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Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

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Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#41

Post by potatolicious »

Oculus wrote: post #37
potatolicious wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because cost are going up across the board throughout the Bay Area, and the transportation infrastructure - both automotive and otherwise - hasn't kept up. Moving further means increased commuting cost. For drivers this comes in the form of massively increased fuel costs. For transit users this comes in the form of increased fares, since BART practices distance-based pricing. Commuting daily from Fremont to SF costs…

I don't think they mean move to a place more affordable out side of SF, but move away from SF to another part of the country.

Where though? At the end we're really talking about arbitrage. Places with jobs are expensive to live in, places that are cheap to live in don't have jobs.

There's no way to win, except maybe temporarily exploiting an arbitrage opportunity (i.e., a place with jobs but the cost of living hasn't caught up yet). Expecting people to do this is unreliable at an individual level, and disastrous as public policy.

Ultimately the only mid- to long-term solution is to help make job centers cheaper to live in.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#42

Post by cozuya »

sp332 wrote: post #33
beering wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people still remember when you could graduate high school, go to work for GM for a few decades, and have the company pension to depend on in retirement. A suburban house with a white picket fence is somewhere in there too. Nowadays we're much more used to the at-will relationship. The employment only lasts until either the employee or the employer decides that things would be better off if the relationship ende…

What am I supposed to do, live in fear every day of my life that my job might disappear tomorrow?

Should companies be forced to employ people indefinitely?

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#43

Post by bequanna »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #24
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #3

Why don't these people just move to more affordable places?

> Why don't these people just move to more affordable places? It's not a viable solution to just "go somewhere more affordable" when you don't have the money to leave and there are no jobs where housing is more affordable. What you save in housing costs would be eaten up or exceeded by the cost of just getting to a job. If you're rich, moving is always an option. If you're not rich or have no financial cushion, you a…

>It's not a viable solution to just "go somewhere more affordable" when you don't have the money to leave and there are no jobs where housing is more affordable. What you save in housing costs would be eaten up or exceeded by the cost of just getting to a job.

This just doesn't make any sense to me.

So, you're homeless and jobless. You're saying I shouldn't somewhere else because 'it's too expensive to find a job'?

These people have an emotional attachment to SF, I get that and absolutely sympathize. The reality is there are many, many jobs in the Bay Area and plenty of them are close to affordable housing. Additionally, if they want to spend time downtown, most places in the bay are no more than an hour via public transport.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#44

Post by delluminatus »

sp332 wrote: post #33
beering wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people still remember when you could graduate high school, go to work for GM for a few decades, and have the company pension to depend on in retirement. A suburban house with a white picket fence is somewhere in there too. Nowadays we're much more used to the at-will relationship. The employment only lasts until either the employee or the employer decides that things would be better off if the relationship ende…

What am I supposed to do, live in fear every day of my life that my job might disappear tomorrow?

I think it's important to cultivate a skillset that makes you valuable in the market, not just to rely on the security of your current position.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#45

Post by Kalium »

To those people who believe this is the fault of tech - I have a question.

What is the ethical way to move to San Francisco? Or anywhere in the Bay? What do you think is a good solution to this, beyond some variant on tech people owing undefined amounts of money to everyone else?

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#48

Post by [deleted] »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #6
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #3

Why don't these people just move to more affordable places?

Because they have roots and history in SF and the valley. They've got friends, family, and memories there. It's hard to give up your home. It's those tech upstarts that're causing all the trouble; Moving there en-masse, with their strange ways and disrespect for the local culture. Always trying to "disrupt"; they're obviously troublemakers! Really, it's no different from casual racism, but you've got to understand th…

[deleted]

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#49

Post by ankurpatel »

delluminatus wrote: post #2

Loading extremely slowly for me. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opf... After reading the article, this quote really jumped out at me: "I was going along, being a good citizen," Todd, now 52 years old, says. "I was a volunteer firefighter, I coached football and baseball, I was saving my money, doing everything you're supposed to do, being a single father, raising my daughter by…

To add to that in United States even if an employee is laid-off they are given severance package and on top of that they can apply for unemployement benefit and the government happily gives them a pay to survive on for about 6 months. Considering all of this I feel a salary man is in a good position and can find another job in 6 months.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#50

Post by warfangle »

DannyBee wrote: post #7
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #3

Why don't these people just move to more affordable places?

Because people believe that once they've lived somewhere long enough, they have a right to live there forever. There are a lot of issues with this article. It talks about the Ellis act as if it isn't standard in every other part of the country. (in fact, the only thing non-standard is the state of the world pre-ellis act, where landlords in california could never evict people and decide to stop being landlords )

The Ellis Act is kind of fucked up, dude. It's _not_ standard in every other part of the country. It pegs the buyout price of a unit by law, and hasn't been increased in quite a while.

Compare to how it works in Brooklyn:

If your landlord wants to evict you without cause, they must purchase your lease from you at a price which you can negotiate. It's much more difficult (and can be costlier) to evict you _for_ cause here. In a gentrifying area, tenants have been known to negotiate lease buyouts at upwards of six figures - and there have been some lease buyouts in the $MM range.

> never evict people and decide to stop being landlords

This is a pretty huge misconception. It's evicting people _in order to_ stop being landlords. E.g., converting a rental building to condos or single-family housing. It's a cheap way to cash in on skyrocketing real estate: the most you'll ever pay to evict someone is $18,000 a unit.

In most sane places, if a landlord wants to go out of business / quit being a landlord, they must sell the property to another landlord. They can't just say "oops, you guys need to all leave now!" For good reasons.

Even red states like NC have pretty strict restrictions on when you can evict a tenant, and "'Cause I'm shutting down the LLC" is never one of them.

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