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Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

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Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#151

Post by delluminatus »

sp332 wrote: post #88
delluminatus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, it would probably bother me less if it were possible to find a job in a reasonable amount of time. Everyone I know who lost a job recently couldn't find work for months. Any reliable trade I can think of takes years to learn if you're apprenticed full-time, so how could I pick that up on the side? It doesn't help that, even though I went to a pretty nice college, the "career center" encourages resume-spamming a…

Well, you could just get a degree in CS :)

In all seriousness, I don't really have any advice about it, except to say, skills pay the bills. Marketing yourself is great but IMO you are better off taking the time gathering expertise in your field. There's a book on this topic called "So Good they Can't Ignore You" that I highly recommend.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#152

Post by tedunangst »

astrocat wrote: post #149
HarryHirsch wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it seems that this fear has become limiting A network of friends and family for such things as childcare and temporary accomodation is worth dollars. If you can leave your son/daughter with their grandmother while at work or can find a couch at a friend's house while between jobs you can put up with lower local wages. To move elsewhere, the new job would have to pay enough for childcare and to allow to build a cushio…

All this is true, and very understandable. But the question remains, why is it NOW more common to stay put rather than relocate? What is it about the modern environment that makes people so much more reluctant to pick up and move? With all the benefits of modern communication and technology that makes maintaining social connections over distances and receiving financial support from anywhere so easy, you'd think it'd…

Families used to live together, so when you moved to a new city, grandma came with you. What's new is splitting a household into many households, such that "leaving" is actually possible.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#153

Post by ktothemc »

muzz wrote: post #132
ktothemc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have to be a statewide ballot proposition, and you'd be up against the entire real estate industry, which has large parts of the California State Legislature in its hands. They would spend enormous amounts of money to mis-market it in poor political advertising. Perversely, two-thirds of the financial benefits of Prop. 13 and its tax freeze went to commercial interests even though it was sold as a way to kee…

> These are people who may not intend to actually live in the Bay Area, yet they buy up homes without even seeing them. A higher property tax with a "homestead exemption", i.e. for those who live in the property they own, would serve to counter-act absentee owners. As you sort of allude to, the tax structure and Prop 13 incentive is to buy and hold, regardless of occupancy.

Right, but how do you prove that?

That is the dilemma all these prospective piece of legislation in Vancouver, NYC are running up against? What would you do? How would you enforce it?

Water bills? Electricity? Which you could fake.

Phone presence?

A rebate program, which no one would vote for anyway.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#154

Post by sp332 »

delluminatus wrote: post #151
sp332 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it would probably bother me less if it were possible to find a job in a reasonable amount of time. Everyone I know who lost a job recently couldn't find work for months. Any reliable trade I can think of takes years to learn if you're apprenticed full-time, so how could I pick that up on the side? It doesn't help that, even though I went to a pretty nice college, the "career center" encourages resume-spamming a…

Well, you could just get a degree in CS :) In all seriousness, I don't really have any advice about it, except to say, skills pay the bills. Marketing yourself is great but IMO you are better off taking the time gathering expertise in your field. There's a book on this topic called "So Good they Can't Ignore You" that I highly recommend.

I have a degree in CS. I also had 3 years experience as a professional programmer when I was laid off. Let me be clear: resume spamming does not work. I was on unemployment which requires documentation, so I know that for 9 months, I applied to a minimum of one job per week. In that time I got only 3 calls back and one interview. Fortunately I interview very well :)

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#155

Post by ktothemc »

muzz wrote: post #136
ktothemc wrote: post #85

I was the person who wrote that super-long take on the San Francisco housing crisis in spring on TechCrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ I'll just say this. It's four issues compounded. 1) Growth controls enacted in the 1960s and 1970s: Beginning in the late 1960s, the California Supreme Court started making a series of anti-development rulings: for example, one decision ruled that cities didn't…

Curious what you think of this chart of home prices showing Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco moving almost in lock step: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BolI6BiIMAAgpWT.png To me it seems like this seem would to imply statewide factors exert more influence than local ones (tech jobs, city zoning, etc).

That's not the right chart. The rest of the country probably looks somewhat similar.

