Real estate

We all know today’s housing market

is unfathomable, with eye-popping prices in hard-to-figure locales. Even by unreal estate standards, it’s hard to grasp the idea that a 291-square-foot condo sold in April for $415,000. It’s on the second floor, so we’re not talking views ... and it’s at Seventh and Howard, not a locale you’d want to show your parents. Or anybody else.

The average asking price

for downtown rents is hovering near $70 a square foot, twice the rate in 2009. And here’s something we didn’t see even at the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000: Brokers tell of a tech firm seeking 60,000 square feet of space — think big supermarket — that has all the money it needs from investors but is so new that the founders haven’t yet come up with a name.

Compared with Seventh and Howard,

a.k.a. Outer Skid Row, the $928,000 asking price for a two-bedroom house in the Inner Richmond sounds reasonable. Until you consider that in April it was full of rats, spiders, mold, 300 jars of urine — and the decomposed body of a woman that authorities speculate had died several years before. Far from scaring off buyers, the “major fixer” sold for $1.56 million.

Now that once-raffish

Dogpatch is a hot address, no wonder that the owner of a self-storage center on Mariposa Street next to Interstate 280 wants to build housing there. But get this: The 17 “penthouse” units would be on top of the existing four-story facility. At least residents won’t need to check 511.org for traffic conditions, because the elevated roadway will be right outside their windows.

Many shopping malls

have hard-to-lease space. But only in Everybody’s Favorite City would Westfield San Francisco Centre fill empty storefronts outside Bloomingdale’s with Bespoke, “coworking, demo and event spaces ... where tech and retail marketplaces converge.” Among the amenities? A climbing wall, a bocce ball court and “libraries with sleep nooks.” Hey, it beats the food court.