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

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

#441

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:12 PM UTC

ishjoh wrote: post #108

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people doubt supply and demand to some degree. How often have you seen someone argue we should secure the supply of food to disaster zones by repealing price gouging laws? Rent control is popular because many people believe, wrongly but wholeheartedly, that landlords are just price gougers and everyone could get cheap adequate housing if they weren’t manipulating it.

What's interesting and something I've witnessed first hand in NYC, that the tenants of rent controlled apartments will setup a black market for their rent controlled apartment in collusion with their landlord. So if they do move they will attempt to sell for the privilege of renting the unit, at the time this could range as high as $50k, the landlord and previous tenant would split this 'fee'. What's incredible is th…

[deleted]

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

#442

Post by Tiktaalik » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #412

random314 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in favor of a wealth tax in general, or only property taxes?

Wealth taxes in general are challenging to execute. Property taxes are much easier, as well as deal with the extra issues brought on by land ownership that cash-equivalent wealth does not.

A property tax is a type of wealth tax.

A wealth tax is no more difficult to execute than our existing property tax system.

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

#443

Post by claydavisss » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #134

claydavisss wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasingly, single family detached homes in the interior of SF are owned by the very wealthy who can remain in the city to shape policy over the long term, while renters come and go. So don't expect anyone at City Hall to swing a wrecking ball in the direction of Pac Heights. The problem has solved itself already - the US is big and empty. There is little reason to stack people twenty stories high in a Zoom economy…

I wouldn't bet against urbanization. There are many advantages to living in a large, busy city and Zoom can only counter some of them.

Then pay the price and stop complaining. Once again, this is a trite response but what else is there to say? Accept the cost or move. Don't wait - the things people are complaining about here have been constants in California since the 90s and aren't going to change no matter how many upvotes you earn...the people who shape these rules realized long ago that real votes outrank upvotes.

HN conceives of itself as a master-race but is really just a disposable worker-class. The real master-race are the owners of capital.

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

#444

Post by Tiktaalik » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

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…

Seems like an easy enough solution, though in an environment of plunging rents developers very quickly seem to put projects on hold and shift gears to other sorts of things. I've witnessed this first hand in my city whenever there's bumps in the road (eg. global financial crisis, recent introduction of various foreign buyer/speculation taxes).

This should intrinsically make sense. Private developers don't have to build and there's other ways for them to invest their money.

Now if the developer was a public entity with a mandate that they had to build now that would be different.

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

#445

Post by onecommentman » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #318

randomdata wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This doesn't pass the sniff test to me, at least for most COL levels. The only way that our household was able to reduce our food budget by eating out was to massively reduce quality in order to meet caloric needs. For roughly the equivalent quality of ingredients it was much cheaper for us to cook at home. And that's before we got a bigger house in a lower COL area with a chest freezer, which allows us to bank high…

“massively reduce quality in order to meet caloric needs”?

Please define “massively” for us. It sounds like you were eating larks tongue in aspic and are now buying year-old potatoes at the Latvian coop. Remember, some in an international audience may have done just that at some point. Is that what happened?

Wonder if a functional kitchen should be thought of as an expense-management device. No matter what the financial situation, in the US without a kitchen you can always find something to eat to keep body and soul together, but with a functional kitchen you can always eat something both tasty and healthy (if you can cook). You can choose to cook if you have the cash; you may need to do that if you don’t. The fact that you always can is a very consoling fact in rough economic times.

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

#446

Post by pkaye » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #336

bfirsh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a data point: I asked for 25% off my 1 bedroom rent (which seemed like roughly market rate). They said something along the lines of "we're not lowering any rents because we're struggling due to the economy". So, I left and they got nothing. I doubt they're going to rent it out again for a while.

This behavior is very common and just baffling to me. In many markets right now, there is just no way they are going to rent that out. The only explanation I have heard is that lenders allow a certain amount of vacancy increases in the terms without triggering a reevaluation of the property value. Whereas lowering the rent will more quickly trigger that new valuation. And the way many commercial loans are setup, they…

There was a great comment on Reddit who is familiar with the commercial real estate industry. These loans are combined and split up among thousands of investors. Its basically the same thing that happened back in the last recession with residential loans.

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

#447

Post by amscanne » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #432

randomdata wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>But at the other end, non-fast food restaurants focus on providing entertainment. Could you expand on this? I have no idea what you mean. Aside from some niche restaurants like Benihana, I can't think of any sit down restaurant at any price point that provides any more entertainment than McDonalds.

Non-fast food restaurants spend a lot on locations (for nice views, people watching, etc.) interior build-out (fancy design, murals, furniture, music systems, etc.), and staff (attractive young hosts, servers, etc.). They also market themselves in particular ways to bring in specific groups of clientele.

None of that has to do with the food in any way. I assume this is what the parent poster means by “entertainment”: all the reasons you would go to a restaurant other than food.

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

#448

Post by Kalium » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #442

Kalium wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth taxes in general are challenging to execute. Property taxes are much easier, as well as deal with the extra issues brought on by land ownership that cash-equivalent wealth does not.

A property tax is a type of wealth tax. A wealth tax is no more difficult to execute than our existing property tax system.

You're absolutely right - a property tax is a type of wealth tax. I completely agree, which is why I attempted to differentiate between a general-purpose tax on all wealth in any form and a tax on real property. Please accept my humble apologies for my failures to be less clear than I could have been - my communication skills are a work in progress.

With that said, I have been under the impression that countries that have attempted to levy general-purposes taxes on all forms of wealth have in many cases run into practical difficulties. This requires things like finding a fair way to value and re-value an art collection or shares in a company not traded or liquid. In several cases - like France - these difficulties and others have led to dropping general-purpose wealth taxes.

Have I been laboring under a misapprehension? Can you help me understand what I've missed?

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

#449

Post by Tiktaalik » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

starclerk wrote: post #131

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unwilling to give up on their single family homes I think that expecting people to "give up their homes" is more than unreasonable. The reasonable compromise being that builders can build in more densely once the current owners sell it.

Absolutely. Upzoning never forces owners to "give up their home"-- maybe the issue is owners don't want their neighbors to be able to sell their homes to developers either.

Not necessarily true. An upzoning will likely increase the value of the land, which will result in higher property taxes (assuming this is a normal city with no prop13 nonsense).

The higher taxes could effectively force a land owner to sell their property.

Often part of what existing land owners are fighting for is preferential zoning which artificially keeps the "highest and best use of land" a low density detached house, which keeps land values relatively low.

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

#450

Post by Tiktaalik » Mon, Dec 28, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

kansface wrote: post #413

chrisseaton wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't they use reinforced concrete since they're in an earthquake and fire zone? This wood seems so temporary.

The numbers don't pan out until for buildings with fewer than 5 floors or so. I don't know the street, but this will almost certainly be a 3 story house, max.

Lots of historic reasons for why Canada and the USA build with wood, but beyond that and going forward, I expect we're going to see even more of a pivot toward wood buildings as both countries try to meet their climate goals. Concrete is a big CO2 emitter while wood is CO2 storage.