Pet’s: The pea to everyone’s pod, to many a best friend or a companion to take care of, a member of the family. Having a pet is like having a child (without the crippling debt) but that may not be the case for many residents of the San Francisco bay area. Residents of the bay area know just how expensive it is to afford housing but when landlords add on extra fees for pets it makes all the difference in terms of choosing a place to settle.

According to an article posted on Sfgate.com “Some landlords charge "pet rent" -- usually an extra $50 to $150 per pet -- while others increase deposits by thousands of dollars. That means that if you own two or three pets you could be paying upwards of a thousand dollars to keep them. Along with extra fees some properties have a dreadful “no pet” policy written into their leases forcing individuals with animals into harder housing searches. For some this doesn’t seem like a fair argument in view of the fact that San Francisco has one of the lowest “pet rent” fees averaging around seven dollars as stated on rentjungle.com. This in comparison to Washington DC’s whopping $427 fee seems like the better deal but remember San Francisco’s highly priced housing market? When you tack on these extra fees the price to rent can climb.

In such a pet friendly city the extra costs and written policies come as a surprise to many including myself. To avoid these annoyances some people (like me) take to stashing their pets in corners of their house to avoid the wrath of their unrelenting landlords. Last summer my roommates and I made the very conscious, mildly impulsive decision to adopt a pet bunny into our apartment. Our landlord is completely unaware of the circumstances to this day but I’m sure he’d be a huge fan (wink). Hiding a bunny we soon learned is not as easy of a task because they have bladders so defective it allows them to defecate at least 2 million times a day (whilst still being adorable). Our struggle to keep our bunny despite his little affect on anyone in our building has sparked my thinking about those who are in similar predicaments. Pet’s shouldn’t have to be expensive to house anywhere and assuming everyone has the same financial capabilities would be false thinking.

In order to keep the pet’s in San Francisco we must keep the costs low enough to afford them. Although this doesn’t seem like the biggest of the city's worries it’s still important to acknowledge the possibility of higher prices in the future.