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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

#481

Post by kelnos »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #456
Kalium wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think you're wrong. There's easy parts (ie. publicly traded equities) and hard parts (eg. art collections). I've been skeptical of skepticism (lol) of the wealth tax mostly because the easy parts dominate the hard parts. Most wealth is in the easily identifiable areas (ie. equities and property) not the hard areas. Even with private companies like some startup, surely the shares have some known valuation righ…

My -- perhaps overly cynical -- expectation is that a "focus on the easy stuff" wealth tax would just cause wealthy people to move their assets into the "hard stuff" as much as possible.

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

#482

Post by kelnos »

fortran77 wrote: post #405
zapita wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if it weren't for Prop 13, my home and my business would have been forced out by people moving in and paying too much money for homes next door to me. Prop 13 does not solve this problem. It merely shields historical homeowners from it, while amplifying it for everyone else. Many people and businesses were forced out by speculation because of prop 13, but you and a small group of people were exempted so you don…

How dare you say "I don't care." Who are you to speculate about what I think about?

I think the point being made is that if you support Prop 13, you either a) are wildly misinformed about its effects, or b) don't care about its effects because you are in the privileged group that benefits from it at the expense of others.

(Whether or not the assumptions behind this assumption are true is of course up for debate, though I personally tend to believe Prop 13 is a bad deal, even for those who think they benefit from it.)

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

#483

Post by notsureaboutpg »

nelsonenzo wrote: post #186
diveanon wrote: post #167

Does this mean that cost of living will stop being the everyday boilerplate conversation I have with every bay area resident I have ever met?

Doubt it. I moved to SF in 2001 and that conversation had already existed for 20 years and continued forward for 20 years. The second prices become reasonable again, tons of folks will happily move to SF because of the weather, parks, pleasant social norms, etc. And once those folks move in, the price goes up again. It's a never ending cycle.

Pleasant social norms... in SF?

I must have lived in the wrong SF for 5 years...

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

#484

Post by kelnos »

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…

> Everyone I know who has asked for a discount has got the discount.

Just one data point, but a couple I know who lived in a 1BR in a largeish apartment building was denied a rent adjustment, despite other identical, vacant units in the building being put on the market at a somewhat lower rate. They ended up moving into a 2BR in a nearby duplex at the same rent (plus a couple free months), but nearly twice as much space.

A month after they moved, my friend told me that their old building had something like a 35% vacancy rate due to similar departures. My theory is that they're banking on the rental market going back up by mid-2021, and, being a rent-controlled building, don't want to allow people to lock in much lower rates.

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

#485

Post by s5300 »

finikytou wrote: post #369
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it is simple. rich suburbs are sometimes even pricier than paris. suburbs with massive ethnic populations (1st/2nd generation or immigrants) are dirt cheap but for some of them that means getting food at the hallal butcher,eating kebab, going to a hairdresser where the windows are closed so that you can't see women inside, high crime, dirty cities ran by leftist at best, communist at worst that deny high income to mo…

Well, you've got quite a skewed since of reality, because it's well documented within the majority of high income votes left haha.

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

#486

Post by kelnos »

kevindeasis wrote: post #380
jonpurdy wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's possible the parent only had one month left on their lease.

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

#487

Post by sagarm »

fortran77 wrote: post #388
pound wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not enough housing to meet demand means raising property values, which is beneficial for property owners without having to pay more taxes

I don't think every California home owner is some evil beast trying to keep others out. I support building more homes, and would love it if every single family detached home were automatically rezoned for two units on the parcel. But if it weren't for Prop 13, my home and my business would have been forced out by people moving in and paying too much money for homes next door to me. And "raising property values" only…

By "forced out" you mean you could

1) sell, reaping a huge windfall. 2) use a HELOC or reverse mortgage to pay for the higher property taxes.

But of course you'd prefer both to keep the windfall and not move, a privilege afforded to you by prop 13. That is only natural.

Meanwhile, homelessness in the state continues to rise as high land values make housing production and anti-growth activists on planning committees exacerbate our housing shortage.

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

#488

Post by sagarm »

jrnichols wrote: post #479
bwest87 wrote: post #87

Oakland relaxed a lot of zoning, and permitting regulations about 5 years ago, and so now you're starting to really see production sky rocket. This article [0] mentions 2019 was had 15x more units completed than 2018. And 3x the total units from 2013-2018 combined . Anecdotally, I have several friends who've all moved to Oakland in the last year or so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and maybe, hope…

I thought this was interesting about San Francisco: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Faster-and-cheap... They're building affordable housing, prefabricated.

Prefab won't be a solution for housing shortages in California because of trade union opposition. The fact that there is more than enough work to go around doesn't stop them from opposing efficiency improvements and extracting rents in the form of union labour requirements in housing bills.

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

#489

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #387
jefftk wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not 20 years, but the old Circuit City building in Assembly Square (just outside of Boston) has been vacant for 11.

That does seem strange, it’s hard to imagine the financial and legal structure that would incentive the beneficial owners to let a desirable chunk of real estate sit idle for 11 years.

Because the Fed is continuously lowering interest rates and pushing up asset prices??

Commercial space in a city like Boston rarely rents for anything close to 1% per year. R/E has been appreciating at over 6% per year.

You're going to make almost 10x as much money doing nothing as you would renting the building - even if the rent was 100% profit (it's not). In this case, the landlord would need to do a ton of repairs and probably wouldn't even cash-flow for 2 years.

For 10% more profit? That sounds like unnecessary / excessive risk to me.

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

#490

Post by bastawhiz »

centimeter wrote: post #249
bastawhiz wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to need to present some evidence for this, I think. I don't even know what an "inferior toilet" is. I've pooped in a lot of SF toilets and can assure you that they've all gotten the job done satisfactorily.

This is a brief summary: https://www.aier.org/article/trump-is-right-american-toilets... TL;DR: Toilets clog more with lower GPF. Showers clean less effectively - you only need to go to a country with no "eco" pressure or flow rate limitations to notice this yourself. Washing machines and dishwashers perform poorly with low flow rate and no TSP. Basically any appliance that people complain about and have a bad time w…

> That's because you're used to using garbage and you've never experienced anything better.

I grew up in Pennsylvania for the first 21 years of my life, moved to SF for seven, and have lived in Chicago for 3. I've traveled pretty extensively. I can assure you I know how toilets, showers, sinks, washing machines, and dishwashers work. As someone with a breadth of life experience and full control of my faculties, I cannot say I've experienced any of the issues you describe. Do not make assumptions about my life experience.

If _anything_ the worst issue I've experienced in some parts of SF is low water pressure, which has nothing to do with fixtures or appliances and everything to do with infrastructure.

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