Gold Rush Era Real Estate was Actually More Expensive than Modern Day San Francisco

San Francisco during the Gold Rush in 1851 (wikipedia)

As we all know, due to San Francisco’s second digital gold rush, real estate is unfathomly expensive right now. I mean, the average price for a one bedroom apartment is $2,800! While that shit is absolutely ridiculous it got me thinking about how crazily expensive San Francisco was during the original gold rush, you know, the one where they were actually digging gold out of the ground. So I pulled out my copy of Herbert Asbury’s classic The Barbary Coast to find out.

According to old Herb:

There were not nearly enough dwellings in San Francisco to shelter even a small proportion of the new-comers…To sleep in a bunk or a cot cost as high as fifteen dollars a night…Very few private rooms were available, and the cheapest rented for from two to three hundred dollars a month, payable in advance. The best brought from five hundred to a thousand dollars for a similar period.

So let’s plug those numbers into an inflation calculator.

$15 in for a bunk or cot in 1849 would be $407.85 in today’s currency.

$200 in 1849 equals $5438.04 in today’s currency

$1000 in 1849 equals $27,190.19 in today’s currency

As you can see the scarcity of housing made everything in SF ludicrously expensive in 1849, but the difference is that it all evened out a few years later as The City expanded. While modern day San Francisco isn’t as expensive as Gold Rush era San Francisco (yet), I worry it won’t ever even out. Let’s put pressure on those in City Hall to create more affordable housing. SF needs it!