The left says we're in a housing bubble, but prices keep going up with no end in sight. They want to believe in a bubble like they want to believe in man-made global warming. Outside of the political sector the meritocracy is alive and well. The best and brightest are still getting ahead if the runaway success of snapchat, whatsapp,instagram facebook is any clue. Ambitious, high IQ people are making millions and billions in a matter of months and years through coding, web 2.0, stock market, real estate ,etc. The meritocracy, America's global influence, and the US economy has never been stronger. The left wants to believe that America's best days are behind it because they resent the success of the 1% that make America the success it is.
The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
21–30 of 75 posts
Re: The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
The companies move to where the good employees want to live so that they can hire and retain good employees. I hope that explains that for you.
The alternative proposed was "distributed, remote employee base", which - if it worked - would let you hire and retain good employees wherever they wanted to live (even if they didn't all want to live near each other). So your explanation alone doesn't address the issue.
There are plenty of reasons not to do the alternative. Are we now going to iterate them and iterate counter-reasons and such and such? It's a waste of time.
Re: The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
#23My wife and I are technically 1%-ers, and we could not oompete enough to buy a house in SF. We gave up and moved to the peninsula. As the article described, one house we bid for had 20 bidders. We bid over $200k above asking, and we were 10th out of 20 bidders. The winning bid was $400k over asking. But am I resentful? No. It's the reality of the situation. For those that are bitching and moaning about not being able…
"The best cure for high housing prices are high housing prices." Provided you have the possibility of actually building more (and/or denser) housing at a sufficient rate.
That's one solution. The other is that housing becomes such a huge liability to local commerce that people will just leave.
Housing prices are like high taxes or burdensome regulation - they add to the cost of doing business, and in the extreme case people will just get out.
The end game if the Bay Area won't allow more housing to be built is that the industry will move out of necessity. This is already happening, though not at scale.
Re: The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
#24My wife and I are technically 1%-ers, and we could not oompete enough to buy a house in SF. We gave up and moved to the peninsula. As the article described, one house we bid for had 20 bidders. We bid over $200k above asking, and we were 10th out of 20 bidders. The winning bid was $400k over asking. But am I resentful? No. It's the reality of the situation. For those that are bitching and moaning about not being able…
"The best cure for high housing prices are high housing prices." Provided you have the possibility of actually building more (and/or denser) housing at a sufficient rate.
From my limited understanding, I take that this is the issue in SF. There is a lot of regulation issues with building denser housing thus the shortage in supply.
Re: The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
#25My wife and I are technically 1%-ers, and we could not oompete enough to buy a house in SF. We gave up and moved to the peninsula. As the article described, one house we bid for had 20 bidders. We bid over $200k above asking, and we were 10th out of 20 bidders. The winning bid was $400k over asking. But am I resentful? No. It's the reality of the situation. For those that are bitching and moaning about not being able…
"The best cure for high housing prices are high housing prices." Provided you have the possibility of actually building more (and/or denser) housing at a sufficient rate.
That is not necessary. If prices get so high that no one wants to or can afford to live in SF, then the prices will naturally decline.
I'm old enough to be a crusty dot-com boom veteran. Rent prices were about as crazy as they were today, except it was more in the South Bay than SF, so no one appeared to care as much. My 2 br apartment in the South Bay went from $1700/month to $2300/month after the lease was up. We had to move out and into a shitty rental in Sunnyvale for 2 years, when the rent prices started to drop because of the dotcom bust.
So, the supply-demand equation is very real, and at some point, prices will abate. Nothing goes up forever.
Re: The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
#26My wife and I are technically 1%-ers, and we could not oompete enough to buy a house in SF. We gave up and moved to the peninsula. As the article described, one house we bid for had 20 bidders. We bid over $200k above asking, and we were 10th out of 20 bidders. The winning bid was $400k over asking. But am I resentful? No. It's the reality of the situation. For those that are bitching and moaning about not being able…
Yes but hysteresis effects likely come into play where actual price points can't keep up with ideal market price points when the ideals change quickly. E.g., residents would balk at a $30 Chipotle burrito (I'm guessing here) even if that's the price it would need to be for a Chipotle owner to break even. By the time residents update to the "new normal", the damage is already done.
Re: The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
#27I'm hoping some people start to wake up and realize they don't have to be in SF or Silicon Valley to be successful entrepreneurs or technologists. Between the harsh northeastern winter, and whats happening in San Francisco, we're making a big push to attract folks with low cost of living and high quality of life in Myrtle Beach, SC through http://WhyNotTheBeach.com . With so many companies becoming more and more open…
"I'm hoping some people start to wake up and realize they don't have to be in SF or Silicon Valley to be successful entrepreneurs or technologists."
Yeah I agree.
But being in the Bay Area helps a lot.
If I move to Myrtle Beach, would I be surrounded by people like me who are into startups or will I be one of the few?
It is not even the local resources or quality of life. San Francisco is a poorly-run city. Startups and entrepreneurship, however, thrives in spite of it.
For better or worse, the mindset of the people living in the Bay Area sets it apart. That is something that is hard to recreate.
Re: The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
#28My wife and I are technically 1%-ers, and we could not oompete enough to buy a house in SF. We gave up and moved to the peninsula. As the article described, one house we bid for had 20 bidders. We bid over $200k above asking, and we were 10th out of 20 bidders. The winning bid was $400k over asking. But am I resentful? No. It's the reality of the situation. For those that are bitching and moaning about not being able…
Yes but hysteresis effects likely come into play where actual price points can't keep up with ideal market price points when the ideals change quickly. E.g., residents would balk at a $30 Chipotle burrito (I'm guessing here) even if that's the price it would need to be for a Chipotle owner to break even. By the time residents update to the "new normal", the damage is already done.
My home keeps going up in the bay area. same for my stocks. XLV GOOG FB TWTR. I've made so much $ in terms of my investments since 2009 it's obscene. And i never worked a day in my life at a regular 'job'. This is the smartist era. the new economy. ppl get rich without trying. losers fall beteen the cracks and get evicted. better lean in says Sheryl sandburg.
Re: The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
#29I guess it's time to give up that tech job and become a real estate agent.
Re: The Housing Market With Nowhere to Go but Up
#30I could write yet another boring comment about how hypocritical and stupid longtime SF residents are because they complain about rising housing costs or being priced out while simultaneously voting to prevent more housing from being built, but I'd rather ask a serious question: Why do all these Bay-area startups and tech juggernaughts insist that all of their employees squeeze into housing on the peninsula? Of course…
> but why is it so impossible to conceive of having a distributed, remote employee base? There are many successful tech companies (and YC startups) that have done this.
And there are some that are even trying to solve that problem by making it easier to remote, like ours (Floobits), and our YC competitors: Screen Hero, Hackpad, Sqwiggle. So there are a lot of options for making remoting easier. I know Zapier has a remote team and those guys are doing fantastic. At Floobits we're entirely remote. And really working from home is the best work experience I've ever had, I don't ever want to have to commute back to SF (I live in the east bay). I've been taking and picking up my daughter from school , I've taken her to the library once a week ever since and I've gone to all her ballet lessons with her. Something I couldn't do when I worked in SF.
I hate that every day working people are priced out of their city, and a socially conscious company could consider remoting as a solution. Good for the community, good for their employees and good for the company.