If you were to take historical data, California home prices were 27 percent higher than the U.S. median in 1960, then 35 percent higher in 1970. But by 1980, they were 79 percent higher, and then by 1990, they were 147 percent higher. (Fischel, 1995) http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674753884

In the early 1960s, California accounted for one-fifth of the housing permits issued in the entire United States. But this pro-development orientation shifted once the available flatlands in the Los Angeles Basin and the rest of the Bay Area got built out to the hills. It transformed the politics of all the suburbs toward growth control, as residents started fearing that multi-unit dwellings would start encroaching on their single-family homes and bringing poorer people (read: minorities).

Today, California is this: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/us/a-california-dream-not-...

It's more extreme in SF because we have water on all three sides, and are largely built out. There are only maybe 37,000 market-rate housing units too. The city has created 70,000 new jobs since Jan. 2010 and added roughly 10K residents per year since then. So, yeah, that's why we have the most expensive median market-rate rents in the nation.

Btw, the comparison to NYC isn't really accurate because you're comparing SF against all of NYC. Manhattan alone is probably more of an apples-to-apples comparison.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#156

Post by ktothemc »

tptacek wrote: post #114
ktothemc wrote: post #85

I was the person who wrote that super-long take on the San Francisco housing crisis in spring on TechCrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ I'll just say this. It's four issues compounded. 1) Growth controls enacted in the 1960s and 1970s: Beginning in the late 1960s, the California Supreme Court started making a series of anti-development rulings: for example, one decision ruled that cities didn't…

Here's a question for you: REITs dehumanize and perhaps volatilize real estate markets. Do their benefits outweigh their costs? And if so, what are those benefits? Is it legitimate public policy in a system that ostensible has free markets as a principle to suppress or otherwise regulate REITs?

One founder told me that a decent personal investment strategy of his was to be a forever-renter and invest in REITs instead. That way you get the financial upside of homeownership but more diversification instead of having all your equity locked up in a single asset. It sort fits the changing profile of this generation, which is more mobile and doesn't want to own cars or huge assets.

On the other side, while I personally don't know enough about the behavior of REITs across the entire country, I can tell you that Sam Zell's Equity Residential is causing huge problems for the Latino and black community of East Palo Alto, which is adjacent to the Facebook campus. They're getting hundreds of eviction notices per month, which the community lawyers have to fight off.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#157

Post by x0x0 »

Kalium wrote: post #148
x0x0 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, you're now moving the goalposts -- I demonstrated your claim that google is involved is patent bullshit. Your claim about blowback is similar. And yes, companies -- and the larger they are, the more so -- should be involved in the communities in which they and their employees are located. This is true for many, perhaps most, firms that aren't tech firms. And they often are! Go to eg council meetings…

I'd say the tech community is obliged to return that care which is shown for them. At a time when "Die techie scum" is a rallying cry, be thankful apathy is all you get.

quod erat demonstrandum

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#158

Post by aphelion »

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…

You say this as if the 20-something libertarian software engineer isn't just as pissed off when he gets screwed over on equity or stock options as is the 50-something manufacturing worker whose job has just been outsourced.

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#159

Post by gojomo »

ktothemc wrote: post #153
muzz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are people who may not intend to actually live in the Bay Area, yet they buy up homes without even seeing them. A higher property tax with a "homestead exemption", i.e. for those who live in the property they own, would serve to counter-act absentee owners. As you sort of allude to, the tax structure and Prop 13 incentive is to buy and hold, regardless of occupancy.

Right, but how do you prove that? That is the dilemma all these prospective piece of legislation in Vancouver, NYC are running up against? What would you do? How would you enforce it? Water bills? Electricity? Which you could fake. Phone presence? A rebate program, which no one would vote for anyway.

Occasional random door-to-door checks? (Miss too many, and you lose your local-resident exemption.)

Re: Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

#160

Post by DannyBee »

warfangle wrote: post #50
DannyBee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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. "

Actually no. This is not really true.

There are plenty of states/places where you can simply evict the tenants at some prorated rate, and then go about your life. You mention it yourself a few paragraphs up.

Additionally, for the specific case of condo conversions, which is the largest claim of ellis act "violations", most states are friendlier than you claim.

Let's take maryland (A state I am barred in, so very familiar with property law for): http://www.peoples-law.org/conversion-condominium-ownership

You get 180 days, an offer to purchase the unit at the same price as the best price the unit gets offered for in the next 180 days, and moving expenses. That's it.

"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."

Source? AFAIK, this is completely incorrect for "most states"

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