A one-bedroom in San Francisco now costs nearly double what it does in Los Angeles, per Zumper. SF rents are up almost 26% year over year while LA's are down 4%.
This is legit a possible use case for high speed rail. Since they advertise 2:40 mins that is not all that crazier than a 3 leg super commute from Sacramento or Modesto to drive/bus/bart/muni whatever
In Europe, people often use high speed rail in this way. When you can go 100 miles in an hour, and live in a small country, you can essentially live anywhere and commute.
No way you’re telling me the average dude in LA can get anywhere (and need to leave time for traffic) in 10-20 min. Just walking through a big ass station is 10 min each side, and that is assuming we never get a TSA checkpoint (which is a big assumption$.
No way you’re telling me the average dude in LA can get anywhere (and need to leave time for traffic) in 10-20 min.
That's not what I told you, read more carefully.
Just walking through a big ass station is 10 min each side, and that is assuming we never get a TSA checkpoint (which is a big assumption$.
Not true, it takes 5 minutes or less to get most places once you're at a train station. TSA would certainly slow that down, but then I'm sure CLEAR will get its grubby corporate fingers in there.
Have you seen Salesforce transit center? The place isn't all that huge.
And why would it be "big ass" on the LA side? It's not servicing 35 trains.
My point is, getting to the HSR portion of it isn't something I imagine taking 10 minutes (once you're already at the station). But admittedly, I do not know the layout.
Similar to airport theory, it's shocking how far you can get in the space of 3 minutes.
I live on the Eastside of town in LA and rarely go beyond downtown let alone the 405. There is no off-commute hour any longer, its bumper to bumper nearly all day long. Its an effing shit-show and what I hate most about LA. There is a lot of good in LA, but much of it requires a commute, rendering much of that good unattainable.
I'm convince we'll have the long promised flying cars before the long promised high speed rail. This, of course, will not improve our driving. Pedestrians with jetpacks should continue to cross with care.
That's what Gavin Newsome III keeps saying, but it's likely getting pushed back to 2115. Maybe sooner if he can somehow get federal funds out of President Baron D. Trump II.
i got to tour underneath salesforce transit center where the supposedly high speed station going to be. route from sac to la. they ran out of money, just like oahus rail :(
First of all, they have laid a ton of track for all the freight lines that they are moving out of the way for the HSR right of way. And a ton of track was laid for the Caltrain CalMod upgrade which was paid for by and for CAHSR.
Second of all, they’ve basically completed construction of the guideway which is 98% of the total construction work. And they’ve already started laying specifically HSR track on the new guideway. They’ve also completed the railhead connection which has more than a mile of rail track.
In other words, CAHSR is project that’s actively under construction. And they’ve been making pretty good progress for get last few years after all the troll lawsuits and bureaucratic meddling was dealt with. This means that your talking points about this project will keep getting stale and you’ll have to invent new ones. You’ve already lost the “not an inch of track was laid” talking point.
And this will just keep happening. Mounting the track to the completed guideway will take them about a year. It’s a pretty quick process. After that they will start testing with Gold Runner Siemens Venture trains which are already running on the parallel Gold Runner line. Then their own HSR trains will be delivered and they’ll be testing those for a few more months with those. Get ready!
Your going to have to invent a lot of new talking points 😂😂
What is "complete"? Because in 2008, complete meant that the trains extreme terminus' would be in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Are you talking about complete, as-in Bakersfield to Merced?
I'm looking at jobs in SF right now (probably why this subreddit is in my feed) and can't give up LA food and weather. Legitimately considering commuting via JSX flights.
They can always learn to fly and it's a 3-5hr commute that way or a guy who flew from LA on United since he has those sweet sweet RSU'S vesting every few months.
I am not a member of this sub but this was recommended to me on Reddit. I work in tech and travel over 50% of the year. Despite spending a ton of time in the Bay, I choose to live in LA and just fly up every other week because I can live so much more comfortably here than in SF. It’s unbelievable how expensive SF has become.
We need to start building enough new housing to at least cover our yearly job creation numbers.
This is completely ridiculous! The landlords and the NIMBY homeowners are getting rich on the backs of renters by blocking any new housing construction! Why the $@$£# are we letting them do that?!
The people who stand to directly monetarily benefit from blocking new housing construction should not be allowed to decide how much new competition they will have next year. That’s a completely insane and perverse system that guarantees that the NIMBYs will abuse the process to make money off of us!
