A Tale of Seven Cities: 1930-2007

The following tracks the ratio of city median rents to state median rents for seven California cities. Note that "median rent" means median contract rent paid -- not asking rent. The data is from the decadal census, together with the American Community Survey.

Source: Census

Note the rent uptick during the dot-com period followed by collapse for San Francisco and San Jose, although Oakland had a very brief mini-spike as well. Also note the effects of wage compression during the post war period, as rents crowded around 1 and then diverged. Also note the increasing volatility of these ratios, as the higher income cities tend to be more volatile after the period of wage compression.

Can you guess when rent control was instituted in some of these cities?