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Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

dougmccune.com

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Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#151

Post by int_19h »

WildUtah wrote: post #145
3s933x7dpsh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. If the problem is that absent foreign investors are buying up all the housing stock, maybe we should make a 100 story tower on some parking lot in SOMA and sell each floor as a $5M luxurious penthouse unit with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country. Boom, we just took a bunch of those foreign investors out of the market without increasing traffic and decreased the annual US trade deficit b…

"with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country." If we could prevent them from getting a visa to come at all, we could do the same thing and we wouldn't even have to build the building. Just allocate a few address numbers on ritzy street corners and sell the "buildings" to investors stashing Russian or Chinese black market cash.

Think about all the future and derivative opportunities, too...

Heck, we could do high-frequency house trading!

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#152

Post by 3s933x7dpsh »

WildUtah wrote: post #145
3s933x7dpsh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. If the problem is that absent foreign investors are buying up all the housing stock, maybe we should make a 100 story tower on some parking lot in SOMA and sell each floor as a $5M luxurious penthouse unit with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country. Boom, we just took a bunch of those foreign investors out of the market without increasing traffic and decreased the annual US trade deficit b…

"with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country." If we could prevent them from getting a visa to come at all, we could do the same thing and we wouldn't even have to build the building. Just allocate a few address numbers on ritzy street corners and sell the "buildings" to investors stashing Russian or Chinese black market cash.

Of course it's an absurd analogy, there would not be much value if there is no underlying property you can make use of. But I think it illustrates the point well: if the high prices were caused by absent foreign investors, 101 would not be jammed.

More realistically, investors rent out the properties they buy. So a market with tons of foreign investors spending irrationally would have an undersupply of homes to buy and corresponding oversupply of homes for rent. Renters would get a great deal and buyers would get bad ROI.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#153

Post by int_19h »

Houshalter wrote: post #44
stevewilhelm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores the impact on all the services and infrastructure that would be effected by additional housing: transit, roads, hospitals, schools, etc.

All of which could be paid for much better by distributing the taxes over the new residents. Economies of scale should make denser cities cheaper and more efficient.

I don't know about SF, specifically. But some places already tax new developments - in order to fund existing infrastructure (because property taxes aren't high enough to actually pay for it). So it becomes a pyramid scheme, where you have to constantly build more to maintain what's already there. For the city councils, it becomes a game of hot potato - what matters is that the pyramid doesn't collapse while you're in charge...

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#154

Post by wavefunction »

resu_nimda wrote: post #144
pauloday wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that it's an "epidemic", but houses are certainly getting bigger in the US[1]. I can see why a block filled with yards/gardens and small buildings is preferable to a block filled with large buildings and not much else. This just seems like a newsletter for people who care about things like that enough to participate in their local government. I doubt I'd personally agree with many of their stances, but I…

This just seems like a newsletter for people who care about things like that enough to participate in their local government. For other cities/locales you may be right, but in SF, it just seems offensive. We all know what the consensus epidemic is in the Bay Area, and attempting to use that word to imply that these poor landowners are being encroached upon is something I find reprehensible. Their "epidemic" is a trif…

Just what laid-back rural areas need, some urban control freaks with more money than common decency and a superiority complex towards their new "home."

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#155

Post by moseandre »

corysama wrote: post #14

Very beautiful, poetic, relevant to a lot of the audience of HN, and props for detailing the tech behind it. Meanwhile... the highest and lowest hex I can spot is 1265 / 457 = a ratio of 2.76 with both endpoints having relatively steep curves compared to the rest of the histogram. With the graph's Z0 set to 457 and Zscale set to an arbitrary ratio, the sculpture-graph conveys the impression that there is a discrepanc…

This is really nice art and data visualization too.

It's common to scale the elevation of a topographic map to exaggerate features [1], even non-linearly [2]. If you try to 3d print a raised relief globe without exaggeration it is surprisingly flat. If you're buying an expensive classroom globe, the specs talk about the exaggeration [2].

This is a sculpture, so whatever goes, but perhaps the designer looked at the version without exaggeration and noticed that it looked less emphatic.

