Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 754 posts

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#641

Post by chii »

cheriot wrote: post #365
rcpt wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning laws aren't laws of physics. People make those up to align with what works best for them. Prop 13 strongly incentivizes less housing (because it boosts voters asset values with no downside to homeowners) and more commercial (because cities now rely on sales taxes to stay functional). Until the landowners start to feel some downside from the housing disaster don't expect anything to change.

Landowners are a minority in the city. The divide is deeper than just property values because 100% BMR units are obstructed the same way.

if landowners are a minority of the city, then how do laws pass that benefit them so much at the cost of the majority?

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#642

Post by primitivesuave »

flaque wrote: post #603
primitivesuave wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One number you're missing there is the total homeless population estimated in 2019 to be around 8000 people [1], which works out to around $45k per homeless resident. 1. https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...

This is a misleading metric. Say you had a $100k homeless budget, and 100 homeless folks. You’re spending $1k per resident. But say your program REALLY works, and now you only have 10 homeless folks. Then, your program is spending $10k per resident! the program didn’t get worse. As your program gets better, you should be spending MORE per resident, not less.

Another great point, it is entirely likely that happened in SF since I’ve heard the homeless population quoted as 20,000 a couple years ago. As the commenter above also pointed out, my original math was indeed misleading.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#643

Post by titanomachy »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #534
opportune wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of people under 30 in the Bay Area who could have much more than 3 rental properties if they wanted to. Especially outside of the bay area. It's just that living with roommates is pretty frugal, and before the pandemic, it was a good way to save an extra $10k a year living in a more central location. Every single person I know who is a bay area SWE makes enough to afford renting a 1bed apartment in a good…

>> makes enough to afford renting a 1bed apartment in a good area In most cities in the US this is not the definition of wealthy or even well off. living with roommates to save 10K a year does sound like one step above poverty.

> living with roommates to save 10K a year does sound like one step above poverty.

Sounds like every college student and recent grad I've ever known.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#644

Post by chii »

dicroce wrote: post #176
Alupis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And/Or move their companies too. Particularly all the "tech startups" that think they don't need physical office buildings anymore. For a lot of companies, SF is becoming difficult to justify. Well-intended ideas, not fully thought out, leading to unintended consequences... nothing really new for SF.

People in San Francisco have long been angry at tech workers for driving up prices... Driving them out may be on purpose!

And then wonder why the city's tax base dies and turn into detroit.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#645

Post by ummonk »

sushid wrote: post #504
runarberg wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted this because as someone that has been what many consider homeless in San Francisco, I am a little insulted by this attitude. It comes across as someone that has never lived this life claiming that it is a good life and generalizing over the homeless population as freebies and criminals. If there exists a complicated social problem that involves thousands of human beings and someone on the internet claims…

Yes, people from all walks of life may end up homeless but I'm tired of hearing stories of my friends being robbed at gunpoint/knifepoint or straight up assaulted for a phone and a wallet. People walk into stores and steal without impunity, shoot up drugs, shit in the middle of a street, etc. It's truly appalling. As far as being homeless goes, the homeless here are free to fuck things up for the rest of us.

No doubt there is substantial overlap between thieves / violent criminals and the homeless, but I’m not sure the bulk of the criminals are homeless. I’d also point out that often the homeless are the most likely to step in to help when needed - while people who’re busy going about their lives will often succumb to the bystander effect and continue going wherever they’re going.

I’d want to focus enforcement on criminals (homeless or otherwise) and people who are a danger to public health rather than the homeless in general.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#646

Post by ummonk »

digitaltrees wrote: post #576
runarberg wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question why are you blaming the homeless for fucking up things for the rest of us? In my experience the rich are far more guilty (as a generalized group) of fucking things up for me. The rich have polluted the planet, raised the global temperature up a whole degree. The damage is that now I can’t go outside in late summer, if it doesn’t rain the week before, because the air is poisoned by soot from forest fir…

I agree that the scale of damage is greater. I just caution anyone grouping people based on belonging to a category. Being rich doesn’t mean you polluted more than others. Al Gore is rich, but he was kind of focused on that issue.

To be fair though, Al Gore likely has a a carbon footprint orders of magnitude higher than the average person.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#647

Post by ummonk »

opportune wrote: post #519
ransom1538 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's insane to me that the city with so many rich people and incredibly valuable companies is such a mess, your telling me that a small city with an incredibly wealthy population can't figure out how to keep the tenderloin from being full of tents and open drug use? Or get some form of functioning public transit? Pretty pathetic." SF resident for 15 years until I left. I walked around and talked to homeless. From th…

Just as an aside, I don't know the stats for SF, but in Seattle the "invisible" homeless outnumbered the street-homeless 2:1. Street-homeless people tend to cause the most problems and put the most strain on the system, but there are a lot more people sleeping in cars, shelters, temporary housing, and couchsurfing, who are still homeless and need help. I honestly think SF and Seattle need to be tougher on the street-…

To be honest I think there is a bit of semantic trickery here by homeless advocates. In colloquial parlance, “homeless” means “unsheltered” rather than “lacking a long term living arrangement”.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#648

Post by forgotmypw17 »

GhostVII wrote: post #309

San Francisco's solution to everything seems to be to just keep raising taxes, and throwing money at things which don't work. At some point you have to realize that more money isn't always the solution, you actually have to fix your beurocracy. It's insane to me that the city with so many rich people and incredibly valuable companies is such a mess, your telling me that a small city with an incredibly wealthy populat…

I once spoke with a woman who grew up in SF, and she told me about a warming shelter they spent a lot of money building for outdoors people. Once the money was spent, the building developed a crack, was closed down and never repaired or reopened...

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#649

Post by mypalmike »

rmk wrote: post #597
mypalmike wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants "nice suburban homes" or being a landlord. Many people like city life. It's really that simple.

I agree. A lot of this stuff is a function of age and marital status. Older people tend to get married and have kids, and once that happens they clearly prefer the suburbs. There are many folks who prefer city life, but I bet they would be found in much greater numbers in the 'real' cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Washington D.C... San Francisco just feels like a slightly overgrown town with…

40% of SF residents are married. That is just slightly lower than nearby mostly suburban Sonoma County at 47%. And the median age of an SF resident is actually higher than the state median.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#650

Post by arcticbull »

chii wrote: post #635
arcticbull wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is literally exclusively a supply and demand problem. If you want rent to go down, allow more building. End of story. There's actually nothing else to it. Lower property values caused by an increase in supply will yield lower rents because rents are generally indexed to mortgage rates which are indexed to property values. The problem is twofold. 1. Americans view property as an investment while also wanting i…

> non-voters ... Landowners tend to be older, established voters ... city council panders to [voters] surprise, surprise, if you don't vote and assert your civic duty and rights, you don't get included in the process to decide the direction of society. > view property as an investment while also wanting it to be affordable. These are mutually exclusive. they aren't - investment is supposed to increase the efficiency…

> they aren't - investment is supposed to increase the efficiency of production, thus increasing the availability of said product. The issue here is that land is scarce, and can be made more scarce by various laws. Building/construction costs have decreased somewhat, but the major cost is the land, and lack of density leads to lower supply.

You may have misunderstood, I'm suggesting it's not possible for something to remain perpetually affordable and be a good investment. A good investment becomes less affordable over time. A bad investment does the opposite.

For instance, nobody complains about how unaffordable AAPL shares are do they? That wouldn't make a lick of sense because that's the desired outcome. That's why you invest.

If you want housing to be affordable you don't invest, you buy. Like a car.

Post reply on HN