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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

#171

Post by inamberclad »

diogenescynic wrote: post #151

San Francisco is self-destructing and sabotaging its own success. Instead of fixing crime and quality of life issues, they've actively made them worse or gas-lighted residents and done nothing at all. I've always thought it was insane paying the prices of SF to live in squalor and near so much crime. BART is also a completely miserable experience. I don't think anyone wants to commute into SF or live there if they do…

Beat cops should be a requirement in every neighborhood in every city. It makes the police more human and forces the police to see the populace as more human. I assume it's not done because of a combination of cultural reasons (cops don't want to walk) and budgetary reasons (it's more expensive somehow).

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

#172

Post by infamouscow »

clpm4j wrote: post #102
DantesKite wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Chesa Boudin lost his recall election unopposed.

That's pretty damning evidence crime is bad and the people are right to dismiss strawman arguments as deranged nonsense.

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

#173

Post by steve76 »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#174

Post by jdeibele »

0xFACEFEED wrote: post #105
jonas21 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

"1986 Proposition 58

Proposition 58 allowed homeowners to transfer their principal residence to children without a property tax re-assessment, as well as the first $1 million (not indexed to inflation) in assessed value of other real property."

Of course if the homeowner has more than one child it could get messy

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

#175

Post by Aloha »

epistasis wrote: post #108
claytongulick wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cou…

I remember the conservatives of that era, and as you note, that era died with Prop 187.

The republicans killed their ability to have a place at the table on meaningful discussions about the states future, and as of right now? Being a democrat requires you to hew to certain ideological perspectives and ways of discussing issues. I'm not suggesting that the current or former Republican Party had the right answers, but you need more than one perspective to make meaningful change.

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

#176

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

> Besides staffing costs (which also go down when you hire technologists from outside of Bay Area)

That's not what I've seen. Top talent still commands SF salaries, no matter where they happen to be located.

So far everyone I've seen try to implement Geo-adjustment magically had to carve out "special" deals for most engineers. They won't talk about it openly of course.

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

#177

Post by mullingitover »

trashface wrote: post #154
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…

In-office work can make a comeback. All big tech has to do is tell new college grads "you have to work in our office." They will agree. After a few years and all the remote workers are sidelined and not important.

This is like saying offices can make a comeback after the industry went all in en masse for open plan. The stated reason for open plan was the mythical 'organic interaction,' but in reality it was reduced seating costs.

Remote work takes that those seating costs right to zero, and it's already been proven out with ample data demonstrating that productivity suffers little, if at all. There are a plethora of multi-billion companies that are 100% remote to really drive this point home.

In-office work isn't coming back any more than personal offices with doors for individual contributor engineers are coming back.

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

#178

Post by diogenescynic »

nemothekid wrote: post #66
nathanaldensr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are living in an age of media ignoring elephants so large they've burst through the very walls of the house.

It's strange that crime is simultaneously all the media ever talks about while also being elephant the media ignores. San Francisco is constantly lambasted mad max where the walgreens owner is being shaken down by the local crime syndicate but it's somehow an open secret that you only read about in top secret government files.

Media isn't monolithic. Local media tends to ignore or downplay crime--I think in part because the writers are either insulated from it or have their own political biases. National media plays up the crime because they like to use SF as a whipping horse to say "see don't be like SF or your city will have full blown anarchy". SF is actually a huge anchor on national progressives because republicans can always point to SF and show how poorly policies have played out. If SF was as clean/safe as Copenhagen, it'd be a lot harder to make that argument. SF progressives are a different breed altogether though--it's all about scolding people and identity politics to distract from meaningful policies like universal healthcare, elder/child-care, etc.

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

#179

Post by DantesKite »

clpm4j wrote: post #102
DantesKite wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Keith's house got broken into. I think that's fairly near the crime.

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

#180

Post by steveBK123 »

daxfohl wrote: post #112
88913527 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mean, most of the jobs went to the suburbs in the 90s because of cost and convenience, then boomeranged back to the city for (culture? fun? actually idk why; I liked suburbs better). So, no reason history won't repeat itself.

A lot of urbanists overlook the way online culture and modern logistics have brought so much of the "culture" (good ethnic cuisines and food trends) to the suburbs and even exurbs in weeks/months instead of the 10+ years trends used to take to travel.

Anyone who grew up in the burbs in the 70s-90s and goes back today can observe this.

Anecdata - I have a sibling who lives in fairly rural MAGA country outer exurbs and yet has both bubble tea & pho shops in driving distance.

Similarly "well everything is so far in the burbs".. ok well, I've lived nearly 20 years in NYC and my average commute has been about 40 minutes. All my friends live all over the 5 boroughs, most of which are a good 30-40 minutes by uber or subway. We mostly see each other weeknights after work in midtown/downtown since thats closer.

Remote or even 2-day in-office hybrid work makes the trade offs of being 30~60 miles outside the city much more attractive.

The city has many conveniences and also a ton of inconveniences, it doesn't take a lot to put the balance out of whack and make you question why you pay so much for it.

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