San Francisco Rents Explode!!

Ahmed blames rent control for high rents? Is he insane?

Ahmed 2

Why would rent control explain fluctuations in rent, if we've had it for decades. Paul seems to be communicating that rent went up recently. I bet Paul has taken the simplified microeconomics 101 course that many of us have been exposed to that requires us to repeat back the politically correct ideas that minimum wages cause poverty and rent control causes high rent, if he got into law school. He has a pretty good case that macroeconomic forces are causing this, specifically the decisions of the centralized banking infrastructure and its effect on house speculation. Rent is indirectly affected by the international real estate speculation Rent is pretty awful in all of the South Bay as well. It is also bad in Los Angeles, Boston, New York, England.

Wanna know why rents are so suddenly high in SF? Just look at the major corporate landlords, like Parkmerced, who colludes with others in its class, such as Skyline Realty, to fix rents at astronomical levels for the purpose of driving working people out of San Francisco, thus changing the political demographics of a once-progressive city. All these landlords and their front men and women in at the SF Board of Realtors and SF City Hall need to held criminally liable (i.e. RICO charges) for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Don't count on City Attorney Dennis Herrera or DA Kamala Harris taking action - both are members of the same gang and gatekeepers for these crooks. Just look at the list of donors to their campaigns.

well, ultimately what happened is that rich people moved into town. That is why rent is high. The most interesting thing to ask is how they were created, and whether they can keep it up.

Seriously, during the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and most of the 90s... where there an equivalent number of people in the country who could buy or pay those rents (inflation adjusted?). Were they just living in other cities, then San Francisco became popular recently, or more gay people moved here?
I don't think so.
What changed is the degree to which the upper 10% are wealthy. In the 50s and 60s, there were tons of middle class families and even blue collar families where there could be one earner, and they could afford kids and a whole house in San Jose plus food clothes and medical care. They could afford this because the prices equated to fewer hours of work at a job obtainable by average people.
After that, things slowly got out of whack, because as the wealthy got wealthier, they could drive up the prices of 'needs' such as housing/food/healthcare in the same location. So the same house in San Mateo might take the same number of hours of labor to build, but will take 15 years of wages to purchase etc.
Why is this area so wealthy? Stock holdings of some people, plus Silicon valley is a special economy where a few people can really make a lot. It's important to remember that a lot of this is military expenditure related. While google employes 20,000 worldwide, there is a whole list of military contractors in the south bay that employ tens of thousands - Raytheon, Titan, General Dynamics, Northrop Kaiser, Lockheed.
Really, the only thing which could stop this is a 'correction', first in the stock market, which cancels some wealth, or inflation to remove the value of currency.

Some other factors which might affect San Francisco would be the international city effect where people in other countries buy condos.