I've been reading about the "imminent" collapse of the SF housing bubble for essentially my entire adult life. Even the actual housing bubble implosion in '07 barely put a dent in it.
Current median home price in SF is $1.3M. 60% of that is $780k. You can definitely buy for that in Albany, Richmond, or El Cerrito. The nice neighborhoods in Richmond are basically in the south part of the city, anyway, which cuts down the distance. Unless you're talking about 30 minutes out in hardcore rush hour traffic, these cities will definitely fit the bill.
Daly City fits, since $1M is 77% of $1.3M -- not that I'd particularly like living in Daly City, but it is 23% less than buying in SF.
San Mateo median price is the same as SF, so, obviously, you don't look there for home bargains.
Seriously, just troll Redfin or Realtor.com sometime.
Edit: my bad re: 60%. I should be looking at $520k homes. There are definitely places in worthwhile neighborhoods in that range in Richmond. I've seen them. But, if you revise that number down to 40%, a lot of stuff opens up. So, 20-40% is a better range than 20-60%.
A more extreme example: 1/5 of all housing stock in China are vacant concrete boxes, and people are still complaining about apartment prices reaching to the sky.
Imagine cities both 20 times the size of SF, and being one fifth vacant.
To be fair, housing in China is used as a savings vehicle. They have few, if any, social safety nets available to them, and don't trust the stock market.
Housing in the US doesn't have nearly the same speculative force behind it.
Vacant != on the market. I know a few people living in china, all of whom own more apartments than they can use (in the same neighborhoods no less, so it's not even vacation homes).
They do it because it's the best way to invest their savings, so new apartments are usually spoken for before they're even built and often unoccupied until they're sold again.
Is it legal for private citizens to rent out vacant housing units in China? If so, that doesn't surprise me very much. Every landlord has more housing units than they can use.
Yes it's legal but the people I've talked to don't do it. There's a stigma of renting over buying so the rent/home value ratio is way off compared to the US. Renting out the homes wouldn't really net much profit overall and they don't want to deal with being a landlord anyway, so they let the apartments sit empty.
[1] - https://books.google.com/books?id=GiAa8pLrSTIC&lpg=PA45&lr&p...