Surely a one bedroom place is the least efficient way to live? Also, bear in mind most people live in couples, so if there's two of you, a combined income of $100,000 is very reasonable, and you should be able to live anywhere here.
personally I live in a one bedroom, and there's one of me, and the heat map for my area looks perfectly accurate.
I'm also happy not to be forced to live with someone and still work any where I like. Freedom 'n all.
So wait, couples are 'forced' to live together? You would think a couple would like each other to some extent, and in a lot of cases enough to gladly live together.
Not everyone is in a relationship. The forcing is due to money - if you're poor enough, then you simply can't afford even a studio and are forced into having roommates to split the cost of rent.
I believe your parent meant having roommates, but even still I think people move in together much earlier in the relationship in expensive cities than they would otherwise.
I meant roomates but to be honest, it could be the same for couples. If couples don't wanna live together, why not? Because its not the accepted social behavior? Meh. It's up to the couple, nobody else.
If almost 45% of San Franciscans are single, plus a chunk of polyamorous, co-opers, and goodness knows who else, it may not be true that "most people live in couples."
http://www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/solocities.aspx
Also, I know it's often done, but a one-bedroom is rather cozy for two people for the long term.
> "$100,000 is very reasonable, and you should be able to live anywhere here."
$100K is really not total-freedom money in a city like SF. Take the FiDi and Mission Bay for example - $3200/month for a 1BR means $38,400 in rent every year.
That's spending $39% of your pre-tax income on rent, a deeply inadvisable amount, if any sane landlord would even allow it. Even if we drop the rent to $2500 to open up options in the Haight, Castro, and Mission, we're still talking about $30K in pure rent.
Nowadays I'm in NYC, where no sane landlord will let you break the 40X Rule, where your monthly rent multiplied by 40 may not exceed your pre-tax annual income. On $100K that's $2500 a month - and that's an absolute upper bound rent. $2500 is totally feasible in SF, but you definitely won't have your pick of apartments. A income of $100K would be well-advised to stay under $2500, where pickings are increasingly slim.
> "Also, bear in mind most people live in couples"
Citation needed. I know a lot of people who have roommates in SF, but SF is a notoriously single city. I'd be extremely surprised if >50% of SF's population is living with a spouse or partner.
Some quick Google-fu:
In fact, it looks like as of the 2000 census[1] that 38% of the city lived alone, and 56% of households do not have a spouse or partner living there. I wouldn't call that "most people".
> I'd be extremely surprised if >50% of SF's population is living with a spouse or partner.
I think when the grandparent said "living in couples" they mean "in pairs" not "romantically engaged." Most well-to-do SFers I know live with 1+ roommate. That's all they're saying. A 2(+) BR apartment cuts costs per person because you share the "core" (kitchen, bathroom, living room).
"Couple" used to mean romantically engaged. When I lived with a roommate, if somebody asked "are you guys a couple?" it'd certainly suggest something we were not :)
When people live in couples, there's a distinct possibility of being three of you instead of two of you, and then maybe more :) And then combined income of 100K is really not a lot of money.
Great map, but the financials are a bit misleading. Maybe a note qualifying the salary numbers with a message indicating that the stated number is more of a minimum would help.
Take Mission for example - would you really spend $2250 per month rent on an 82,000 salary? That's nearly 2 weeks' take-home pay after taxes. Good financial practice says that your rent/mortgage should only be 1 week's take-home pay. A responsible spender should make closer to $120,000 to be spending $2250/month on rent.
I don't know what it is in SF, but the rule in NY is 40x monthly salary; you'd need $90k here for a $2250 rental.
It's pretty tight if your rent is two months salary, but here where it generally covers heat and water, the saving from not owning a car makes up for it.
True: but it can stop being nuts, or at least be less nuts, whenever voters want it to be: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... . SF's housing price problem is entirely self-inflicted, even if many people seem to treat it as some law of nature.
I think you're failing to account for taxes and other things out here. At $100K+ year, someone out in the bay area will likely see only 64% of that in their paychecks. So by that rule, they'd have to find somewhere to live that cost them no more than $1230 per month.
In the bay area, I'd say 1.5 ($1846) weeks to 2 ($2461) weeks of pay is a more realistic number.
The only people I know that have rent/mortgage that is 1 week's take-home pay either make significantly more than $100K per year or have split the rent between multiple occupants/families.
