Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

sfstandard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 622 posts

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#61

Post by hollywood_court »

mstipetic wrote: post #40
hollywood_court wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not near a big tech center, but I know of exactly 3 businesses in my town that no longer exist because they would not allow their employees to work remotely. Two of them were owned by former clients of mine. They allowed themselves to fail because they wanted to make their employees’ lives more difficult. It was that simple. There was no need for either business to have a brick and mortar location at all. No need…

The businesses literally shut down because of that? They were that stubborn? Or they noticed it too late?

The one I was most familiar with was a business that edited wedding photos and videos. The owner insisted that each employee be on site each day.

There were other factors too such as the fact that he forced them to work on Windows machines when each employee had M1 Macs at home.

He made the fatal mistake of saying “if you don’t like it, go start your own business.”

Well, two of them did. My wife and I gave them the money they needed to do a bit of marketing and hooked them up with our attorneys. Now they work wherever they wish.

The owner made a lot of entertaining social media posts afterwards about how lazy workers are ruining this country. The guy was a walking stereotype

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#62

Post by nemo44x »

121789 wrote: post #10
bragr wrote: post #2

Give the corresponding housing crisis in the Bay Area, one wonders if the solution is to "simply" start converting office space to living space until the corresponding demand for office space recovers from a combination of increased demand and decreased supply. Now I'm sure there are all kinds of challenges to doing that, engineering, zoning, other practicalities, but it seems overall reasonable to me, though perhaps…

From my understanding, it’s just like a legacy code base. It is just easier/cheaper to start from scratch than converting the entire thing a piece at a time.

That's mainly how renovations go. Just easier to have the demo team demo and then have the trades come in and do their thing. Working around existing infrastructure and integrating with it is unpredictable and messy. Not to mention, once you touch something you have to bring it up to code so best to leave it alone or replace it entirely.

I did a renovation once where the idea was to preserve a few of the old wood windows that would be lost due to the nature of the renovation. The original idea was to reuse them and move them into the new renovated space and install them. Turned out it was going to cost more to carefully remove them, fit them, etc than just buying the highest end Marvin windows. So new windows were purchased and the old ones are used for parts now.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#63

Post by brandur »

sidvit wrote: post #34

How's this compare in other cities? Just annecdotally speaking, I feel like I know a lot more people who used to live and work in San Francisco who don't anymore post pandemic, as opposed to friends of mine who left and came back to Austin/New York/Seattle

Linked from the article, the Urban Displacement Project's recovery ranking dashboards [1] place San Francisco dead last amongst 60 major North American cities.

[1] https://www.downtownrecovery.com/dashboards/recovery_ranking...

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#64

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jdkee wrote: post #41
jeffbee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. On an area-weighted basis most of SF is wasted on detached single-family homes. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7470676,-122.4914956,314m/da...

Americans overwhelmingly prefer single-family detached homes when given other options. How is choosing a higher-quality of life option “wasted”?

> Americans overwhelmingly prefer single-family detached homes when given other options. How is choosing a higher-quality of life option “wasted”?

It's not. But it's wasteful in an urban core, where that lack of density forgoes real economic opportunity. It also creates an easily-identified cause for the lack of housing supply.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#65

Post by cjrp »

bragr wrote: post #2

Give the corresponding housing crisis in the Bay Area, one wonders if the solution is to "simply" start converting office space to living space until the corresponding demand for office space recovers from a combination of increased demand and decreased supply. Now I'm sure there are all kinds of challenges to doing that, engineering, zoning, other practicalities, but it seems overall reasonable to me, though perhaps…

They started promoting this in the UK in ~2013 when the planning laws were relaxed[0]. The early conversions were pretty poor I think; badly-sized and without enough natural light.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/planning-measures-will-ma...

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#66

Post by x0x0 »

CTmystery wrote: post #27
baggy_trough wrote: post #22

You would have to be stark raving mad to open a business in San Francisco. Not only is the downtown filthy and unsafe, but the government, when it can stir itself from its torpid incompetence, is absolutely malevolent towards businesses.

> but the government ... is absolutely malevolent towards businesses. How so?

It kind of depends.

Opening a restaurant is an absolutely hostile experience -- there are numerous articles discussing people's experiences.

Opening a tech company in SF is very smooth sailing in the small (interaction with the government, registering, paying taxes, etc). Source: did it.

Where SF fucks tech companies extraordinarily hard is housing costs (insane), commute times / options (even more insane, shockingly incompetent), and the horrible provision of education, a major concern for parents.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#67

Post by ceeplusplus »

CTmystery wrote: post #27
baggy_trough wrote: post #22

You would have to be stark raving mad to open a business in San Francisco. Not only is the downtown filthy and unsafe, but the government, when it can stir itself from its torpid incompetence, is absolutely malevolent towards businesses.

> but the government ... is absolutely malevolent towards businesses. How so?

Gross receipts tax of 0.69% plus 1.5% payroll tax [1]. $20,000 trash cans [2] and arcane permitting processes for brick and mortar businesses. The city's leadership has their head so far up their ass about going after rich techies that they proposed a tax which was intended to target Amazon, but was so poorly written that they asked to retract it off the ballot because Amazon wasn't subject to the tax but small businesses were [3].

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

[2] https://sfstandard.com/politics/heres-what-a-san-francisco-2...

[3] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-activists-wanted-...

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#68

Post by treeman79 »

downrightmike wrote: post #4
bragr wrote: post #2

Give the corresponding housing crisis in the Bay Area, one wonders if the solution is to "simply" start converting office space to living space until the corresponding demand for office space recovers from a combination of increased demand and decreased supply. Now I'm sure there are all kinds of challenges to doing that, engineering, zoning, other practicalities, but it seems overall reasonable to me, though perhaps…

The only way SF will be fixed is if there is massive earthquake to take care of all the nimby concerns. Can't be concerned and stop construction if you don't have a back yard anymore.

Not again… last time was such a mess.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#70

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #52
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The underlying issue is government preventing development of both houses and office space. We live in a democracy. The underlying problem of government is voters. Most home owners ( especially in The Bay) refuse to allow anyone to build anything because they see that as a threat to their home value.

> We live in a democracy. The underlying problem of government is voters. Pretty sure dictatorships have the same problem with improper zoning.

> Pretty sure dictatorships have the same problem with improper zoning

I can't find it now, but there was a study measuring the straightness of the road between capitals and their airports. The straighter the road, the more authoritarian the regime that built it.

Post reply on HN