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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.

#621
post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even during the lockdowns only 40% of the US workforce worked from home. Here’s another stat: only 33% of the us population has a bachelors degree or higher. Step out of your bubble and think about all of the people making the goods you order, maintaining your roads, construction workers that fix your home, the workers at the grocery store, the person that delivers your packages, the warehouse workers, etc etc etc. T…

Vast majority of those jobs don’t rely on the network effects of major SF/NY/Seatle hubs. There’s little difference To prospects to someone working as a plumber in a town of 30k people vs a city of 3m people.

> Vast majority of those jobs don’t rely on the network effects of major SF/NY/Seatle hubs.

If you reduce the need to maintain both a worksite for people and a home, while you will increase the need for labor to maintain/service the home and supporting infrastructure somewwhat, it will probably be less than the reduced demand for labor to maintain and service the worksite. The initial effects of a large scale shift to telecommuting is going to include a lot of net physical service/maintenance/support jobs lost.

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

#622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many companies have publicly stated they will allow permanent work from home [1]. Many others have said so privately to their workers. As more companies adopt this, this provides more options to those who relocate and whose employer tries to pull them back. Keep a long runway in an emergency fund, keep your professional network warm, always be ready to bounce if your employer tries to change your quality of life for…

And when you decide to leave your current company? Certainly I believe that remote work was already on the way to becoming more and more accepted, but by moving out you're still limiting your employment prospects to those companies that decide not to focus more on in-person roles. Maybe that will still work out in the long-run, but I still think there's significant long-term financial benefit in maximizing your numbe…

> And when you decide to leave your current company?

You apply at companies with remote roles. I haven't lived in SF though, and would never do so, so I can't speak to solving for timing the market there.

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

#623
post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think properties are somehow valued based on the rent potential, so landlords are disincentivized to move base rent and would rather offer 1-2-3 months free and keep rent at standard rate.

you can easily take this into account too, and my calculation did. Assuming your tenant is staying for 2-3 years, you can really only afford to let it set empty for a few months. Your yearly rent increases are just a couple percent (tenths of pecents a month). Every month it sits empty is 8% of your yearly income for the unit.

The yearly income isn't what's important to these landlords, it's the real estate value of the property. Loosing out on a full year or more of rental income is the cost of doing business if it keeps the underlying valued high and appreciating.

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

#624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but this is wrong. Food scenes require diverse cultures. Small town USA doesn't have 50+ ethnic groups making restaurants downtown

France, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Basque, and Japan are all examples of places with mostly one ethnic group and great food scenes.

The best Indian food I've ever had (and I only ate there once so maybe it was a fluke) was an Indian restaurant in Brno, Czech Republic, population 400k.

I can't imagine there were very many Indian people there, but the food was amazing.

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

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is curious to me is that NYC rents haven't seen the same crater at all (link says 15% but anecdotally most of the desirable top of market neighborhoods aren't budging). I don't buy the "SF is not very fun during the pandemic" rationale as more special than any other notable city, and NYC tends to have less space than SF. To me, that says the SF case has more complexity. IMO, the key factor here is that there app…

Speaking anecdotally I think this has some truth in it. A lot of people I know seem to loathe San Francisco and only put up with it because they’re required to live here for a job. If that’s the true reason for an exodus, then I hope it benefits the city to have residents that want to live here.

I lived in SF for a year and hated it. I don’t belong there: it’s not for me.

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

#626

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)

SF literally has an award winning food and drink scene, but you go off king. Sounds like you were spending time in the wrong places. Please enjoy Miami

Oh yay an award “one hand clap” eye roll

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

#627
post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring the fact that SF has rent control; it resets only once a vacancy hits. If market rate was 3k a few months back, but is only 2k now, if you take a 15-year view, it's still cheaper to let your rent-controlled unit sit unrented for 12mo than rent it at just 2k for 15 years provided the 3k/mo rates recover in two years. Basically, that's one of the major reasons why rent-controlled units aren't going down…

No, I'm not forgetting that. In my experience, most market rate units turn over every 2 or 3 years. 15 years in sf apartment leases are unusual except for people who cannot afford to move out. If you assumption, as a landlord, is that the next person into your unit isn't moving for 15 years, then yes, the cost calculation moves. However, that calculation is very different from a 7 year calculation, which is very diff…

> 15 years in sf apartment leases are unusual except for people who cannot afford to move out.

I'm a little confused here. If your rent is 1.2k for a 2bd in SF (because resident since 2000s), whereas market rate for a 2bd now is 3.9k in SF -- what is your determination -- is a person able or not able to move-out?

Why would anyone move out every 2 to 3 years if they're rent-controlled, and they'd have to pay significantly more for any new place?

Likewise, if you've been owning a property since the old times, and it's fully paid off, the property tax liability in Cali is tiny, and for older owners perhaps entirely a wash-off due to infamous Prop 13. Which is part of the reason that many owners don't even bother renting their properties.

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

#628
post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid has already got to the point where it's more likely that you'll die in a car accident than of covid... so I think with something like the flu vaccine is probably good enough.

Motor vehicle deaths per year in the US are under 40,000. In less than ten months, more than 210,000 people in the US have died of COVID. You're an order of magnitude off.

[deleted]

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

#629
post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the downvotes here are fair. Drug development is hard. Most candidates never make it to market. This is a vaccine for a virus that's never been successfully vaccinated against. Expect a majority of the vaccines in trial to fail over the next 6 months, either for safety or efficacy.

> This is a vaccine for a virus that's never been successfully vaccinated against. For lack of economic need. Most coronaviruses only cause mild symptoms, so there's not been a need for one. SARS vaccine efforts died early because the disease itself died out and there was no impetus to continue searching. MERS is similar in that, even though it hasn't gone away, it burns itself out so quickly that the need for a vacc…

For lack of economic need.

Exactly, and because of lack of economic need our experience with creating vaccines against coronaviruses is pretty minimal.

And yes, I agree that we'll get something, but people should be prepared for a few of the vaccines to fail, a few to be pretty mediocre (are they worth even getting) and a few that actually have some utility. The challenge is the ones in development are strung out along a pretty long timeline, so if we're lucky, one of the earliest ones works and we don't have to wait until late 2021 for something worthwhile.

And not only that, but people should expect something promising to be approved and then likely pulled off the market 6-9 months post-approval. It's just the nature of trying to accelerate a vaccine and then once approved, dosing tens of millions of people with it.

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