“You’re Really Stuck”: Housing Strategies and Compromises in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

Over the past decade, housing prices in many regions of the United States have increased precipitously. This is especially true in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region that has experienced an influx of highly paid tech workers and a tightening of the housing market. Against this backdrop, this article examines the strategies and compromises that a racially and socioeconomically diverse group of Bay Area residents use to maintain housing. Drawing on survey and interview data, the article finds that both homeowners and nonhomeowners described feeling “stuck in place” as prices rose around them. Yet nonhomeowners made greater compromises to maintain housing, including (1) living in structurally inadequate housing; (2) moving in with friends and relatives; and (3) accepting legally precarious living arrangements. Although research on housing often focuses on why families move, this article reconfigures immobility as a deliberate process, documenting the trade-offs families make to keep their homes.