Why Are Oakland Rents Suddenly So Much Cheaper Than SF’s?

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amid a ballooning rental housing market across the Bay Area, Oakland rents are mostly staying flat. Today, the median San Francisco rent for a one-bedroom home is about 70% higher than in Oakland. While Oakland often trails the city’s rental market, the gap is now far larger than in recent history. We’ll discuss whether Oakland has cracked the code on making housing more affordable, or whether other factors may be driving people away. Guests: J.K. Dineen, Bay Area housing reporter, San Francisco Chronicle Chris Salviati, senior housing economist, Apartment List Tim Thomas, director, Eviction Research Network at UC Berkeley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:33.9	From KQED.
0:36.5	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the Bay Area
0:40.8	rental market this morning, specifically what looks like a real divergence between San Francisco
0:45.8	and Oakland. We're going to talk about a bunch of the factors that might be contributing to this
0:50.2	widening gap between rents and the cities, especially for one-bedroom apartments. And consider what these stories tell us about our strategies for addressing the housing crisis. Joining us this morning, we've got Chris Salviati, who is a chief economist at Apartment List, researching economic trends in the housing market. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on. We've also got J.K. Denean, San Francisco Chronicle Reporter, covering housing and real estate. Welcome back, J.K. Thanks, Alexis. And we've got Tim Thomas,
1:15.1	research director at UC Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project. Welcome, Tim. Good morning. Thank you.
1:20.8	Thanks so much. So, Chris, you know, you're working with this apartment list data. Just tell us what
1:25.4	you're seeing the rental market here
1:28.1	in San Francisco and Oakland. Yeah. So I think right now we're seeing a real divergence between
1:33.4	the two cities. Over the past year, just 12 months, 13% increase in the median rent in San Francisco.
1:41.3	So huge spike that we've seen in prices in San Francisco. In Oakland,
1:45.4	it's only up 2%. And so that gap, you know, Oakland's always been a bit more affordable than
1:49.9	San Francisco, but that gap is really widened. Right now, our median one-bedroom estimate for San
1:55.2	Francisco, about 3150 in Oakland, it's about 1850. So that's almost a 70% gap, really, really significant.
2:02.7	Yeah, for places that are, you know, in some cases, 10 or 15 minutes apart, you know, closer
2:07.2	to uptown Oakland, you know, if you're in downtown San Francisco than you are to a lot
	...

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