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A recent real estate report showed one-bedroom rent prices in SF have fallen 11.8 percent — eclipsing last month’s record-breaking 9 percent drop — as more locals pack their bags. We decided to catch up with a few of them to ask why they’re leaving (or have already left) the City by the Bay.

San Franciscans are leaving Dodge in droves as unemployment rates climb and notable tech companies (Facebook, Twitter, Square) adopt evergreen work-from-home models. One product of this local “tech exodus” — another anecdotal nicety being easier street parking — is that for the first time in over a decade, SF is home to a renter’s market. And a recently released Zumper National Rent Report reemphasized that point, showing double-digit rent declines in the seven-by-seven — the largest observed in any U.S. city and the heftiest ever recorded for SF by the real estate listing company.

Though for some, the choice to box their things and go wasn’t only financially based. It was simply that the pandemic allowed them to realize the lifestyles they crave ceased meshing with what San Francisco could offer.

“Overall, there were a few lifestyle reasons that factored into my decision to move away,” says Charlotte Boyd, a former San Francisco Evernote employee who recently moved back to her hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to SFist in an email. “Even with making well over $100K a year, I felt that I had few long term options for a lifestyle that fits with me as I grew  — I would never be able to purchase a home or live by myself even with a comfortable salary.”

Her plight is well justified. Regardless of “pandemic pricings” — in our research, we came across a Zillow listing for a home in Bayview-Hunters Point that slashed another $100K off its already lowered asking price in June  — the average cost for a home in San Francisco still sits north of $1M.

So, if you factor in a standard 4 percent fixed interest rate, a monthly payment on a 30-year mortgage (which are bemoaned by tax advisors) would total near $4,774. And that payment alone is, per neuvoo, over 80 percent of a monthly paycheck for someone making a salary on-par with Boyd’s; many financial experts believe you should never spend more than 30 percent of your income on housing to have a good quality of life.

But the far-fetched idea of homeownership isn’t the only reason Boyd decamped the Bay Area for a metro that totes a cost of living 3 percent lower than the national average. She, like many of her friends who have also recently moved away from SF, wanted a more “comfortable life.”

“From a community standpoint, I had a good number of my friends move also to live a more comfortable lifestyle which made me reconsider my surroundings,” Boyd adds. “There was such little creativity or time to do anything other than sleep, commute, work, repeat.”

It was a comparable Oprah aha moment realized by a second source close to SFist – who chose to remain anonymous – when she was laid off from a local marketing firm. The said departed San Franciscan used that bout of unemployment as the catalyst to reframe what she wanted in life (like “warmer weather”), ultimately pointing her move to another, albeit less expensive startup hub: Austin, Texas.

Ironically, these more spacious and affordable towns could see rent increases as people escaping costlier cities move in.

The report — which aggregated data from over a million active listings across the country and calculated the median asking rents for the top 100 metro areas by population, per Zumper’s research methodology — states that as the pandemic persists, there could well be an increased demand for rentals in “neighboring, less expensive areas” across the nation.

While those regions might be considered comparatively “less expensive,” it seems working in them hasn’t affected some people’s incomes, including Boyd’s.

“I’m currently doing marketing consulting for [three] different small companies in town and making just under what I was making in San Francisco,” she continues, just before closing with a resonate, straight-to-the-heart line: “I finally have my time back, and I don’t know if I ever would’ve gotten it if I was still in San Francisco.”

Good news! Earlier today, the Superior Court REJECTED the request of the SF Apartment Association and SF Realtors Association for a temporary restraining order against our COVID-related eviction protection law.

— Dean Preston (@DeanPreston) July 2, 2020

Last month, the Board of Supervisors extended the City’s COVID-19 eviction ban indefinitely — helping slow the hourglasses for thousands of San Franciscans as they meditate on what their next moves entail. (A joint request by the SF Apartment Association and SF Realtors Association to place a temporary restraining order on that ban was recently rejected.)

For more information on both current and past Zumper rent reports, visit zumper.com/blog/category/rent-reports to see just how rental prices have shifted in the Bay Area over the years.

