Will the AI boom in SF cause another housing crisis in Oakland?

Source Domain: oaklandside.org

As the artificial intelligence industry propels the U.S. economy toward unprecedented levels of wealth creation and concentration, the country’s urban epicenter of AI development, San Francisco, is dealing with a sudden housing crunch.

San Francisco rents are rising faster than anywhere else in the nation, said Nigel Hughes, senior director of market analytics at CoStar, a real estate data and listings company. “It’s a big turnaround from where it was a couple of years ago, when everything was very flat,” he said.

The average apartment in the wider metro area is renting for more than 9% higher than it was a year ago, according to CoStar. Other real estate analysts report similar white-hot market activity in San Francisco. Apartment List says rents in the city proper are up nearly 17% since last May.

You don’t need to see those stats to notice changes in the housing market: workers moving to the city are living in pods and landlords are accepting equity in tenants’ start-ups in lieu of rent checks.

The neighborhoods seeing the sharpest spikes are those where AI companies are concentrated, like Mission Bay and SOMA, Hughes said, “so there’s a very direct relationship there.” Some of these companies offer hefty bonuses to workers who live near the office.

If you lived in Oakland a decade ago, you know what could come next.

During the tech boom of the 2010s, renters priced out of San Francisco came across the bay in droves. Demand for housing in Oakland skyrocketed, rents went way up, lots of long-timers — especially Black residents — were displaced, and homelessness exploded.

The Oakland skyline changed dramatically in those years, with developers racing to respond to the changing market. Shiny buildings seemed to spring up downtown on the daily; Oakland permitted 4,617 new housing units in 2018, mostly market-rate apartments.

At repetitive dinner-table debates, residents fought about whether this…

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