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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

#371

Post by sofixa »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #244
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but you can buy an apartment 25 miles / 30 min from the city center with a minimum wage salary (I know, I have friends who did it). Try doing that in the Bay.

Do you have any more details on that? I'd like to know more. Either apartments outside of Paris are dirt cheap or minimum wage in France is really high. A dev from Paris I met in Germany said he left due to how unaffordable housing was so something doesn't add up.

Housing is expensive in the city and some nearby suburbs ( mostly to the west and southwest), but less so the further away you are. Thanks to the RER train system even far away suburbs, with cheap or cheapish housing aren't that far away - e.g. i have colleagues with houses ( with big yards and two stories) in the 200k euros range south of Paris, in fancy-ish suburbs, and are 40-50 minutes from the office ( i live in a suburb right next to the city and i travel entirely by subway, and it takes me 50 minutes, because the subway is much slower).

Depending on what you want though, it can indeed be very expensive - e.g. if you want an apartment in the city to profit from the night life ( after 1am the transport to the suburbs is only with buses and much slower), it is going to be very expensive to buy.

And that's just for "regular" people. Each city in France is required to have a minimum percentage of social housing, to which you can have access ( including to buy) if you're below a certain threshold of income ( so on minimum wage, you're there).

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

#372

Post by wjossey »

finikytou wrote: post #365
0xffff2 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the lease had other terms written in, California generally allows landlords to continue to charge rent until the unit is rented again (or the end of the lease term).

so considering the covid and the fact that it will be hard to get rented ... OP made a mistake?

Not necessarily. I’ve lived in three rentals in LA over the past five years and each one had a clause that allowed me to break my lease in exchange for two months rent. Not saying the OP had that clause, but I’ve never had to ask for it and it’s been baked into the lease.

I know my current landlord is going to be excited about me leaving in a month, as rent had gone up about $1,300 a month in this area over the last two years, but my increase are capped.

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

#373

Post by SllX »

nostrademons wrote: post #364
SllX wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of LVTs is precisely to alter participants' behavior in the market. Maybe this is the point to its proponents. However: > Its value as a revenue source is secondary, and many proponents (of the geolibertarian sort) actually support lower tax receipts and smaller government. Statements like this muddy tax discussions. The primary reason for any tax at all, regardless of type or preference is to raise reven…

That depends whether you're a politician or an economist. ;-) Through a politician's lens the goal of a tax is to raise revenue for government and tax policy exists to do that efficiently. Through an economist's lens efficient trade and alignment of incentives are fundamental and governments exist only incidentally to ensure those. There are various schools of economics that suggest limiting government's role only to…

You missed out an important perspective that is neither purely politician nor purely economist: taxpayer.

Taxes are paid on money earned, whether through labors, investments or rents. They are a taking, a legal one, of something that rightfully belongs to someone else, so if you are going to take it, then it had better go back to government services.

Economists have found ways to reinterpret taxes and exploit their second Order effects, but this does not change what a tax is or how it should properly be used, nor excuse the misuse of surplus revenues.

Now the reason I bring this up is because if a tax were enacted for the express purpose of shaping public behavior and the resulting revenue was greater than what the government needed, what ought to be done with the surplus revenue? Should the tax be lowered to match expected expenses? What if lowering it to that level negates the benefit of shaping public behavior? These are the conflicts I would expect to see come up.

This is one of the reasons why the discussions around taxes tend to fall along the lines of what is taxed, how much, and where the burden should proportionally fall. Leading with second order effects muddies the waters and hinders productive discussion.

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

#374

Post by throwaway201103 »

iaw wrote: post #41
Swizec wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

There's a growing concept of 'mid-rise' woodframe construction as well due to how the codes are written.

Yep, first (ground) floor is concrete with a slab "roof" and then a four-story stick-framed building constructed above that. Ground floor is either retail or parking. I guess they pass fire code but they look like tinderboxes to me.

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

#375

Post by epistasis »

cwilkes wrote: post #80
pydry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a side effect of de-taxing land. The more land becomes an asset and the less it becomes a liability (e.g. by capping property taxes) , the greater incentive there is to hoard it and jealously guard its value with NIMBYism which leads to even less development, greater shortages and even higher prices on an upward spiral. Saying "it's about supply and demand" is not technically wrong but it glosses over the toxic…

But they are using land productively as they are making $3100 a month off of a small studio. Also I doubt if raising taxes will result in anything more than them passing that cost on to the renters.

