San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident • Hacker News Board

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#141

Post by falcolas » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

lkbm wrote: post #67

Reedx wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are houses throughout the Bay Area sitting empty, just being used as a relatively safe store of value. That goal is already achieved without having to deal with the overhead of managing the property and tenants. So the homes just sit... empty.

Seems strange. Surely a management company would happily handle all that hassle and provide a secondary income stream. Sign a couple forms and boost investment income by a few percent? Surely that's not significantly more burdensome than the bureaucratic hassle of purchasing the property in the first place. I guess there's some significant tax/regulatory difference between capital gains from holding property vs. an i…

Renting a home devalues it through normal wear and tear. We see this during housing price drops in our local housing market (Montana) as well. The investors would rather a house sit empty than rent it or sell it at a lower price.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#142

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #52

ahelwer wrote: post #14

You can't build yourself out of the housing crisis when the problem is one of distribution, not one of supply. The idea that housing should be treated as an investment is, itself , the problem. How can you want housing to be affordable while also wanting housing to gain in value, i.e. increase in cost? These are completely contradictory aims. Zoom out for a second and consider how wild it is that we turned a life nec…

The premise isn’t that housing is treated as an investment. The premise is that housing is personal property. (Just like bread, etc., and many other things necessary for life.) It’s cities that are turning housing into an investment through laws turning it into a scarce resource. (Not just laws against building, but laws against short term rentals, boarding houses, tenements, etc.). It’s unsurprising that homelessnes…

> (Just like bread, etc., and many other things necessary for life.)

Yes, this is a very good point. You don't see people vilifying farmers for making profits on food, even though some people go hungry. But for some reason people hate developers for making a profit on housing. (In my opinion, all of the NIMBY arguments, very much including the vacancy one in the article, are just attempts to mask the real reason for opposing housing—a preference for the suburban lifestyle.)

> But this is mostly a San Francisco and New York problem.

It's not just a San Francisco and New York problem. Add Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Austin, Miami, and Boston/Cambridge to that list, just to name a few. That's not even counting non-US cities like Vancouver, London, Paris, etc.

I agree that housing shortages are unevenly distributed, of course.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#143

Post by sigstoat » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

rckoepke wrote: post #135

sigstoat wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems strange. Surely a management company would happily handle all that hassle and provide a secondary income stream. unfortunately management companies require managing themselves. even if you find a good one, they won't necessarily stay good, so you're firing them, getting new ones, etc. and i've never heard of one that will let you hand them a property, and then eat all of the risk for you and provide a simple…

Sounds like a new business plan for a new market.

nothing about property management or property management in SF is "new".

anybody who can afford to de-risk a real estate income stream can afford to just buy real estate themselves, they don't need yours. there's no market here.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#144

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

ahelwer wrote: post #125

harryh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't build yourself out of the housing crisis when the problem is one of distribution, not one of supply. This is wrong. There is no distribution problem with housing. It's not that people can't find a house to live in, or a house has to be shipped across the country and the rail line is broken. The problem is that people can't afford housing. And they can't afford it because demand has increased dramatically wh…

I think you misunderstand what I mean by "distribution" - there is already enough housing for everybody (see article), it is just not distributed in an equitable way among people who need it. Nothing to do with shipping houses.

There obviously isn't enough housing for everybody. How many people do you think want to live in San Francisco (including those displaced by housing prices), but can't, and therefore live out of town, out of state, etc.?

The statistic about vacancies is only meaningful if you assume that the only demand for housing in SF comes from the homeless, which is clearly absurd.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#145

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

biznickman wrote: post #4

When I lived in San Francisco, the newly built condo building across from me was fully empty (but fully sold) for all the years I lived there. This is a tower in SOMA. There was only one apartment which appeared to be a corporate one that was occasionally utilized. The rise of foreign money parking money in real estate has screwed things up on a global level. San Francisco has felt the brunt of this due to their insa…

Counterpoint: I live in a newly-built condo building near Mission Bay and I don't know of any vacant units in the building. My neighbors very much exist.

These debates always turn into anecdotes that cover up the real reasons why people oppose or support housing—a preference for the suburban or urban lifestyle respectively. People who argue that newly-built condo buildings are mostly vacant always happen to prefer the suburban lifestyle; people who argue that newly-built condo buildings provide much-needed housing always happen to prefer the urban lifestyle (including me). It's all a facade.

