
San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690 - vector_spaces
https://www.cnet.com/news/san-franciscos-outrageous-rent-hits-a-new-peak-highest-in-the-us/
======
dthal
Note that Zumper is _not_ a reliable source for median rent data.
CityObservatory wrote an article about their data problems a few years ago
[1]. Zumper's data is, of course, based on apartments that are for rent and
doesn't include currently occupied units. That alone skews high, especially
when there is a lot of higher-rent new construction hitting the market. Also,
it looks like Zumper's data skews towards higher-end neighborhoods.

For a broader look at the rental market, including occupied units and rent-
controlled units, you could just consult ACS data. That says that median rent
for all occupied 1-bedrooms in San Fransisco was $1912 in 2017 [2].

[1] [http://cityobservatory.org/journalists-should-be-wary-of-
med...](http://cityobservatory.org/journalists-should-be-wary-of-median-rent-
reports/)

[2]
[https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25031&geo_ids=...](https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25031&geo_ids=16000US0667000&primary_geo_id=16000US0667000)

~~~
fountainofage
I guess it depends on what question you're asking. You seem to be pointing out
that you think the real question is: "what is the median rent for anyone
living in San Francisco?" whereas Zumper seems to be more answering the
question: "if someone moved to San Francisco today, and has zero connections,
what rent would they pay?" Both are valid questions, but I think it's good to
set the context for if you're having a conversation about "general median
rent" vs "newcomer median rent."

~~~
ehsankia
Even then, it's not as clear. First off, median caries the implication that
these are all "valid" places, whereas in reality, most apartments that are
still up for grabs probably aren't rented for a reason, therefore including
them in a median is misleading.

Next up, the data itself needs to be "fresh" for this to work. It could be
that cheaper apartments appear on the market frequently, but are rented right
away. So as someone new in the city, you could find these cheap places if you
looked for a bit, but a single survey will probably not catch these.

A better approach would be to look at the median of all _new_ rented
apartments throughout the year. That will give you an idea of what someone who
comes to the city will realistically pay.

------
askafriend
On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled to
a one bedroom unit in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world.
Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements.

There are several reasons why the prices have gotten so high (lack of supply,
politics, etc).

But don’t expect to move your Texas ranch or Midwestern single-family-house
lifestyle to SF with no compromises.

But in return for your compromises, you will get quite a bit in return.

Is it worth it? That’s a very personal decision. For many, it’s not. For many,
it is.

~~~
rayiner
> On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled
> to a one bedroom in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world.
> Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements.

New York is the “human epicenter” in the US. San Francisco is in the same tier
as Houston or DC:
[https://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2018t.html](https://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2018t.html).

Paying New York/London prices to live in a city that is not New York or London
is just sad.

~~~
genidoi
SF maximizes technological intelligence, Wall Street maximizes financial
intelligence. Plenty of overlap, but the top talent stays where the rest of
the top talent is.

~~~
rayiner
Having technological intelligence doesn’t make San Francisco a “human
epicenter” (whatever that is). I wouldn’t even call San Francisco a
technological epicenter. Even within computer technology, much of the most
important technological intelligence in the US is outside San Francisco: in
Portland (Intel), Seattle (Microsoft), San Diego (Qualcomm), and maybe San
Jose (Cisco). Put differently, what cities would be most devastating (in terms
of impact on US technological capabilities) to lose early in WWIII? I’d put
Boston or Seattle ahead of San Francisco.

~~~
Cyclone_
Agreed, SF has a lot of tech companies, but a lot of them don't do things that
ate very valuable for society, many are social networking/advertising.

~~~
rayiner
I think consumer tech is valuable in the sense that our peace-time economy is
based on consumption, and San Francisco is great at helping us consume. But
when I hear the word epicenter I’m thinking “what’d put us back in the Stone
Age if we didn’t have it?”

------
NTDF9
I just visited New York on an extended trip.

Most of NYC is better connected, more vibrant, more concerts, more sports,
more universities, more housing, more international people, more business
activity.

Yet, NYC is affordable with a "functioning" commute system. People on all
spectrum of income can live there.

SF bay area has none of all that and yet is super expensive wasteland of
suburbia. SF city is better but not even comparable to major cities of the
world.

The only thing SF has going on for it is weather, outdoors (for which you need
a car and a parking spot) and tech companies.

For any young padawans considering SF, it has its attractions but you won't
know what a bubble it is until you get out. It's not worth spending one single
life in the bubble.

