In my life since college I have learned several things, but the one bugging me right now is this: if you want to live in a really cool city you basically have to kill someone to find an apartment. Right now we live in the foggy hinterlands of san francisco, just ten blocks from the pacific ocean. It looks like we are going to have to move out of our house (that we moved into just back in october) because the landlord wants to sell. So now I am back on the apartment hunt, and my god there is basically nothing out there, unless we didn’t have cats. But we do have cats, and there you are. What is frustrating about the whole process is that there is no solution to the apartment problem other than live in the burbs. For various reasons public policy is designed around encouraging home ownership rather than renting. So if you are a renter (and if you live in SF and don’t make $500k+, you are) there are no tax breaks, no grants, no encouragement for developers. Basically there is no reason to create additional rental units, and nobody has. There are several new projects in the works, which may help eventually, but right now the law of supply and demand means I need to run out the door with a check in hand, drive around the city and throw down $6000 when I see a place we like. And that is the gripe of the day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 20:56 and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.