How to get an apartment in San Francisco
San Francisco, much like every other high-cost-of-living city favored by young people, has a miserable rental market. What the pandemic once slackened is now tightening again, and signs of housing crisis remain apparent – from the constant bickering of local politics to the sheer number of one-bedroom apartments listed every day above $4,000.
In search of a new place to live this spring, I toured over a dozen apartments (if you include the two where I was ghosted by a realtor when I arrived at the front door). My attempts at scrupulousness were mostly rewarded with failure. I have no doubt my search would have been easier if I were more flexible about price, if my salary was at or above San Francisco’s Area Median Income (AMI), if I were working as a Senior Marketing Strategy Development Operations and Implementation Guru at Floox. (Worth noting: The US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2024 AMI for a single-person household in San Francisco $130,600. This means a low-income single-person household, calculated at 80% of AMI, qualifies at $109,700.) This meant I had to learn about San Francisco’s housing market the hard way. And here is what I learned.
Most people reading this know San Francisco’s housing prices are wild. I’m sure some people reading this choose to live here too - it’s a city of endless charm, where on every street pastel Victorians shoulder leafy parks and millionaires live in shoebox apartments, just like you! But the sheer price of rents still amaze me, even as they rebound slower from the pandemic than other cities like New York.
Say what you like about why these rents are so high, but it’s hard to argue against how easily rich people can bid up the cost of housing, especially when supply is as limited as it is in a place like San Francisco. (And rich people here are getting richer, faster. Bay Area Council Economic Institute found that from 2010-2019, Bay Area median household income increased by nearly $250,000 [or 87%] among households in the top decile. Meanwhile, the bottom decile rose by only $4,000 [or 36%])
Rent reductions in the pandemic offered a bit of salvation. Anecdotally, two of my coolest friends (bartenders slash DJ slash political activists) opted to move back to San Francisco from Oakland during this time. They said most of their friends were doing the same and secured rent-controlled ~$1800/month one-bedroom apartments, and I really hope they stay. (Interestingly, while SF rents begin to climb again, Downtown Oakland’s residential and commercial market is tumbling.)
Most apartments here are covered by the San Francisco Rent Ordinance, which provides rent control and just cause for eviction. (Single-family housing stock and housing stock built before 1979 is exempted, so new newer neighborhoods like SoMa are largely not rent controlled). My old apartment (approx. 450 square feet situated in a lovely location between Noe Valley and the Mission), cost $2,595 per month and the rent was only legally allowed to rise 1.7% year-over-year – at that rate, my landlord didn’t even bother to increase. Rent control allows people like me to breathe a bit, and not live in fear that the lease renewal will bring impossible news. After one year, most rent-controlled leases convert to month-to-month leases, another major perk, so I was able to enjoy a more relaxed housing search than most (I ended up staying another 6 weeks, and paying for exactly that). And unlike New York City, renters do not typically pay broker’s fees.
I went to college in Boston and lived in a neighborhood where, if you were looking for a September 1st lease, you’d hope to have a lease signed by November the previous year. It was frustrating, but at least you knew you had time to search. In San Francisco, the market moves much faster. I theorize this is largely due to the prevalence of many month-to-month leases. Landlords only receive a 30-day notice of when their tenants leave, so they are incentivized to act immediately to line something up fast. And they do. Listings go up and down in a day; in some cases, landlords asked if I could move in as soon as that weekend.
Landlords also ask for a lot of documentation (I was once rejected from an apartment for submitting a paystub that was one month old, rather than the current pay cycle). Supply is largely consolidated between Craigslist, Zillow/Redfin (which seem identical), the MLS (for condos), and some weird sites like Trulia. Many listings go up and are taken down in a single day.
So I searched and searched. I’ll admit that I am relatively location- and price-constrained, so my options may be more limited than most. My boyfriend is a PhD student who bikes to Caltrain most days of the week (Our move to the Bay Area was precipitated by his lab moving from Chicago to Palo Alto). And like a lot of people reading this, I thought I was clever enough to also find a place that was cool AND modern, spacious AND affordable, possessing a refrigerator AND a freezer. You can probably smell my naivete.