Being a single person in the Bay Area, or a couple with one income earner is not an easy task when you consider those figures.
In the past century, in the US, people spent approximately 1/3 of their income on housing.
Its been years since I did that analysis, and I can't find it anymore so I don't know if it was 1/3 of pre or post tax, but I do remember that it was remarkably consistent over time.
You are right about responsible spending numbers. Tech workers making $80k-ish in SF can't really afford to live in the Mission, SoMa, South Beach etc. WITHOUT roommates. There just aren't any 1-beds for less than $2500 - $3000 in the Mission right now.
The data not reflected here is the housing quality for the given price, and included features. For example most of these locations East of the park probably don't have parking, which could be an additional hundreds of dollars per month, if it's even available.
Are the including Studios in this or just 1BR? I ask because a 1 BR is a luxury apartment for a single inhabitant. Most folks living by themselves would have a studio. SF is expensive but it's not that expensive.
Some other related statistics I thought were interesting:
According to the Census, the median household income in SF was $72,947. According to census data from 2007-2011, approximately 1/3 of SF residents make over 100k. There's a notable doubling of households making >200k between 2000 and 2011, from ~20k to ~42k.
Based on the two datasets, it seems like 2/3rds of the population of SF either cannot or can only barely afford to live in the city.
There is no rent bubble. Bubbles are caused by speculation. There isn't a large amount of people renting or owning speculatively in San Francisco. In fact, pro-tenant regulations in San Francisco make it an especially bad place to speculate. I have heard of the city forcing landlords to renew leases for suspected drug users that leave spent needles all over the porch.
High rents in San Francisco are caused purely by scarcity. That is, everyone wants to live there, but the city refuses to allow more units to be built or make it easier to rent. This damage is self-inflicted; California liberals hate density and gentrification although such things are green, decrease broad-market housing costs thereby serving the "displaced" poor, increase urban vibrancy, and reduce traffic congestion compared to the status quo.
I saw a study that suggested the economic cost for permission to build a unit in SF (calculated by subtracting a unit's cost from the value of the land it sits on plus the cost of building it) is $600k. By contrast, it's $100k in Chicago and five figures in any major city in Texas.
I don't think it's correct to imply that the city refusing to build more units is why SF is expensive. There's only so much space in SF, regardless of how high, fast, or dense you want to build.
SF isn't particularly dense. It's twice as big as Manhattan,[1] but has only half as many people. It's the second-densest major city on paper, but it seems to me that this is because the city itself doesn't have the "long tail" of less-dense urban area merging into the suburbs that other cities have.
If you look at the downtown areas of Manhattan, places like Midtown are over 100,000 people per square mile. Neighborhoods like Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia top out over 60,000 per square mile, and neighborhoods like Gold Coast in Chicago are around 50,000. The only neighborhoods that dense in San Francisco are Chinatown (75,000/square mile) and Nob Hill (50,000 per square mile).
There are a lot of neighborhoods in San Francisco like the Mission District that are in the 20,000-30,000 range. The near north side in Chicago is about 30,000, and there are vast swaths of low-rise areas there that could be built up (the whole west side of the near north side is semi-industrial). If built with high-rises with generous street set-backs, 50,000 people per square mile is very easy to achieve without feeling cramped.[2]
[1] And frankly, even Manhattan as room to grow. If upper manhattan were as densely built as lower manhattan, you could probably fit another half a San Francisco onto the island easily.
[2] When people think of 50,000+/square mile density, they think of Manhattan, but that's a bit misleading. Manhattan's paper density is understated because it has an absolutely enormous daytime population (almost 4 million people, or 180,000 per square mile). This is the result of everyone commuting in from NJ, CT, etc. Manhattan also has relatively poor set back and air and light requirements, no alleys (so people share street space with trash bags), tons of tourists, etc, which all make the place feel more cramped than it would otherwise be. My neighborhood in Chicago is 50,000 residential per square mile, and it can feel pretty empty if you stay away from the tourist areas. That's because land area is saved by having residential high-rises, which allows very generous set-backs for air and light and broad sidewalks.
While I admit I don't know a lot about SF, I have a hard time seeing that large scale redevelopment would make sense once an area is already gentrified, not least from an infrastructure perspective. I also think gentrification works best when it "moves around" to new places, something that seems to have happened successfully in NY.
