We've all read the reports: San Francisco's rents are rising impossibly quickly, people can't afford to live in San Francisco anymore, and if you lose your apartment, you may never find another one. Right? Wrong, suggests one of the founders of a rental search company, who believes that outside a few high-demand areas, SF rents have actually stayed stable or decreased in the past year.
According to Zumper Co-founder and COO Taylor Glass-Moore, his company compared the median prices for one-bedroom apartment listings realtors posted on their site in January 2013 and January 2014, and calculated the difference.
The result is the above map, which illustrates. Glass-Moore told Business Insider, that "tech is driving demand and prices for apartments, but only in specific neighborhoods."
"A lot of focus is placed on SOMA or the Mission where a lot of tech workers have moved, but that's not representative of the city as a whole. There are plenty of neighborhoods where people aren't wearing Google Glass and jumping into a Google shuttle," Glass-Moore said.
As long-ago as 2008, San Franciscans have been talking about the so-called "Google Bus effect," that is, an increase in housing prices along the corridors served by corporate shuttles.
More recently, map upon map has attempted to quantify the phenomenon. Those mappers' labors, along with the corporate shuttle map circulated in 2012, don't appear to clearly confirm or deny Zumper's findings.
Of course, you're all smart people, so we don't have to tell you that this is just one map from one company, not the final word on the subject. That said, Glass-Moore is confident in what his company's map seems to indicate, saying that "San Francisco is still an affordable city to live in if you're open to other neighborhoods."
