The State - News from Sept. 19, 1985

In 1970, a home in San Francisco’s Haight district sold for about $30,500. Today, it’s hard to find a house there for less than $150,000 . It’s the same throughout most of the city. “In many ways, San Francisco resembles Paris more than any American city” said Dennis Gale, a George Washington University city planning professor in a San Francisco Chronicle article. “Planners in Paris joke that you have to go to the suburbs to find poor people.” San Francisco is now in second place, behind Honolulu, for the highest-priced homes among major U.S. cities. “The conventional wisdom of the real estate industry,” Richard LeGates, San Francisco State University’s head of urban studies, said, “ . . . is that somebody moves out of an $80,000 house into a $100,000 home, then somebody in a $60,000 house moves into the $80,000 house . . . . Here we have that turned around.” he said, adding that people are being forced to find lower-priced housing outside the city.