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San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

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Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#171

Post by sys_64738 »

jdavis703 wrote: post #23
sys_64738 wrote: post #18

I always wonder how those who are not in the high paying jobs can afford to live there. I'm talking about police, fire, EMS, coffeehouse workers, etc.

They don’t. For example in nearby Atherton the cops have made makeshift sleeping quarters in the police station because they cannot afford to live in the city they work. Many of the homeless in tents or RVs have jobs in the city, the sole reason they’re homeless is because there are no homes affordable on a low-wage job.

You do hope that first responders can live permanently close to the district they serve. It doesn't do anybody any good if they had to travel two hours before doing their job. Police, fire, EMTs, etc, are the folks we need to be on their game all the time for their safety and ours.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#172

Post by learc83 »

askafriend wrote: post #166
learc83 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price for a studio isn't going to be far behind a 1 bedroom, and rooms in houses aren't really an option for for people who aren't single in most cases. Even if you wanted to cram multiple people into one 12x12 room, most cheap rooms for rent are explicit about 1 person only. Look at median household income, San Francisco is effectively off limits to most people.

Point taken. We definitely have a problem but I really don’t see any solution anytime soon. Even if we committed to building a ton of new supply tomorrow, it’d still take years to get approved and actually physically built. I’ll push back a little on your point back alternatives not being too far behind the price of a 1 bedroom though. I know several people with units <$1800. Some converted rooms go for <$1500.

A median price of $3,700 doesn't imply that single bedrooms cheaper than that don't exist.

>don’t see any solution anytime soon

There's not. But a solution 5 years from now is better than never.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#173

Post by ericd »

wankerrific wrote: post #142
ericd wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd definitely keep in mind that those are after-tax figures, though. At the higher income levels, CA+Federal taxes hover around 50%. So, roughly double that rent difference to get the salary offset needed.

Really? At what income level in California are you paying half your income in taxes?

Sorry, I meant marginal tax rate, since we’re looking at the diff. At the $300k level, that’s around 35% Federal, and 11.3% CA. CA also has a relatively high 9% sales tax, and I believe SF proper has some special taxes as well.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#174

Post by whatshisface »

leereeves wrote: post #140
whatshisface wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but housing as a basic human right is not something that exists in the US, at most it is a high priority. If it was really treated like a basic right our society would be unrecognizably distorted around that one thing. A human right is not something you can let slip on a bad day, and that fact has big implications. If you are allowed to say, "our budget isn't adding up today so some people will have to stay on…

Many rights in the US are only guaranteed in the sense that they "shall not be infringed" or "Congress shall make no law". The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and the right to bear arms, but the government won't build you a church or buy you a rifle. Housing could be a right in that sense: the government shall make no law preventing the construction of housing. Of course, like all other rights, it would b…

>the government shall make no law preventing the construction of housing

The most pragmatic objection to this would be that everything you do prevents the construction of housing - if you build a city hall, you are preventing an apartment block from being built on the same land. Taxes prevent the construction of housing because the reduce the funds available to home builders and buyers. Property rights prevent the construction of housing because they would prevent me from setting up a tent in your front lawn. Making housing a right is a wellspring of endless absurdities, unless you are willing to treat it as a "maybe" goal. Maybe-goals and human rights are disjoint sets.

>Of course, like all other rights, it would be balanced against reasonable government interests...

So, let's look at a real human rights example, being assassinated by your government because you are protesting something. The dictator might claim that they were balancing your life against reasonable government interests - the reasonable response would be, "no interest is so reasonable that what you did would be justified." That's the thesis of human rights, if anything is justifiable then you don't believe in human rights. It's not that complicated.

So, if you think that housing as a basic human right can be suspended for reasonable reasons, you either don't really think it's a human right, don't believe in human rights at all, or are proposing a distorted crazyland.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#175

Post by whatshisface »

vertex-four wrote: post #165
whatshisface wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all people deserve shelter as a basic human right I hear this a lot and it still makes absolutely no sense. Where will they get the shelter from? What if the builder doesn't want to build a house for that person? Is the plan to force the labor out of them? Every positive right that I have ever seen comes along with an implicit demand that somebody else become a slave.

“Shelter as a basic human right” means that we have a moral imperative to organise and structure our societies so that that right is fulfilled. If your society is structured so that not enough housing is being created, or so that housing is left empty while there are people without shelter, then that society is running on incorrect axioms and the people who make it up have a moral imperative to change how they do thi…

>There’s no force involved, it’s a potential principle of self-organisation.