~~~
sonnyblarney
SF is not the Bay Area, the data often gets confused.

And SF is oddly very, very different from San Jose or Palo Alto - they're
literally different climates, like 10 degrees differential on most days!

SF proper is a very small city, less than 1m people!.

~~~
NTDF9
That is true. That's why I wrote:

>> SF bay area has none of all that and yet is super expensive wasteland of
suburbia. SF city is better but not even comparable to major cities of the
world.

Most SV jobs are in the bay area. Even concerts, sports, shows in SF are in
bay area not in SF proper.

SF proper is smaller than Jersey City or Brooklyn, with lesser walking
stores/restaurants, lesser community activities and anyone not in a rent
controlled apartment cannot live a life without stress in SF proper.

------
yingw787
I think high rent prices are bad for a number of reasons:

Less flexibility in starting a company: You can't choose to bootstrap unless
you do it as a side hustle at a megacorp, and it's hard to not compete with a
megacorp because it does everything. You have to take VC funding and follow VC
rules to some degree, and it may not be a direction you wish to follow. This
is a feedback loop.

Oligopsony employment conditions: If you wish to build savings and not spend
all your money on rent, you can really only work for the largest and best
funded companies, and even then you need to negotiate at a disadvantage, since
they have far more information on the employment markets (because they're big)
and they each know the other big players (because they're few) and can bound
salaries through price leadership. This is also a feedback loop.

I'm concerned we will see fewer "real" companies like Intel/Apple, and more
Snapchat clones and e-scooter startups. Less meaningful bets, less drive, and
more complacency -- borne out of the desire to cannibalize social trust (e.g.
if you work hard, you earn shelter) and the societal fabric (e.g. all people
deserve shelter as a basic human right) for privatized financial gain.

~~~
whatshisface
> _all people deserve shelter as a basic human right_

I hear this a lot and it still makes absolutely no sense. Where will they get
the shelter from? What if the builder doesn't want to build a house for that
person? Is the plan to force the labor out of them? Every positive right that
I have ever seen comes along with an implicit demand that somebody else become
a slave.

~~~
Gibbon1
What will you do when it happens to you? That you have no place to live?

Because it will.

~~~
GhostVII
What makes you think that will happen to them? Most people don't end up
homeless at some point in their life.

~~~
Gibbon1
More people than you think and it gets more common over time.

------
ksec
Excuse my ignorance. SF doesn't look anywhere like Hong Kong, possibly the
most crowed places on earth, and it is not close to Tokyo or Seoul. It has
plenty of Spaces, for many coming from Asia, most part of SF is like country
side so to speak.

What cant there be more housing development on the edge of SF, or taller
building with many smaller apartments etc. Underground packing lot?

Edit: Ok, is it because it is in an Earthquake zone?

~~~
olalonde
From what I've heard it's very difficult to develop new housing in San
Francisco due to various regulations. Apparently, you even need to apply for
permits to change your windows. Having lived in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, San
Francisco does feel like country side.

~~~
Gibbon1
> Apparently, you even need to apply for permits to change your windows.

Needing a permit to install windows is a thing everywhere. Because if you want
a really good way to ruin a house, installing windows wrong is a great way to
do it.

~~~
olalonde
Everywhere in the world or everywhere in California? If the former, I find it
amazing that house owners ruining their house by replacing windows is a
universal problem and that requiring permits solves it.

~~~
Gibbon1
Pretty much every developed part of the world requires permits for such
things. Why permits? Because building codes are as old as civilization.

[https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5181e80b-f307...](https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5181e80b-f307-42e6-a357-c2d081b678ff)

------
towaway1138
When headhunters contact me about SF (or even Bay Area) jobs, I just scoff and
shut them down. If you're fresh out of school, no family, and willing to live
in a hovel for some interesting life experience, sure. But if you're an adult,
it's no way to live. And putting kids through it is frankly unethical.

~~~
stale2002
Well it depends.

I'll agree with you that if you work at a rando tech startup, the costs of
living are going to be quite high, and make it probably not worth it.

