I wonder, are these rents all because of Silicon Valley and Hollywood? Maybe with a bit of hype and rich people in the mix? Is, for example, San Diego or Sacramento just as expensive?
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Because everyone is being priced out of their shitty suburbs. 1) Glass-Steagall repealed; trusts can now be investment banks 2) Home lenders now capable of packaging investment products full of mortgages 3) Investors sold financial instruments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.