The general assumption is that finding housing in San Francisco is difficult, time-consuming, and overall EXPENSIVE. Those points are all true but there are definitely strategies to find cheaper housing without resorting to either settling for a half-living room with two roommates plus live-in boyfriends.

My personal opinion is that San Francisco housing prices are generally overblown because of articles reporting figures of 3K+ median rent while another site will display scary map pictures like the one below of average one-bedroom prices per neighborhood.

And the prices here aren’t inaccurate, they’re just depicting SF’s housing prices inaccurately by only showing one-bedroom apartments. One-bedroom apartments in San Francisco are especially expensive because space is expensive in SF and one-bedrooms take up a lot of space on a per person basis. Indeed if we only look at one bedroom apartment prices as a metric for overall SF pricing, the city looks alarmingly expensive.

Data scraped from Craigslist over a period from November 2017-April 2018

TLDR: 1. Find a Roommate (duh) 2. Look in rooms / shares of Craigslist

Let’s dig in deeper though and assume you’re down to get a roommate. Besides getting a roommate or ten to reduce pricing across the board, how do we find which neighborhoods have better deals on multi-bedroom apartments or houses?

Analysis: Apartment for rent vs. Room for rent

Using data that I scraped over a period of five months, I mapped out the location of every single apartment in the Craigslist section of apts / housing for rent as well as rooms / shares. Apts / housing showcases all rental housing by unit listed on Craigslist, rooms / shares lists open rooms in existing homes and apartments for rent.

The metric we want to optimize for is price per bedroom. If looking in apts / housing (or any other website besides Craigslist), the price of rent is calculated by taking the total cost of rent for the 2+ bedroom units and dividing it by the number of bedrooms. On the other side, we can look at rooms / shares and make sure to check the private room filter on Craigslist because we’re not in college nor trying to live in a living room.

From the distribution of price above, clearly there are cheaper rooms in rooms / share. But are these prices actually cheap in the neighborhood that we want to live in? There is a zero tolerance policy for living more than a ten minute walk away from a Philz coffee or an avocado toast joint.

Plotting all of the apartment rentals on a map, we get a scale on the average prices across the neighborhoods for apts / housing vs. rooms / shares. The neighborhood boundary maps are drawn by the San Francisco city council.

The color scale is the same across the two maps. There’s a considerable number of neighborhoods in rooms / shares that prices a bedroom around low 1000s. In fact most neighborhoods have average prices less than 1800 while in apts / housing the pricing is much more expensive, where a room will cost you more than 2000 dollars on average.

﻿

Why the disparity? Most of the evidence points to factors around rent control. Neighborhoods with a high density of new apartment buildings and houses are exempt from rent control and can charge high market rates. Again if we look at the percentage difference between the two maps, we can plot out the neighborhoods that have the most upside into looking in the Craigslist section of rooms / shares.

Neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, Financial District, Haight Ashbury, and Pacific Heights are around ~40% cheaper in rent when looking for rooms in existing apartments. While Financial District and Pacific Heights are cheaper because the new units are so expensive, the Tenderloin and Haight Ashbury specifically are cheaper because many of the apartments are offering rooms under rent control. As stated by the San Francisco Rental Board, all apartments built before 1979 are under rent control, and both the Tenderloin and Haight Ashbury have very little in-between brand new apartment complexes and very old apartments with scary elevators. Yet once the tenants in an apartment leave, the landlord will usually rent out the apartment as a whole unit and charge the expensive market rate because of it’s great location proximity.

On the flip side, if you look at the lighter green neighborhoods, many of them don’t really have that much of decreases in rent when looking for existing rooms. The Potrero Hill/Dogpatch sees only a 19% decrease in rent when looking for existing rooms comparatively because there lacked many apartments to begin with in the neighborhood versus the number of new apartment buildings that have popped up. The Dogpatch has been a huge area of apartment development because of it’s proximity to downtown and the closing of many warehouses in the area. Other neighborhoods like Portola, Outer Mission, and Richmond don’t see many rental decreases as well from a lack of newly expensive apartment complexes in the area when the existing rentals in the area are already on the cheaper side.

Conclusion

It’s hard to find housing in San Francisco but it can be done when there’s more transparency. If you’re having a hard time finding housing in San Francisco, getting a baseline idea of what you should be paying is a good first step. I’ll try to dig into this Craigslist data some more as well.