San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident • Hacker News Board

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#31

Post by ianleeclark » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

isoskeles wrote: post #24

TACIXAT wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that the cognoscenti proletariat should be empowered to confiscate all property and redistribute it as they wish Or we could, you know, build some cheap housing.

That's definitely not what the implication of the article is. Many would read this and think, well, we should just put the homeless people into those vacant homes!

> Many would read this and think, well, we should just put the homeless people into those vacant homes!

Decommodifying housing sounds like a good idea. People in the streets sounds like a bad idea

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#32

Post by infecto » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #20

jayd16 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should really just repeal prop 13 for commercial and non-primary home real-estate. edit: forgot to add non-primary home.

Repeal it for everything except owner-occupied residences. That's the way homestead works in Florida.

Fuck at the very least yes. This is the most ignorant law I have ever seen. It blows my mind everytime to think that it not only applies to non-owner-occupied but also businesses.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#33

Post by fuzzinator » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

> The ten most populous Bay Area cities listed above have a combined point-in-time homeless total of 63,527

If you add up all the homeless numbers listed for each city in the article this number is actually 23,528.

What is considered a healthy occupancy rate for a city? 100% occupancy would obviously not be ideal since there would be no places for people to move to.

Are there any direct stats on vacant home ownership as a means to hold money?

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#34

Post by damnyou » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

GrayTextIsTruth wrote: post #30

damnyou wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should different rules apply to foreigners in this context? An American billionaire buying a few condos and keeping them empty has the exact same effect as a Chinese billionaire doing so. Rules around vacant homes are good, though, and I strongly support them.

There’s a lot of money in real estate. It’s better staying in the country than going to Chinese firms. If it makes no difference to you, why not favor your own country?

Because I am a committed internationalist and believe that national borders are the greatest moral atrocity that exists today.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#35

Post by lrajlich » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

Counter argument: SF has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jo... This article is promoting a bad faith argument used by anti development activists.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#36

Post by cuillevel3 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

sigstoat wrote: post #16

as some of the comments on the article note, you've got natural churn in residency, uninhabitable structures, renovations, etc. also it's not like you can let someone live in a house for free and just call it a wash. anyone who has ever rented a home to folks knows that tenants can be _extremely_ hard on a rental property.

also some of them might not want to be registered? having a home might not be enough to be able to deal with bureaucracy and such

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#37

Post by finaliteration » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

asdfadsfgfdda wrote: post #22

rb808 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least an American billionaire pays some American taxes. If a foreign speculator makes a lot of money they aren't even paying any income or capital gains taxes here.

They are still paying plenty in property tax. From the city's perspective, you couldn't ask for a better resident. Somebody who pays full property tax and consumes almost no services (schools, police, etc).

But they also don’t participate in the local economy and can just blindly vote against anything that impacts their bottom line (e.g. tax increases) rather than having to interact with and see the impact on people who actually live and work there whose lives are impacted by local and regional politics.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#38

Post by lacker » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

How do they tell if a home is vacant?

Mail and computer-assisted telephone and personal-visit interviews. All group quarters responses are obtained by personal visit interview.

Okay, so if you don't answer spam calls, or you aren't home when some random person knocks on your door, your house might be considered to be vacant. This data seems pretty worthless.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#39

Post by zapita » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

asdfadsfgfdda wrote: post #22

rb808 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least an American billionaire pays some American taxes. If a foreign speculator makes a lot of money they aren't even paying any income or capital gains taxes here.

They are still paying plenty in property tax. From the city's perspective, you couldn't ask for a better resident. Somebody who pays full property tax and consumes almost no services (schools, police, etc).

They often pay very little property tax, thanks to California prop 13. Long-time property owners are incentivized to just ride the real estate boom with a vacant building that costs them nothing. The city gets almost no tax revenue, and the neighborhood is crippled in its development.

As a bonus those property owners are politically active and fight zoning reform and development/transit projects to protect aforementioned real estate boom.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#40

Post by Reedx » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

biznickman wrote: post #4

When I lived in San Francisco, the newly built condo building across from me was fully empty (but fully sold) for all the years I lived there. This is a tower in SOMA. There was only one apartment which appeared to be a corporate one that was occasionally utilized. The rise of foreign money parking money in real estate has screwed things up on a global level. San Francisco has felt the brunt of this due to their insa…

There are houses throughout the Bay Area sitting empty, just being used as a relatively safe store of value. That goal is already achieved without having to deal with the overhead of managing the property and tenants.

So the homes just sit... empty.