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San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

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Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#191

Post by corytheboyd »

notherthrowaway wrote: post #154

I think people are asking the wrong questions. We know that people moving back in with their parents is up about 3 million due to COVID [1]. It would follow that studio apartments are the mostly likely to be rented by those same young people, thus the demand has dried up. The question we aren't asking is, what happens when the economy recovers and these people move out of their parent's homes? Will they go back to th…

My guess as to what will happen, for the sake of playing along with the hypothetical simply because it’s fun.

Destination cities will still be desirable, however there will be a very slow rebuilding of demand. The magnitude of that demand will never reach the same height. The entire world was forced to work from home for an extended period of time, introducing those from industries that would scoff at the idea to a different lifestyle. Sure some people don’t like it, they will be the ones moving back to cities, but I think enough find it vastly favorable to the grind of commuting too and from a physical office that it will have some stickiness once social distancing can safely be stopped.

This general shift in attitude will make it far more realistic to work where you actually in your heart of hearts want to live. I’m excited for this change, I live in downtown San Francisco right now and it’s not BAD— life is fine, we’re making due with the times. But I never wanted to permanently live here, and now there is this perfect chance to move out of the city, you bet your ass I’m taking it when my lease is up :)

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#192

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jeffbee wrote: post #176
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese has had a huge influence on markets like Vancouver BC. In the USA west coast, tech jobs are much more of a factor, though many of those techies happen to be Chinese (but many are also Indian, American, Russian, and so on...). My aunt in West Seattle had people make unsolicited bids for her house (that wasn’t in the market), but these people were Indian (and they could have as easily been Chinese, Russian, Ame…

A guy rang my doorbell in Oakland and brandished a bank check for well over a million dollars to buy my house. He was a white American, though, so I don't get to build an awkward racist narrative around that event, I guess.

I didn’t say anything about the market being racist, just that the market was largely tech driven and not driven by nationality.

If you got a racist narrative out of my comment, you were completely missing the point.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#193

Post by seanmcdirmid »

zamalek wrote: post #182
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Seattle has seen the same thing, the market has gone crazy here and there isn’t much housing supply to meet demand. That is just the forsale market, rentals are much weaker.

Seattle's reckoning/correction is coming. The city is doing everything in its power to chase money away, Amazon is trying to move to Bellevue as an example. People are growing tired of the messy streets, needles are tents are spreading as the city ignores the problem. On the plus side, our landlord is doing everything in his power to keep us happy, for the first time.

Maybe, but it hasn’t happened yet, it’s a seller market ATM. And we just moved from Bellevue where we were renting, houses are actually cheaper in Seattle, we could never afford anything decent in Bellevue.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#194

Post by packetlost »

alextheparrot wrote: post #152
packetlost wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in freaking Madison, WI and you can't find a studio for under $1000, there's no way you're going to find that in SF.

Is that just downtown by the capital where the high rise apartments are? Or has the market shifted that severely since I graduated school in 2016?

In some of the 'worse' parts of town rent dips into the upper $700-800s or if you get very far from downtown into the suburbs in older buildings. The eyeball-average price for suburbs/outer areas for a studio is $900-1000. The median appears to be in the $1100-1500 range overall [0].

[0]: https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/wi/ma...

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#195

Post by refurb »

chrisseaton wrote: post #43
themark wrote: post #2

Not surprised. I have been seeing a lot more SF city parking stickers on cars in San Diego.

Is there a big difference between San Francisco and San Diego? They're both Californian mega cities.

Very different. San Diego is not a mega city like LA or the great Bay Area. Much better weather than SF, seems a bit more relaxed pace and not as overrun.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#196

Post by adaisadais »

When San Francisco has it’s businesses open (pre-Covid) it is a fun city.

When the businesses closed it became the opposite of a fun city. Restaurants and bars have been shut down and only a few have started to reopen. Many Parks outside of The city have had their parking lots closed. The city itself started doing massive road renovations which seem to be in every neighborhood. Helping the homeless seem to become less of a priority. All of the real problems that people covered up by going to shows and having a good time at restaurants and parks and bars became quite apparent.

I don’t think San Francisco will recover for a long time.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#197

Post by refurb »

jeffbee wrote: post #15

Like a few lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, that's a good start, but it should be city and state policy to chop another 80% off the price of housing, to get it back to historical norms.

80% off is historic norms? That would bring the price down to what it was in the 80’s and inflation alone has doubled that.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#198

Post by bumby »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #102
mxcrossb wrote: post #26

> The figures underscore how the pandemic has roiled property markets and changed renter preferences. With companies allowing employees to work from home, people have fled cramped and costly urban areas in droves, seeking extra room in the suburbs or cheaper cities. I am skeptical. Yes a lot of Bay Area companies are allowing work from home for now, but are people really weighing that so heavily that they’re moving?…

SF is great (really, just stop it haters!) and there will always be people who want to live there and prices will always be relatively high. However, for a long time SF has been a place of extreme price distortion because of low (~no) new construction and huge concentration of high paying jobs. The result is many many people feeling trapped there way beyond where it makes sense for their lives. If you are single and…

I’m curious as someone who has never lived in SV (only visited for work) but do you feel like there are certain areas that displaced SV gravitate towards and would eventually cause property in those areas to rise as well?

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#199

Post by [deleted] »

baby wrote: post #153
prpl wrote: post #60

I bought a house in the east bay, walking distance to a BART station. We contemplated “cashing in” on a rent controlled 2 or 3 BR apartment but prices on those haven’t dropped quite as much, and we still wouldn’t likely have a yard. We have 3 kids and we were in a rent controlled 2BR in the Richmond district, but we had no w/d and the landlord was increasingly hostile. At the end of the day my mortgage is $4200/mo wh…

W/d?

[deleted]

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#200

Post by leetcrew »

jdmichal wrote: post #168
leetcrew wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how would this work? the only way I can think of is for the government to buy above market when prices are going down and then unload them when prices go up. it's hard to see how the public would actually benefit from this. it's a little insane to use government funds to take perfectly good housing stock off the market and prevent people from living in it. seems like the cure would be worse than the disease. imo, it'…

And yet this is exactly what is done for farming: Paying farmers to leave fields fallow in order to maintain supply and thereby pricing. Dropping property prices shouldn't even be an issue for owners. Property value and thereby property taxes should also go down. As long as they can cover that, then they can continue to own the property. Except in reality everyone is actually leveraged against their property and don'…

> And yet this is exactly what is done for farming: Paying farmers to leave fields fallow in order to maintain supply and thereby pricing.

I'm sure there are some subtleties I'm missing, but this has always struck me as a little odd. why do we subsidize agricultural production and then turn around and also pay farmers not to use fields to stop the price from falling too low?

also a price collapse isn't necessarily cataclysmic for someone with a mortgage. as long as they can keep making the monthly payments, nothing immediately changes. it's only a problem if you need to sell or if the prices never recover.

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