I searched with a particular focus on units that might be under-advertised. My trials and tribulations included viewing:
A one-bedroom with an antique fireplace and spiral staircase leading from the kitchen to the bedroom, which almost would have worked, had the sound of the highway not been so deafening that my boyfriend didn’t bother hiding his disgust at the constant rumbling in front of the realtor, knowing she could not overhear his laughter at the vibrating wood beams ($2,850/month, plus all utilities)
A slightly-too-small one-bedroom with lots of charm, painted emerald green walls accented with violet purple on edges and corners, a garden so well-maintained it could have fit inside a botanical garden, an older lesbian landlord who wrote about 1,000 words on the ad about her efforts to cultivate a “Tales of the City”-like community inside of the building, who told us as we were leaving that the place had received four “quality” applications already but we were welcome to be the fifth if we were to choose (*I am still baffled by her motivations here.) ($2795/month)
An apartment advertised online as a “two-bedroom” which my boyfriend and I realized upon stepping inside, that the second bedroom was actually a walk-in closet (certainly not legally considered a bedroom in the state of California) while the living room possessed a mostly see-through glass door which directly faced inside another unit ($2,775/month)
After many, many hours of searching and touring (time that should have been my leisure time in my busy life!), my friends finally told me I wasn’t being gregarious enough. Two of them said they’d brought manila envelopes with their paystubs and credit reports to apartment showings before even deciding to apply. I decided I had to be faster and stronger. I did what they told me to do and I found an apartment.
Housing construction is politically divisive and particularly frustrating in San Francisco relative to anywhere else I’ve lived in, and I don’t want to touch on it too much in this piece. But I will never forget my friend’s friend, riding a Google Bus to work everyday from her $4,000/month high-rise on Mission St., complain that the proposed development of the completely empty lot next to her building into a mix of affordable and market-rate units was “too tall to be in line with the character of the neighborhood.”
I want to find reasons to be optimistic. When interest rates go down, competition in the rental market might (in theory) slacken. Pandemic-era evictions protections have largely disappeared, but at least tenants’ unions seem to be on the rise, especially in the Bay Area. Work-from-home is encouraging people to leave cities where they don’t want to live.
I try to find reasons against the doomer takes of “renting is getting more and more impossible” but when my last landlord decided not to fix the shower (“You can still live with it that way”), I had basically no recourse. It wasn’t worth housing court. At least he couldn’t raise rent. But it was another bullet point on the ever-growing “I need to buy a house, but it can’t be here” list.
Shortly after my friends convinced me to modify my strategy, I refreshed Craigslist until a listing popped up titled “Unique Loft” — with none of the other embellishments added to essentially every other Craigslist listing (e.g., “Huge bright perfect location cozy ideal for singles couples entire apartment rare opportunity”). There was one photo, of flooring which I was pretty sure was fake, because I had never seen something so ornate on residential flooring — let alone flooring in my price range. I emailed the lister immediately and asked to view as soon as possible. I had a good feeling. It felt like arbitrage.
We signed the lease right after being the first to tour it. The internet installation guy later described the unit as “deeply San Francisco.” And I’ll admit the apartment features some unlikely elements: clear vinyl flooring on the lofts. Prior uses as a barn then as a former commercial space. A bathroom that is straight out of 1970. Ceilings almost 20 feet tall, so tall it is almost dizzying. Ornate, wooden built-in furniture that matches the design of the intricate flooring. Detailed lighting fixtures. A garbage disposal and dishwasher. A fridge (which I had to negotiate to get). A second loft for storage. Over 1,000 SF of living space. Washer/dryer in the adjacent garage (no more begging the laundromat for quarters!). And various other unique perks I have been advised against describing here. I am so grateful for it, in the end, as I type this from my built-in kitchen island. But it shouldn’t have been so hard to get here.
Congrats on the move! I was struck by the similarities to DC housing supply reading this— lots of building constraints (and new dev being contained to a handful of neighborhoods), month-to-month lease protections for most renters, and rent control requirements for older buildings. But possibly the important difference keeping rent prices from ballooning out of control here is the distribution of income? Prevalence of gov and non-profits as major employers sort of inherently caps growth versus the dominance of tech in SF.
MLS means multiple listing service.