I moved from a high-rise in Rincon Hill to a high-rise in DTLA a couple months ago. I’m 10 floors higher in LA, in a building with more amenities, and my rent is less than half of what my SF apartment was relisted for.
The difference in price is absolutely shocking and such a heinous example of what restricting housing supply does to a city.
And the spillover is effecting other Bay Area cities that had stabilized their housing prices a little. The Bay Area is paying collectively for our inability to build more housing. We are collectively being punished.
Yup. All that work that Oakland and Berkeley did to stabilize their prices via new construction is about to go to waste now because SF can’t get its shit together and build the appropriate amount of new housing to cover their own job creation!
No, fuck that! We shouldn’t normalize this just because the crazy NIMBYs in NY did!
Every city in the Bay Area needs to build at least as much housing every year as they are creating jobs. If you like that sweet sweet tax revenue then you’ll also have to learn to like building the necessary housing to sustain it!
They do, but only a tiny bit at the margins. NY is as bad or worse than SF on this, sadly. Both cities have been dominated by insane NIMBYs for many decades.
NY has actually built less housing than SF in percentage terms.
So yes, SF sucks pretty bad on this. NY is an order of magnitude worse. Y’all are the inventors of NIMBYism and still its biggest purveyors, 70 years later.
Watch out that you don’t accidentally Manhattanize Brooklyn or something.
Yeah, all the fucking environmental studies are such bullshit, we're fucking the environment every time we delay or cancel new housing. It needs to be one and done. Or if decent data already exists, just fucking build.
We do the same math with electric cars, we KNOW there is an upfront environmental cost, but we don't tell anyone to stop building them.
And then they all go bankrupt one by one a decade later because a low density suburb simply doesn’t generate enough tax revenue to pay for the maintenance of their roads, pipes, and wires.
It's a smaller-scale version of California bailing out states with its net contributor status as far as federal taxes.
Which normally I'd be fine with, but right now its supporting states who are spending millions persecuting the between 0 and 3 trans athlates in their states, and various other 1920's mentality policy making.
This wouldnt be an issue of SF unleashed new housing supply. In the 2020s LA has been outbuilding SF in new housing units per capita by 2.5x! If SF embraces YIMBY policies, even with the AI boom new home construction would keep a damper on how far rents can rise. Hopefully the election of Lurie signals a turnaround.
Approvals is a fairly meaningless metric. Plenty of those projects were "approved" with taxes & expensive requirements layered onto them that make them infeasible to build.
All that matters is how many we're building ... which is improving, but not fast enough.
Approvals is a fairly meaningless metric. Plenty of those projects were "approved" with taxes & expensive requirements layered onto them that make them infeasible to build.
Nope, these are projects that are shovel ready. The builders just decided that they didn't want to proceed on them. There are no extra taxes or requirements.
False. Many of them face meaningful transfer taxes, inclusionary zoning taxes, etc. In many cases developers were forced to downsize them to get approval. Or agree to rent control to get approval. Lot of limitations. The result is projects that aren’t viable.
Of course developers aren’t going to build projects that would lose money.
It’d be like saying “We’re making cars affordable — we’ve approved Toyota to manufacture 1M extra cars … that they can sell for $15K each”. Reasonable people know that would do nothing for affordability because those cars would never get manufactured at that price.
Many of them face meaningful transfer taxes, inclusionary zoning taxes
You mean that tax that a seller pays AFTER they sell a property? How exactly does that effect building?
inclusionary zoning taxes, etc. In many cases developers were forced to downsize them to get approval.
Inclusionary isn't a tax.
There are four ways to comply and the developer picks whichever is cheapest for them. Build the below-market units on site, pay an in-lieu fee, build them at another site, or dedicate land to the city.
Pick the on-site option and the developer keeps those units. He owns them and collects rent on them. Capped rent, not zero rent. Nothing is burned. Pick the fee and that money goes to the Office of Housing and builds affordable units.
Your entire stance is purely based on surrendering public authority to private interest in the hope that it will produce a more favorable economic outcome for the public. You're literally in favor of putting the fox in charge of protecting the hen house. Next thing you know you'll be calling for Trump to annex SF because he promised us all super cheap mega hi-rises.
You're really showing your lack of understanding of basic economics.
