It's hard to find places in the Bay Area that have good access to public transportation and are actually as cheap as rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco. Just being "way cheaper" than SF may not be enough if it still doubles your rent -- anywhere on the Peninsula down into Silicon Valley merely drops you from "most expensive in the country" to "in the top ten most expensive in the country," and even most of the supposedly "cheap" East Bay will run you far more than most other metro areas across the US. Apartments around Palo Alto, Cupertino and Mountain View, where there has never been any rent control, are not nearly as far behind SF's market rate as I think people sometimes imagine.
I'm not making an argument for rent control, per se -- it's hard to dispute that it's a distorting influence on the market in San Francisco itself -- but it's hard to appreciate just how banana crazypants the housing market across this whole region is right now.
> Apartments around Palo Alto, Cupertino and Mountain View
If you're trying to save money, of course you don't live in those places. Are you going to list Woodside, Hillsborough, and Atherton as well?
There are plenty of other less expensive cities that have great access to public transportation and decent access to SF; like Redwood City, Fremont, Hayward, South SF, Daly City, Oakland, and others that are a lot less expensive (most of these places are also way more bike friendly than SF). Even really inexpensive places like Concord, Pittsburg, or Livermore have decent access to Bart.
> even most of the supposedly "cheap" East Bay will run you far more than most other metro areas across the US.
Well yes, but your salary is higher as well compared to the rest of the US; so the East Bay is very affordable. Is is still more expensive than the rest of the US? Of course, but that's what happens when a lot of people want to live in a specific spot.
You can also just rent out a room too if you want to save money in pricier areas. In the past even with an engineering salary, I've rented a room in a cheap area just so I could save up money for house later on.
I'll tell you why this YC thread is really annoying to me: Hacker News is a forum supposedly filled with thinkers who aim to solve problems. Yet with a good number of HN people in this thread, instead of looking for alternative solutions (i.e. cheaper neighboring cities), they seem to be focused on how the problem is unsolvable without legislation.
this. Its actually cheaper for me to live in rent controlled SF than "close to BART" Oakland. Bart isn't cheap. Owning a car isn't cheap. With the state of our transit, I would never want to live in Oakland without a car, but I would definitely live in SF without one.
Basically, if we had the mass transit system of new york, the rest of the bay might actually not be that bad compared to walking to work.
I'm not making an argument for rent control, per se -- it's hard to dispute that it's a distorting influence on the market in San Francisco itself -- but it's hard to appreciate just how banana crazypants the housing market across this whole region is right now.