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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.

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF wasn’t fun before the Pandemic. I’ve visited friends who work in tech 3 different times the past 5 years. The city lacks culture, the food and drinking scenes suck, and the people are all the same. (I spend most of my city time in miami, nyc, and montreal)

This is what tech money does to a city. Rents go up, everybody interesting leaves for places they can afford without a ludicrous salary.

NYC is mostly run by finance money, which must be at least as pernicious as tech money right?

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I feel like SF restaurants are relatively pricey, so in order to get the good stuff you'll have to pay a lot more than in many other places in the world.

Sf has some great hole in the wall places that aren’t too expensive. E.g. Tonga room isn’t that badly priced Dropping 50$/person on dinner & drinks in sf isn’t that much money when your rent is 50x+ that figure.

The SF Bay Area as a whole has some great holes in the wall, and there's even still some in San Francisco proper if you dig around, but in addition to being a bar in the Fairmont as others have noted, the Tonga Room is a world-famous tiki bar that opened in 1945, with two themed dining rooms that wrap around an artificial lagoon with a "rainstorm" every thirty minutes. That's a really weird definition of hole-in-the-wall. :)

While I haven't been up to SF proper for food and barhopping in a few years now, the Lark up in the financial district is much more of what I'd call a good cheap bar. I tend to bristle a bit at people dissing the SF food and drink scene, but I have to remind myself that with few exceptions my favorite places in the Bay Area aren't actually in SF itself. The metro area as a whole has virtually everything you can imagine at a very wide range of price points. I suspect one could make a case that the most interesting stuff happening is in the East Bay and South Bay, though.

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

#513
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep reading people make this claim. I haven't found it to be even remotely true for the food my family is inclined to eat. Every time I've gone to visit hip small college towns for the last 5 years, I've eagerly sought out the talked-about eateries, and they were all... distinctly mediocre compared to NYC or Bay Area or LA food. You still can't find anything but Americanized Asian food, even the California-cuisine…

> You still can't find anything but Americanized Asian food Anecdotally, I moved from the bay area to somewhere near los angeles a while ago, and the americanized chinese food here sucks compared to what I could get in the bay area. And it costs twice as much! :(

Try the San Gabriel valley.

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

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get top-quality Japanese food in thousands of small Japanese towns, and top-quality Thai food in thousands of small Thai towns. However, rest assured you will have a very hard time finding (say) Mexican in either. The only places in either country where you have a genuinely cosmopolitan food scene are Tokyo and Bangkok respectively.

What is top-quality American food, and where do you find it?

Not an American, but the last time I rocked up to a random small American town and chose a random small restaurant, I had a really good turkey chili burger [1]. Hardly gourmet, but delicious, and it's quite difficult to find this kind of thing outside the US.

[1] The "Chili Monster" at the Dillinger in Boulder City, NV, in case you were wondering. https://www.thedillinger.com/ (Not to be confused with Boulder, CO.)

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what tech money does to a city. Rents go up, everybody interesting leaves for places they can afford without a ludicrous salary.

NYC is mostly run by finance money, which must be at least as pernicious as tech money right?

You have a point, and there are parts of NYC that are very heavy finance workers, but I'd point out a few differences:

- You'd have to include SF, San Jose and Oakland together to equal the size of NYC (and much of that SF metro area is single family home suburbs with no one on the street at night)

- Tech workers concentrate in SF proper because there is not much outside of it (yes, there is, but SF is the core)

Just my take, but SF seems to revolve around tech, while finance is big in NYC, it's not the dominating industry like tech is in SF.

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

#517

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As another poster said, companies aren’t going to risk lose talent in troves if they enact a work from office policy. When you got major companies like Twitter, google, Facebook, and others already saying WFH is a permanent option that’s put pressure on others to figure out how to make it work. Talent is needed at many, many companies and if the talent is a.) needed and b.) good enough the company will make “exceptio…

As someone who has worked both in the Bay Area and outside of it, I moved here because of the job market, not because of the salary. I would take a salary cut any day to move away, but I want to stay with my current company AND keep access to the SF Bay Area job market. Literally the only thing keeping me from listing my house right now and moving to a different area is that not enough Bay Area companies have committ…

wise thinking.

there is a huge difference, not only in the kinds of work you can put on your resume, but in the quality of co-workers, and what you can learn from them.

You can approximate that experience in some other areas (Provo, Boston, Austin, San Luis Obispo, etc) but a LOT of American cities are still technological backwaters, and there's nothing available but garbage jobs that will drain your soul and turn you into a code zombie.

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

#518
post #427

I'm curious what folks here feel about the serendipity factor? I've been remote for 4 years and love it (in the NY suburbs area), but there definitely isn't that "random creativity" as being in the office, as the valley has been trying desperately to analyze and recreate artificially.

And I’d be curious if there are systematic data-driven studies on the existence and level of unique-to-physical-collocation creativity in the era of advanced multipoint videoconferencing.

There will be a lot of anecdotal evidence presented over the next few months, but I suspect it will be tied to political agendas. There’s a lot of money and economic dislocation at stake if downtown real estate, or commercial real estate in general, suffers a structural drop in value, so I’d expect those interests, along with mayors, will marshal their direct or indirect PR minions to talk down WFH.

Cutting through that fog will be worth it for those parents who, saved from (some of) the commute, have the energy and time to build a better family life.

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

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My baseline is grilled cheddar cheese on plain white bread with Campbell's Tomato Soup is the greatest food ever invented. I once went to a work lunch at one of the city's most raved about restaurants. I ordered the grilled cheese and tomato soup. That was when I realized that I really am not a food connoisseur. How can something so simple as grilled cheese and tomato soup be so thoroughly ruined, just in an effort t…

I like how this is downvoted. HN's culture is so not the nerd stereotype that people paint it as, it's much more elitist honestly.

There's a kind of weird inverse elitism in going to a fine dining restaurant, ordering an expensive fancy grilled cheese and tomato soup combination, and bitterly complaining about it because it's not a can of Campbell's and a slice of American on white sandwich bread.

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless upper management goes full-time remote, then power (and ambitious employees) will always consolidate.

^ ever work with someone in a remote office. I’ve always seen their careers take a hit. Same for remote employees. It’s great when you have a family with kids and you’re less career focused. But I noticed my comp increased almost 2x their’s over the same timeframe.

It's absolutely true that the home-office staff always get the best projects, be in-contact and visible to the executive staff, and are last on the list when layoff-time comes.

This is also true when you're at a home office, and you get acquired, and it becomes a remote office. Your career gets fucked.

I've had it happen to me over and over again; and it's very different when you work at the headquarters.

It's my biggest worry about 'permanent WFH'. It's that I'll end up being like the remote-office nightmare all over again.

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