SAN FRANCISCO—”The City By the Bay” now houses some of the most expensive hotels in the world, according to NBC Bay Area and is now the most expensive city to live in the United States, according to Business Insider and Propery Shark, a real estate reporting webpage. Prices are continuing to soar as people who can’t afford to live in SF are uprooted and those working in the technological field move in.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco claims that the median price to purchase a home is $1,000,000, while the average rental unit is priced at $3,057, nearly $15,000 higher than that of California as a whole.
Many South-American, Mexican and Chinese immigrants, with their own distinctive culture and shops are being misplaced by artisan delis, organic yogurt shops and Hiram yoga centers, bringing with it a mix of a new version of culture.
“San Francisco 2.0,” an HBO documentary, narrated and directed by Alexandra Pelosi, depicts the tensions and how the city is uniformly becoming a “modern-day Venezuela.”
Some even blame the Ellis Act, a 1986 lobby enacted to assist landlords of “going out of business” legally by selling their buildings to new owners who initially have rights to “price” out tenants.
According to some locals in the Bay Area, new residents working in the Silicon Valley are causing the rise in cost of living to take place, some are even baffled by the company, AirBnB, a business that allows home owners to transform their abodes into temporary inns for travelers.
AirBnB has allegedly purchased properties from landlords looking to “retire their jobs” and raised rent, forcing long-time residents to move.
Mayor Edward Lee of San Francisco, who initially wished to preserve 30,000 units of homes by 2020, plans to propose more affordable housing on the west side of the city, even if areas of public property must be used. According to housingwire.com, plans are even being set in motion in exchange for exceeded restrictions on current buildings.
