San Francisco is My Home

29
Nov

Housing prices drop

Author: kris, Category: News

The housing situation around here is starting to get interesting.

Of course, it’s been interesting for a long, long time. I was interested in the astonishingly high prices being asked — and paid — for houses in the city, to say nothing of the Bay Area at large. I was interested to see that a nice, fairly ordinary three-bedroom apartment in a decent, but not mansion-y, neighborhood (my neighborhood, in fact) sold for over $1 million. I was only mildly interested, of course, because that sounds normal to me. Yes, you should definitely have to pay $1 million or more to be near more than one bus line and more than one restaurant.

Except I am pretty sure this is not normal for most of the country. I went and looked at some listings in other places I’d be willing to live — Denver, Seattle, Portland, etc. — and they don’t seem to be this high.

Anyway, since this business with the subprime loans, home prices have been steadily dropping in the city. I mean dropping in an exciting way, like to the point where my fellow and I could almost maybe afford to buy something halfway decent in an okay neighborhood, possibly.
Since the housing bubble began, more and more families, artists, blue collar workers and all those groups that give a city a feeling of holding many diverse lifestyles cupped in its hilly hands have been priced out, moving to Oakland or Antioch or farther out. It would be exciting to see these people returning to the city. Imagine the improvements we could make to the school systems if more kids were here; the new art scenes that would spring up if more artists could afford to stay. I would find that very interesting indeed.