Castro Rents Matching Citywide Real Estate Explosion

Anyone who lives in the Castro knows two things: the real estate market is experiencing one of the largest booms in the modern era and rents are climbing quicker than ever. If you're lucky enough to have a rent controlled apartment, any unit built before 1979, you're hanging on for dear life praying the building owner doesn't sell it out from under you. Or they decide to move in using the Ellis Act and toss you out into a rental market with the highest rate of eviction in 12 years and where all over the Bay Area-including Oakland-the rental vacancy rate is 4.1% versus 7.4% nationally. There are thirty-six definable neighborhoods within the City even though real estate agents and their parent corporate companies are attempting to invent or rebrand certain section of the City to make areas sound more palatable and marketable for well to do clients to move into like the newly christened Bayview Heights district. The Castro falls into the top third of most graphs when it comes to rental prices and increases. According to a well researched and vetted post from Priceonomics there are a variety of issues that led to rental median price increase of 27% for a one bedroom in less than two years and a two bedroom  to jump by 33%. How high is that? That's almost 10 times the rate of inflation during those two years.

Issues feeding the rental price boom include an overall population uptick. In 2000-2010, 28K+ new residents arrived. In the last two years alone another 20K+ have moved here in search of their own bit of Oz and lured by the second wave of tech job expansion. Quickly falling unemployment rates are also a large factor. SF average dropping by nearly half in that same period. More folks plus more jobs equal I need a place to live. The lack of new build on the open rental playing field-only 261 new apartments came on the market in 2012-has also contributed to ever escalating rental prices. Looking around at all the construction cranes dotting the Cityscape- six new, large-scale, builds going up in the Castro alone- the rush is on to provide more space for the rising tide of new arrivals, but, this boom is behind the eight ball when it comes to meeting the needs of 'now'. 5000 new units will be up and running by 2015 but it's unclear if this will put a dent in the continuing rise of rent prices. All graphs available at the Priceonomics site are sobering as is their analysis. You can interact with two of them punching in any neighborhood in the City to get a quick glimpse of the rental realities if you're looking to move or relocate to San Francisco.

Long and short of it-things are gonna be rough for the forseeable future before they get better. This report also doesn't even begin to address the issues that trail along with the high prices of Castro rents like; gentrification of the neighborhood, how rental builds are effecting retail biz rentals prices, the loss of our blue collar, working class and working poor population priced out of the Castro and City, the LGBT senior community losing long-held apartments at a much higher clip than their younger counterparts or how to fit affordable housing builds within this overall housing boom going on in the Castro. These graphs are just the facts and figures of now. What we do to fix the problem will be up to us and local politicians to work on as a community.