The Changing Landscape of the City
Long time San Francisco residents will notice something strange in the above charts: historically inexpensive neighborhoods, especially downtown and the surrounding areas, are now some of the most expensive...Over the past year, rents have continued to increase, but not uniformly. Asking rents have increased tremendously downtown, mid-market, and in the southern part of the city that offers the shortest commutes to the South Bay.

Ten percent of ZIP codes in the San Jose metro have median home values of more than $2 million....In the Bay Area... housing has become so expensive that much of the middle class has been effectively priced out of home-ownership. Forty-four ZIP codes have median home values above $1 million, just nine have median home values below $300,000, and not a single ZIP code has a median home value below $200,000. 

Rent growth exceeded 6% over the past year in San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle....But household incomes have stagnated, resulting in a financial squeeze for a growing number of renters. 

Prices shot up during the tech boom in the late 1990s then dropped after the bust. They peaked even higher in 2006 before hitting a recession low in 2011. They have been on the upswing again, but as of April, the region as a whole is still 14 percent lower than its previous peak in May 2006.

That's not true everywhere. Several cities in the region have already zoomed past previous peaks such as San Francisco, Fremont, Berkeley, San Mateo, Redwood City, Alameda, Pleasanton, Menlo Park, Foster City and Lafayette.

What kind of job do you need to afford a good house in San Francisco? One that pays around $140,000 a year before taxes, according to a new report from financial publisher HSH Associates....And even then you’ll be unable to qualify for a good number of homes on the market. That salary makes the City by the Bay the least affordable major city in the country

The fastest-moving markets had a lower percentage of homes still listed after the two-month period, while the slowest-moving markets had a higher percentage. 

Trulia found that the top three markets were Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco — all major tech hubs where rising rents and gentrification have been hot topics as of late. In all three of these metros, only roughly a third of the homes that were listed in February were still for sale in April. Nationally, the rate was about 55%. 

They also found that the fastest-moving markets had the highest gains in prices, with year-over-year increases well over the national average of 10%.

They looked at every home that was sold in the years 2003 and 2013, then compared the median sale prices, adjusting the 2003 prices for inflation.

What they found from comparing the more than 6,000 transactions completed in San Francisco in 2003, and the 8,000 done in 2013, was that prices are indeed on the rise in most parts of the city.  


"It's a very hot, hot market, and this really underscores everything else everyone is talking about in San Francisco," Jorisch said. "Whether it's the rental market or sales market, there's not much available in San Francisco, and if you're intending to live there, it's costly. It's the best example of supply and demand out there." 

 Catherine Bigelow chatted with the noted scribe about the "comically off-putting" shrubs in front of her limestone Pac Heights palace, Steel had this to say: "Sometimes I think San Francisco hates successful people ... No matter what I do, people say nasty stuff. I mean, the world is falling apart and people complain about my hedge. It's a mystery."

SF Examiner:
It’s a concentration of more than 50 cloud-computing companies that have set up shop between Market Street and AT&T Park. Today’s Cloud Corridor is roughly located in what used to be called the Multimedia Gulch during the first dot-com era. Names come and go. But with our digital lives moving to the cloud, these techies claim their innovations will determine the future as much as Silicon Valley has transformed our lives already.

Such impact requires a memorable name.

Is Cloud Corridor a marketing ploy? Sure. But so was Silicon Valley. No one called it that until 1971. The media forever branded it the place where cool stuff happens.

Names matter because any city that gets to coin the zeitgeist’s next big tech destination will enjoy economic benefits for decades to come. Based on the venture capital dollars flowing into San Francisco, we’re already being called the “new” Silicon Valley. But we deserve a unique name.