 _But_ , the whole equation changes if you are working for a big 5 tech
company, or _hot_ unicorn company.

These companies will pay you double what the rando startups pay. Who really
cares if you are paying 40k a year on rent, if your total compensation breaks
250K.

And getting 250k+ as an engineer, with a couple years experience, is only
really possible in the Bay area.

~~~
moftz
But the cost of living is so high there that the inflated salaries are pretty
much required to bring anyone out there. A company wants to have competitive
hiring so they offer a little bit more than competition so what was a $200k
job is now $220k. Prices increase to what these inflated salaried workers can
afford and the cycle continues. It will be incredible to watch when SF finally
starts to allow for more high density housing. Housing prices will fall and
the salary bubble will pop. A lot of companies will start cutting back on
starting salaries and as a result, experienced workers will start either
taking paycuts to switch jobs or be first in line for layoffs because they
cost the company too much.

~~~
nostrademons
This gets causality backwards. Employers don't give a shit about whether
employees can afford housing - if they did, we wouldn't have such a big
homelessness problem, and our teachers/firefighters/policemen wouldn't live
over the mountains in Pleasanton. Employers pay enough to prevent employees
from going to a competitor. The reason FANG salaries now hit $300-400K is
because Facebook refused to play ball with the wage-fixing cartel that
Schmidt/Jobs/et al had worked out, then the DoJ cracked down, and so now
that's what you need to pay to keep your software engineers from working for
someone else. Then you have a lot of tech workers with extremely fat salaries
and not enough housing for everyone who wants to live here, so they bid up
rents & housing prices until they're unaffordable for all the middle-income
folks who used to live here.

If more high-density housing was built, then rents would fall, middle-income
people could live here again, and tech workers could pocket their fat salaries
as savings (or live extremely lavish lifestyles). They would still be paid a
lot, because there'd always be another tech company around the corner willing
to bid up wages to their current level. For the salary "bubble" to pop, a lot
of these companies would have to go out of business at once. This was exactly
what happened in 2001 and 2009, and it had the predicted results: unemployment
spiked, wages fell, rents fell, and people moved out of the Bay Area back to
wherever they came from.

~~~
ascar
If that would actually be the case you would have these salaries all around
the world, but you don't. Because it's mainly a few big highly profitable
companies (FAANG) that can afford these salaries and a big VC and stock market
funded bubble around them. And even FAANG pays much lower salaries in cheaper
regions, because hightech employers have to give a shit about housing. You
can't compare it to teachers.

I think it's a dangerous attitude to think the salaries in CA are the actual
worth of a software developer's work. It's just what FAANG can afford to pay.
For many companies devs at that price point are not economically sustainable.

~~~
nostrademons
It absolutely is what FAANG (and newer companies like
AirBnB/Uber/Lyft/Stripe/DropBox etc) can afford to pay. And what FAANG can
afford to pay is not going to change if more housing gets built in the Bay
Area. And yes, for many companies devs at that price point are not
economically sustainable, but that's why FAANG are sucking all the oxygen out
of the startup developers market and maintaining their oligopsony.

(Also, while there's some variance for cost-of-living in FAANG salaries in
different regions, it's not _that_ much. Google developers make less in
Beijing than they do in Mountain View, but their salary still looks much more
like a Google salary than a Beijing salary.)

------
sonnyblarney
It's an existential issue.

"Peter Thiel: The vast majority of the capital I give companies is just going
to landlords" [1]

[1] [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-vast-majority-
cap...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-vast-majority-capital-give-
companies-just-going-landlords-134709786.html)

~~~
adrianN
He could try giving capital to companies in other locations. Rent in Berlin in
less than a third of what you pay in SF.

~~~
gumby
True, but having lived in Berlin (Prenzlauer Berg) and Bay Area (Palo Alto) I
have to tell you the scenes, and intensity, are very very different. SV in
particular (Moreno than SF) is _very_ tech oriented while Belin is more
e-commerce and food delivery.

Thiel in particular is German and has made some particularly scathing comments
about the German startup scene (to the German press).

------
pcurve
"The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development said last year that a
family of four earning up to $118,400 qualified as "low income" in the city. "

For comparison, in NYC, it's $83,450.

~~~
cm2012
Median household income in NYC is 50k, which is an interesting contrast.

------
sys_64738
I always wonder how those who are not in the high paying jobs can afford to
live there. I'm talking about police, fire, EMS, coffeehouse workers, etc.

