[epicureanideal]

For anyone who is interested in a CPI inflation adjusted view of those numbers, "$900-$1000" for rent in North Beach in 1985 is supposedly worth about $2100-2400 now.

Their combined salary of $30,000 per year would now be about $71,000.

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

However, the article says "$900-$1000" was for "an apartment" without specifying the number of rooms. It seems reasonable that it might've been a 2 bedroom apartment.

[joe_the_user]

As I remember, North Beach in particular did become unaffordable at about that time. Other parts of The City remained expensive but affordable up to the 2000s.

The rent jumps and illegal/shady evictions starting maybe 2010-2012 effectively pushed out a fraction of those surviving on rent control plus many of the merely upper-middle-class out of the city, leaving the wealthy and big-5 programmers getting huge salaries for 80-hour-days during the whole of the best years of their lives.

The thing about the situation the city hasn't "upgraded" but rather has been left gray and boring (yet fearful and hyperkinetic). Pretty sad compared to the lively punks I saw squatting old industrial buildings in 1984. Even that was sad compared to the summer of love I assume but I wasn't around for anything but the end of that.

[jaysonelliot]

It probably was a two bedroom. When I moved to SF in 1994, I was sharing a four-bedroom on South Van Ness that cost $1200 total.

The next big rent spike came around '98 or so, as the dot com boom was in full swing. Rents didn't only shoot up, it got so that there was no housing left to be had. You could show up to an open rental with stellar credit and references, only to have someone else offer the landlord 25% above the asking rent, and pay the entire first year in advance.

[beamatronic]

And you had to go through MetroRent or RentTech