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Originally Posted by 10023
Doing this by entire city is pretty useless.
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Every city has peaks and valleys. Depending on neighborhood, a peak PSF hood might not equal a peak $ amt hood. None of the cities on this list are all that different in this respect, and I don't think using city limits is useless.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 10023
And similarly, looking at all of NYC (350 square miles) hugely understates the actual cost of living there for most professionals that want a decent commute. As it states, in Manhattan the average price is more than 3.5x that of the city as a whole (and prime Brooklyn is probably 2.5x as high). There are parts of the city that are quite cheap, but they're not places that people who are highly mobile would want to live, frankly.
It's also not an apples to apples comparison to look at Boston or SF (less than 50 square miles) vs. cities that are much, much larger geographically.
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I'm tired of this argument that SF = Manhattan. Yes, you must take a bridge or tunnel to enter both. Yes, both are constrained by water and have high prices. Both have a Chinatown and a Financial District. Both have seen prices soar in the past 24 months. However, the comparison stops there. Manhattan doesn't have single-family home neighborhoods and large middle class neighborhoods. SF does. SF's 850,000 people aren't all richies or Chinatown residents, to the degree that Manhattan's 1.6 million residents are.
SF's version of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Bronx, etc are the Richmond, Sunset, Mission, Noe Valley, Hunters Point, Glen Park, Visitacion Valley neighborhoods, which don't have equivalents in Manhattan.
SF's version of Manhattan would be the NE Quadrant expanded to include part of Supervisor District 2 (gotta include Pac Heights to get that UES/UWS equivalent) and Supervisor District 6 (due to odd cutoff).
My problems with this argument continue as follows:
1. Metro NYC and certainly all of the Outer Boroughs have better, more accessible, and more effective transit than the City of San Francisco. That speaks volumes to NYC and is one of my harshest criticisms of SF. Effective transit can open up a whole lot more "affordable" housing options for middle class people and allow them to reach work centers quickly and conveniently without a car. Most residents of SF need a car, let alone the metro area, as the transit isn't so widespread or effective.
2. NYC city is 8.5 million people, and ~20 million+ people depending on how you look at it in the metro. Arguing that SF and Boston city limits are too small is inadvertently arguing that their scale is approaching NYC, and it's not. In SF's case, there is an ocean on 1 side, a wide bay on 2, and a mountain range immediately to the south that cut it off from the rest of the metro. It's not contiguous, so expanding the land area wouldn't be as effective as you think, nor would it really bring down the average home price or add that many people to the population.
This is why Bridge and Tunnel is a phrase also used in SF, because it's literally true.
3. Manhattan has less economic diversity and far less housing diversity than SF. That is because Manhattan is 1 central borough to one of the world's largest cities that has the world's largest economy. SF is a full city, with Manhattan like neighborhoods down to single family neighborhoods, from ghettoes and ethnic enclaves to some of the wealthiest down to middle class swaths of the city very comparable to Queens or Brooklyn or Staten Island. SF has all of this in its 47 square miles because it's a much smaller city, population wise, to begin with. Manhattan isn't a complete city without its Outer Boroughs because those Outer Boroughs comprise its middle class.
This is also why Rent Control and possibly phasing it out in the City of SF is such a contentious subject, because it's NOT all rich techies living here in expensive new apartments, and the fear is that opening up older housing stock to market rates would make them ripe for all of the rich techies still living in the burbs who would then move into the city, pushing out the city's middle class and truly creating a more Manhattanesque demographic.
If you did want to expand SF artificially to include its metro area, which also doesn't take up much land as a whole, then it would still be at the top, as unlike a New York or Boston or DC to a lesser degree, there really is no escaping insane pricing, and $1,000,000 won't get you a decent house (decent to the same standards elsewhere) anywhere in the metro area, or basically anywhere in urban CA.
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Originally Posted by dave8721
What I was thinking exactly. Basically what this list amounts to is just an average price per square foot ranking for a city. There is also the whole disconnect between condo and single family prices. Condos/Apartments will always cost more per square foot and the prices for the two should be separated.
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Agreed. I know here that condos now exceed $1,100psf on average, but most condos are 1/2 BRs and have lower overall price points than 3 BR single family homes, so they are more "affordable". The 3BR homes that I've seen on the market here aren't that much cheaper PSF than the 1/2BR condos (list indicates $665psf avg for all housing in city and that number seems more like either 2012 or the number for the whole metro area, as a 3BR home here averages $845psf according to Trulia, and that's a number that seems more like it).
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Originally Posted by Crawford
And coops will always cost less per square foot, but are not really "cheaper" than condos. So the condo/coop breakdown makes an enormous difference.
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Is a co-op similar to what we call a Tenancy in Common? (TIC)
Could the numbers in this list be old? I ask, because not that it would be a good thing to have less square footage for $1M here in SF, but in all honesty, $1M won't buy you 1,500 SF here, at least nowadays in 2014. $1M will get you a 1,500 SF shack down in Palo Alto, though. LoL
East Palo Alto search for houses for sale - $370K-$999K to live in a shack in a former Most Dangerous City in America
A quick search on Trulia reveals that All Properties average $862psf. Not sure where this report gets its numbers, though it could be from ~2012/early 2013 when that would have made more sense.