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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

#251

Post by nostrademons »

sokoloff wrote: post #189
renewiltord wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land owners are not in the business of giving money away. That's precisely why increased taxes will not result in increased rents. After all, if they could increase rents and the market would clear it when there's a tax, why wouldn't they when there's no tax? They're not selling at cost-plus, they're trying to maximize profit.

Because renting in SF trades off in part against buying in SF at the margins (and against renting nearby to SF and against moving out of SF entirely). If buying in SF becomes more expensive due to an LVT, then renting becomes more competitive on the margin. I find it to be strangely magical thinking that land-value-taxes will precisely and surgically extract 100% of their value from landlords with no players in the g…

The point of LVTs is precisely to alter participants' behavior in the market.

The value of LVTs is in aligning incentives so that landlords have an incentive to build more housing and use it more efficiently. It makes vacancy & speculation a money-losing endeavor (the same way that inflation makes holding cash a money-losing endeavor), and creates political pressure to repeal zoning laws and create smart public improvements, ones that will increase the value of the land more than their cost. Its value as a revenue source is secondary, and many proponents (of the geolibertarian sort) actually support lower tax receipts and smaller government.

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

#252

Post by dehrmann »

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…

> More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people.

Pre-covid, I knew engineers making $100k+ living with four roommates in a somewhat run-down apartment. Sure, $100k isn't that much, but it's enough that they should be living somewhere nicer without the roommates. People who should be in high-end apartments are living in low-end apartments, displacing "normal" people who would normally live there. If you build only mid-high-end apartments, the priced will come down to the point that the average tech worker can afford them, and they'll move out of their four roommate situation. That will free up inventory at the lower end, and prices will drop.

This really is just supply and demand. It does funny things at times (see the backward bending supply curve of labor), but until there's a surplus of housing, this isn't one of them.

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

#253

Post by lock-free »

runarberg wrote: post #219
fennecfoxen wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear SF, More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people. But, when you think of them, you're thinking way too small. You need to think in terms of, like, literally doubling the number of apartments available, and they may then be in reach of normal people once more. You also need to get yourself together and reverse that trend where your transit system has carried fewer peo…

> More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people What? No! Rent control is among other something that can lower the rent for normal people. I know SF has rent control, but currently it only applies as long as you don’t move.

Is this sarcastic? Rent control drives up rent. It doesn't make housing cheaper, it's just NIMBYism that renters get to participate in

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

#254

Post by jeffbee »

da02 wrote: post #177

If you live in San Franscisco, have you noticed crime going up or staying the same?

It is mixed with most categories of property crime up and most kinds of violent crime down compared to 2019, except homicide which is up a bit but the denominator is small.

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/sites/default/files/2020-...

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

#255

Post by nostrademons »

Apocryphon wrote: post #238
imtringued wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea behind the LVT is not about making rent cheaper. It's to reward landlords for using land more efficiently. If the land costs a fixed amount you want to build as many units as possible and make each unit as attractive as possible. Compare that to a conventional property tax where you have to pay more tax for each unit of housing you build. You also have to pay property taxes for home improvement meaning old p…

Have LVT proponents ever considered augmenting it with tax credits on the LVT for property improvements? To really hammer home incentives towards development in especially supply-strained markets such as S.F.

LVT is a tax only on the unimproved value of the land. Property improvements are not covered: the land owner gets to keep (or pass onto the renter) 100% of the value of such improvements. No tax credit is necessary; it's a natural consequence of how the tax is structured.

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

#256

Post by Kalium »

tehjoker wrote: post #234
bastawhiz wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent control stops rent from going up, but how does it make rent go down?

Public housing would.

California requires winning a plebiscite to build public housing. This is not optional.

When it does manage to build public housing, SF spends approximately a million dollars a unit to do so. That's purely to get a habitable unit. It includes none of the maintenance costs, which will increase over time, or the social services required to make public housing work as intended.

With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does.

Incidentally, the Supes only actually get to control about $3.5bn of that. So now we're reduced to 3,500 units a year... in a city where population growth averages 11,000 people a year. And we still haven't talked about social services, maintenance, or how allocation of what will never be enough public housing units will work.

I think these numbers lay clear that public housing is unlikely to solve SF's housing woes. Don't hesitate to ask if anything is unclear!

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

#257

Post by wil421 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #6

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

We do not frame our houses with stones in the US. It’s not cardboard it’s OSB[1] (Oriented Strand Board). The US and Canada make most of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriented_strand_board

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

#258

Post by daniellarusso »

jeffbee wrote: post #235
daniellarusso wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, is the existing infrastructure well maintained in your opinion and adequate for existing use?

That the SFPUC's facilities are adequate to water their 2.7 million existing customers seems like a fact which proves itself.

As long as people are getting water, nothing is wrong?

The city is losing 7 million gallons per day in leaks (this also includes firefighting).

Are there alot of fires daily?

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

#259

Post by technofiend »

kenneth wrote: post #250
technofiend wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, just a virtual tourist via YouTube. According to (1) average Tokyo apartment size is 20 square meters or a little over 400 square feet vs 700 square feet in San Francisco as found from a quick Google search. Considering some Japanese rent and live in Cyber cafe cubes that are even smaller I'm not sure how fair a comparison really is between the two. Japan in particular seems to have small appliances ge…

Japanese people are also smaller than Americans! Joking aside, the lifestyle is also different. Tokyo and HK where I live are known for tiny apartments, but they're also cities where residents spend far less time at home, offering cheap options for eating out, many places to hang out outside home, reliable transit, and extreme safety from crime at all times of the day. I'm far more comfortable in a tiny HK flat than…

Sadly you are correct about Japanese vs American sizing. But beyond that hanging clothes to dry vs having a dryer, inbuilt grills on stoves, rice cookers, dishwashers being rarer, etc all add up to more efficient use of space.

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

#260

Post by kosievdmerwe »

chillacy wrote: post #217
daniellarusso wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time is money. Why hold out and continuously interview potential tenants, when multiple people are literally asking you to take their money? Cash today is better than cash in a few days.

Yes this: in real estate investing this is called the vacancy rate and it eats into profits, sometimes significantly. Too much vacancy and you can’t cover the mortgage.

Divide a month's rent into 12 and you see it's a 100-200 dollars, which highlights how much you'd have to raise rent for a month's vacancy.
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