Well, the rents are high throughout the SF Bay Area. I mentioned the techie commuter buses at Glen Park BART station in San Francisco. Rents there run about $5000 a month and up, and are driving out non-techies, while techies are flooding into the area. My wife manages her mother's affairs, and we just sold her mom's home in Glen Park district a few months ago after we remodeled it for the last couple years. Home is a few blocks from the BART station. I had previously mentioned on threads that homes here were appreciating about 10 percent a year, and were selling on average $300G over asking prices; some here scoffed at that. We priced the home at $1.2M after looking at comparison sales in the neighborhood (which by themselves were high), and the home sold within the week for $1.5M with competing buyers. Absolutely crazy, techies with lots of money to burn.
Anyway, they buy here, then hop on the techie commuter buses that take them to Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc. for work. The non-techies are jealous/envious and are moving out as rents climb ever higher. So yes, rents are too high.
So how far out does one have to go before sanity starts to appear in the housing market?
We left S.F. In the opposite direction during morning commute. I swear that the three lanes of traffic stretched for 50 miles.