It's not a matter of "gentrifying." It's a matter of tearing down all the stupid low-rise buildings and putting up skyscrapers. You know, civilization.
What I find deeply ironic about the Bay Area is the conflict between the whole "high tech" thing and the pathologically suburban upbringings of most of the people who work in the sector. It's people who talk about 21st century technology who aren't comfortable with solidly 20th century technology.
What I'm saying is that once something becomes gentrified (higher real estate prices, condo conversions, changes in demographics etc.) it gets a lot harder to just tear down buildings. Both from a economic, political and practical perspective.
I do agree with the sentiment in you second paragraph though.
The Gold Coast in Chicago is a particularly good example.
It's Chicago's most prime real estate, preferred by celebrities and high powered executives. Yet it's cheap enough that most people here could live there in a studio or 1br on a code monkey salary and have plenty to spend left over. This is because Chicago allows supply to meet demand, and has the Manhattan-like neighborhood of the Gold Coast in a city without nearly as much as housing demand as the real Manhattan. (Also, the Gold Coast is way nicer for reasons the parent post talks about.)
The thing I love about Chicago is its design reflects a deeply midwestern sensibility. Illinois is plain, flat land. Chicago isn't an island (MFH), or on a peninsula (SF), or sandwiched between two rivers (PHL). They could've sprawled, but instead they built this compact downtown, because it was orderly.
The town my wife grew up in in rural Iowa has less than 2,000 people. Yet, it's got this perfect 10x8 little street grid. Why? The town founders didn't want the layout to be disorderly in case the town ever became a huge city.
Grid layouts were very common from the mid-19th century to about World War II. For example, Boston's colonial-era city center is a mess, but Back Bay and Cambridgeport are an orderly grid, and the postwar suburbs outside Route 128 are sprawl. A city like Chicago did not exist in 1776, and so it has a more orderly downtown.
There's also a certain path-dependence at work. Western states were also laid out in a rectangular grid by federal land surveys, and thus arterial roads often fell on the boundaries. Subdivisions, however, can be much messier, depending on when they were developed and what the developer felt like doing. Compare Seattle (prewar) to its outer suburbs across the lake (postwar). Or inner Phoenix (prewar) to outer Phoenix (postwar).
I think that what they mean is that the height of buildings in SF is limited in most places (except the financial district).
So while the land is mostly occupied, the buildings could be 10x bigger (each of them).
So yes.. there is some "artificial" scarcity. Yes but.
If the city was a manhattan with only big buildings, nobody would want to live there, anyway. The reason why people like SF is that it does NOT feel too much like a big city IMO
Amazing, 21st-century technologies like "elevators" and "steel" can be used to make very high buildings: per this: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... , which I posted elsewhere in this thread, it would be very easy for developers in SF to deploy these technologies in order to provide more living space.
Good, I'm not the only one that is dumbfounded by the abysmal quality of apartments in SF and the Bay area. If you start checking out reviews for apartments, 99% are complaints about noise. Well, yes, that's because 99% of the apartments are shoddy two-story wood constructions, built decades ago. There's some modern apartment buildings up in the city, and precious few on the peninsula, but the overall level is ridiculous.
And the worst part is that not even if you have lots of money can you easily get a modern apartment, there just isn't any supply. It drives me nuts.
I would argue that there indeed is quite a bit of speculation going on. Most of my friends are spending an unsustainable % of their income on rent, betting that their stock options will pay off. Of course for most, they won't, and once that sinks in the market will adjust.
Very cool. I wish there was a time dimension on this. Also, would love to see Berkeley/Oakland. SOMA was actually one of the best values merely 5 yrs ago. My friends got a huge 1BR loft with parking spot for 2500. Granted they had no rent control and got effectively evicted when the rent increased to 3300. So maybe it wasn't the best value afterall.
The northern side of Bayview borders the expensive Potrero Hill neighborhood. And the very southern end of Bayview has some new apartment buildings, with a large hill separating them from the ghetto.
I'm surprised it's that cheap. I pay $1,550 a month for a 430 square foot studio 20+ miles north of Manhattan. In a gentrifying, working-class neighborhood no less.
