Moving to SF Bay Area

The non-Californians are going to have a very hard time relating to this.

B)

 

Erick,

I live in the Bay Area, but not in the East Bay. Some of the information you seek is in various Web sites.

DQNews.com: Median price of a home in San Ramon is $758,000, up 7.52% from last year. Your budget probably can get you the house you want. Better school districts mean higher prices.

BART: Your closest station is probably Dublin/Pleasanton.

GreatSchools.net: Test scores for schools are available there.

I don't commute from near San Ramon to SF, but my guess is that you would be better off with BART. We did the drive from Livermore (sister-in-law provided babysitting) to SF for a company party on Saturday, Dec. 10 around 6:30-8:15. The drive was great until we got near the Bay Bridge. Then it was gridlock leading up to the toll plaza. The drive took about 1 hour 45 minutes. If that is any indication, BART would be faster (about 50 minutes one way).

Good luck. San Ramon is a nice looking town. Pleasanton is near there, and it's appealing too.

 

The only carpool lane is at the Bay Bridge -- 5am - 10am / 3pm - 7pm. You don't get free toll -- it's still $3 going into the city / free going out -- just cut down the time spent waiting in line for the toll booth on bad traffic days. (Could save you 20-30 minutes on a bad day, but won't help you out getting from San Ramon to the bridge.)

However you have to jump through a couple hoops to use the lane. First you have to get a "Fastrak" (bridge toll) hybrid transponder. That's basically like a prepaid debit card for the bridge. Then you have to submit a request + $8 to the CA DMV to get your big, ugly carpool stickers -- there are 4 of them, one for each side of the car. There's a limit of 75k stickers being issues, so you should do this ASAP. Also, you might want to call Fastrak and DMV to see if you can order your transponder and stickers before you have CA plates. (I believe that CA law requires you to reregister your car in CA within 14 days of moving here, or something like that.)

Here are a couple related links. Also, you can search these forums for discussions on the # of remaining stickers and other similar discussions.

http://www.bayareafastrak.org/static/about/faq_hybrid.shtml

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/vr/decal.htm

From San Ramon to downtown SF, BART is a pretty good option. You'd have to drive to BART and in SF, either take the bus or walk to work. SF has a very good, frequent bus system, so that can be a reasonable option.

I actually do the reverse commute, so I can't give you the answer which way -- Prius or BART -- would be faster going with commute direction.

Good luck!

mike

 

Erick currently lives in the Los Angeles area, so his car is already registered in the state and he probably has already gotten the HOV stickers.

I suggest that the cost of parking should be factored into his considerations. From what I remember, parking in the San Francisco business district is scarce and expensive.

 

He will still have to get FastTrackbecause they will catch the fact that he is transiting the bridges without a transponder.

 

According to DQNews, the median price in Pleasanton is up 12.63% in the last year to $749,000. When Oracle completed its hostile takeover of PeopleSoft in Pleasanton, there was a fear that home prices there would plummet due massive layoffs. But prices in the Bay Area have been charging ahead, and there was no shortage of buyers even in Pleasanton.

Here is another view of housing prices in the Bay Area:

How much does it cost to buy a house in the bay area?

House prices go up and down. Over the long term, the trend is upward. Historically, house prices only go down around recessions. The longest downward trend in the last 20 years has been 1990-1995 following the recession of 1990-91. The dot-com era ended in 2000. Tech companies laid off tens of thousands. Yet, housing prices hardly fell, and then they soared upward. If your horizon is at least ten years, your house price has a high probability of going up.

 

Okay, I think that Bay Area housing could go down in price some as interest rates go up. There's a lot of people out there that are affording houses via "interest-only" variable rate loans. This is based on expecting the value of the house to go up, and the money that these folks will make when that happens. However, as interest rates go up, this tends to affect affordability, and people end up putting more of their income into paying interest, so have less to put into loan principle.

At any rate, it is difficult to predict what Bay Area housing will do, but historically when interest rates go up, prices go down some as a result. I don't see why it would be different this time. And if prices do go down, a certain number of the "interest-only" speculators will drop out of the market (sell or default).

It may be that prices don't actually drop, but that the growth rate of prices slows down. If it falls below the rate of inflation, then it is effectively a price drop.

Just my thoughts. The biggest wild card that I see as interest rates rise is the effect on the recent phenomenon of "interest-only" homebuyers

-Roger