| A Room for a Few– | August 24th, 2008 |
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Last week there was a great real estate rental story in the SF Weekly about the Tiger House– a seven bedroom home in Cole Valley, right where Belevedere dead ends into Frederick. It’s known as the Tiger House because the whole facade is covered with a painting of a fantastic Tiger sitting in the jungle. If you’ve seen it, you can definitely picture it in your mind right now. The SF Weekly story is about the fluid twenty-something bunch that lives there. The anchor tenant is Dan, the owners’ son. Known as the “Danlord, he oversees manages the tenant turnover. Whenever he posts a vacancy, the response is overwhelming and competition to get in is very tough. The alchemy of personalities is very important to the Danlord, and you have to be very funny, clever, smart and cool in all the right ways. When I first moved to San Francisco in 1986 and needed cheap rent I dreamed of finding a group household with funny, clever roommates. My life would be like a series of “Friends” episodes where we would share meals, be there to greet one another when we got home, and never, ever leave dirty dishes in the sink. My first place was a room in a giant flat in the Duboce Triangle with four roommates. I got hardwood floors, ceilings that went up forever, and little plaster cherubs nestled in the corners of my big bay window (I’ve never seen anything like them since). The downside was the careless sloppy people I lived with. My low point came at 2:00 am about four months after I’d moved in, when they decided to use a chain saw on some furniture because they had run out of wood for the fireplace. After that, two old high school friends invited me to live with them in a flat across town on Filbert, between Octavia and Gough. It was a good sized three bedroom, built in the 1960s with a lovely back yard that we were allowed to look at but not use– it belonged to Mrs. Chin, who lived with her husband downstairs. Mr. and Mrs. Chin were retired, old-fashioned and extremely noise sensitive. To this day I can’t figure out why they decided to rent the place above them to three young women. They peeked between the blinds each time we passed their kitchen window on our way upstairs, and Mrs. Chin’s days were spent banging a broomstick on the ceiling whenever more than one person walked across the living room at a time. My third shared rental was my last, in a two bedroom Victorian apartment on Carl Street. The trim on the outside and inside was thick with layers of paint and there was wall-to-wall beige shag carpeting with insanely ugly kitchen linoleum. We also overlooked the N Judah and there was a power surge each time a train went by. But it had a formal dining room and for the first time I could really entertain and try recipes like pot roast with Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix dumped over it. The market for rental housing has been getting tighter and tighter over the past few years and much of it is tied to the current real estate market. In my little real estate world, I see scores of renters who are staying put because they either can’t get a mortgage or are choosing to wait until the market bottoms out. I’m also hearing from friends with grown children who have scored big-paying jobs and are moving to the City. These kids can afford the big rents that drive the cost of housing up, making competition for reasonably priced rental housing even more fierce. Other renters stay put because they have cheap rent-controlled housing that they don’t want to give up. Then there are owners of smaller buildings who choose to keep their units vacant. I can think of two clients right now who have big flats sitting empty– they want to keep their options open in case they want or need to sell, and the value of their property goes down once they rent them out. I’m sure if I were to poll my associates at Paragon, I would come up with at least twenty other landlords who are doing the same thing. If I were a twenty-something seeking a rental today, I would probably be a stressed-out wreck. So kudos to any of you trying to find a decent place to rent at an affordable price today. Anyone willing to try it must be incredibly courageous, creative and resilient. Leave a Reply |
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