These SF "microapartments" are 220 square feet for $930/month. There are 10 square meter (108 square foot) apartments in Tokyo for which the rent is $750/month. This is nothing.
Studio apartments of that size (sometimes even smaller) are bought by university students in Norway all the time, sometimes for as much as $200.000. They can be quite comfortable.
Not sure how they’d be priced in SF, but to my intuition that seems out of working homelesss range. In cheaper cities though, definitely.
The name is misleading, they're just very small apartments with a design carefully chosen to minimize regulatory constraints & tax burden. They go for about $600 a month.
$3500 if you want to live in a new building. I've been looking at 1 bedrooms and rent has come down in SF. Not hard to find one for less than $2500 now (in a good neighborhood).
I hear of downtown SF studios going for up to 2500/mo. Perhaps they're betting that demand will keep rising uncontrollably over the next decade, making their prices comparatively reasonable.
I moved into SF in July and in my search for 2 bedroom apartments I found the prices are pretty similar throughout. Obviously some areas are nicer than others, but overall the range was pretty similar. Expect to pay $1000 (if you're really lucky, I saw some single bedrooms around that price in the valley) - $2000/each. I landed a bit on the lower end of that spectrum and I was quite lucky to get the deal that I did. $1500/each is probably a reasonable starting expectation.
I think comparing to the median SFH price is a bit apples to oranges. Keep in mind that (as far as I know?) the city isn't building actual houses. Most of these developments are more like college dorms or fancy campgrounds (e.g. a parking lot with a bunch of one room 8x8 shelters and a communal bathroom- granted those "tiny homes" are probably not the ones costing over $700k).
I'm paying $1800 for a ~250 sq. ft. microstudio in Soma. It's very much like having my bed in a tiny kitchen, but it's by far the cheapest place within a 15 minute walk of work (FiDi) by myself with somewhat reasonable facilities.
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