From the summary of the Planning Department’s recently released report profiling demographic, housing, employment and commuting statistics for San Francisco’s neighborhoods:
San Francisco’s 2010 population – at 805,330 – has well surpassed its all-time high in the 1950s. Despite some long term shifts in proportional shares, San Francisco’s racial and ethnic composition remains diverse. The City’s Asian population is growing steadily but the number of Black residents continues to drop. San Franciscans of Latin or Hispanic origin are also increasing, although not at rates seen at state or national levels.
San Franciscans are also getting older, with a median age of 38.2 years. There are more children under 5 years old but San Francisco continues to be in the top three of major cities with the fewest children. The numbers of older San Franciscans are growing as well. Family households are increasing but there are also more single-person households.
Our citizens are also better educated: a third of San Franciscans over 25 years old have earned a B.A. diploma and about one in five hold a graduate or professional degree. Median incomes rose, although once adjusted for inflation, are almost unchanged from 2000.
More employed San Franciscans are taking transit to work. Commuting by car has dropped and other travel to work modes such as biking and walking are becoming more popular. Working at home is also increasing. A growing number of San Francisco households are car-free.
A couple of other tidbits: there are now 358,380 housing units in the San Francisco with 22,220 units having been built over the past decade. Thirty-eight (38) percent of units are owner occupied with a median move-in date of 1995 versus 2003 for renters.
Drill down in the report for neighborhood specific statistics and food for thought.
∙ San Francisco Neighborhoods Socio-Economic Profiles [sf-planning.org]
It’s been pretty obvious the city’s population has been increasing. But man were there some arguments on here about that.
“There are more children under 5 years …”
… and then they’re old enough to enter school. Hmmm….
“Commuting by car has dropped and other travel to work modes such as biking and walking are becoming more popular.”
Thanks of course to the creation of better facilities to encourage cycling. Transportation mode share shifted even though the city had to pause deployment of bike facilities due to a two year case of District Five Diarrhea.
“Median incomes rose, although once adjusted for inflation, are almost unchanged from 2000.”
Wasn’t expecting that. Move-in dates are interesting too.
Sure incomes haven’t increased since 2000 corrected for inflation. Y2K was pretty exceptional. Any English major fresh out of college would get a job scribbling html for 80K at the time, or even being hired with no other purpose but to snatch invaluable “talent”. Now some of them are making lattes or selling stuff. The pros are still doing very well.
Note that little of the data in the report appears to be new, just Census ACS 2005-2009 with some Census 2010 thrown in. The planning dept data on # units built seems to be the lone exception.
The aggregation of census tracts into regions close to common neighborhood definitions seems to be the main convenience provided.
“Wasn’t expecting that.”
The reason it’d be unexpected is that the national number has been down, adjusted for inflation, during that time. lol points out a good reason for this, however.
All the pretty colors on the maps presumably mean something???
I’m not going to scoff at Planning for “merely” consolidating pre-existing data in a more user-friendly format, that is a valuable service. What I find particularly enticing however, is the stated commitment in their introduction to regularly updating the document. Going forward, that could make for some very useful trending information.
@BobN — Census tract boundaries don’t necessarily correspond to common neighborhood boundaries (eg Noe Valley, Castro,…) I think the color coding indicates the actual geographic area used in the report to represent a named area.
@AJ – It’s debatable whether the future of this type of data lies in hand curated PDF’s or some of the already existing online tools which aggregate census data sometimes with other sources thrown in.
2 numbers next to each other that tell a lot about SF’s Real Estate:
Median Rent $1,220
Median Home Value $781,490
Someone not accustomed to SF peculiarities would think that landlords are clompletely bonkers to accept only 1.87% of gross returns before taxes + expenses.
Viewed from the outside, SF doesn’t make sense. But it’s a like functioning alcoholic addicted to Rent control liquor and Prop 13 moonshine.
For rentals, the low $ value can most probably be explained by the perverse side effect of rent control: With higher market rents, people do not move out eagerly from a deal they’ll never find again. People stick to their places which makes the disconnect between the current renter base and the actual market even greater. The “real” market is around 2X the median, pushed by high paying jobs from successful newcomers.
For sales, the numbers are based on actual sales. Because of high desirability and other factors like Prop 13, very few properties are actually for sale in SF but a sizable minority can actually afford it. Prices reflect that.
2 worlds into one: SFers that cling to their entitlements, and SFers who keep moving ahead.
Interesting that the number of households is 5000 lower than in 2000 (we now have 2.4 persons/household, up from 2.3), while there are 22,000 new housing units. Remember – supply and demand.
The median income number is interesting, particularly because home selling prices are now also back down to around 2000 levels plus inflation, or a little lower.
I found it interesting that while the household and family incomes varied widely from nabe to nabe, the per capita income remained fairly level from what I saw (excluding very wealthy areas like seacliff).
Must mean that as you make more money you start having more children, negating your advantage.
