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

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

#201

Post by twblalock »

cogman10 wrote: post #142
itchyouch wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> 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.

That isn't the reason rent is high in SF.

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

#202

Post by jjoonathan »

BurningFrog wrote: post #182
jjoonathan wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, here's the thing: pipes can be built. Big pipes can replace small pipes. Plant capacity can be upgraded. Shocking, I know, but it's true.

SF is so ossified that people don't even consider the possibility that infrastructure can be built...

Which itself is probably part of the problem.

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

#203

Post by Joeri »

blueline wrote: post #151
fennecfoxen wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, it's been a while since I left Potrero Hill, but I think that I heard the feds had taken over the public housing projects on the south side (you know, back where OJ Simpson grew up) because they were basically uninhabitable. What's the status on that? But you know, that's last generation projects. What's the status on today's "affordable housing" projects? Oh, you say it costs $750,000 in construction costs…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

Singapore relies heavily on cheap foreign construction workers. In order for that model to be applied in SF would require opening the Mexican border to allow for cheap immigrant workers to come to SF. That’s not going to fly for many reasons.

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

#204

Post by 0xffff2 »

randomdata wrote: post #69
ashtonkem wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the years I’ve come to the realization that a number of “kitchens” in luxury apartments are clearly designed for making at most breakfast and otherwise looking pretty. It’s not all luxury apartments, not by a long shot, but a surprising number were unusable due to layout mistakes or a complete lack of equipment (on the owners side). The conclusion I came to is that the people who rented these units valued a pret…

> If land is incredibly expensive and one intends to eat most of their meals out, it doesn’t actually make sense to rent a full kitchen. It is hard to beat the economies of scale of a restaurant, as much as the "you only need to factor the cost of raw food" camp like to tell otherwise. From a purely economic perspective, a kitchen at home, when other sources of food are widely available, is tough to justify. From a w…

I worked as a line cook in college. The place I worked was in a HCOL city, but nowhere close to SF. Our general rule was that items should sell for about 4x the cost of ingredients to cover all overhead.

I'm a salaried employ with no expectation of overtime, so my opportunity cost to cook for myself is essentially $0/hr, but even if I factor in a fairly reasonable $15/hr for my own labor, I'm still easily under 4x raw input cost for most dishes, which makes sense since I don't have to pay (or already pay regardless) other overheads like rent, taxes and FOH staff.

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

#205

Post by skellington »

onei wrote: post #187
aqme28 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider Tokyo. They have kept supply up with demand, and as a result prices have stayed relatively flat. https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...

Isn't it common for Japanese apartments to be super tiny though? As in enough space for a mattress and not much more.

Yes, but if you want to have adequate supply in a very space limited area, that's going to be one of the natural compromises.

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

#206

Post by fapi1974 »

Simulacra wrote: post #89

In the Noe Valley rent is still pretty darn high. While that is to be expected in this area, a lot of people have moved out and the neighborhood is a little vacant. With the massively high rents I imagine most landlords paid off mortgages, so could these expensive properties remain empty indefinitely?

Noticed the same - Noe's feeling like a ghost town.

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

#208

Post by centimeter »

jeffbee wrote: post #191
daniellarusso wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the infrastructure can handle double its current utilization? Aren’t the sewers in SF literally over a century old? No issues with adequate water supply and sewage treatment?

These are bad faith arguments and therefore you are either debating in bad faith, or a dupe. San Francisco's gross water demand has been falling consistently for the last 50 years. Not per-capita. Gross. In 1998 the demand was 82 million gallons per day and in 2019 it was 63 million, with a population 17% greater. The more people you pile into a city, the less demand there is, because grossly wasteful activities like…

This is mostly from quality-of-life reductions, like inferior showers, toilets, washing machines, etc.

You can only reduce quality of life so much.

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

#209

Post by Apocryphon »

sokoloff wrote: post #149
mywittyname wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Wouldn’t the rent be too prohibitively expensive at some point, and the landlord will be forced to shift their strategy for recouping the money lost from LVT from lowering rent, to redeveloping it to be a more effective money maker? Such as by building more units and increasing urban densification.

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

#210

Post by akiselev »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #160
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…

How about mixed-cost buildings? Some higher-cost "luxury" units whose price/rent subsidizes the lower cost "essential" units, where firemen, teachers, local people can live.

A third of all units developers build in SF goes to low income housing
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