It's a new building right on the Metro North line (which takes you straight into Midtown). But the surrounding neighborhood is otherwise like Harlem (and not the newly gentrified parts of Harlem).
I think average studio in Manhattan is over $2,500, and that includes Harlem, etc, which drags down the average. The above chart seems to top out at $3,250 for financial district. In comparison, the average 1BR in TriBeCa is pushing $5,000.
Harlem studios are nowhere near $2500 - $2500 is at at the upper bound of studio prices in Manhattan, outside of anomalous neighborhoods like TriBeCa.
You can easily get into the $2K range in Chelsea, a bit less on the Upper East Side, and in the high $1Ks in the Village. Harlem is gentrifying, but the last prices I've seen there aren't anywhere close to $2500.
Manhattan housing prices are more or less stabilized as all of the manic demand has moved to Brooklyn. DUMBO, Williamsburg, Park Slope, are now giving even the most expensive parts of Manhattan a run for their money.
As a graduating student destined for San Francisco this summer this map is a godsend! Great help in narrowing down areas to look for good housing. Finding a place in SF seems brutal.
Why is the area around the Golden Gate park so much cheaper than the surrounding areas? Is it working class? Seems strange that with access to a large park (and no other info) that it would be considerably cheaper than neighbouring areas.
I've always speculated that the main force driving down rent prices on the west side of San Francisco (and down through Daly City and Pacifica) are largely due to the weather being foggy and chilly more often (especially in the summer) on the far west side of the northern peninsula, so it is seen as less desirable. I'm sure there are other factors at play as well, but that seems to be a major one.
Transportation. San Francisco's Achille's Heel (though the city has many, many such heels).
If you look at the heatmap you will see that it corresponds to transportation infrastructure almost to the T. Areas with access to BART are expensive. Areas with access to a functioning MUNI train are expensive (along the J-Church, for example).
Outer and Inner Richmond has no mass transit, whatsoever. The Inner Sunset has the N-Judah train, which has about 1/4 the capacity it really needs - i.e., don't count on it getting you to work during rush hour. In fact, don't count on it getting you downtown during off hours either, given its notoriety on breakdowns... From the Outer Sunset to downtown the N-Judah easily takes a full hour.
Yes, to go six miles.
Transportation in San Francisco is really a clusterfuck. For the second densest city in the US it is positively shameful. Even sleepy Portland, OR, has a better transit system. In fact you can find mid-sized cities in the Midwest with better transit. SF is really the worst-run city I've ever lived in.
San Francisco is where people move to live the car-free, urban lifestyle, and then yearn for a car and beg for rides all the damned time.
Ultimately, you either give up and buy a vehicle, or you give up and develop legs of iron cycling over hills, or you move to the Mission.
Thanks, that makes sense. It's odd though - when I visited SF I found it bizarre the sheer variety of public transport available - trains, trams, buses, ferries, cable cars, half-tram/buses, half-bus/trams...
I pay far less living in Tokyo, and I can walk to Shinjuku station in 20 minutes. I pay a lot more for food and my apartment is tiny, but rent is affordable, and if you share a place, it becomes really reasonable.
However, it's certainly not as cheap as Philly was.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadpersonally I live in a one bedroom, and there's one of me, and the heat map for my area looks perfectly accurate. I'm also happy not to be forced to live with someone and still work any where I like. Freedom 'n all.
Also, I know it's often done, but a one-bedroom is rather cozy for two people for the long term.
> "$100,000 is very reasonable, and you should be able to live anywhere here."
$100K is really not total-freedom money in a city like SF. Take the FiDi and Mission Bay for example - $3200/month for a 1BR means $38,400 in rent every year.
That's spending $39% of your pre-tax income on rent, a deeply inadvisable amount, if any sane landlord would even allow it. Even if we drop the rent to $2500 to open up options in the Haight, Castro, and Mission, we're still talking about $30K in pure rent.
Nowadays I'm in NYC, where no sane landlord will let you break the 40X Rule, where your monthly rent multiplied by 40 may not exceed your pre-tax annual income. On $100K that's $2500 a month - and that's an absolute upper bound rent. $2500 is totally feasible in SF, but you definitely won't have your pick of apartments. A income of $100K would be well-advised to stay under $2500, where pickings are increasingly slim.
