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Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

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221–230 of 1001 posts

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#221

I am living in SF now and this confirms a very clear pattern that I have seen emerging, particularly of tech workers. I would say that >50% of the people I know who were living in the city have left, or are in the process of leaving. Some examples (there are countless): 1) All three of the roommates that I had are choosing to leave either permanently or temporarily. 2) A friend who works for google who is going on a…

FWIW, it seems similar in the Seattle area. Lots of people moving out of the big cities. I assume it's a combination of being able to work from home and people no longer being able to afford their incredibly expensive in-city homes due to furloughs and layoffs.

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yea, I agree the natural beauty is astounding. It's the extreme left wing, near Bolshevik culture and attitude that has destroyed it for me. I say this as a lifelong democrat.

I agree, SF/Oakland/Berkeley do not resonate with me as a life-long democrat as well. Extreme-left wingers in my view stand head to head with extreme-right wingers. These people are the cancer of the society IMO.

One bit of broader context to keep in mind is that "extreme" left-wingers in the US are merely 'the left' by, say, European standards, where the US as a whole is seen as a right-leaning country.

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#223
post #217

These HN comments don't seem to grasp that there are two distinct groups of people here, and these trends can/will counteract eachother: the ones that are in the city for work, and the ones that are in the city because they love cities. COVID creates an exodus of one, but people in the latter category are also moving into cities as well as prices drop and they are no longer priced out. HN folks love to complain about…

>there are two distinct groups of people here, and these trends can/will counteract eachother: the ones that are in the city for work, and the ones that are in the city because they love cities. COVID creates an exodus of one, but people in the latter category are also moving into cities as well as prices drop and they are no longer priced out. I don't think it's as simple as one group replacing another so it's a was…

I don't think it's going to be a wash, or prices wouldn't fall. You're right that this will decrease tax bases, so I guess the real question is "by how much?". Only time will tell what that looks like, but I think that will lead more to rebudgeting/allocating than just objective negative losses.

Your specific examples are interesting though, as NYC's population explicitly rejected Amazon's HQ2 with public backlash. NYC has always been defined by being a city of many industries, both white collar and creative. The day that's not true is the day NYC is no longer NYC. I think SF is a great example of what that looks like if you even compare SF of 2000 to 2020. I was between the two cities when I graduated college, and the diversity of industries is one of the main reasons I chose NYC. I don't want to be socially surrounded by my day job.

NYC has gotten along just fine without having a large tech worker population (in terms of percentages), and there are also plenty of tech workers like me that are staying. While some of my coworkers have moved since pandemic, most have not and are still contributing to NYC taxes you're concerned with.

These are all open questions that we need to answer, but the reason I look at this as a good thing still is that as a lover of cities, I'd much rather have these new issues. The mass influx of tech and wealth that cities have struggled with in the past 5+ years were/are eroding many of the things that define the actual cores of said cities, and when that's complete, you end up with more unhappy people on all sides. SF is certainly the closest to that point, and this exodus, if real, just might give it a chance to be saved.

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#224
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property taxes in California are among the lowest in the nation.

On a percentage basis. 1% of $1m is still way more than 4% of $150k

It's also worth calling out that when people make claims about lowest in the nation, they're almost certainly calculating that based off average price paid across all homes in the state.

Thanks to Prop 13, many homeowners do pay quite tiny property taxes. But this turns out to be extremely nefarious because along with removing a fair tax base and liquidity from the market, it also means that the disproportionate burden for paying California property tax is placed on new home buyers, who are often younger people/young families.

New entrants are often paying incredible levels of property tax (as it's a percentage of the already highly inflated prices), and because they're disproportionately more likely to be working, they're also the ones paying state and federal tax, along with the miscellaneous municipal taxes which can also be quite high in cities like San Francisco.

Meanwhile, legacy owners make off like bandits. I looked up the property I rent in once, owned by a large real estate holder that's decades old, and it was assessed at a few hundred thousand — for a 5 unit building in central SF. I don't know what the actual value would be, but it'd be closer to a ballpark of $3 to $6M. A differential of ~20x, and this isn't uncommon.

It's this framework that gets you to "lowest in the nation". I tend to think about it as _both_ the highest and the lowest in the nation, largely determined based on when your family moved here.

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#225

These HN comments don't seem to grasp that there are two distinct groups of people here, and these trends can/will counteract eachother: the ones that are in the city for work, and the ones that are in the city because they love cities. COVID creates an exodus of one, but people in the latter category are also moving into cities as well as prices drop and they are no longer priced out. HN folks love to complain about…

[deleted]

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#226
I’m in tech, but I like the Bay Area for what it is. I plan on working remote to be near family, but also intend to use the lower cost of living to save up and purchase a house in SF at some point later in life, hopefully to retire to. It’s a nice area and I think many people will be back after the pandemic (tech people or not); it just doesn’t make economic sense to be here now.

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are reforms that would fix the problems. But they are politically impossible to enact. Moving to a city that already has a functioning society is something one person can do without permission. So people do.

What are examples of cities with functioning societies? My backup plan was NYC, but thanks to de Blasio that's now out.

There are 53 US metropolitan areas with > 1M people.

They all have something wrong with them, but only SF has it's unique set of problems.

So everyone has to figure out what tradeoff works for them.

To me the biggest flaw in SF is the institutionalized Nimby-ocracy and the resulting housing and homelessness crisis, which I think poisons most areas of society.

Texas seems like it has that side of society figured out. It has other serious problems, I know.

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#228
post #4

I applaud this trend. I am in the 60% of people[1] who prefer to work from home, and spend more time with loved ones and less time rushing to get to the office. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/business/pandemic-work-fr...

I’m very skeptical that 60% of all people prefer to work from home. In my experience, it’s a small but vocal minority who don’t value the social component of an office. I think work from home should totally be optional, but why do work-from-homers assume that everyone else likes to work that way? I do not.

>> 60% of people who prefer to work from home

> but why do work-from-homers assume that everyone else likes to work that way?

How did you get from 60% to "everyone else"?

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably flux at first, and after some time an equilibrium. People get used to all kinds of things - change or die, for companies and careers alike. Worrying about this will be irrelevant after some time. Too much concern on this kind of suggests to me that a significant portion of people’s pay is based on the perception of productivity derived from interfacing with many people at work, but not necessarily producing…

I don't agree with the dichotomy here. There's no "more than" about it; interfacing with people is one of the most important ways that white collar professionals produce value for a company.

Thankfully we have technologies now that have moved beyond smoke signals and we can actually talk to people without being in visible range.

Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If SF decided to show compassion and start spending the massive amounts of money needed to help the homeless via education or mental health facilities, every other municipality in the country will start shipping people in. This isn’t a problem any city or state can address. It’s only solvable on a federal level, and that’s only because there is a military to enforce borders.

So you decide to not help people, because then you would need to help people?

Emotional platitudes such as “helping people” are not useful. It is obvious that if I vote for my city to provide mental health and housing to anyone that needs it, my city will quickly go bankrupt. Same for my state. It’s the same situation with providing taxpayer funded healthcare.

I know that we need the full weight of the federal government to attack this problem, so I support and vote for candidates who I think can best help us get there federally.

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