North Beach room with shared bathroom lists for $750 a month
A 64-square-foot room at 301 Columbus Ave. in North Beach is listed for $750, even as one-bedroom rents hovered near $4,000 and AI demand tightened the market.
A 64-square-foot room at 301 Columbus Ave. in North Beach was listed for $750 a month, with no kitchen and a shared bathroom, underscoring how small San Francisco’s rental options have become. Zillow showed the Unit 314 space as a studio or room for rent, and a similarly small 70-square-foot unit in the same building was listed for $800 after sitting on the market for about 259 days.
The listing landed in a city where the price of a basic one-bedroom had already climbed to a level that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. In May 2026, San Francisco’s median one-bedroom rent hit $4,000 for the first time in city history, according to Zumper coverage cited by SFist. Mission Local put the average rent for a typical one-bedroom at about $3,745, up 13% from the year before, and said roughly 59% of San Francisco renters were paying more than $3,000 a month.
That makes a $750 room less a bargain than a signal of how far the city’s housing squeeze has gone. Local reporting has tied the acceleration to the AI hiring boom, with landlords and brokers saying the influx of AI workers has tightened supply and pushed up asking rents across the city, including in neighborhoods such as North Beach.
San Francisco’s housing rules still leave some room for protection, but not enough to offset the market on their own. The San Francisco Rent Board says most tenants are covered by eviction and rent increase protections under the Rent Ordinance, while the San Francisco Planning Department says residential SRO hotels remain one of the few remaining affordable housing options for low-income households and seniors.
The city’s 2026-2027 area median income guidance and affordable-rental rules, updated for 2026 on SF.gov, continue to set income limits and rent caps for subsidized homes. Against that backdrop, a 64-square-foot room with a shared bathroom looks less like a quirky outlier than a stark measure of what $750 now buys in San Francisco, and how close many workers are to the edge of the market.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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