The $3100 is the result of rent-seeking, not of productive economic activity. SF landlords are leaches on the economic engine and wealth of the city, one of the rare things that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx would agree on.

> Also I doubt if raising taxes will result in anything more than them passing that cost on to the renters.

Only new buildings in SF pay substantial taxes, and only new buildings have rents that are close to their carrying costs. The landlords that are getting huge property tax subsidies due to Prop 13 are enjoying market rents that are far far above their carrying costs. This is why SF landlords are economic leaches, their profits come from a supply shortage not from productive activity.

If they coludn't afford to pay the tax, would rents have dropped? No, they would sell if they couldn't cover their costs with rent.

According to pretty much any economic model, the LVT can't be passed on to tenants. Having a hard time finding a concise, and to the point explanation of that, but maybe check out the answer here:

https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/24352/why-cant...

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

#376

Post by pjpweaver »

ashtonkem wrote: post #34
the-dude wrote: post #10

I have somewhat inside info about a drop in rent for commercial real estate in a high end shopping street in NL ( The Netherlands ). This is unheard of, real estate owners rather keep a shop vacant than drop the rent. I think we have seen nothing yet in commercial real estate, obviously not limited to SF or NL.

Commercial real estate rents work differently, at least in America, because of how they’re financed. Unlike residential housing, commercial buildings are continuously refinanced. When the owner of a commercial building gets a new mortgage on their building, the potential for rent is weighed more by the banks than the current rent. The way the math works out, it’s much better for a commercial land lord to leave a unit…

Do you know of anywhere I can read more about this? I've been trying to understand this phenomenon in NYC for a while.

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

#377

Post by fortran77 »

zapita wrote: post #312
klipt wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think SF has already taken the hint that they can outsource their residents to Oakland. Residents strain the city budget via things like public schools. Businesses put money into the city budget via gross receipts taxes. SF wants the businesses but is very happy for residents to live elsewhere.

This is true, and will remain true until prop 13 is repealed. The same dynamic is at play between San Jose and Mountain View/Cupertino/Palo Alto.

What does Prop 13 have to do with the fact that they're not building enough housing?

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

#378

Post by inglor_cz »

randomdata wrote: post #270
sofixa wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I'd be interested in seeing your math on the subject, and it probably depends on location and at what rate do you "bill" your time, but restaurants have a lot of overhead ( property, staff, taxes) that offsets economies of scale. Even without going all-in with cheap fo…

It seems the average Big Mac meal is $6 these days. It provides approximately 1,000 calories, and the average person needs approximately 2,000 per day, so we'll assume you'll need to order two. That puts the food costs at $12 per person. The average cost to install a kitchen is around $60,000. If we assume a rate of return of 5%, that is $3,000 per year right there that the money needs to provide to justify it being…

"The average cost to install a kitchen is around $60,000."

An ordinary home kitchen? That is ... quite a lot.

I am in a different part of the world, but I still managed to equip a home kitchen with reasonable-quality appliances (no scraping the barrel, mostly Bosch and Whirlpool) for some 4000 dollars in 2019.

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

#379

Post by djsumdog »

packetlost wrote: post #59
djsumdog wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved into a new downtown apartment in a major midwestern city back in April thinking this would be over by May. Now I'm stuck in a dystopian downtown. My lease is up in April though. I'm looking forward to putting everything in a POD and heading back to where I grew up in small town America. Hopefully it will help all cities go back to reasonable prices, for people who still want to live there.

Madison? State St. (the only real 4 blocks of downtown Madison has) still has a ton of boards up from the BLM protests, and last I heard the count for closed stores this year was almost 40.

Worse: Chicago.

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

#380

Post by kevindeasis »

jonpurdy wrote: post #337
ozzyoli wrote: post #54

Don't ask, Don't get. Everyone I know who has asked for a discount has got the discount. After several months of the pandemic, and noticing the adjacent apartment being relisted by my landlord at a discount I emailed my landlord and asked if I could have my rent adjusted by the same discount. They said yes, if I committed to another years lease. Saving 5% of rent, at the cost of a one year commitment didn't seem like…

Another data point. Tried to get a discount in our Inner Sunset 1BR that we paid $3250 for. Other units in the same building listed for the past few months for $2700 with 2 months free (effectively $2250). Denied a decrease (citing CA Fair Housing and not giving anyone a decrease) so we paid 1 months rent to break the lease. Now living in a 2BR by the beach for the same price as before with 50% more space, W/D, garag…

Wow!

Some places would charge you a month's rent for each month that they couldn't fill the apartment when you break lease!

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