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Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

sfchronicle.com

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Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#101

Post by blagie »

refurb wrote: post #63
julianeon wrote: post #24

I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back. Yo…

My prediction is remote work won’t last. Maybe for specific workers and tech must be the last, but other office jobs? They’ll be a slow but growing expectation to be in the office and the folks that show up will be the ones getting the desirable projects, the promotions and raises. It might take a few years until we get there, but we will.

My prediction would have been different 2 years ago. Pre-COVID, I worked on a few 100% remote teams, and it worked great.

COVID didn't do what I expected. Instead of online learning moving into the mainstream, we got emergency crappy online learning, and the world burned out on online learning. Everyone now believes it can't be done.

All the businesses I worked with switched to WFH, equally poorly. In my current job, working from home, I feel isolated and asocial. I hate it. That's true of many coworkers as well. It's not the fault of remote work, but it's the fault of the very poor implementation of remote work at my employer.

I don't think my employer is unique here.

I now share your prediction.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#102

Post by clpm4j »

DantesKite wrote: post #44
julianeon wrote: post #24

I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back. Yo…

> Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. Keith Rabois said one of the the major reasons he moved was because of crime.

Keith Rabois and David Sacks and all of the other billionaire VCs who love to whine and complain about SF on twitter are nowhere near the crime (which is totally blown out of proportion). These guys own $20-30MM homes in Pacific Heights which is one of the poshest neighborhoods in the world. They're complaining because they're used to being able to pay for perfection - perfect dinners, perfect vacations, assistants and workers who do exactly as they're told, and SF is frustrating because if you live here you can almost see how it could nearly be the perfect city, but no amount of money can make it perfect - there is no such thing in reality as perfection and these VCs are pissed that they can't throw money at it and make it so.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#103

Post by beebmam »

88913527 wrote: post #97
rootusrootus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cause of death: remote work It seems premature to say this with confidence, though. Last time I saw the stats, remote work overall is down to 10% and still dropping pretty fast. Yes, prevalence is higher in the tech world, but still, we should wait until it stabilizes (especially with an incoming recession) before proclaiming that two years of remote work has changed the world.

It might be premature, but it seems like the cat is out the bag, especially if it means lower operating costs for businesses. Everything in the near future points to cash-flow positive businesses being the Wall Street darlings. Being unprofitable is no longer in vogue, which is a pretty seismic shift for the bay. If you don't need the office space, you're going to get undercut by your competitor who goes without. Bes…

I think the comments on Hacker News tend to suffer from Selection Bias of the most Online engineers. I wouldn't trust the highest voted comments as an accurate depiction of reality. In the same regard, I wouldn't trust any comment as an accurate depiction of reality.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#104

Post by littlexsparkee »

acchow wrote: post #89
kqr2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S.F. has nearly 16 million square feet of vacant office space. Why can't it become housing? https://archive.ph/znGkU

16M square feet is last year’s estimate. Wonder what the figure is today

18.7 as of April https://socketsite.com/archives/2022/04/visualizing-all-the-...

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#105

Post by 0xFACEFEED »

jonas21 wrote: post #95
0xFACEFEED wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea doesn't sound that bizarre to me. I'm not an expert or anything but as people grow older their earning potential slows down too. What if the neighborhood grows in value even though the retired homeowner hasn't made any changes to their home? It sounds reasonable to me that a retiree with a conservative investment portfolio that is barely over/under inflation should be able to live out their remaining life in…

Yes, that's the point of postponing the taxes. The retiree can live out their remaining life in the home, and the taxes are due when their heirs inherit it.

Yea I guess that makes sense. Although inheritance is a change of ownership and the new owner would see the home re-assessed, no?

The other issue I see is that the deferment program is limited to very low income seniors (< $35k year or something like that). That's pretty low for a lot of places in the Bay Area which means not being able to go on road trips and do whatever it is seniors do in their twilight years.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#106

Post by akomtu »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #65
epistasis wrote: post #7

I'm still absolutely furious that SF managed the boom times by handing over massive amounts of cash to landlords and property owners, by restricting construction, that came directly out of the pockets of workers and has resulted in massive displacement. Sure, the tax revenue looked great, but it happened in a way that caused great human suffering by making occupancy in the city zero sum, and awarding it to only those…

Yup, like the Sangiacomo family, a bunch of slumlords who own more real estate in SF than anyone else, and have done nothing of note to earn that position other than hoovering up real estate and sitting on it while rents skyrocketed: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Angelo-Sangiacomo-one... However, SF and California is largely run by a small handful of families who are "kingmakers." The Buells, Fishers, Guggen…

Pritzkers also run the transgender industry in the US: all that expensive medicine and such.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#107

Post by ironmagma »

hintymad wrote: post #93
julianeon wrote: post #24

I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back. Yo…

> Cause of death: remote work. Is this contradictory to the reason that startups are funded in S.F proper? I remember many articles and social media posts were saying along the line that people chose to work in S.F because they loved bustling city life. Yet the city is doomed because people wanted to work remotely en masse?

People got a taste for how good remote work can be. That changed people’s priorities. Before, we were (mostly) blissfully unaware, or at least partially sold on the idea of office life being preferable.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#108

Post by epistasis »

claytongulick wrote: post #64
Aloha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prop 13 is one of the legs of the stool of most dysfunction in California. Some of these are gonna spark controversy but term limits, the recall and ease of passing propositions are some of the other ones. The legislature is no longer professional enough to govern, so the people do it at the ballot box, at the behest of whom ever has the most money to spend. The fact that California is a single party state because of…

Quoted post unavailable.

California was the home of Reagan and Nixon, and their legacy on state politics lives on to this day.

As mentioned, Prop 13 was a libertarian tax revolt that continues to cause massive structural problems in the state's economy, which only gets papered over by the absolute dominance of the economic productivity of massive innovation. Even California's farmers have innovated far better than many other parts of the country, and grows massive amounts of food without needing the subsidies that so much of the rest of the country depends upon.

But that's not what the commenter was complaining about, I think. My understanding is that his complaint is that Republicans made themselves irrelevant and destroyed their chances to provide a counterweight to Democratic efforts. They did commit a spectacular and awful suicide, through things like Prop 187. (However I disagree with the commenter on the Republican Party being able to provide a positive counterweight to Democratic legislation. IMHO their sort of rentier-promoting, winner takes all, style of legislation would kill off the in bio drive industries that drive California's amazing economic engine.)

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#109

Post by teaearlgraycold »

hintymad wrote: post #93
julianeon wrote: post #24

I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back. Yo…

> Cause of death: remote work. Is this contradictory to the reason that startups are funded in S.F proper? I remember many articles and social media posts were saying along the line that people chose to work in S.F because they loved bustling city life. Yet the city is doomed because people wanted to work remotely en masse?

Perhaps half of SF office workers were commuting in before the pandemic? Too lazy to research the numbers but certainly some large chunk just doesn't want to bother driving in every day.
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