181–190 of 640 posts
I live in downtown SF: streets are filthy, homeless situation is worse than ever before, everything that I would want to do outside is closed, there’s no reason to live “close to work” anymore, I only go outside for groceries and laundry. I’m moving to LA in 3 weeks.
Asking out of cluelessness and as a non-Californian: why is this better?
That title reads super awkwardly. Anyway, on the flip side, the trend seems real from my observations. I live in a mountain town in North Central Washington. The real estate market has seen around a 35% price increase, homes are selling in hours all cash and almost every builder is already booked through 2021. It's almost exclusively people bailing from Seattle.
But Seattle has seen the same thing, the market has gone crazy here and there isn’t much housing supply to meet demand. That is just the forsale market, rentals are much weaker.
On the plus side, our landlord is doing everything in his power to keep us happy, for the first time.
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That makes no sense. Rent controls don't specify a minimum rent, all your reasons apply equally to rent controlled and uncontrolled rentals.
Rent controls do sometimes specify how much rent can be raised year over year. Drop it too low one year, be stuck with relatively low prices in the short term.
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This is what leases are for, they fix prices for a year or so by adding cost friction to moving (usually a few months of rent). Which, in theory, act as a buffer to stabilize prices. The problem is that the cost savings of moving is so great that it was cheaper to pay to break the lease than it would be to stay. We saw the reverse of this before: when landlords were paying people $8,000 to move early because rent inf…
> cost savings of moving is so great that it was cheaper to pay to break the lease than it would be to stay What's the law on this? I've read that the landlord is required to make a good faith effort to replace you, but if they can't (or if they can't recoup the costs), you are on the hook. So if the cost is 32% lower and the landlord can only find a tenant willing to pay that much, it seems like you are responsible…
Quote from the article, Google translation:
> Jayson Hill recently stopped by his old apartment. He didn't feel sad that he hadn't lived in San Francisco since the end of August. Instead, he thought of all the things he won't miss: the dealers on every corner who go about their business so bluntly that passers-by can see money and drugs change hands. The syringes lying around everywhere. The human feces on the street and the unbearable smell of sewers. Hill once saw a corpse on the sidewalk who had obviously died of an overdose, a coroner had just come to the scene. Hill ran into drug addicts so often that he learned how to give Narcan, an antidote to heroin and other opiates.
> Hill was once threatened on the street and was increasingly afraid to leave his house in the dark. "It was starting to feel like a terrible nightmare," says Hill. During a farewell visit to his old apartment building, he heard that ten other former neighbors had given up their apartments.
> Nevertheless, some companies are now adjusting to the fact that they will need less space in San Francisco in the future than expected. Pinterest has accepted a contract penalty of almost 90 million dollars to get out of a rental agreement in a new office building. Twitter has just offered part of its headquarters to sublet. CEO Jack Dorsey has already said before that he no longer wants to be as focused as he has been in San Francisco. Other companies are also loosening their ties to the city. When the software company Oracle announced that it was relocating its annual mega-conference "Open World" to Las Vegas, the reason for this was not very flattering: It was not only the costs that were decisive for this decision, but also the desperate conditions on the streets of San Francisco.
[0] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/obdachlose-und-drogen...
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I live in freaking Madison, WI and you can't find a studio for under $1000, there's no way you're going to find that in SF.
Is that just downtown by the capital where the high rise apartments are? Or has the market shifted that severely since I graduated school in 2016?
There is currently an article (in German) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine called "The Demise of San Francisco" [0] in which the possible reasons for this are discussed. One reason given (which I cannot verify as I don't live there) is: people are fleeing the city because it has become a terrible place to live: Quote from the article, Google translation: > Jayson Hill recently stopped by his old apartment. He didn't fee…
> The figures underscore how the pandemic has roiled property markets and changed renter preferences. With companies allowing employees to work from home, people have fled cramped and costly urban areas in droves, seeking extra room in the suburbs or cheaper cities. I am skeptical. Yes a lot of Bay Area companies are allowing work from home for now, but are people really weighing that so heavily that they’re moving?…
And just north of the border: Toronto rent prices are down 14.9% year-over-year. https://rentals.ca/national-rent-report (Detached home prices? Up 10.8%, to an average of $1.14 million CAD. Sigh.)