I just added a caveat about that, but many of the top of market neighborhoods people tend to go for here haven't dropped nearly that much (e.g West Village area, Chelsea, UES/UWS). NYC is huge and that drop is not spread equally. Guessing it isn't in SF either, but it seems 31% is going to hit every neighborhood at least a good deal.

Edited to add to this, see the spread in June:

https://www.renthop.com/studies/nyc/renthop-2020-subway-rent...

West 4th = West Village, up 7% YOY mid pandemic, even as other neighborhoods saw more drops.

Also see the trend here as editorialized around NYC on pace to overtake SF as the most expensive rent market: https://www.zumper.com/blog/rental-price-data/

A better graph near the bottom of this article to show how small the dip is for rentals: https://streeteasy.com/blog/august-2020-market-reports/

From what I’ve seen in San Francisco, the biggest decreases in rents have been in the newer upscale construction in SOMA. There’s nothing to do in SOMA other than walking to your tech office job and most of the restaurants around there are specifically for business lunch so many of them aren’t open now with the offices are be closed. Given all that, I imagine that area has seen the biggest exodus in the city. Plus the rents were stratospheric to begin with, so even a 30% drop is still ridiculously expensive. In other parts of San Francisco prices have dropped but not nearly as much as in SOMA.

This is all from my casual observations on craigslist and Zillow, I would love to see broader data and analysis if anyone has any

IME, sf has falled 20-30% even in desirable neighbourhoods.

You can get a recently renovated 3 bedroom with laundry and dishwasher, in a desirable area for $4500. Those bedrooms weren't going for less than $2k a year ago.

At least for the West Village, at least some of that is tempered by NYU. I’d imagine most of their overseas students are still renting.