Photo Credit: Franck Michel
Complaining about how expensive San Francisco is feels trite these days. Everyone knows that San Francisco is borderline unlivable unless you’re a billionaire or something adjacent to one.
It’s been said and been done to death.
You can’t turn on the news without hearing stories of tenants allegedly getting murdered by their landlords to cash in on the AI goldrush, or shady LLCs buying buildings in historic neighborhoods with the intent of evicting old ladies on fixed incomes just to replace them with some guy from Stanford who wants to monetize and automate something that doesn’t need to be automated in some grand vision to make the world marginally worse with the promise of making it marginally better for people who hate going outside.
You also see it when you walk the streets, you see the homeless, you see the dilapidated buildings with cramped studio apartments going for close to 4k a month, and you wonder how it all works, get angry, post something angry on the internet, and continue on your merry fuckin’ way.
But from a bird’s eye view, what does San Francisco’s housing crisis look like? How bad is it?
Probably worse than you think.
How do I know? Because I got the numbers.
First, here are things everyone pretty much knows. Homelessness is a bigger problem in urban, rather than suburban areas. That’s common sense, but just putting it out there. Counties with major cities in them have higher rates of homelessness than counties that don’t. In the case of the Bay Area, those counties are Alameda, San Francisco, and Santa Clara counties
But in the case of San Francisco, which is both a city and county, the per capita rate of homelessness is shocking.
There are roughly 1000 homeless people for every 100,000 people in San Francisco. Which means roughly 1 percent of the city is homeless.
And while San Francisco has the highest rate in California as a county, if we focus just on cities, Oakland’s rate is even higher at 1.3 percent.
These numbers are likely conservative estimates because it often doesn’t count people who are housing insecure. It literally just means homeless in the strictest definition of the word.
And a lot of San Franciscans would qualify as housing insecure. For example, nearly a quarter (23%) of San Francisco households subsist on less than $50,000 a year. That would put them in the extremely low income category. Considering for a single person, SF considers anyone making under 100k a year as low income, this means roughly 1 in 4 SF households are existing on the edge of a financial cliff. By the way 42% of San Francisco households make under $100,000. Which means, nearly 1 in 2 San Franciscans are low income by the city’s own standards.
So while San Francisco is the per capita billionaire capital, and the epicenter of the AI boom, half the city is poor and if you walk by 100 SF residents, one of them sleeps outside.
The only reasons why many of these people are still able to exist in the city is due to affordable housing and rent control.
Without those important protections, literally half of the city could be sleeping outside or simply disappear.
However, despite these problems, San Francisco is very pretty, and the fog is quite charming.
There’s also a fat sea lion at the Wharf, not far from the Taco Bell Cantina.
Everything’s fine. Don’t worry about it.
