What year/decade ended affordable San Francisco? (Sacramento, Berkeley: apartment, rent)

[tallrick]

There's always some special showing hippies living in San Francisco. By the 80's it was extremely overpriced. When did that happen, 60's 70's or 80's?

[gizmo980]

Welllll... my parents paid about $500K for a 5-bedroom home in San Mateo Park, in the year 1983. I'm guessing that was fairly expensive by '83 standards, as they had to take a big loan from my dad's company, after selling our (larger) home in MD for $150K-ish. So based on that, it would've had to be the 70's or earlier when things "boomed" - probably early '70s, since I've heard older people talk about buying a cheap home then.

[Fat Freddy]

The property value and rent explosion must have been in the 80s.

We lived in S.F from the mid 70s to the mid 80s.

At first we lived on Vermont St. on Potrero Hill. We had the top floor flat which had two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room which was used as a painting studio, a kitchen, and a deck with a view of everything from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate including the whole east side of the hill up to Twin Peaks. If we looked out the front living room window we could see out across to the East Bay.

Rent was about $200 a month which we shared with a couple of room mates.

When we had kids, we moved out to the Sunset by 42nd and Lawton. It was only a few blocks from the beach to the west, and a few blocks from the park to the north. Rents out there for a two bedroom house with a yard and garage were about $250 a month.

That was too steep for out budget so we rented a storefront for $125 a month and turned it into a nice apartment.

The disadvantage of living in the storefront was that when the kids got older they had no place to play. We either had to take them over to the park, or let them play on the sidewalk in front of our place or in the schoolyard down the block.

So we moved back to Sacramento and rented a house with a big yard.

We didn't go back to the Bay Area for years until our daughter went to school at Berkeley and then we would go into the city as tourists.

[ImRandy]

I've heard quite a few people saying this housing bubble actually began in the mid 60's while others have been saying the late 80's when prices dramatically started out pacing inflation. I think the real answer is there isn't a real answer and it all depends on what you're basing your numbers on.

[icazares]

San Francisco has been expensive since the mid-19th century, when people started to pay the most expensive rents in the country for landfills in today's financial district.

[Joe_Ryder]

1849. The Gold Rush.

San Francisco has never been cheap. The hippies lived in the parks and paid no rent Or in houses with 30 or 40 other hippies. The hippie movement started winding down when the trust funds ran low and reality came crashing down like a load of bricks. Hunger has a way of crushing idealism.

Prices started really jumping in the late '80s. Silicon Valley was kicking butt and this was the place to be. The mid '80s was a great time here. It was a bit more expensive than the rest of the country but wages were higher and jobs were plentiful. By the mid-'90s, any high school kid who could keep an instance of Windows from crashing for 30 minutes could land a job paying in excess of $70K a year. If he could even spell UNIX, he was worth $110K. The high wages for tech jobs started attracting actual talent and the population started to explode. All these new folks were making bank and buying new homes. They couldn't build 'em fast enough to keep up with demand. That's why a shotgun shack in the ghetto sitting on half a small city lot will sell for a $half-million.

[LexusNexus]

Originally Posted by ImRandy

I've heard quite a few people saying this housing bubble actually began in the mid 60's while others have been saying the late 80's when prices dramatically started out pacing inflation. I think the real answer is there isn't a real answer and it all depends on what you're basing your numbers on.

I would say the mid to late 80s.