How Much Longer Can We Afford to Live in the San Ramon Valley?

Last week, a fellow agent explained the current Concord, CA real estate facts of life to me. According to him, the local Concord market is disintegrating due to the amount of people in upside-down situations. Being upside-down means you can’t sell your house for what you owe on it. You couple this with the number of 100% financed homes with ARM’s coming due, and you have a formula for tough times.

My fellow agent has a home on the market that he feels he will have a tough time selling as more and more upside-down homes are coming on the market and driving prices further down.

Yes, Concord is not San Ramon, but Concord is one of the nearby communities that lower income families look at when trying to find affordable housing. Some families are venturing out to Tracy to find affordable housing. (I am not saying that Concord is a low income town. If you have lived in the area, you have seen the outward bound march of affordable housing.)

I walked through part of an older San Ramon neighborhood a while back and talked to three people who were ready to retire but couldn’t afford to move – unless they wanted to move to Nebraska (new home prices and taxes).

I read on the Contra Costa Times website that the City of San Ramon and Sunset Development Corporation are ready to move forward on the “City Center” project at Bishop Ranch. It’s great that the city will have a new home, but what about all of the people being forced out of the community by the high cost of housing? What do you think the condos in this new development will go for? When affordability starts at +$700K – well, that’s a true oxymoron.

I’ve read recent concerns about all of the condo conversion projects in San Ramon that are reducing affordable rental properties in the area.

I read in the recent issue of Red Herring about the dwindling middle class in the Bay Area. According to the article, we face the very real possibility of a “haves” and “have nots” social structure.

So, I ask, How much longer can we afford to live in the San Ramon Valley?