> "Also, bear in mind most people live in couples"
Citation needed. I know a lot of people who have roommates in SF, but SF is a notoriously single city. I'd be extremely surprised if >50% of SF's population is living with a spouse or partner.
Some quick Google-fu:
In fact, it looks like as of the 2000 census[1] that 38% of the city lived alone, and 56% of households do not have a spouse or partner living there. I wouldn't call that "most people".
[1] http://sanfrancisco.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm
Side note: it's crazy that you can rent places in good parts of Manhattan for cheaper than parts of SF these days.
I think when the grandparent said "living in couples" they mean "in pairs" not "romantically engaged." Most well-to-do SFers I know live with 1+ roommate. That's all they're saying. A 2(+) BR apartment cuts costs per person because you share the "core" (kitchen, bathroom, living room).
By high I mean I often have close to a 1000$ left over at the end of the mont which has been going to savings.
In New York, the rules are whatever the landlords want them to be. Renters have zero bargaining power with vacancies as low as they are in the city.
Take Mission for example - would you really spend $2250 per month rent on an 82,000 salary? That's nearly 2 weeks' take-home pay after taxes. Good financial practice says that your rent/mortgage should only be 1 week's take-home pay. A responsible spender should make closer to $120,000 to be spending $2250/month on rent.
It's pretty tight if your rent is two months salary, but here where it generally covers heat and water, the saving from not owning a car makes up for it.
Seems like a good enough qualifier. Especially since these are median prices, so cheaper rents are to be found.
not actually. SF is nuts.
True: but it can stop being nuts, or at least be less nuts, whenever voters want it to be: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... . SF's housing price problem is entirely self-inflicted, even if many people seem to treat it as some law of nature.
Here In NYC, the rule of thumb is 40x your monthly rent to get salary to qualify (so $2250 would mean $90k salary.) I guess it's different in SF?
In the bay area, I'd say 1.5 ($1846) weeks to 2 ($2461) weeks of pay is a more realistic number.
The only people I know that have rent/mortgage that is 1 week's take-home pay either make significantly more than $100K per year or have split the rent between multiple occupants/families.
Being a single person in the Bay Area, or a couple with one income earner is not an easy task when you consider those figures.
Its been years since I did that analysis, and I can't find it anymore so I don't know if it was 1/3 of pre or post tax, but I do remember that it was remarkably consistent over time.
According to the Census, the median household income in SF was $72,947. According to census data from 2007-2011, approximately 1/3 of SF residents make over 100k. There's a notable doubling of households making >200k between 2000 and 2011, from ~20k to ~42k.
Based on the two datasets, it seems like 2/3rds of the population of SF either cannot or can only barely afford to live in the city.
I for one am ready for the rent bubble to pop.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/0667000.html http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/... http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
High rents in San Francisco are caused purely by scarcity. That is, everyone wants to live there, but the city refuses to allow more units to be built or make it easier to rent. This damage is self-inflicted; California liberals hate density and gentrification although such things are green, decrease broad-market housing costs thereby serving the "displaced" poor, increase urban vibrancy, and reduce traffic congestion compared to the status quo.
I saw a study that suggested the economic cost for permission to build a unit in SF (calculated by subtracting a unit's cost from the value of the land it sits on plus the cost of building it) is $600k. By contrast, it's $100k in Chicago and five figures in any major city in Texas.
If you look at the downtown areas of Manhattan, places like Midtown are over 100,000 people per square mile. Neighborhoods like Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia top out over 60,000 per square mile, and neighborhoods like Gold Coast in Chicago are around 50,000. The only neighborhoods that dense in San Francisco are Chinatown (75,000/square mile) and Nob Hill (50,000 per square mile).
There are a lot of neighborhoods in San Francisco like the Mission District that are in the 20,000-30,000 range. The near north side in Chicago is about 30,000, and there are vast swaths of low-rise areas there that could be built up (the whole west side of the near north side is semi-industrial). If built with high-rises with generous street set-backs, 50,000 people per square mile is very easy to achieve without feeling cramped.[2]
[1] And frankly, even Manhattan as room to grow. If upper manhattan were as densely built as lower manhattan, you could probably fit another half a San Francisco onto the island easily.
