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San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

sf.curbed.com

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

#161

Post by Psyladine »

macinjosh wrote: post #146
Psyladine wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vacancy taxes are hardly authoritarian. If government has any purpose it is to address the irreconcilable conflicts of individual self-interest vs the benefit of all.

And your 'realistic solutions' leads to exploitive loopholes for people who already benefit enough without additional tax incentives, like communities that go in on luxury senior developments to meet their low-income/transient housing obligations.

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

#162

Post by cameldrv »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #158
refurb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repeal it for everything. Just do what Texas does and allow deferred property tax payments for when the owner dies or sells. Why should we be giving tax breaks to people who have seen incredible appreciation of their homes. Those are the last people who should be getting tax breaks.

This is what I've been saying for years. I didn't know anyone had implemented it.....looks like they have an 8% interest rate, that's crazy high for the situation.

There's a product called a reverse mortgage that accomplishes the same thing. Having the government offer this instead of foreclosure nullifies the "I lost my house because of high property taxes" argument, but there's no need for the interest rate to be especially competitive. If you can get a better deal on the private market, go get it.

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

#163

Post by lrajlich »

pcwalton wrote: post #150
happytoexplain wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, exactly. Housing price increases and low vacancy rates "should" be correlated (eg, not enough supply in the market) and in fact are, which the original article's argument completely ignores and instead implies that the right vacancy rate is 0. If those circumstances ever happen, good luck finding a place to live.

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

#164

Post by vonmoltke »

frandroid wrote: post #122
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…

> Any city will have some % of empty rentals, if it didn’t, no one would ever move around. You do understand that people advertise apartments available for rent before the previous tenant has moved out... In Québec, the majority of leases end on July 1st and you have a number of people moving on that day which is quite greater than the vacancy rate. You can sign a lease for a new apartment months ahead of time.

What you describe is not the way the US rental markets I have been in worked. Even the past three properties I bought had been vacant for at least a couple months before I even looked at them, let alone closed the deal. Our current house met the Census definition of vacant for six months after we closed on it so I could do work on it before getting all our stuff in.

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

#165

Post by lrajlich »

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…

housing is a market so low vacancy == price increases. That's the actual story. This is the case in markets more generally (eg, wage increases tend to be higher when unemployment is low).

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

#166

Post by vonmoltke »

refurb wrote: post #98
vonmoltke wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repeal it for everything except owner-occupied residences. That's the way homestead works in Florida.

Repeal it for everything. Just do what Texas does and allow deferred property tax payments for when the owner dies or sells. Why should we be giving tax breaks to people who have seen incredible appreciation of their homes. Those are the last people who should be getting tax breaks.

Texas also has a value increase cap for owner-occupied residences, though not as generous (10% per assessment, since the state uses three-year assessment periods).

> Why should we be giving tax breaks to people who have seen incredible appreciation of their homes. Those are the last people who should be getting tax breaks.

It's about not forcing people to move because he area they live in appreciates suddenly. Basically, the same argument as rent control. That an owner gets to cash out some value is cold comfort when their life is uprooted against their will.

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

#167

Post by rayvd »

isoskeles wrote: post #24
TACIXAT wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that the cognoscenti proletariat should be empowered to confiscate all property and redistribute it as they wish Or we could, you know, build some cheap housing.

That's definitely not what the implication of the article is. Many would read this and think, well, we should just put the homeless people into those vacant homes!

Darn that Takings Clause...

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

#169

Post by slavapestov »

api wrote: post #43
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…

A few starter ideas: (1) Repealing prop-13 is probably a non-starter but we could probably get away with repealing it for non-owner-occupied homes. Prop-13 was meant to prevent people from being driven from their homes by property tax increases, not to protect speculators from being taxed. (2) Levy a substantial additional property tax on residential properties that are not currently occupied by either the owner or a…

> (4) Tax foreign (non-US-citizen) purchases of residential real estate

So permanent residents and visa holders cannot buy property and are instead forced to rent? What a terrible idea.

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

#170

Post by forwhomst »

logfromblammo wrote: post #139
forwhomst wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically impossible to increase housing utilization to 100%. It's pointless to even try. 10% is a healthy vacancy rate. Build 110% of the housing your city needs.

Mathematical nitpick. A vacancy rate of 10% is an occupancy rate of 90%. To house everyone with a 90% occupancy rate, you need to have 100 / 90 in available housing stock, which is 111.1% of occupation requirements. If you only build 110% of what is needed, and no one is homeless, the vacancy rate would be 9.1%, or ( 1 - 100/110 ) . The point still stands. Cities need more housing than strictly required for residents…

I perceived the error but I left it there so someone could gratify their pedantry. Congrats.
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