251–260 of 407 posts
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Somehow the city with the highest average salary/cost of living usually goes unmentioned... Seattle has two huge tech companies, a lot of mid sized tech companies, and a growing startup scene... and it's not that far away from the bay.
Seattle is not that cheap. Decent houses in good suburbs easily approach a million dollars.
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> It was renters living in the Mission who were (not incorrectly) terrified that new development means they will get evicted and displaced. This is such a bizarre idea. How exactly do renters get displaced by adding more housing?
Because the actual building they live in gets demolished to build another building. Or because the new building next door is filled with 'luxury' $5000/mo rents, which might drive the rent up in their building.
This is such a stupid myth. On par with "vaccinations cause autism" or Bigfoot.
Science has studied how price depends on supply and demand very thoroughly. Increased supply always leads to lower prices.
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http://www.vancouver-downtown-condo.ca/details.php?id=31618&... $300k (USD) 1 bd room apartment in Yaletown, equivalent of this in SF is at least $750k. Plus property taxes in SF are around %1.15 for a $750k condo that comes down to 10k a year, just on property taxes. Not sure about the rules in Vancouver but the link I posted above claims $1,008 in property taxes. So yea I think Vancouver is affordable.
It would be pretty much impossible to buy that unit at that price. The new normal is that you list your property at below market rate and a get nice silent auction going. for example a friend of mine just bought a condo in vancouver last week, List price was around 500K, he put an offer of $530, got a counter of $550 and it finally sold for $580. http://bc.ctvnews.ca/fierce-bidding-wars-a-new-reality-in-lo...
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That's the key question. The article I cited details many limitations on local governments that would seem to limit their ability to demand affordable housing.[1] Bottom line, this bill is massively supported by developers, so take that as a gauge of how much power it gives municipalities. [1] http://48hills.org/2016/05/22/a-terrible-housing-bill-looms-...
But bear in mind this just brings California in line with a bunch of places that managed to build their way out of a housing crisis. $1T in war spending dumped on DC in the last decade, led to cranes everywhere, not massive rent increase.
In fact, when you look around, you see similar trends nationwide. A lot of this is just the predictable consequence of our near-zero interest rate policy since 2009.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/medi...
https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-washington-rent-t...
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I think NYC is already there. It's so easy to find a tech job in NYC. Maybe it's even easier in SV, but I've never missed not being in SV. There's such a variety here. Plenty of startups, all the tech giants, and plenty of tech/IT jobs at "regular" companies, consulting opportunities, etc... And it's not _just_ tech -- plenty of other industries are headquartered in NYC. By contrast I can't think of any other industr…
NYC is far far far way from overtaking SV as the capital of tech industry. The combined value of just Google, Apple, and Facebook is $1.3 trillion dollars. To reach that scale will take many many years and some incredible companies. Honestly, places that can put in a serious competition to SV are in Asia - China and India. Chinese tech companies are raising massive rounds, with multiple billion dollar investments in…
Then you'd have to count Wall Street, which for a great part are big software companies as well.
Some landlords (such as our firm) are liquidating our rental assets due to the increasing risk of 1979-1995 properties being pulled into rent control regimes. Cities like San Jose, Richmond, San Mateo, just this year either debated increasing or actually increased control over rental properties. The population is rising; the supply of rental units is too low; cities want to stop landlords from raising prices; so they…
Surely not all cities?
There is so much pressure, career-wise, to move to either the Bay Area, the West Coast in general, or a major urban hub. I honestly like living in a semi-rural part of the Midwest. I like seeing fields and forests while driving to work. If I want to get out to some wilderness, I can do so in 15-30 minutes. I travel in a car that, I feel, offers me freedom. To boot, I have a nice, reserved spot in the garage below my…
For me people trumps nature. I like living in a big international city with a lot of culture, getting to meet a lot of new people all the time. At least not being closed off to those possibilities. It doesn't have to be SF. It's not just that rent is expensive, it's that for the price you pay you most likely aren't even living in a nice neighborhood (most parts of Mission, parts of Soma, Market, parts of Haight, Divi…
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Because the actual building they live in gets demolished to build another building. Or because the new building next door is filled with 'luxury' $5000/mo rents, which might drive the rent up in their building.
> because the new building next door is filled with 'luxury' $5000/mo rents, which might drive the rent up in their building. This is such a stupid myth. On par with "vaccinations cause autism" or Bigfoot. Science has studied how price depends on supply and demand very thoroughly. Increased supply always leads to lower prices.
Not in real estate economics. Housing isn't a commodity market. There are firm price tiers, different methods of construction, different fixed costs for those methods, and drastically different markets for individual neighborhoods. Real estate isn't fungible and it's isn't particularly liquid. Basically none of the requirements of Econ-101-style supply and demand are met in the world of real estate. Building skyscrapers is nothing like creating an assembly line for widgets.
So yes, "construction" has some small aggregate effect on the price of a rental in the city, but that effect is meaningless to you if your affordable building was knocked down to make room for a luxury skyscraper.
Moreover, if you do happen to overbuild housing in a market, the price sags. Developers then almost immediately stop building, because the costs of new construction don't decline with scale. Thus, price controls enabled by construction happen on the order of decades, not years. Neighborhoods gentrify much more quickly.
In practice, a low-density neighborhood gentrifies, land values go up, and developers start to replace cheaper, low-density construction with expensive, high-density construction that can only be justified because of the higher land values. Existing residents are displaced. Ideally, those residents then move to a cheaper neighborhood. If no such neighborhood exists (because, say, you're in a small land-locked city with more millionaires per capita than anywhere on earth, and no remaining "undesirable" land), then those residents are, indeed, completely displaced. The fact that luxury apartments are theoretically $30 a month cheaper in some other neighborhood is thin gruel.
There is so much pressure, career-wise, to move to either the Bay Area, the West Coast in general, or a major urban hub. I honestly like living in a semi-rural part of the Midwest. I like seeing fields and forests while driving to work. If I want to get out to some wilderness, I can do so in 15-30 minutes. I travel in a car that, I feel, offers me freedom. To boot, I have a nice, reserved spot in the garage below my…
I have 11 acres, horses, a goat, cats, a dog, and I live 15 minutes from downtown and 17 minutes from work. This is in a mid-sized midwest city (Grand Rapids, MI). While I realize that I could achieve a substantial pay raise on one of the coasts, a similarly sized plot there would cost millions. I paid under 200k 5 years ago with a 1500sf house on it, and it's still probably only worth the mid 200k range after we improved it (cleared 6 acres of trees, planted and fenced a bunch of pasture, made significant improvements to the house). I could not achieve a similar lifestyle on an engineer's salary near a major urban center on a coast ... and I have no desire to move to one :).
Plus, I get to make avionics, which is on my short list of the best jobs ever.
This is a contentious issue and in case you are not from SF and wondering why Y Combinator is taking a stand on it, it has to do with the politics of the tech boom. The plain truth is that the housing crisis is a combination of too much sudden demand fueled by the tech boom and too little supply. The tech community likes to deflect criticism of their sudden influx of relatively high-income workers and say "don't blam…
I don't live in SF, but having spent most of the past 15 years in Europe, which is dense: it's almost completely a supply problem. SF is not really very dense at all for a place with such a high demand for housing. Random place in SF: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7718267,-122.4388549,3a,75y,... Near where I lived in Padova, which is way smaller than SF, and way, way less well off: https://www.google.com/maps/@45.3…
When you have sudden surges in demand you can't just pin it on supply. You have to think about macroeconomic objectives for the city (i.e. preserving low and mid income housing) as well as how to plan for the long term, like when the boom turns to bust and lots of those new residents leave.