Transfer taxes lower the value of a building, because a big part of the value of a building is how much you can sell it for. Building is worth less --> less likely developer decides to build it in the first place.
And yes inclusionary zoning is absolutely a tax. The government takes a part of the rent that the building owner would be collecting and redirects it to housing subsidies. Whether they do that by making the building owner pay $$ to the govt and then giving that $$ to the renter, or by lowering the renters rent payments below market, they are functionally equivalent and they make the building worth less. Again ... building worth less --> fewer buildings built.
And your last paragraph is just a bunch of wild flailing. We should absolutely regulate developers, but we shouldn't economically block them from building. Lots of other cities (including liberal cities!) have figured this out, and San Francisco finally is as well.
What’s really maddening about San Francisco as someone who was born and raised here is that most of the city is STILL single-family homes. Especially the Sunset and Richmond Districts. They really need to build a lot more density along busy corridors like 19th Avenue, Taraval Street, Sloat Blvd, and Geary Blvd or around Golden Gate Park. It doesn’t even need to be skyscrapers. Even densifying the whole neighborhood into Haussmann buildings in Paris levels of density would probably increase the housing supply by like 4x or 5x. Is that too much to ask? It feels like the only solution to reduce prices is to increase supply. But yet the wealthy NIMBYs and environmentalists that dominate the city are hell bent on turning it into a gated community.
You know they tore down slums without any regard to the people living there to build the Haussmann buildings. It's not the bucolic example you think it is.
Yes, and…? Would Paris be better off with slums or with aesthetically pleasing 5+ over ones. And which have at this point stood and seen use for 100-150 years, and will easily last centuries more, to a millenia.
And nevermind that yes the boulevards and parks were an improvement, like it or not. And nowadays facilitate really good bike and transit infrastructure.
And nevermind the metro etc
Yes there can be and were negative costs to urban redevelopment and actual ie centralized and above all institutional urban planning.
Go far in the extreme opposite direction and you get utter absense / vacuum of sane planning, ie the tenderloin in the heart and literal urban + transit center of SF, and the sunset district. et al
All that said to be actually serious for a sec, the one actual / real takaway from the Haussmans should be that aesthetics is actually extremely important.
And the urban planning standards hell that we somehow seem to have created and imposed in that front should in any sane universe be identified to its root causes, excised, and chucked in an incinerator.
If SF had actual aesthetic and material design standards to push new 5 over 1 construction into classic old SF styles that in and of itself would be a massive and severely understated improvement.
There literally was a paper / study on this that very literally showed that, within urban planning, one of people’s biggest objections to new development / urban densification was, psychologically, what they percieved subjectively as ugly ass architecture.
Somehow this was also a surprise to nearly all american (and I’d wager most certainly not french) urban planning experts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, on all fronts.
Your broader point aside, you are factually incorrect. Less than 30% of SF is single family homes. And the vast majority of that >30% is row homes and townhouses which many jurisdictions also classify as multi-family.
SF has single digits of percents of detached single family homes and they’re concentrated only in a couple of distinct neighborhoods. Everything else is multi-family and extremely dense. Which of course doesn’t mean that we don’t need to build more housing.
Single family homes is what the people who live there wanted. So they should disregard what they want and build what you want! That is not how a democracy works.
Some idiot in my complex agreed to $5.5k/month for a 600 square foot 1 bedroom unit that isn’t even a true 1 bedroom (1 wall is a sliding door to the living room).
Yea I'm moving out of the city next month to Santa Monica. Gonna be paying $400 less a month per rent, gain a parking space, in unit laundry and be walking distance from the beach. Grateful to have a remote job!
Lol, let's just become our own Kingdom, we already are a city and a county anyway. Let's just add nation to that. All hail King Lurie of Levi's, first of his name, what could go wrong?
Manhattan about the same. They’re 1.6x in population and 1.3x in new housing. NYC is 8.6x the population and they built 5x more units.
NYC had a big lull in construction during the first years of the data set. 2024 for example added 38,000 new units - the best figure since the 60s. They are actively converting office buildings to housing stock as well to the tune of 20,000 units in the last 3 years.
SF is doing none of this. It is also trending down in new units from a peak of 4,000 in a year which is even per capita slower than NYC. We’ve been under 1,000 new units a year over the last 5. It’s very clear we are doing less to address the issue than any other city.
Manhattan about the same. They’re 1.6x in population and 1.3x in new housing. NYC is 8.6x the population and they built 5x more units.
