Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

The couple you're talking about is working full-time + 25% and spending >50%(!) of their combined income on rent. If either of them loses a job or has hours cut, rent is on the line. They can't afford to split up. They can't afford to have a kid. This is a VERY tenuous situation.

“Median rent” means 50th percentile, not cheapest option available. The bottom quintile or decile of market-rate studio apartments costs well under $2,000/mo.

I'm really skeptical of that claim. Very few apartments are on the market under $2k in SF, let alone "well-under." And while living in a 300 sq ft hole in a sketchy area can be a stopgap, your hypothetical couple is working too many hours to have many options for ever escaping it

Currently 20 legitimate listings on Zillow for <$1600, and 60 listings of 2-bd apartments for under $3000.

“20” “quintile or decile” Having attempted to shop in this area in roughly this bracket, I can tell you that “legitimate” lies on a very strange spectrum, and that it’s likely all of those apartments are only habitable in an essentially hypothetical sense. Give it a shot! :)

The bottom quintile (1/5th) of all studios costs under $2000 (55 out of 264 current listings in SF). That is affordable to anyone earning at least $18/hr.

Can you maybe see how these goal-post shifts matter? “Well under” becomes “anything under.” $15/hour becomes $18/hour. This isn’t a joke. Real people are trying to make this work, and they can’t fudge these numbers arbitrarily.

I said a couple each earning $15/hr. That is $75k/yr for a full-time 48+ hour workweek schedule that most homeowners work. This couple can afford $3200/mo in rent. There are 79 2-bdrm currently avail.