{"id":142854,"date":"2025-09-09T00:44:39","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T00:44:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/142854\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T00:44:39","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T00:44:39","slug":"amid-ai-boom-san-francisco-rents-are-up-so-are-evictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/142854\/","title":{"rendered":"Amid AI boom, San Francisco rents are up. So are evictions.\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Sept. 2, Mayor Daniel Lurie retweeted<\/a> a news story detailing a \u201csurge\u201d of AI leases in San Francisco. \u201cSan Francisco\u2019s office market is bouncing back,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNew companies are arriving, and homegrown innovators like OpenAI are expanding.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe future,\u201d he continued, \u201cis being built right here in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

But that future does not look great for tenants. With San Francisco rent increases over the last 12 months the fastest of any major city in the country, eviction notices are also spiking.<\/p>\n

Companies like OpenAI are shelling out millions<\/a> or tens of millions<\/a> to hire a single engineer \u2014 a month ago, employees there received bonuses alone that could be in the \u201cmillions<\/a>.\u201d Ordinary tenants are being crowded out.<\/p>\n

Median rents reached $3,069 for a one-bedroom apartment in August and $3,637 for a two-bedroom, according to data from the rental site Apartment List. Overall, rent prices are up 11.5 percent over the last year and edging towards pre-pandemic levels.<\/p>\n

Though tenants received a brief reprieve during the pandemic, their rents were never cheap. Even when prices were at their lowest in January 2021, rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was still the sixth most expensive nationally, according to data from Apartment List.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eviction notices, meanwhile, are at their highest rate since 2018 and have almost doubled in the last year alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The sheriff\u2019s department has received an average of 84 eviction execution orders a month this year, which are issued by the Superior Court when a tenant loses an eviction case, compared to 88 a month in 2024 and 76 a month in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Tenderloin, Financial District\/Northern SoMa, and the Mission District saw the most eviction notices citywide. In each neighborhood, the number of eviction notices issued this year so far has already surpassed the total issued in each of the two years prior.<\/p>\n

The most common reason for eviction notices was for nonpayment of rent. <\/p>\n

Evictions for failure to pay have more than tripled in the past year: In 2024, landlords issued an average of 14 notices a month for nonpayment of rent, while in the first eight months of 2025, landlords sent 49 a month, according to data from the San Francisco Rent Board<\/a>. Landlords are not required to report notices for non-payment of rent, so the true number of notices issued is likely higher.<\/p>\n

\u201cFolks are struggling. COVID officially is over, but it\u2019s not over economically,\u201d said Ora Prochovnick of the Eviction Defense Collaborative<\/a>. Prochovnick said that 70 percent of the group\u2019s cases have to do with non-payment of rent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Real estate agent Ken De Leon said that landlords who may have been more lax in the past are now \u201cless flexible and forgiving of tenants not paying their rent.\u201d With rental prices up, landlords have less incentive to cut tenants slack.<\/p>\n

Landlords who gave concessions during COVID-19 \u201cto keep their tenants because the rents had gone down. \u201dNow, they\u2019re more inclined to push tenants out\u00a0 \u201cbecause they now know that they can get more money from the new market rate,\u201d said Rahman Popal, founder of the Law Firm for Tenants Rights.<\/a> Other factors, like immigration crackdowns,<\/a> could also affect a family\u2019s ability to pay rent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

City officials tout AI boom, as rents go sky high<\/p>\n

Over a third of San Francisco renter-occupied households are\u00a0 \u201crent burdened,\u201d meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau<\/a>. That includes 20 percent that are \u201cseverely rent burdened\u201d and spend more than 50 percent of income on rent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But for San Francisco City Hall, post-pandemic rising rents are a \u201cbright spot\u201d for the city\u2019s economy, according to the city controller\u2019s July report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a sign of economic vitality. It\u2019s clearly demand growing again \u2014 more people wanting to live in San Francisco,\u201d wrote Ted Egan, the report\u2019s author<\/a> and the city\u2019s chief economist.<\/p>\n

Egan is not alone. A trend that might have brought unhappiness in past years is now seen by the business community and housing advocates as a sign of San Francisco getting back on its feet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pro-housing groups say those high rents are, paradoxically, needed: Without them, developers have no incentive to build the housing they believe will ultimately bring rents down. Corey Smith, the director of the Housing Action Coalition, said at a city hearing<\/a> last year that \u201cOne of the challenges we face in San Francisco is we need the rent to go back up.\u201d<\/p>\n

De Leon, the real estate broker, pointed to the contradiction. \u201cThe increase in evictions is a negative impact of a positive trend,\u201d he said. \u201cSan Francisco is coming back economically from a very hard time and the rebound is both rapid and perhaps just in the early stages due to the likely sustainability of the AI wave.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many of the newcomers are AI apostles coming to work for places like Databricks, Anthropic and Open AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSan Francisco has become the center in the country, and probably the world, of AI startups,\u201d said Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst at Compass, a real estate technology firm.<\/p>\n

According to the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies<\/a>, a think tank, companies in San Francisco raised $34 billion in venture capital investment last year, compared to $11.4 billion the previous year. According to the Wall Street Journal<\/a>, which Lurie retweeted this week, AI firms leased \u201cclose to 1 million square feet\u201d of office space in 2025 so far, about a fifth of the total office space leased this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While downtown office space is still at about 65 percent of capacity<\/a> \u2014 far below pre pandemic levels \u2014 city officials are hoping AI will change that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By 2030, an industry specialist told the Journal, AI firms could \u201coccupy 12 million to 15 million square feet.\u201d<\/p>\n

The AI boom, Carlisle said, \u201cis pulling people in from all over the country\u201d \u2014 and just starting. \u201cThat will continue to grow and continue to add pressure to asking rents.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Sept. 2, Mayor Daniel Lurie retweeted a news story detailing a \u201csurge\u201d of AI leases in San…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-142854","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}