This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I\u2019m Alexis Madrigal. We\u2019re talking about the Bay Area rental market this morning\u2014specifically what looks like a real divergence between San Francisco and Oakland. We\u2019ll discuss a number of factors that may be contributing to this widening gap in rents, especially for one-bedroom apartments, and consider what these trends tell us about our strategies for addressing the housing crisis.<\/p>\n
Joining us this morning, we have Chris Salviati, chief economist at Apartment List, who researches economic trends in the housing market. Thanks for joining us.<\/p>\n
Chris Salviati: Thanks for having me on.<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: We\u2019re also joined by J.K. Dineen, San Francisco Chronicle reporter covering housing and real estate. Welcome back, J.K.<\/p>\n
J.K. Dineen: Thanks, Alexis.<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: And Tim Thomas is with us as well, research director at UC Berkeley\u2019s Urban Displacement Project. Welcome, Tim.<\/p>\n
Tim Thomas: Good morning. Thank you.<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: Thanks so much. So, Chris, you\u2019re working with Apartment List data. Tell us what you\u2019re seeing in the rental market in San Francisco and Oakland.<\/p>\n
Chris Salviati: Yeah. Right now, we\u2019re seeing a real divergence between the two cities. Over the past year\u2014the last 12 months\u2014we\u2019ve seen a 13 percent increase in median rent in San Francisco. That\u2019s a huge spike. In Oakland, rents are only up about 2 percent. Oakland has always been more affordable than San Francisco, but that gap has really widened.<\/p>\n
Right now, our median one-bedroom estimate in San Francisco is about $3,150. In Oakland, it\u2019s about $1,850. That\u2019s almost a 70 percent gap, which is really significant.<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. For places that are, in some cases, 10 or 15 minutes apart\u2014and in some cases, parts of Uptown Oakland are closer to downtown San Francisco than to other parts of San Francisco. So tell us about the methodology here, because median one-bedroom data is a pretty specific slice of the rental market, right?<\/p>\n
Chris Salviati: Totally. This is an important methodological caveat. What Apartment List primarily sees is large, professionally managed apartment complexes\u2014think 50-plus-unit buildings, often high-rises. That\u2019s not exclusively our sample, but it makes up the bulk of what we track.<\/p>\n
So we\u2019re really talking about downtown areas in both cities. And when we talk about the softness we\u2019ve seen in the Oakland rental market\u2014where prices are actually down quite a bit from five or six years ago\u2014a lot of that decline is concentrated in downtown Oakland specifically.<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: That makes sense. J.K., when you hear these numbers, as someone who does a lot of qualitative reporting on what\u2019s being built and how these cities are functioning, what stands out to you?<\/p>\n
J.K. Dineen: The first thing I think is that there\u2019s not going to be new market-rate development in Oakland for a long time. A lot of apartments that opened between 2019 and 2023 are now going back to their lenders. They\u2019re being foreclosed on and selling for around $400,000 per unit, which is about half of what it costs to build a unit in Oakland.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve got projects like the old CCA campus in Rockridge\u2014one of the nicest neighborhoods in Oakland. It\u2019s a beautiful site: woodsy, hillside, great views. It\u2019s entitled for 445 units, but the developer, Emerald Fund, has said, \u201cI can build it, but it\u2019s going to be worth a lot less than it costs to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: Some of this story, right, Chris, is how long it took for Oakland\u2019s pandemic-era rent decline to bottom out. For this type of apartment, you had the pandemic, which disrupted everything, and then a wave of new supply coming online. From your data, it doesn\u2019t really bottom out until 2024.<\/p>\n
Chris Salviati: That\u2019s right. While rents are up 2 percent over the past year, if you go back to 2023 or early 2024, Oakland rents were declining 5 to 10 percent year over year.<\/p>\n
What we\u2019re really seeing is that a big construction boom in Oakland\u2014started before the pandemic, when the market was strong\u2014continued, and all of that inventory hit just as the city was hollowing out due to remote work and other pandemic effects. Oakland had both a supply surge and a demand slowdown, and demand hasn\u2019t come back as quickly. That\u2019s driven a lot of the ongoing softness we\u2019re seeing.<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: Tim Thomas, you focus on urban displacement issues. Do you think this is good news from a displacement perspective, or is this a slice of the market that doesn\u2019t necessarily affect the people you\u2019re most concerned about?<\/p>\n
Tim Thomas: I think it\u2019s generally good. Historically, rents don\u2019t usually go down. Right now, to avoid being rent-burdened in an $1,800 apartment, you need to make about $74,000 a year. Median income in the Bay Area is about $128,000. When you multiply that by 0.8\u201480 percent\u2014you get what HUD defines as low income, which in the Bay Area is shockingly about $102,000.<\/p>\n
So when prices drop from pre-pandemic Oakland rents of $2,600 or $2,700 down to $1,800, that creates a real opportunity for people who aren\u2019t in the tech industry to stay in place.<\/p>\n
Before the pandemic, I moved to Berkeley in 2019. When I was looking for an apartment, I was competing with nurses from San Francisco because they couldn\u2019t afford to live there. What happens at the epicenter of San Francisco affects the entire region\u2014Marin County, Alameda County, and definitely Oakland.<\/p>\n
Before the pandemic, Oakland was experiencing a revival. During the pandemic, I saw a lot of U-Haul trucks as people were locking down, and the population never really recovered. The economy didn\u2019t fully recover either.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s interesting now is that the divergence we\u2019re seeing is largely due to the AI boom in San Francisco. About $30 billion in venture capital was invested there in the third quarter of 2025. That\u2019s led to falling office vacancy rates, falling apartment vacancy rates, and a return-to-office push that\u2019s concentrating people back in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
During the pandemic, San Francisco hollowed out, but now population growth there has been significant. I think before too long, we\u2019ll likely see population growth return to Oakland as well.<\/p>\n
Right now, though, many downtown businesses aren\u2019t getting much foot traffic. People often cite crime as the main reason. However, homicides are down, vehicle thefts are down 65 percent, and burglaries are down 42 percent.<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: That\u2019s also because 2023 was such a bad year. It was anomalous.<\/p>\n
Tim Thomas: Sure, but things are getting a lot better. When people realize that, there\u2019s probably going to be another revival in Oakland.<\/p>\n
Alexis Madrigal: We\u2019re talking about the Bay Area rental market and why San Francisco rents have risen so much faster than those in Oakland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors. Alexis Madrigal: Welcome…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-172452","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-san-francisco","9":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","10":"tag-san-francisco-news","11":"tag-sf","12":"tag-sf-headlines","13":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}