They're already written off SF decades ago, has no one ever stayed at the Whitcomb?! SF has some of the worst hotels I've seen anywhere. So much hasn't been updated for decades and it definitely shows.
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Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
81–90 of 163 posts
Re: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
#82Congrats to SF politicians (and people who voted for them) for ruining this city.
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Re: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
#83Wolf Richter rips on this article pretty hard: https://wolfstreet.com/2023/06/12/ive-had-it-with-stupid-stu... > Park Hotels failed to pay off a $725 million interest-only non-recourse mortgage that matured last November. The mortgage was secured by two run-down mega-hotels in San Francisco, the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square and the 1,024-room Parc 55 San Francisco. > Park Hotels only owns the properti…
This is wrong. The new owner can select a new operating company.
Re: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
#84Congrats to SF politicians (and people who voted for them) for ruining this city.
The cell will burst and the contents of the cell will move to other cells.
Re: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hotels may or may not be themselves run down, but there's also the neighborhood to consider, especially when you're talking about San Francisco. I know someone who used to travel to SF for work a lot, like 10-12 times a year. He had a favorite hotel there that was a block and a half away from his office. But every single time, he'd rent a car, just to drive from the underground parking at his hotel to the undergr…
Oh for goodness sake. He felt safer than when he was walking. Renting a car to drive a block and a half is just ridiculous - unless maybe he's displaying obvious signs of wealth? I stayed in the hilton union square in Feb and yes there are a lot of homeless people and addicts around but none of them even looked at me crossways
I don't know SF all that well personally, so I really can't say. I do know that where the person I know stayed was in the Mission District, which was (and still is) widely known to be among the more dangerous parts of San Francisco. I also know he was routinely coming and going at odd hours, 23:00 or later.
I also know that he had a permit to carry a gun, which (at the time) was near impossible to get in California, and that he in fact did so. Nevertheless, he chose to drive the block and a half rather than walk, because the last thing he ever wanted to do was be forced to use his gun.
I personally don't consider that to be an “obvious display of wealth”, but take it for what you will.
Re: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
#86Has San Francisco become that bad? My father lives in the city, but I've never heard him complain about the state of things.
I was there in May. It’s actually probably better than the last time I was there, which was admittedly almost 20 years ago. But now, yeah, just normal stuff that anyone who lives in even a smaller city is used to.
Re: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
#87Is this the Bay Area population of HN expressing their frustration that there are many homeless people in SF? These posts come up from time to time. I was there some 4 years ago, and I met some homeless folks for sure, but the city was nice.
I can never tell if these things are SF residents expressing frustration, or people outside of SF expressing a sort of wishful spite. I sort of learned my lesson in taking these things at face value with that evolving story of the tech exec who was stabbed. That said, what did strike me as a little odd were a lot of comments on the Vision Pro threads about where if you walk around with it on outside, you'll be instan…
> That said, what did strike me as a little odd were a lot of comments on the Vision Pro threads about where if you walk around with it on outside, you'll be instantly mugged.
I mean, as someone who visits San Francisco for work from time to time... I'm fairly sure that's not actually true? It's never felt particularly unsafe; it's just a normal largish city (albeit with an awful lot of homelessness).
Re: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
#88They're already written off SF decades ago, has no one ever stayed at the Whitcomb?! SF has some of the worst hotels I've seen anywhere. So much hasn't been updated for decades and it definitely shows.
That's arguably actually a sign of a hot hotel market; if any room will rent, then, really, why bother updating anything? (Caveat: in many European cities with very hot hotel markets, you'll see a lot of shiny new hotel rooms, but it's largely because hotels are redesigning themselves to put more rooms in the same space. This seems way less common in the US; I think Americans are way more bothered about how big the rooms are.)
Of course, covid disrupted that to an extent, particularly for cities which were heavily reliant on business travel for their hotel business (I'd be a little surprised if business travel _ever_ returns to pre-covid rates).
I'm in SF occasionally for work, and, yeah, the hotels are notably, almost impressively, dated. Beyond the presence of the obligatory flatscreen TV, most of the rooms probably looked much the same in the 80s.
If the market actually _is_ cooling down severely (based on the article, one could be forgiven for thinking this is more a case of a company abruptly discovering that property values don't automatically go up forever, which is a lesson that property investors tend to learn every couple of decades) then you'd actually expect that to change, as hotels have to compete on the product being offered rather than just taking a "look, here's a room, there are no rooms, obviously you will rent it" approach.
Re: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
#89Is this the Bay Area population of HN expressing their frustration that there are many homeless people in SF? These posts come up from time to time. I was there some 4 years ago, and I met some homeless folks for sure, but the city was nice.
I lived there for around 8 years, and specifically near City hall for around 6 of those. My neighborhood near City Hall became increasingly unsafe over time, and after witnessing a couple of incidents such as an unarmed robbery which resulted in a physical altercation with an employee at my local Walgreens, an accidental fire started in the encampment outside of my building which partially set fire to the building and broke my neighbor's window, and the realization that the leaders of the city were not in any hurry to make any improvements here, I decided I no longer felt safe or comfortable in this area and moved.
In my opinion it's not so much homelessness that is the issue, but rampant heavy drug use (methamphetamine and fentanyl). I think the term homeless is a misnomer. It's the debilitating drug use and the consequences of what that does to people's behavior that causes downstream issues to public safety. Working class people who are trying to do everything right (like the Walgreens worker) are the ones most impacted, and that to me is the most frustrating part.
Re: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
A cruel experiment that will neither relieve suffering nor address its cause. America is insane.
Cruel yes. Better in the long run? Maybe. People need support. This support requires funding. This funding comes from taxes, which requires business operations and such. Business operations are impacted by perceptions of safety and cleanliness, which also requires funding and scales with the number of people who need support.
I'm no expert on US politics/taxes, but isn't the bay area already home to some of the richest companies on the planet? Mostly companies whose income comes from all over the globe, and hence is almost entirely independent of the state of San Francisco's streets?
And people on HN make it sound like the Bay Area is full of workers making several hundred of thousand of dollars a year, buying houses worth several million dollars, so income tax and property tax revenue should be off the charts too.
Isn't the bay area be absolutely swimming in tax revenue already?