~~~
jdavis703
They don’t. For example in nearby Atherton the cops have made makeshift
sleeping quarters in the police station because they cannot afford to live in
the city they work. Many of the homeless in tents or RVs have jobs in the
city, the sole reason they’re homeless is because there are no homes
affordable on a low-wage job.

~~~
puranjay
Why aren't these people out in the streets protesting this? It seems so wrong

~~~
rightbyte
It takes a while before you relize it's wrong and unsubstainable. And then
it's too late becouse you have been a waitress or what ever for 3 years and
when you move out there are plenty of people willing to take your place before
they realize it and so on. Big city hype.

And there are some real natives with rent control housing.

I lived in Palo Alto for half a year before I even though about how the
grocery store clerks could affor living there (which they don't). You also
notice the lack of children after a while.

------
refurb
The data is suspect. Anecdotally, and throw browsing the Craigslist
classifieds, the rental market seems to have softened some since the peak a
year or two ago.

Specifically looking at the Mission, there was a time that a sub-$3000 one
bedroom was very rare. Now you can find plenty in the $2500-$3000 range and
even some decent ones below $2500.

There is also more inventory.

------
ScottAS
Where I live in Atlantic Canada you can rent the same for $550 USD, or just
buy a brand new modern home for $180k USD. People here work remotely for
companies like Google. The government will also help fund your startup’s
product development through various programs (hundreds of thousands of
dollars).

Always wanted to move to San Fran but starting to feel pretty grateful about
being here.

~~~
shdh
How large is the remote ecosystem there?

------
seanhandley
I have a 4-bedroom house in the country and the _mortgage_ for it is 5 times
smaller.

Absolute madness.

------
superkuh
And in addition to that because it's San Franscisco you don't really own your
own home or apartment. You just have a set of things you are allowed to do on
it on the whim of the city (ie, no airbnb).

------
cm2012
For those who live in SF - what's the cost of a one bedroom rent 1 hour from
most jobs in SF? I know in NYC you can reliably get that for around 1500.

~~~
mavelikara
Walnut Creek is about 40m away from SF on Bart. So door-to-door that'd be
about an hour commute. Safe, picturesque, good schools and vibrant downtown.
The rent there would be about $1800 for a 1BDR.

EDIT: As noted by the sibling post, the reason it is cheap is because Walnut
Creek does not have very many tech jobs. Also, the peculiar thing about the
Bay Area is that about 15 years or so the tech industry oscillates its
epicenter between San Francisco and the South Bay. From Walnut Creek you can
reach San Francisco in an hour, but if you have clients/partners/HQ etc in
South Bay it is one bad commute.

~~~
seppin
> Safe, picturesque, good schools and vibrant downtown

It's completely dead and devoid of culture.

------
scarejunba
You just have to pay attention. Last year this time people said it was $3400,
but I rented for $2300 that May.

~~~
akhilcacharya
It makes me mildly annoyed that people are getting cheaper rents than me in SF
than I am near Boston.

Are these luxury places?

~~~
scarejunba
They are not. It's just a standard 1 br. SF is a bit peculiar. There are some
things I should call out which are different in most rentals in comparison to
luxury rentals:

* No Washer/Dryer in the unit. You'll usually share.

* No parking spot.

* No-one will be around to pick up parcels for you.

* You'll have to put the rubbish bins out for the bin man.

* The stove and fridge and heating won't be using the latest stuff. You're not expecting to have a Nest or a Viking but you won't get a nice stove either, it'll be very basic.

Honestly, it's a downgrade in standard of living for me but not to the point
that it annoys me. Those things were just luxuries. Really the washer/dryer
being in my unit is the one thing I really miss.

------
arisAlexis
Barcelona, Amsterdam. Same/better quality of life

------
gumby
I do t want to install the app just to find out: hasn’t this been true in Palo
Alto for some time? My ex pays more than that and her place is hardly de luxe.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Palo Alto is particularly expensive because of how luxe the area is (from what
I understand).

~~~
gumby
I first moved to Palo Alto in 1984 and can assure you that luxe it is not.