Related: Spurred by Bay Area Tenant Exoduses, a Renter’s Market Surfaces in San Francisco

SF Supervisors Extend Eviction Moratorium Indefinitely

SF’s Biggest Landlord Insists It Won’t Delay Selling Its 67 Rent-Controlled Buildings

Image: Aman Kumar

Article source: https://sfist.com/2020/07/02/san-franciscans-continue-leaving-for-more-comfortable-lives-elsewhere-as-rental-prices-plunge/

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BERKELEY (KPIX) — Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are mapping how systemic racism is leading to resegregation in the housing market.

“Those of us that thought spatial segregation is a factor of the past, (that) we’ve all risen to the middle class and integrated nicely — not so,” said Dr. Karen Chapple of UC Berkeley.

Chapple runs the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley. Her team is mapping how Bay Area cities are becoming whiter and wealthier.

Places like Antioch are considered highly segregated and impoverished. It is 96 percent non-white, whereas other wealthier, whiter areas such as Piedmont in Alameda County have been flagged as experiencing what Chapple calls “advanced exclusion.”

Chapple’s group also found social services rarely overlap with segregated poor areas which, Chapple says, is a huge problem.

“Social services are still located in the core cities and, if people lose access to them, that then leads to sort of cascading effects of disadvantage,” Chapple said.

Miquesha Willis is a construction worker from San Francisco who makes $30 an hour but still can’t afford to stay in the city she was born and raised in.

“It’s very emotional when you’re living in that cycle and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Willis said.

Just before the pandemic hit, she walked door-to-door in San Francisco city hall with a group of black homeless advocates telling her story and the story of other black community members like her to city supervisors.

Willis says she wants to know why someone with a decent salary and consistent work is now, in her words, homeless. “I’m staying with my mom with my son,” Willis said.

Before she left her stable housing, Willis says the only place she found that she could afford to rent was in Antioch.

“I had my own place before but I had to move out of the city to get it. I came back because I work in the city,” Willis said.

She says unreliable transportation made it nearly impossible for her to get to work.

“There wasn’t BART running there so, in construction, you have to be up at five o’clock in the morning and I couldn’t even get to work after my car broke down. So then I found myself staying at my mom’s house,” Willis said.

Willis came to city hall in San Francisco to shine some light on an ugly truth about the region’s housing affordability crisis: it is leading to resegregation.

Donmonique Daniels was born and raised in Oakland but now lives in Richmond, another segregated area that’s mostly non-white.

KPIX followed Daniels’ family last year while they were being evicted from their Oakland triplex.

The owner of the triplex moved his son into one unit and forced Daniels’ family out.

Daniels is a teacher. Her mother Terema is a nurse and always paid the rent on time but, back then, owner move-ins gave landlords the legal right to evict all tenants and raise rents in the other units to market rate.

“There was no conversation, they refused to speak to us. If they just came over and had a conversation I would not be opposed to paying a little more,” Daniels’ mother Terema Pettus said.

After KPIX aired their story, Oakland changed its law regarding owner move-ins without just cause but it was too late for Daniels’ family.

“We didn’t know what we were going to do or, like, where we were going to go and the rents around here are really high,” Daniels said.

They were able to buy a home in Richmond. Daniels says she feels lucky they could make it work but, still, Richmond doesn’t feel like home.

“It’s pretty sad to be from here and seeing the changes that are being made and that they don’t include me or people that look like me,” she said.

Both Daniels and Willis fall into that missing-middle category — they make too much money to qualify for housing subsidies but don’t make enough to pay the going rate in their hometown.

“My wages are OK but it’s not enough for San Francisco,” Willis said.

“We’re losing culture. We’re losing a sense of community,” Daniels said.

“To think that we can actually build a new culture in exclusive suburbs … is kind of wishful thinking so some of this is going to be lost forever,” Chapple said.

Chapple argues there’s still a lot that can be done. Most importantly, she says, resources need to be shared regionally so those who have been forced to the fringes don’t end up being even more disconnected.

“If we just leave it to the market, it’s all going to sprawl out and we’re not going to have optimal solutions for the region or for communities,” Chapple said.

Article source: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/16/project-home-study-race-discrimination-housing-real-estate-bay-area/