So building less parking in developments equates to fewer households with cars, residents choosing other modes of transit, and still maintaining the high quality of life status? Well, obviously.
The planning department needs to take five years off and go away on a long vacation. I suggest Syria.
Median income for USA overall decreased in this period so holding steady is good performance, relatively.
San Francisco’s racial and ethnic composition remains diverse. The City’s Asian population is growing steadily but the number of Black residents continues to drop. San Franciscans of Latin or Hispanic origin are also increasing, although not at rates seen at state or national levels.
Feeling sort of like the no-longer-800-lb gorilla in the room. Yoo hoo…
I was a little surprised to see fewer children in San Francisco. Only 5000 less, but still less.
We need to build more housing, having the population only grow 3%, while the statewide population grew 10% is a recipe for more sprawl. Household size has gotten smaller, probably due to all the doubling up during the dot com years.
More home owners without cars! A full 9% now. Though this homeowner may be buying a car soon: our oldest did not get into a school close to our house and it is really too far and too steep a hill to walk or bicycle to.
NoeValleyJim wrote:
That assumes that the outlying areas are going to support “more sprawl”.
Luckily, after what happened with far flung exurbs (my favorite example is Mountain House) after the housing bubble collapse, the governments in the outlying areas, at least around the Bay Area, have mostly had a “come to Jesus” epiphany regarding smart growth. From ABAG’s development and conservation strategy site:
So what are the strategies and how do they address the aforementioned sprawl development and long commutes?
The silver lining inside the paucity of funding for new McMansions in outlying areas is that the smart growth projects can use the next several years to really get going and get people accustomed to them before the real estate agent and mortgage broker-driven “drive ’till you qualify” mentality sets back in.
“Household size has gotten smaller, probably due to all the doubling up during the dot com years.”
I see smaller household sizes because of fewer children, and more single people (such as myself)living in larger units. (or even single family homes) The “dot com” boom was not what changed the city household size, it was a shift towards a different type of family structure. If you really want to see where children vanished, take a look at what happened to neighborhoods north of California Street from the 80’s until today.
Except household size has grown in SF since 2000 . . .
@A.T–regarding household size, it is true that the report lists citywide average household size at 2.4 and that is bigger than 2.3 per census 2000. But with the 2010 census redistricting data release which is the source of the population count, it does show decline (albeit a very modest one). The foreword was written with the 2010 numbers in mind, even as most of the data available were from ACS.
Avg HH Size
Census 2000 2.30
ACS 2005-2009 2.41
Census 2010 2.28*
*Estimate assuming the same group household population as in 2009 since household population for 2010 is not yet reported by the Census Bureau.
Lol
Heaven forbid that any common sense be injected into a foaming-at-the mouth rant about “entitlements,” but …
Your rent vs. home-value comparisons (which are for owner-occupied units) are not valid because studios are very disproportionately rentals and mansions are very disproportionately owner-occupied. Hence, the 1.87 percent gross returns you cite is meaningless.
Also, the current home values listed here do not align with a) what residents or landlords actually paid for their properties or b) the rental costs listed here, which include stabilized prices for long-term tenants.
To measure the actual returns, one has to measure prices and rents at similar sizes and with the timing of purchases and leases factored in.
Also, if you’re talking about homeowner entitlements, you have to look outside SF for the worst of them all.
Radically lower interest rates set by the Fed (Subsidy #1) have allowed long-term homeowners to reduce their costs and stay put instead of downsizing. The rates also promote cashing out on equity for income that involves minimal taxation (2) compared to compensation generated by work.
And the equity has been created in large part by the low interest rates, which drive up prices (Subsidy 3 or 1-A). Renters/aspiring buyers get crushed by the higher prices and reduced supply created by government intervention on behalf of the ownership-debtor society.
Also, Prop 13 is statewide, not peculiar to SF.
Interesting to note that the neighborhoods with high percentages of renters tend to have lower unemployment than the ones with high owner-occupancy. Chinatown a notable exception.
To LOL,
I should make the point that outsiders know that rentals are generally smaller than owner-occupied properties. They would not look at the numbers as you seem to think they would.
In most neighborhoods, by the way, the median rental rate (with long-term occupants factored in) jibes with high-end studio rents in 2011. The number would have been between studio-1BR prices high for 2009, which may have been when the stats were collected.
“Your rent vs. home-value comparisons (which are for owner-occupied units) are not valid because studios are very disproportionately rentals and mansions are very disproportionately owner-occupied.”
I agree here, basically the rental stock and owned stock do not have the same composition. So looking at the ratio of median rent to median price is not that useful in an absolute sense. It can have some value for looking at relative changes over time periods where the rental and owned compositions have been fairly static.
What you really want to look at is the ratio of price to rent for a particular property. If the rental price is not directly available, some comp based measure like the OER (Owners Equivalent Rent) that the Fed uses for inflation calculations could be used. Generalizing this to more then one property would yield a measue such as the median of price to rent ratios. [i.e. median( price/rent) is not the same as median(price)/median(rent) ]