| I'm not sure I know too many 2.3 person households that are in a studio apartment, though. Also above we counted adults vs everyone so the numbers are a bit high for the full household - SF turns out to be more like $1200/household/mo. Looking again at averages [1], we have average SF rent in 2018 at $3787, so taxes account for roughly 1/3 (32%) of the rent cost. And let's also compare LA at 2.83 persons/household [2] and $2371 in avg rent [3], so tax per household is $583, or about 25% of rent. I was just curious to compare that - although you are right that property tax is only $1.7B of SF's $5.5B General Fund revenue [4]. It turns out that most of the rest are Business Taxes and "Other Local Taxes", which look like maybe Transfer Tax is a big piece? ...but if your argument is that SF taxes things other than property tax to raise most of their tax revenue, you are correct, but total business taxes are only $880M, or averaging about $26K/yr. If you look at an average Starbucks, they're pulling in $880K/yr gross or $200K net [5], so business taxes end up at ~3% of gross, plus SF sales tax of 8.5% means you're paying 11.5% or $0.69 on your $6 cuppa joe. Expensive, yes - but probably not the major reason rents are high. The rent costs on a 1500sf Starbucks might be as high as $80/sqft/yr = $120,000 - 4.6x the impact that SF business taxes have. So as far as the numbers go, it looks like supply and demand pushing rental prices up are the primary cost drivers in SF, not any sort of "hidden" SF taxes. [1] https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren... [2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/losangelescitycalifornia [3] https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/lo... [4] https://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/CSF_Budget_Book_June... |