The other way to look at this is apartment rental prices are merely "correcting" upwards to be less out of line with the housing prices.<p>A $1 million SF home has to charge $6000 in rent each month to break even, to cover cost of capital, taxes, and maintenance. Apartment rents cover utilities to varying degrees, as well.<p>A nice three bedroom apartment is the equivalent of a $600k or $800k condo, which "should" charge $4000+ per month. What is the going price for that rental? Across the bay area, the median is $2500. That makes sense in San Jose, but in other areas, not so much....<p>So is the issue that house prices are unsustainably high? Or is it the renters have gotten used to prices that lingered unsustainably low for a surprisingly long time?<p>IMO it is a bit of both. But we have probably under built rental units in some markets.
It's a gold rush. California is famous for them. Quality of life for most of the tech workers is pretty low, but everyone is focused on the stock option lottery, and there are plenty of winners (next up: Twitter) to keep up faith in the system.<p>Ironically, most of my friends who have liquidated their options end up moving out of the city.
This is the third or so time this blog has been posted to HN and every time people ask where they got their data and every time there is no response. This time, some of their data doesn't look so good, at least with the boundaries on the map being all messed up. Also it's not clear if they adjust for inflation.
We actually recently made a similar map for a number of metros, normalized by square footage to control for different unit sizes. It's interesting to note the differences in the map between the two metrics (total rent and per sqft):<p><a href="https://kwelia.com/maps/choropleth?metro_group=SF+Bay+Area" rel="nofollow">https://kwelia.com/maps/choropleth?metro_group=SF+Bay+Area</a>
Would have to disagree on everyone being focused on the stock option lottery. 1st its not a lottery. You can do analysis that shows that working for large entrenched dominate company, think Apple, Google or such over 5 years will beat a engineer joining a series B,C company that makes it. For startups there is often a trade of salary for ownership. If you calculate it over many years and payrises, bonus's etc... the numbers may play even.<p>Many many people in the Bay Area are not in startups at all and not playing the option lottery, they are married with children. Some play the management ranks and others contract, etc... I met a woman once in the dot com boom that confided in me that she made $1mill in 2000 over a short time. It got me thinking about the real equations at work. You need to do math, simple math but you need the data which you may not have.<p>Anyhow, that said, it is true I think that engineers do not get their fair share of equity many times in companies even with dozens of people. So this is when ownership or foundership or close to starting is a stock option play. Options are a contract to own at a price set on the contract. If the price rises dramatically you have a massive amount of capital. Stock options are very risky, compared to straight risk adverse salary jobs. For risk there is reward. It has not much to do with lottery, manly with risk and reward and statistics. You need to crunch the numbers and consider risk and then decide on your career paths.
A scale that goes from green to red? I'm unable to discern the difference between colors evenly spaced on either side of the middle line.<p>Mousing over to see change does help. Perhaps instead of simply colors (please, designers, don't rely on color alone to convey information. Think of the chil^H^H^H^H color blind individuals) you could have patterns for the fills.
It will be interesting to bookmark this, and then look at it 18 months from now when the market grows by about 28% (number of rental units in the SF bay area expected to come available due to new construction) SF itself has a huge number of apartment projects being built, as do many peninsula cities.
I'd be interested to know how they are collecting their data. Rent prices are very hard track, short of asking tenants how much they pay.<p>You can monitor Craigslist, but then you are tracking rental advertisements instead of what tenants are actually paying.
I'm no longer jealous of all those american dev that makes 100k+ in that area.<p>Damn... 3000$ to rent... for a MONTH?!<p>I could get one hell of a house here at that price...
Interesting! So why are rents on HUD a lot lower?
e.g., the rent for 1 BR in SF is $1579 according to <a href="http://www.huduser.org/portal/datasets/50per.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huduser.org/portal/datasets/50per.html</a>
Are there any studies relating rent control and pro/anti landlord policies in these cities and how they relate to the availability of inventory and rental prices in the bay?
Why don't people live in Oakland and commute?<p>Google Maps gives a < 1 hour each way commute (BART or bike + ferry), which I don't think is horrible. Is Google Maps just super optimistic?