That means it's not a human right. If your government is engaging in real human rights violations you don't say things like, "potentially maybe we might want to reconsider how we organize our society."

One example of a human rights violation would be, the government makes up for a shortfall in their black budget by engaging in human trafficking. Whatever the solution to that - keep the dictator, change the dictator, give the president a second term; that's all situational, what's not is that you have to quit doing it.

>“Shelter as a basic human right” means that we have a moral imperative to organise and structure our societies so that that right is fulfilled.

Essentially, the problem is, that's not what it means. A human right is a value that you are willing to see your civilization stop existing if that's what it takes to preserve it. If you made housing that high of a priority things would quit working pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you gave public trials to criminals who were willing to surrender, things would go pretty well.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#176

Post by timcameronryan »

whatshisface wrote: post #96
timcameronryan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no shortage of builders. You can just compensate those workers with taxes. If you think taxes are also a form of slavery, that's a different discussion.

You can't fulfill a basic human right contingent on enough taxes coming in. If it's really a basic human right, insufficient revenues or unexpectedly high prices are not an excuse. If your country ran out of money, if the builders all started working for foreign companies, and if housing was really being treated like a human right, you'd have to make builders work without pay, or at least involuntarily. Providing hou…

A high-priority housing program is how you implement a human right for shelter.

This isn't some paperclip maximalization requirement you adhere to the social contract, and under the wrong conditions will force people into house-building labor camps. Human rights are how you reason about resource allocation. You have a right to a trial by a jury of your peers, but that obviously doesn't mean a judge must preside over your case that same day by threat of force. We can recognize physical realities, while still understanding that if we wanted to, we could provide a social safety net that includes a place to sleep.

> If your country ran out of money, if the builders all started working for foreign companies

If your country runs out of money, many human rights are probably in danger.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#177

Post by closeparen »

nostrademons wrote: post #130
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's if you only consider the housing cost. But if housing costs more then so does everything else, because everyone providing everything else has to pay the housing cost too, both for commercial real estate and higher costs per employee. Then you have the tax implications, i.e. all the extra money required should be calculated as after-tax at your marginal tax rate, both federal and state, and California has the h…

"But if housing costs more then so does everything else" That's not really true. Restaurants are more expensive in the Bay Area. Fresh produce is not, if you know where to shop - actually, when I go basically anywhere else in the world, one of the things I miss is the ability to fill a whole shopping bag with 10-15 lbs. of vegetables for The point about tax rates is true for rentals. You can do the math yourself on w…

A dollar of savings is not the same, because your savings needs are proportional to housing costs. Whether it is to make a down payment, pay rent while laid off, or maintain your lifestyle in retirement, you need a much larger savings balance to buy the same capability. Even if it’s a kid’s college fund, as an upper middle income worker in a flyover state you will probably qualify for financial aid; even with the same take home budget, in a high wage high cost scenario you will not.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#178

Post by asdff »

i_am_nomad wrote: post #46
NTDF9 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Policemen make six figures. Others commute from 2 hours in.

To be fair, police (and firefighters) make six figures because they have powerful unions who finance the campaigns of the very people who decide their salaries. Ironic that the people charged with protecting our communities are the ones destroying them.

They risk life and limb for the betterment of the community, I think they deserve 6 figures more than a techworker at facebook if you wanted to get moral about it.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#179

Post by dodobirdlord »

Cyclone_ wrote: post #95
isoskeles wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rent seeking" is a specific term in economics referring to people who seek to extract wealth from the economy without adding to it in any way, e.g. "make building illegal" in order to force up the value of their own property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking

Thanks for sharing, did not know of that term, but I must say it's a rather confusing choice of words!

The term is somewhat dated, but the usage makes sense in context. Historically there has been a noble class awarded privileges via mechanisms external to the market that leveraged those privileges to extract revenue from the market. Generally this consisted of renting out some right like the right to farm certain land or draw water from certain wells or dock ships in certain harbors. From this we get the modern economic usage of the term "rents" to mean the additional cost someone can charge for something due to their exclusive or semi-exclusive ability to provide it. Think patents, copyrights, monopolies, trade secrets, and ownership of scarce finite resources (like land in SF). From this comes the term "rent seeking" to describe the behavior of obtaining market privileges through means external to the market. This (mostly) consists of trying to influence laws to be in your own favor, like patent owners trying to get patents extended or homeowners opposing upzoning.
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