[2] When people think of 50,000+/square mile density, they think of Manhattan, but that's a bit misleading. Manhattan's paper density is understated because it has an absolutely enormous daytime population (almost 4 million people, or 180,000 per square mile). This is the result of everyone commuting in from NJ, CT, etc. Manhattan also has relatively poor set back and air and light requirements, no alleys (so people share street space with trash bags), tons of tourists, etc, which all make the place feel more cramped than it would otherwise be. My neighborhood in Chicago is 50,000 residential per square mile, and it can feel pretty empty if you stay away from the tourist areas. That's because land area is saved by having residential high-rises, which allows very generous set-backs for air and light and broad sidewalks.
What I find deeply ironic about the Bay Area is the conflict between the whole "high tech" thing and the pathologically suburban upbringings of most of the people who work in the sector. It's people who talk about 21st century technology who aren't comfortable with solidly 20th century technology.
I do agree with the sentiment in you second paragraph though.
It's Chicago's most prime real estate, preferred by celebrities and high powered executives. Yet it's cheap enough that most people here could live there in a studio or 1br on a code monkey salary and have plenty to spend left over. This is because Chicago allows supply to meet demand, and has the Manhattan-like neighborhood of the Gold Coast in a city without nearly as much as housing demand as the real Manhattan. (Also, the Gold Coast is way nicer for reasons the parent post talks about.)
The town my wife grew up in in rural Iowa has less than 2,000 people. Yet, it's got this perfect 10x8 little street grid. Why? The town founders didn't want the layout to be disorderly in case the town ever became a huge city.
Grid layouts were very common from the mid-19th century to about World War II. For example, Boston's colonial-era city center is a mess, but Back Bay and Cambridgeport are an orderly grid, and the postwar suburbs outside Route 128 are sprawl. A city like Chicago did not exist in 1776, and so it has a more orderly downtown.
There's also a certain path-dependence at work. Western states were also laid out in a rectangular grid by federal land surveys, and thus arterial roads often fell on the boundaries. Subdivisions, however, can be much messier, depending on when they were developed and what the developer felt like doing. Compare Seattle (prewar) to its outer suburbs across the lake (postwar). Or inner Phoenix (prewar) to outer Phoenix (postwar).
So while the land is mostly occupied, the buildings could be 10x bigger (each of them).
So yes.. there is some "artificial" scarcity. Yes but. If the city was a manhattan with only big buildings, nobody would want to live there, anyway. The reason why people like SF is that it does NOT feel too much like a big city IMO
"Does not feel too much like a big city" is a "nice to have", but is not the main reason.
And the worst part is that not even if you have lots of money can you easily get a modern apartment, there just isn't any supply. It drives me nuts.
[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2013/02/exclusive-pre...
I think average studio in Manhattan is over $2,500, and that includes Harlem, etc, which drags down the average. The above chart seems to top out at $3,250 for financial district. In comparison, the average 1BR in TriBeCa is pushing $5,000.
You can easily get into the $2K range in Chelsea, a bit less on the Upper East Side, and in the high $1Ks in the Village. Harlem is gentrifying, but the last prices I've seen there aren't anywhere close to $2500.
Manhattan housing prices are more or less stabilized as all of the manic demand has moved to Brooklyn. DUMBO, Williamsburg, Park Slope, are now giving even the most expensive parts of Manhattan a run for their money.
Thanks!
If you look at the heatmap you will see that it corresponds to transportation infrastructure almost to the T. Areas with access to BART are expensive. Areas with access to a functioning MUNI train are expensive (along the J-Church, for example).
Outer and Inner Richmond has no mass transit, whatsoever. The Inner Sunset has the N-Judah train, which has about 1/4 the capacity it really needs - i.e., don't count on it getting you to work during rush hour. In fact, don't count on it getting you downtown during off hours either, given its notoriety on breakdowns... From the Outer Sunset to downtown the N-Judah easily takes a full hour.
Yes, to go six miles.
Transportation in San Francisco is really a clusterfuck. For the second densest city in the US it is positively shameful. Even sleepy Portland, OR, has a better transit system. In fact you can find mid-sized cities in the Midwest with better transit. SF is really the worst-run city I've ever lived in.
San Francisco is where people move to live the car-free, urban lifestyle, and then yearn for a car and beg for rides all the damned time.
Ultimately, you either give up and buy a vehicle, or you give up and develop legs of iron cycling over hills, or you move to the Mission.
However, it's certainly not as cheap as Philly was.