Nearly 12M Square Feet of Vacant Office Space in S.F

Personally I don’t think “low taxes” are “reasonable”. We live in a complicated society and we all benefit when we collectively pay people to do a huge variety of important jobs which are hard to fit into a pure-profit system. Cutting funding for those exposes us to a wide variety of risks and eliminates many future opportunities, in the long term harming us all. The Covid pandemic is a perfect case study in the way that e.g. public health infrastructure, expertise, and political support can save hundreds of thousands of lives. (While we are talking about San Francisco here, it’s worth noting that SF and the Bay Area has done by far the best of any US city / metro area at containing Covid and preventing needless deaths of residents, despite some failure especially early to properly target testing resources toward poor/minority areas full of “essential workers”.) But infectious diseases are only one of the many risks that individual people cannot adequately understand and protect against on a personal basis, for which it helps to have collectively funded public institutions.

Instead of income or property taxes, some places raise money via sales taxes instead, or other regressive schemes. Some places raise money by questionable fines on their own residents. Some places make money off the back of wanton environmental destruction.

Some just accept shoddy local services. (When you compare the US to other wealthy nations, it’s really shocking how poor our basic infrastructure and public services are, even in the richest US states and cities.)

But most low-tax areas of the US are substantially supported by federal-level transfers, for example from federal highway budget, from military bases and defense contracting located there, from federal agriculture subsidies, from federal welfare and healthcare funding, from social security payments to people who retired somewhere different than they lived while actively working, ...

You seriously do not think San Francisco and New York have attracted business development?

This is yet another version of the classic “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”

This is the worst strawman argument I've ever seen. The problem is precisely that corporations (especially badly managed ones) have been able to bleed the stimulus coffers dry, and they will continue to do so, because we have a system of government which caters to them.

Direct payments and rent forgiveness are not "printing money", they are limited, specific relief packages targeted at people in need. These are people who are about to be evicted, homeless, in medical debt, etc. These people need help, or the consequences will wreak havoc on a colossal scale.

Related: NYC commercial mortgage backed securities are going to crash

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX1uzbAOnXc

Is it possible to short mortgage backed securities?

The UK authorised this, years ago, because it's obvious that our economy is transforming so that fewer shops and offices are needed but the population is still growing.

The homes built under these rules are generally poorer quality, they tend to be smaller and more expensive to run than an otherwise equivalent new build home. But they are homes, and it's not as though San Francisco has too many of those.

At the extreme of what can be done, Birmingham is a British industrial city, and once upon a time as it began to take off there was enormous pressure to build homes so they constructed what were called "Back to backs". These were groups of homes packed together "back to back" so that you only had windows facing out one way, the other three sides of your home were walled in by other housing. They were squalid and almost all of them were torn down, although the World Wars diverted resources so that the last of them ceased to be homes only in the mid-20th century.

But historical preservation means Birmingham still has one set of Back to Backs, most of which is a museum you can tour to see how they were lived in during different periods, but one home was instead converted into a fairly nice two person overnight apartment you can hire. They plumbed a modern bathroom with shower and toilet, kitchen and so on, and of course in the 21st century we can light interior spaces cheaply and easily so it doesn't feel permanently gloomy, also of course it's just one couple in a double bed for one or two nights, whereas these would have been homes for families of eight people for a lifetime...

So yes, if there's money you can add everything. A Back to Back as constructed has zero running water, let alone sewage, unlike an office building so they'll have had to use modern narrow bore sewage pumping and other expensive tricks to make it work, but if the building would otherwise sit empty...