My area has peculiar characteristics that does not lend itself over comparing costs over renting over an extended period of time. It's always expensive, there are no really up or down markets. Even in a down economy, even during the housing crisis, it was still one of the most expensive real estate markets competing with Manhattan. But even if people could afford to buy an average priced home, there are none to buy, like a game of Monopoly with all the plastic houses sold and there are only rents on the green and blue properties.

The city of San Francisco is about 7 x 7 miles situated on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water. It's a small city in terms of area, simply, there is nowhere to expand its boundaries, no way to make the city bigger, all that can be done is to demolish current structures. This leads to the second problem-

SF is the second most densely populated city, and the housing situation doesn't support this reality- the houses are inefficient, they are lots of Victorians and town homes that are not designed to be filled with lots of tenants. They are nice to look at, but there's not a lot of places to put large highrises. Recently this has changed a little as more highrises and multi tenant condos have been set up, but this has barely put a dent in the vacancy rate. They are also pretty ugly and spoil what SF is known for- great views of rolling hills and the ocean. In some quarters it has an old world European look, which is wrong for modern glass and cement highrises.

Finally, the city has always been a magnet for transplants since the Gold Rush- but because of its importance to Silicon Valley, recently huge amounts of people have been moving to the area, the area is gentrifying even more, as more and more money starts spilling in, the gap between haves and have nots gets wider, more pressure is being put on people to move further and further away as even the suburbs are experiencing a crunch and are reaching home prices as expensive as SF.

Real estate developers would rather sell the houses out from underneath the occupants so they can turn the property into offices for start ups and upscale apartments. The consequence is a top heavy income sector, like all the young entrepreneurs and engineers from all over the world are moving to SF, but what's being displaced are all the service industry workers- waiters, bartenders, help staff are moving out, the ones left are hanging on to their rent controlled apartments hoping not to have their apartments sold to developers.