Most of the other places with rapidly rising rents are fairly suburban and/or mooted alternatives to Silicon Valley, such as Austin, Miami, and Boston. People appear to be moving toward lower murder rates, although that’s a general pattern over the last 50+ years, which is why, say, East St. Louis got so unpopular that nobody lives there anymore.

The places where rents are going up the slowest tend to be heavily black and have already high or rising murder rates. For example, Minneapolis and Portland used to be pretty safe places, but local politicians tolerated so much anarchy there during 202 loo0 that 2021 murders in both were at least twice 2019 murders.

Murder rates went up all over the country during the racial reckoning, but a 30% increase in an already murder-prone heavily black city like St. Louis or Detroit is worse in an absolute sense of incremental dead bodies than a similar increase in Boston or Austin.

Obviously, if I understood genius business strategies, I’d be rich, but I’m not so I don’t. But still, making rents in Oakland, with its history of black radicalism and high crime rates, 17.5% lower relative to the country as a whole over the course of 2021 sounds like a pretty expensive Step 2.