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The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

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Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#151

Post by dv_dt »

rsync wrote: post #110
seattle_spring wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is insignificant compared to yearly property appreciation in the same area.

Let's please test your intellectual honesty, shall we ? You are indeed correct that in our very modern era, the 2% ratchet under prop13 is less than what we see California real estate appreciating at. So would you indeed support rebates and/or clawbacks and/or negative property tax increases if California was to ever see sustained drops in valuation ? I own property in California as well as in other states and I can…

I don't think the people railing against prop 13 have ever lived in states where property tax rates are out of control to the point the people lose their homes... it's not pretty.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#152

Post by thescriptkiddie »

avatar299 wrote: post #140

Blaming Prop 13 is silly. Look at the rest of the state, housing prices are relatively sane in places like san diego, and downright cheap in the inland empire, orange copunty, anaheim, etc etc. Oh, all those places have to deal with Prop 13 as well. San Francisco(and the bay area overall) has consistently chosen to restrict their supply for housing for years. Obviously this would culminate into higher prices in the f…

> housing prices are relatively sane in places like san diego

Consider that the median house price in San Diego is higher than New York or Los Angeles: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/Media...

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#154

Post by [deleted] »

avatar299 wrote: post #140

Blaming Prop 13 is silly. Look at the rest of the state, housing prices are relatively sane in places like san diego, and downright cheap in the inland empire, orange copunty, anaheim, etc etc. Oh, all those places have to deal with Prop 13 as well. San Francisco(and the bay area overall) has consistently chosen to restrict their supply for housing for years. Obviously this would culminate into higher prices in the f…

[deleted]

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#155

Post by Animats »

BurningFrog wrote: post #56
Animats wrote: post #50

"We are on a self-imposed path leading to only one place: a city that is entirely rich and, more or less, entirely white." Sounds like a plan. The problem is this. SF is built out; to build something, you have to demolish something first. So the alternative is high-rise housing. High-rise low-income housing, especially high-rise low-income housing, has been a disaster in the US. Chicago had to demolish the Robert Tay…

to build something, you have to demolish something first Yes, of course. That is how all healthy big cities work. So the alternative is high-rise housing Well, replacing 1-2 stories with 4-8 stories is probably optimal for current SF. Not sure I'd call those high rises.

SF has gone the other way, replacing 4-8 story public housing with 2 story public housing. You can see examples just south of Japantown. Crime rate went down.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#156

Post by ChiCommTroll »

avatar299 wrote: post #140

Blaming Prop 13 is silly. Look at the rest of the state, housing prices are relatively sane in places like san diego, and downright cheap in the inland empire, orange copunty, anaheim, etc etc. Oh, all those places have to deal with Prop 13 as well. San Francisco(and the bay area overall) has consistently chosen to restrict their supply for housing for years. Obviously this would culminate into higher prices in the f…

Of course Prop 13 is distorting prices. It affects all kinds of things. It limits the revenue stream of local governments, causing them to do things like encourage big box store development to get more sales tax. Prop 13 has tons of unintended consequences. Or maybe its framers knew exactly what they were doing.

I ALSO think rent control and airbnb distorts prices too. The Airbnb threat maybe overblown, who knows, but airbnb has maintained in the past they have no way of telling cities how many customers they. Databases are hard I guess.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#157

Post by ChiCommTroll »

iolothebard wrote: post #106
davmre wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that the same arguments apply throughout the Bay Area. That fact that SF needs to build more and denser housing doesn't excuse Palo Alto, Mountain View, Berkeley, Oakland, etc. from doing the same. But even the housing policy you describe, in which SF acts unilaterally, would still be a great good. Tens of thousands of people previously priced out of SF would now be able to live in the city. And those wh…

70 story high rise in Atherton and Belmont! That will be the day :-) I quite liked the Peninsula. SF wasn't really my cup of tea. God forbid people like me that lived on the Cliffs of Despair (Pacifica) and were relatively happy.

They finally demolished the cliff buildings a couple of weeks ago!

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#158

Post by 650REDHAIR »

henrikschroder wrote: post #114
Maarten88 wrote: post #82

I visited San Francisco last week (for the Microsoft Build conference). Having read here on HN about the housing problems and high rents I was surprised to see quite a lot of poorly maintained buildings, if you go a bit outside the centre. From my perspective, there seems lots of room for building and improvement. They could take down blocks and build more densely while improving quality. As in all US cities, a lot o…

I'm also from northern Europe, and the average housing standard here is absolutely crap compared to where I'm from. For fun, try browsing apartments here on craigslist and you'll get to see the interiors as well. And when you then look at the prices of these things, it all seems like a cruel joke. If you just visited the conference you probably didn't see Mission Bay, but they are doing the same here as in most other…

The Mission Bay properties are also ridiculously expensive and the first few buildings were basically student/PhD housing.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#159

Post by alogray »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #122
nkurz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am simplifying greatly, but in a broad sense, SF housing is as expensive as Boston housing I don't think that's true even in the "broad sense". San Francisco rents may be roughly comparable to to NYC, but are significantly more than Boston: https://www.zumper.com/blog/2016/04/zumper-national-rent-rep... It may not be true, but I think the argument would be that in the absence of Prop 13, SF rents would indeed be co…

I think that on a total cost basis SF is more expensive than Boston, but I think your money goes a lot further in SF than it does in Boston. The units in Boston tend to be smaller, without amenities, ancient, in need of significant repair or all of the above. I wouldn't be surprised if like for like, Boston is indeed more expensive than SF... I just checked Redfin for properties in core of Boston (Back Bay, Beacon Hi…

Interesting.

Although, if housing in Boston tends to be of lower quality than SF housing, might that not put extra demand on the more recent and presumably nicer housing?

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#160

Post by muzz »

khuey wrote: post #131
muzz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual market dynamics are complicated. There are so many effects that happen when housing is built. New housing in SF is being sold to out-of-towners who don't actually live there. Building housing into a downtrodden neighborhood can improve it significantly and actually increase values, etc.

http://sfcontroller.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Docum... "Market-rate housing probably has contributed to gentrification in many cities in the past. But the data shows clearly that, in San Francisco in 2015, market-rate housing development is not accommodating upper-income movers who would otherwise be somehow shut out of the city's housing market. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of wealthy new resi…

Yes the first sentence is my point.
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