Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year • Hacker News Board

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#141

Post by sofixa » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #78

flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>will try and sell you on a “kitchen” that is a mini-fridge, tiny sink, microwave and a hot plate whilst still charging you full rent. To be fair, that is a Kitchen to a great number of people on this planet. I shared a mini fridge, tiny sink, and a hot plate with 2 other roommates when I lived in Paris for a few months and the rent was not cheap their either. Was about 2,000 Euros/mo 15 years ago iirc.

Yeah, Paris aint cheap. Most big European cities have huge rents as well but no Bay Area salaries to make up for it.

The difference is that usually ( certainly in the case of Paris) there's plenty of very affordable housing available in the suburbs with good transport connections to the city and some other suburbs.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#142

Post by cogman10 » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

itchyouch wrote: post #123

cogman10 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxing unoccupied homes and apartments will fix things real fast.

How would that be done? If an address wasn’t claimed for a personal tax return for an owner or tenant, it gets a big tax bill?

This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values.

Presumably, the building company would be the owners for all the empty apartments which would make it easy to find and tax. It would be more difficult to detect someone buying a home/apartment as an "investment".

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#143

Post by renewiltord » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #102

ashtonkem wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that rent control is much less about actually controlling rent, and more about controlling who is allowed to be in the city and where. Most rent control systems I’ve seen strongly favor those who have been in their current apartment for a long time, as moving often resets the rents back to market rate. And while that does help avoid evicting long time (and old) tenants, it also has the effect of forcing…

That concern, though, is something I've grown much more sympathetic to. There's a fundamental unfairness in putting in work to make your local community great, making it so good that rich people want to live there, and then being told that the community no longer has room for you because the rent is too high. If the city won't allow enough housing to keep your area affordable, you have a right to feel aggrieved, and…

People overestimate their impact on the community. The elephant here is that those people contributed very little to making the place desirable.

You can usually tell. They'll say that the culture has changed because the desirable people left. That's right. But the groupies are still there. They just don't know where the desirable people went.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#144

Post by jlmorton » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

robbyt wrote: post #99

Dear SF, More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly. With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to b…

You're literally replying in a thread about a massive, rapid drop in average rental prices after a large increase in the vacancy rate.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#145

Post by oblio » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #17

chrisseaton wrote: post #6

It looks like the house in the background is being constructed literally from sticks and cardboard.

You don’t want to use brick in a seismic zone, reinforced concrete is overkill for a 2 storey house, and steel frame is not just overkill but also uses sticks and cardboard for nonstructural components. As far as I can tell, almost every building in western USA that isn’t tall is wood frame construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(construction)

Isn't this the case for most of the US, not just the West Coast?

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#146

Post by renewiltord » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

momokoko wrote: post #56

duxup wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a semi related note, I've seen a lot more 'stop' and 'stop it' on the internet lately. Arguably the various forms of saying the same thing come and go in terms of what is commonly used, but I've been surprised to see such empty words suddenly so common. Personally I would be a bit embarrassed to just tell people to 'stop it' as to me it seems sort of childish, but apparently not everyone. It's strange.

Because it gets old listening to the same tired uninformed troupes from some random person on the internet that is just regurgitating misinformation. For people that actually live in San Francisco this is a real issue that affects our daily lives. Having some random person spreading more incorrect info is insulting and actually potentially harmful to the people that actually live here and have to pay those rents like…

I've lived here nearly a decade and loads of my friends have lived their entire lives from the time they were born here. They don't talk like that.

So I don't think there's anything inherent to being a San Franciscan that makes one act like you did there.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#147

Post by daniellarusso » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

itchyouch wrote: post #123

cogman10 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxing unoccupied homes and apartments will fix things real fast.

How would that be done? If an address wasn’t claimed for a personal tax return for an owner or tenant, it gets a big tax bill?

So, in Florida, you declare your primary residence, and it is taxed at a much lower rate than other property.

See ‘homestead exemption’. Other states use this term, but it means different things.

WV, for instance, only allows the exemption for people above a certain age.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#148

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #86

xyst wrote: post #40

If the city would rezone all of the single family homes into higher density buildings, this wouldn't be a problem. Flood the area with supply and the cost will go down to reasonable levels. This is a problem all across the nation. Everyone wants a single family home, so this leads to two things: outrageously high costs of homes, or people moving out to the suburbs and thus worsening the rush hour traffic and smog iss…

Having lived on another island, with the same woes of SF (limited land, high growth), the problem is always the same - even though it's been on a much smaller scale. The people that have owned for the past 30-50 years, are completely unwilling to give up on their single family homes, gardens, etc. They basically demand to live a nice and cushy suburban life, in the middle of a big city. It then takes forever to build…

I was having a conversation with a person in my HoA. She complained that, when THEY moved in, the "big" houses (gesturing at my 2-story) didn't exist, and they had a lovely view of the fields past my side of the street.

Well, lady, if you wanted the view, you should have bought my lot.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#149

Post by sokoloff » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #129

AmVess wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising taxes on the land owner will result in increased rents. Land owners are not in the business of giving money away.

If the market will bare $3,100 for an apartment, then land lords will only get $3,100 for an apartment, regardless of the taxes owed.

If the market will only bear $3100/mo for an apartment today, that's in part because some less desirable apartment is renting for $3000/mo and that might be the case because that landlord can break even on cashflow and bank on the appreciation.

Institute an LVT and those competing landlords may become cashflow negative, forcing some of those units off the rental market entirely (typically to sales to owner-occupants, sometimes to landlords with better financing or lower overheads, sometimes to short-term rentals or other higher cashflow uses).

An extra $100/mo of LVT may not result in an extra $100/mo of market-clearing rent, but it's far from obvious that it results in $0/mo change.

Thought experiment: if the LVT for that unit were $3500/mo, what do you think the offered rent would be? If that's the case for $3500/mo, what part of that doesn't hold for $3000/mo, $1000/mo, $350/mo, or $35/mo?

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#150

Post by SllX » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

oconnor663 wrote: post #133

mym1990 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those landlords don't try to sell that small kitchen, they DO sell that small kitchen. When I was shopping for an apartment in SF 2 years ago there was no spot that did not have at least 2 other parties looking at it. There was no room for negotiation or to even take a day to think it over, if you walked away from it, there were 2 people right behind you to take it.

> There was no room for negotiation or to even take a day to think it over, if you walked away from it, there were 2 people right behind you to take it. Naive question maybe, but if demand is that high, why don't prices rise even higher to balance it out a bit? Presumably most landlords would prefer another hundred or two a month at the cost of a few extra days on the market?

They do. At some point the landlord makes the decision that this is good enough and accepts an offer using whatever factors are in play, maybe some personal circumstances like needing the money sooner rather than later or just liking one of the applicants more, but the next landlord is now informed by what his neighbors charged a month or two ago for a similar space and uses that as the floor for what they should ask for. On and on it goes and suddenly prices trend up and a space that went for $X two years ago now goes for $X+$500 today, or as we see in the original article, $X-$1K versus a year ago.