordable rapid transit system. As a consequence, anywhere within commuter distance from a BART terminal is within commuter distance of downtown (since downtown is also eminently walkable). For $2 you can go from a convenience store that sells Old Crow pint bottles to the SFMOMA. And it takes you 20 minutes. That drives up the expense of the suburbs for the simple reason that you can now, like, get places.
Boy, talk about unintended consequences. Cheap, efficient transit, historical preservation, strong economy: bye-bye middle class. What I wanna know is why I'm being priced out of my shitty Seattle suburb. Like you already said, no viable public transit in sight. And it's getting worse with the latest round of budget cuts. Half an hour to wrestle with 12 mi. of I-5 by car, and that's during non-peak hours. And still, people across the street are asking half a mil for their 3-bedroom with a scenic view of Aurora Ave.'s asscrack.
Because everyone is being priced out of their shitty suburbs. 1) Glass-Steagall repealed; trusts can now be investment banks 2) Home lenders now capable of packaging investment products full of mortgages 3) Investors sold financial instruments based on the derivative value of investment products 4) Risky loans become attractive investment vehicles 5) People who shouldn't have gotten loans stop paying them 6) Crash of 2008 7) Lots of houses foreclosed, real estate prices crash So there's what you know. Here's where things get really dumb: 8) Foreign blocs and investment banks decide that there's lots of money to be had in renting to formerly foreclosed homeowners 9) Stupid prices are paid for houses, this time by investors rather than homeowners 10) Anyone who doesn't currently have a house is priced out of the market because they're dealing with multimillionaires with cash who have no intent of moving into the neighborhood. We get 2-3 unsolicited offers a week on our house. We've been renting it happily for six years now. And they're all folksy, downy-homey, "gee my family sure would like to live in your house" mash notes, and they're all from large institutional investors looking to slumlord my neighborhood.
It's gotten better since they started changing out the seats, but I've seen some pretty gnarly stains on those systems. I don't know that I would give bart "well-laid-out" either, but if it touches your area (i.e. not Marin or south peninsula), it's relatively nice. I've had some 2-3 hour trips that mixed muni / caltrain / bart / vta that could've easily been done in a third of the time via car. Methinks the better question is how the hell your city works.clean
Economically speaking, Hollywood has about the same impact as the sports teams (hockey, basketball, baseball, soccer). Silicon Valley is not without its impact, but San Fran has long been a financial center. Keep in mind: The LA Metro area has more population than the Netherlands. San Francisco has a third of that... but San Francisco proper (~1m) is a tiny peninsula. It really is about the location. That's why rents in Tokyo are so insane.
Judging by the rest of the original post, I think Meriadoc is making the point that everyone is insane. The prices are what they are because people will pay them, so either everyone's insane or there's something about the area that really is worth so much.