I also think, as data visualization, this sculpture nicely shows the extreme change in price which occurs over small spatial distances. That's really important, and, actually, the tendency to make real estate price heatmaps with models that force continuity and prefer smoothness, like cubic splines, suppresses that aspect of the data. Railroad tracks and some beautification really are sometimes the only thing between million dollar homes and mobile parks.

It would be cool to see this with neighborhood boundaries/names on the mesh.

[1] "A raised-relief map or terrain model is a three-dimensional representation, usually of terrain, materialized as a physical artifact. When representing terrain, the vertical dimension is usually exaggerated by a factor between five and ten; this facilitates the visual recognition of terrain features." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised-relief_map

[2] "Raised Relief: Yes. Elevations from 0-3,280 feet are magnified 60 times, higher elevations and ocean floor are exaggerated by 40 times." http://www.1worldglobes.com/1WorldGlobes/classroom_relief_gl...

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#156

Post by JBlue42 »

joelwilliamson wrote: post #141
robbyking wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not; there are literally tens of thousands of new units currently under construction[1] in the City. The issue people have is most proposals for new construction in San Francisco consist almost exclusively of luxury housing. There's no shortage of housing in San Francisco, only a shortage of affordable housing. [1] http://paragon-re.com/San_Francisco_Housing_Development_Repo...

According to your link, there are about 10,000 new units under construction. That's about 10-20 buildings worth. Not exactly a huge boom.

It's better than nothing.

And developers don't tend to want affordable housing. That's why it usually has to be enforced by regulations of some sort. They're quite cheap and want to maximize their profit (like any other business). City, cultural, etc concerns come second.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#157

Post by 2k03kv4r5p »

WildUtah wrote: post #143
honkhonkpants wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High rises are one thing but they are not the way to solve SF's housing shortage. One 5-story building on one corner of every block in the sunset would easily relieve the shortage. Geographically speaking most of SF already suffers from poor quality of life. Except for the northeast quadrant of the city, SF is dominated by flat, boring, ugly zones of car-centered banality. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7398485,-122…

I can see the problems in that picture. +street five times too wide +snout houses with huge garages and driveways but few yards and porches +low rise housing with one floor devoted to parking in a high demand area +not nearly enough trees +no street corner retail But if you think that's bad, you should see 98% of the United States where it's much worse than the worst of San Francisco.

Those homes have yards, porches, and trees in the back (check the overhead view), and often rooms on the same floor as the garage (which is one car wide). This set-up is clearly not ideal but it's more efficient than the large unused front lawns present in most US suburbs.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#158

Post by hoprocker »

Lovely idea, fascinating way to visualize demographics.

One comment, and not at all a criticism of the art: I'm not sure if relative property values between neighborhoods really describes how SF is being ripped apart over time; for that, it might be more accurate to graph, say, proportional difference in median rent over the past n years, which might more closely hew to contested neighborhoods (ie, Pacific Heights doesn't usually catch headlines for how much it's changed in the last 5 years).

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#159

Post by imh »

bunkydoo wrote: post #138

If you don't like the house prices, move out of San Francisco

I don't like the housing prices. I would love to move somewhere I could afford a house with a nice yard, instead of my little condo. But I don't know anywhere else I can have the career security as a data scientist that I have here. If something goes wrong in the bay area, there are always tons of other places hiring.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#160

Post by stouset »

ramses0 wrote: post #85
dougmccune wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good point! Yeah, please be advised there's artistic license taken and the Z-axis scale is arbitrary (well, not arbitrary, it's linear but stretched and certainly doesn't start at 0). You're totally right that the difference between the lowest areas and the highest isn't really as exaggerated as it appears. The real delta between lowest and highest is about 2.7x. I'd argue though that a difference between ~$500/…

Truly, you'd want to pin rent as 25% of income and then have the height be related to where you would need to be on the U.S. income scale as a percentile to be able to afford it. ie: You've got a $899,000 home sale, that's supposedly a ~$4000/mo rent, which leads towards a "25% rule" of $16,000/mo income => $192,000/yr => which is supposedly 93.9%-ile. Going from $4000/mo => $5000/mo, it seems like it takes you to 96…

The absolute difference in dollars scales ridiculously high though once you start getting above 90%ile though. Going by percentile practically makes it a logarithmic scale.
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