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For a look at the people blown up by the boom in San Francisco and the East Bay, check out our documentary 'Boom - The Sound of Eviction' at http://www.boomthemovie.org which comes from the perspective of the people who were living in the city before the boom and didn't rise with the 6 figure salaries, but were expected to compete for rental units that doubled and tripled, forcing many people into the street to protest (or to try to live).
Anecdotally I have heard rents dropping a hundred or two hundred dollars in a unit, but this is from rents that went up an easy thousand, so i couldn't call that a settling, more like some easing of the crazy ratcheting effect.
Land values in San Francisco are indeed unique due to the absolute limits of a 48 square mile county at the end of the peninsula, but the boom itself triggered a massive transfer of wealth to property owners. This is perhaps the biggest legacy here. And perhaps a number of people in the tech sector got into the market right away and were pleased to see their values increase 20% a year (try finding that in a local savings account or even on the stock market), and perhaps some folks are living on 2nd mortgages...
The fact is the a lot of money left over after the bust didn't go back to the stock market, but came here (and in many other World Cities) into real estate, and now we are faced with a second bubble in the housing market without a parallel increase in wages or jobs, even in the tech sector, much less the lower working class markets. (I have heard that tech jobs are coming back... Certainly the biotech boom never materialized here, despit the City's best efforts to usher it in.)
Very few working families will afford a million dollar home. A shitty house on the outskirts will start at 600,000. Even The Economist is advising people to rent until the bubble bursts.
There's an interesting classical economist by the name of Henry George who wrote a book called Progress and Poverty back in the 1880s in San Francisco who was at least able to predict the massive homelessness and poverty right here in this city, side by side with every increasing, spectacular wealth. His premise is that private ownership of land itself is the funneling-off mechanism for what should be the greater returns to both labor and capital that come with increased productivity (vis a vis high technology for example)... henrygeorgesf.org
mark
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