The actual vacancy rate in San Francisco, as we expect, is relatively low for US cities.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#146

Post by macinjosh » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

Psyladine wrote: post #84

macinjosh wrote: post #59

Offer property tax incentives to real estate owners who have empty homes if they lease them to tenants that have issues with housing stability at rates they can realistically afford. The owner gets tax benefits. People in need get a home to live in. The city has fewer homeless. All lease income could go towards upkeep.

How about punishing malingering misuse of resources rather than offering a carrot. Owners incentivized to utilize land, more real estate available, foreign investment squatting suffers.

Who gets to decide what is or isn't a misuse of resources? People like you would rather use force to bend others to your worldview than actually execute on realistic solutions.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#147

Post by macinjosh » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

nicksellen wrote: post #95

macinjosh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rise of foreign money parking money in real estate has screwed things up on a global level. If the property tax is paid and the maintenance is kept up what is the problem created solely by the fact some homes are empty? The only reason these properties have such high values is because there is a demand that is not being supplied. Supplying more housing makes this a non-issue. > San Francisco has felt the brunt…

> This is the real issue. Governments restrict housing supply for whatever misguided reasons and prices go up, those prices make it a good place to park cash. Government should stop picking winners and losers. Restriction of housing is not limited to Government, housing developers also do it: "[Kate] Barker reached a similar conclusion in her interim report, where she noted that in order to maximize their profits, de…

Corporations who collude with or otherwise use government/laws to manipulate markets in their favor are even worse in IMO.

The fact still remains though that the housing developers wouldn't be able to trickle out homes at their whim if the government enforced limits on housing weren't preventing other developers from competing.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#148

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

cmclaughlin wrote: post #110

aaronbwebber wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call bullshit. Say what tower it was, and when it was built, and what time frame you are actually talking about so we can verify for ourselves whether it was actually empty or not, or even if it was empty whether it was empty for a good reason (e.g. not having it's habitability permit). Otherwise this is the worst kind of anecdata - not even enough detail to verify that the anecdote is true, nevermind whether it is…

I'm all for backing up claims, but drive through Pac Heights and Cow Hollow at night - you won't see many lights on in those mansions. Drive by during the day and all you see is construction workers and gardeners tending to the properties there. It's pretty obvious people don't live there more than a couple months a year. These are the ultra rich with property in the most expensive cities all over the world.

Mansions in Pacific Heights and condos in SOMA are very different. If mansions in Pacific Heights are indeed vacant (which, to be clear, I doubt they are) that would suggest that a better use of the space would be to split them up into new, more affordable, units.

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#149

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

notJim wrote: post #116

flaque wrote: post #45

Many of these homes probably aren’t “empty” in the sense that someone’s just holding on to them long term. This article is citing the vacancy rate, which includes rentals where someone left and the landlord is trying to find a new tenant. Any city will have some % of empty rentals, if it didn’t, no one would ever move around. According to the US Census, [1] San Francisco’s vacancy rate is 5.4%, New York’s is 4.5%, an…

> build more housing and put them in it This is exactly what they want. Their contention is that SB50 doesn't place enough emphasis on affordability, so developers will mostly build market-rate housing. If you build enough market rate housing, the prices do eventually come down, but that takes a while to happen. During that time, a lot of people can lose their homes, especially since lower-income areas can be the mos…

[deleted]

Re: San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

#150

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #62

lrajlich wrote: post #35

Counter argument: SF has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jo... This article is promoting a bad faith argument used by anti development activists.

I can see why somebody might view that as a counter argument intuitively, but as somebody who cares about the problem in a real, practical sense, it's immediately obvious to me that the point isn't to criticise the city's vacancy rate in a void, but to compare it to the potential waste. In a city where prices are disgustingly high and homelessness is appallingly common, the vacancy rate becomes much more sensitive to…

> Simply pointing out that other cities have a higher rate doesn't affect the criticism.

Sure it does. Houston has a higher vacancy rate, and much more affordable housing than San Francisco. This strongly suggests that the vacancy rate is a red herring.