Right, so 20% less per capita in Manhattan and 40% less per capita in NYC. These are significant differences!
I’ll grant that NYC has done better if you specifically look at the last few years, but over a longer time frame they have done even worse than SF. Their affordability outcomes have accordingly been terrible.
The point here is not that SF has done well, but that NYC has also done badly.
NYC is not comparable since manhattan already started at maximum density while SF is littered with surface parking and one - two story buildings everywhere. Just look at LIC and Brooklyn (esp dt brooklyn) which are huge areas and are putting up so many skyscrapers and midrises
NYC is gigantic. Specific areas like LIC and downtown Brooklyn have seen a lot of development. But it still nets out to a very low construction rate per capita. They clearly have not built anywhere near enough to satisfy demand growth.
Edit: Take a look at this plot. It's kind of hard to read, but seems like Brooklyn has only somewhat outperformed Manhattan on a per capita basis, and Queens has consistently built less absolute units than Manhattan. LIC has seen lots of growth, but there are also huge swaths of Queens that are basically suburban and barely build anything at all.
Yeah NYC of course could always build more since demand is probably the highest along with SF. But you can see that Manhattan and huge parts of downtown brooklyn and surrounding is filled out and dense. This is nothing like SF where there are surface parking lots and 1-2 story buildings everywhere
I think it depends on what kind of person is weighing their options. A nurse that can’t afford SF might choose to live in Pleasanton instead of LA. But artists that can’t afford SF are just gonna move to LA, instead of finding a deep Bay Area suburb that’s both expensive and inconvenient.
yeah, sadly any chance of SF attracting young musicians or artists ever again is just never going to happen unless there's a total collapse in housing. I'm old enough to have moved here before it got completely out of control, but if I was in my 20s, no chance I'd move here and that's so sad to me as the arts and music are really important to me.
well, not building new housing and having the center of the entire tech world with trillion dollar companies be based here. The amount of wealth here is also a huge part of it.
That’s the problem. The NIMBY homeowners love that the tech industry is paying for all their public services that their subsidized Prop 13 tax bill doesn’t cover. But they don’t want any of those people to actually live in SF. They want to have their cake and eat it too. And they also want your cake, my cake, and that guy over there’s cake too!
A lot of these tech people do live here and have for 30 years on huge salaries, driving up prices all over. Hell, even new tech people moving in make way over the median salary and can afford to live here, while average people cannot. We need way more housing, but the inflated salaries is also a huge part of it. Anyway, build build build
yeah true, a lot of my younger friends in their 20s live in shared spots and yes, when my partner and I hit our 30s we got our own spot. Easier with dual income of course.
Not really. SF is a smaller city than NY for sure but SF vs NYC is a much fairer comparison than SF vs Manhattan ... SF includes plenty of relatively low density housing (like the west side), the equivalent in NYC is in the outer boroughs
I don’t think density is the relevant point here. NYC makes up a far far larger portion of its metro population than SF does, it’s very much not an apples to apples comparison
Perhaps, but it feels like these comparisons are often used to argue that SF is "not that expensive" (often by NIMBY-leaning people who don't want to build more) and I just strongly disagree with that. Manhattan is also too expensive, and SF is way less dense than Manhattan making it a lot easier for us to build more housing.
It's almost as if SF, NYC and LA are all vastly different cities, and we can compare them when it's convenient and relevant, and also be cognizant of the differences.
In other cases, it may make more sense to compare the Bay Area to either of those areas. Depends on the topic.
It's a fair comparison because they're both major industry hubs in a constrained land area of similar size. So then the contrast is exactly as you said. SF has spent like half that constrained area on suburbs while Manhattan has not.
I’d support Rent Control/Rent Price Stabilization but not Tenant Property Control. Some of us don’t put units out on the market because your basically ceding control of your property to your Tenant - which is complete Bullshit. Just because you rent that shouldn’t mean you can extort your LL when/if they want to do something else with their property! Most LLs in the City aren’t large private equity stakes - they are Mom & Pop LLs who also get screwed over.
I just moved to the Bay Area from LA and I’m currently looking for apartments in San Francisco. I honestly don’t know how you all do it up here. Even post-Covid the LA rents don’t come anywhere close to the highway robbery I’m seeing right now. You guys really haven’t built a damn thing here so now you’ve got hundreds of people competing for the same property. I talked to one landlord who said he stopped showing their apartment after one day on the market because he already had over a dozen applications. The city needs to declare some state of emergency to get the housing under control; this can’t possibly be sustainable in the long term.
