
Renting a 1-bedroom apartment near BART in the Bay Area - jedberg
http://blog.onradpad.com/renting-a-1-bedroom-apartment-near-bart-in-san-francisco/
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727374
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.

~~~
chuckcode
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.

~~~
jedberg
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.

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Cherian
Founders, if you are reading this: When I click on the top left
[http://d.pr/i/JLux](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!

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crgt
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.

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

~~~
keerthiko
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.

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mschuster91
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.

~~~
madewulf
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.

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foobarian
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!

~~~
madewulf
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).

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jedberg
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.

~~~
gpres
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](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Glen+Park,+San+Francisco)

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

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

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

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domdip
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.

~~~
zorpner
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.

~~~
rconti
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.

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

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chuckcode
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.

~~~
cpeterso
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...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/families-flee-san-
francisco_n_1335639.html)

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

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fraserharris
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.

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unreal37
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.

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

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

