> Were you even in SF 15 years ago, when the .com bubble popped and housing prices returned to a degree of sanity?
IIRC, one of the notable things about SF in the .com burst was that housing prices did not drop significantly (as they did in outlying areas of the Bay Area), the rate of increase just dropped, as the people who still had good-baying SF jobs moved in from the peripheries and replaced the people who could no longer afford SF because they fell off the gravy train.
My recollection is that housing rental was in between.
It's worth noting that the dot-com bust hit tech hard, but didn't do anything to housing nationally. So it's hard to separate the effect of the dot-com bust with the housing bubble that was starting to inflate at the time. And thinking about who I know who bought property right after the bust, it was people who made money in the previous bubble, which would also have a masking effect.
IIRC, one of the notable things about SF in the .com burst was that housing prices did not drop significantly (as they did in outlying areas of the Bay Area), the rate of increase just dropped, as the people who still had good-baying SF jobs moved in from the peripheries and replaced the people who could no longer afford SF because they fell off the gravy train.