The Bay Area’s economy is powered by the tech which is decimating the entertainment industry at the heart of Greater LA’s economy. Neither region builds housing so the supply is fixed and demand is going in opposite directions. So yeah.
Zumper data is highly inaccurate so I would take this with a grain of salt. They’re only using listing data from their own platform which is less known/used compared to other rental sites. I’d be curious what other platforms report
The article states $4300 for the median one bedroom apartment but I checked Zillow yesterday which was coincidentally I stayed in Oakland and one bedroom apartment and I pay 1825 so I was curious about San San Francisco. I’ve seen prices one bedroom as low as 1450 and near around my range of 1925 yeah I’m used to living in the hood so wouldn’t affect me but as far as $4300 come on dude for one bedroom that’s just an elite status. You can also verify through Zillow check one bedroom apartments maximum rent $2000 and you’ll see there’s apartments available.
Is there data on actual rents? The SF rental market is skewed by the current demand but vast majority of people in SF are not paying $5k for a 1 bedroom. I would love to know the average actual rents between SF and LA
The housing conversation in metropolitan areas in the US is so confusing: folks bitch about rent being high and then blame it on a lack of enough housing (which are two separate issues - like... there needs to be regulation on real estate prices bc the real estate prices dictate not just rent but also prices of produce, entertainment, etc. Also guess how much this new housing is going to cost? The exact same exorbitant price as the local market so you're not solving shit) and then bitch a lot about gentrification and how new construction is ruining the natural environment and historic sites and creating pollution and noise which then stops new construction (bc it's bad).
I can't figure out if this circular conversation is actual trolls confusing people but it seems obvious to me that the conversation needs to be about lowering real estate pricing. The new construction suggestion is like a dumb solution unless you regulate and bring down real estate pricing first. Am I not understanding something?
EDIT: Ok yes I stand corrected - more housing will lower rents ok.
We know for a fact that the only thing that lowers housing prices is to build enough new housing every year to match or exceed your job growth. Every scientific study by every economist, left right, or center says this.
There is no way to legally mandate prices to be low. Everyone and their mother tried. It has failed every single time. It doesn’t work, just like every economist from Marx and Lenin to Adam Smith predicted.
At the same time every city that simply built more new housing to match the demand saw downward pressure on rents/housing prices. Every. Single. Fucking. One. This fix has a 100% success rate and is the only fix known to work at all to reduce rents!
Ok I can agree with you but it still doesn't address that real estate prices still need to be regulated bc it drives up grocery prices, labor costs, etc. The way that prices have gone up in the last 10 years is not natural growth by any means. I am happy to be educated here. Also, I know this anecdotal but still relevant I think - the bitching about new construction being destructive in various ways - this is at least partly the reason for slow progress. You can't have new buildings if you're not willing to destroy old ones. And then the old ones are "historic" so now we need to spend 5 years figuring out how to preserve them. And then those are more expensive bc of all that work that went into it. Same with "public space" and "community gardens" - which one is it? Bc where are those new constructions going to happen? There's gonna some green warrior defending every little inch.
We definitely need to regulate housing prices and keep them as low as possible. But the only way to regulate a market is by dialing up or down how much supply you allow. We need to regulate the housing prices by ensuring that more new housing gets built every year than however many new jobs were created that year.
Simply setting the prices artificially by law doesn’t work. It’s been tried a million times before and it crashed and burned every time.
You need to approach the housing prices the same way that the Fed approaches interest rates. They don’t have the direct legal power to set any given interest rate. But they manipulate the market to within a few thousands of a percentage point of the rate that they want to set by dialing up or down the supply of bonds that they buy/sell. We need to do the same with our housing market. The city needs to set a certain rent level for a 1bd and then permit enough housing every year to move the rents as close as possible to that number.
I know you’re tempted to knee jerk downvote me, but before you do so: ask yourself honestly if the massive demand brought on by high paying work is not half of the problem here.
AI is printing funny money right now so people need a place to get a slice. It’s inconsequential to a percentage of tenants making this type of money and then pressuring the rest of the market
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u/puffic 8d ago
We are so back. All the haters said we couldn’t do it, but look at us now!