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San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

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Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#291

Post by Kalium »

whimsicalism wrote: post #283
almost_usual wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dating is horrible in the Bay Area unless you grew up in the Bay or don’t work in tech. If you’re an outsider you’re considered a gentrifying techie so you already eliminated mostly anyone who is from the Bay. So now you have to date other outsiders and guess what, most of them work in tech. Most people who work in tech are male.

Psh I don't think that's true. I think you will have trouble if you basically match every single other tech person in every attribute - ie. if you lean really hard into the stereotypes.

It's not as true as it's talked up to be, but there is definitely an "Eww, techies" sentiment found among a non-trivial chunk of those that identify as "natives". You run into it a few times and you learn to spot some of the early warning signs.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#292

Post by fulafel »

etrautmann wrote: post #48
rsync wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?" It is the marginal buyer, not the entire population, that swings the price. It's the last few properties for sale that swing the price. Someone downthread explained it very nicely: "Rent is like a traffic jam. The market collapses on the margin. You don't need to r…

yep - rent is the quintessential example of inelastic supply. A tiny shortage of housing can cause a huge jump in price.

Elasticity features depend on the specific housing market but in the basic mental model housing supply can contract in the medium term when demand contracts and vice versa.

Demand is also elastic at least in the sense that people get bigger houses / move on to their own earlier / get roommates depending on the situation.

And geographically people spread out further if prices get high or move in from neighbouring locales which can be seen as demand elasticity if looked at from pov of a local housing market.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#293

Post by alextheparrot »

milkytron wrote: post #186
alextheparrot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hm, it appears it hasn't changed that drastically since 2016 according to rent jungle: https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-madison-rent-tren...

I lived in a sub-500 apartment with roommates so I was probably just wholly unaware - thinking back more deeply one friend lived in a studio the size of a closet that was just shy of 900.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#294

Post by fredophile »

sergefaguet wrote: post #279
temporalparts wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The magnitude of that demand will never reach the same height. I don't believe this; very few companies are okay with permanent remote work after the pandemic is over, even though they are very notable exceptions, eg Facebook. This also assumes the population of people interested in living in destination cities is constant, but it's been growing every year the last decade except this one. COVID and the possibilitie…

Many of my friends who own large companies are explicitly saying they will never rent offices again. As a founder/CEO this is an obvious move.

Is it an obvious move? I can work from home, and currently do, but much prefer working in an office. I'm more productive when I'm in the office. It's easier to get into and stay in a more focused headspace. There's also a lot of relevant context and info that I pick up just by being around the office that I don't have when working remotely.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#295

Post by tootahe45 »

irrational wrote: post #244
rgbrenner wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magnitude of that demand will never reach the same height. The US is expected to add 80m people in the next 30 years. So that seems very unlikely, even if there is a shift in behavior. Edit: reduced the population estimate with newer numbers from the census bureau.

But those 100m are going to grow up in a world where remote working is the norm.

If remote was the best (most profitable) way to do things, companies would've figured this out well before COVID.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#296

Post by lawnchair_larry »

jojo2333 wrote: post #241
JamesBarney wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in oil and gas, by no means the epicenter of innovation and many of these companies are talking about a moving to a mostly remote work force to save on real estate expenses.

I don't buy the "cost savings" narrative. By a long shot, the largest expense for large companies in employee salaries - rent, by comparison, is a drop in the bucket. What follows is that companies should be most concerned about employee and team productivity rather then office expenses.

It seems like this argument is easily dismissed when you look at the push away from offices and cubicles into cramped tables with no visual separation. Fitting more people into less space has been the trend for a while, despite study after study demonstrating that it’s less productive.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#297

Post by whimsicalism »

Kalium wrote: post #291
whimsicalism wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psh I don't think that's true. I think you will have trouble if you basically match every single other tech person in every attribute - ie. if you lean really hard into the stereotypes.

It's not as true as it's talked up to be, but there is definitely an "Eww, techies " sentiment found among a non-trivial chunk of those that identify as "natives". You run into it a few times and you learn to spot some of the early warning signs.

I find that building solidarity around the distortionary/gentrifying effects of the tech boom, to at least show that you are cognizant of the problems people are facing goes a long, long way.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#298

Post by nullc »

lisper wrote: post #236
nullc wrote: post #212

Personally I think SF itself, compared to the surrounding region, is a terrible place to live whos downsides must only be barely mitigated by specific positives which appeal to some people-- E.g. nightlife and access to high paying jobs. And right now the pandemic has killed the positives: destinations are closed and businesses have cut back and/or accepted remote work in large numbers. Not everyone sees it my way, o…

It is manifestly the case that enough people disagree with you to keep San Francisco rents among the highest in the world under normal circumstances. Not only do we have nightlife and good jobs, we also have world-class restaurants (seven three-star Michelin restaurants in the Bay area and an accompanying halo of lower-tier options), theatre, opera, ballet, good weather most of the time, redwood forests, beaches, sai…

I think it's telling that a number of your examples are things found outside of San Francisco.

It's SF proper seeing these drops-- not surrounding areas in the bay (at least not to anywhere near the same degree).

And just like you see the benefit of being able to travel out to those things it's also possible to travel in to SF for the things that are there-- from my perspective the things that are good about SF (like a performing arts event or a fancy restaurant) are things which I'd only partake occasionally and not every day.

Some of it is just subjective: I think the SF weather is pretty terrible compared to anywhere else in the bay-- continually cold and foggy. I can't stand the constant mind numbing noise. I can't stand the traffic, the lack of parking, and the public transit necessary to deal with it but which stops running early and poorly connects significant parts of the city.

But I don't see a reason to argue it with you: Different people have different preferences and I don't doubt that SF is great in all kinds of ways that matter to you. For me not living in SF was a trivial decision that had nothing to do with real-estate prices, and so it's easy to me to imagine how things are for people who decided otherwise but with the pandemic are finding that the trade-off they made doesn't make sense.

My point was only that there were are many people who find it generally awful and only counterbalanced by factors that, at least temporarily, now don't apply.

> Show me a place with affordable real estate and I'll show you a place that not many people want to move to.

That is a misrepresentation of the economics. Prices can shoot to the sky based on relatively modest differences between supply and demand. Some places have affordable real-estate because they're a lot less attractive, but others have more affordable real-estate because they're only slightly less attractive or because they have slightly less constrained supply, which can just be a product of geography or differences in public policy.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#299

Post by borroka »

Kalium wrote: post #291
whimsicalism wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psh I don't think that's true. I think you will have trouble if you basically match every single other tech person in every attribute - ie. if you lean really hard into the stereotypes.

It's not as true as it's talked up to be, but there is definitely an "Eww, techies " sentiment found among a non-trivial chunk of those that identify as "natives". You run into it a few times and you learn to spot some of the early warning signs.

It depends how good looking the techie is
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