Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Evicted in San Francisco

priceonomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 257 posts

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#191

Post by spikels »

wutbrodo wrote: post #119
bequanna wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you have to go quite that far. $~1300 will get you a decent Studio/1BR/Shared in the East Bay (Dublin, Livermore). Not bad neighborhoods, close to BART. Go even a few miles East of these areas, rent drops rather quickly.

He wasn't talking about just rent, you have to figure in food costs and medical costs etc. Though I do agree that you can make it on that much in certain parts of the Bay.

As mentioned in the article her medical care is already taken care of by a union-sponsored health insurance plan run by a big HMO. These typically require very low or zero payments by the insured.

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#192

Post by rohin »

johnvschmitt wrote: post #189
rohin wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made a mistake in your calculation because you ignored leverage. Most people buy a house using some combination of equity and debt (usually 20% / 80%). You need to calculate the return based on the equity invested. Assuming they paid 20% down that's $125K. The house appreciated $773K over the initial purchase price. That's a 6x return on equity, not a 2x. But thanks for the lecture about how other people don't un…

You are correct, of course. My point was more about how journalists too often spout "PRICES DOUBLED!" to get attention like blood in the water, including here. And, in too many cases, it's over a time period that's 10+ years, so it's not really doubling, but 6%/year. And, yes, leverage can profit, but it can bite hard too. Plenty of people bought at $500k with $100k down, then saw the value drop to $300k, meaning the…

Well, when debt is involved, prices doubling is a big deal! Prices going down 10% is a big deal too though.

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#193

Post by spikels »

smtddr wrote: post #160
malandrew wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The tech boom isn't at fault here. The refusal to make the necessary changes that allow the housing supply to grow is to blame. Basically, San Francisco voters are responsible for the evictions, whether they be natives, long-time residents or recent tech transplants.

Grow at the expense of what though? So you tear down anything you can to increase SF's ability to hold all the things techies enjoy... and then one day, all this booming goes away and you're left with... http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/3433 ...kinda like the real-estate boom. Build houses anywhere & everywhere because everyone suddenly can afford a house(or at least get the loan)... then one day that isn't the case…

Reading socialistworld.net will only make you more confused about economic issues like these. I'd suggest any basic economics text as a good place to get started.

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#194

Post by flomo »

tsotha wrote: post #149
flomo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco almost always looks the other way regarding these 'illegal' units. Many of them are in plain sight and the rent/tenancy control laws still apply. I would guess the unit must have been a serious health/safety hazard for them to do anything.

The problem was someone filed a complaint. Like any bureaucracy, once you put something down on paper they have to do something. If she hadn't been such a difficult person to get along with she'd still be living there.

The article states that, but it is semi-official policy to let these units be. I think that if you made some random complaint about your neighbor's mother-in-law unit, you would likely not get any action from the city. Therefore the complaint must have been fairly serious (or the developer pulled some strings).

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#195

Post by jack-r-abbit »

trhway wrote: post #180
jeffdavis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What difference does it make? Pretty much everything has reasons behind it. A diagnosis is just giving one of those reasons a name.

>What difference does it make? to me it does. I think as a society we're at the level when we can allow and thus must allow to cut some slack to disabled people, and temporarily or permanent lack of ability to reason is a disability just like not having a leg for example. When some limping guy with a stick say stumble and hit you while falling, would you deploy your anger like it would be in the case of intentional h…

Honestly... if some random limping guy (not my family) fell and hit me with his stick every other day and often fell and hit my neighbors too... I would certainly want that guy out of my house. If I tried to help him get out of my house and he kept falling and hitting everyone that tried to help him... well at some point I would stop caring and just want him gone. Based only on what is in the article, since that is all we have, I feel they did start out with compassion. But you can only get hit with a stick so many times before you start losing that compassion. When they bought the house, they knew they were getting an illegal rental unit... not a one bed mental hospital. It wasn't their job to make sure she got help. It seems like they did more than they should have to.

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#196

Post by omegaham »

tsotha wrote: post #151
forrestthewoods wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if excessive regulation and NIMBY-ism in San Francisco has created an artifical bubble of hyper inflated housing prices that causes the most harm to the people who are in most need of help. Damn.

It's not NIMBY. The problem is between California law and San Francisco law renters have far too many rights. A person who knows how to play the game can stay in your rental for more than a year without paying rent. You shouldn't need to hire a lawyer everyone thinks is an asshole (think about that - someone who's an asshole even for a lawyer) to get rid of someone who isn't even paying rent. Property owners sell off…

And then the exact same activists who cry about renters being evicted then wonder why there's such a bad housing shortage.

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#197

Post by vectorpush »

trhway wrote: post #180
jeffdavis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What difference does it make? Pretty much everything has reasons behind it. A diagnosis is just giving one of those reasons a name.

>What difference does it make? to me it does. I think as a society we're at the level when we can allow and thus must allow to cut some slack to disabled people, and temporarily or permanent lack of ability to reason is a disability just like not having a leg for example. When some limping guy with a stick say stumble and hit you while falling, would you deploy your anger like it would be in the case of intentional h…

What more could be done? The courts bent over backwards to accommodate her, going so far as to award her $14,000 after patiently exhausting every other option. 14k and a moving crew seems pretty generous as far as evictions for hostile, unsanitary, non-paying tenants go. Her story is depressing because she is clearly a troubled woman, but you can't just ignore reality and expect everything to work out, it's unsustainable to allow every person with poor reasoning skills live rent free.

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#198

Post by bradleyjg »

NoPiece wrote: post #182
hapless wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF has a very low density. It's less dense than LA. If you want to compare it to NYC, it's less dense than the NYC suburbs in NJ and Queens. Rebuilding at higher densities is definitely practical, they just choose not to do so.

San Francisco is twice is dense as Los Angeles. 17,620/sq mi vs 8,225/sq mi. New York is the only city of a s similar size or larger that is more dense than Sn Francisco. San Francisco is more dense than Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_francisco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_angeles The Bay Area as a whole is less dense than the LA Metropolitan area.

That's just a historical accident of municipal lines. For whatever reason San Francisco didn't incorporate its inner suburbs while those other cities did. SF isn't functionally similarly to NYC or Chicago, it's more like Manhattan or the Central + North side. Both are considerably denser.

It's true that the Bay Area as a whole needs to get denser, but SF proper needs to lead the way.

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#199

Post by Crito »

bronson wrote: post #123
Crito wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets say that I was once struck very hard in the head by a frisbee, and the moral center of my brain now causes me to believe myself entitled to live in Malibu. Wanting something is not the same as deserving something.

If you'd previously been living in Malibu for decades you might actually have a case.

My entire point is that I reject this ridiculous premise. People who currently live in SF don't have any more of a "right to SF" than anybody else. Thinking otherwise is just plain old xenophobia.

The only land that you ever have an indefinite right to is land that you have purchased. I don't get "special privileges" to Seattle or Philadelphia just because I have rented in those two cities for the past 15 years. You don't have some sort of "special right" to your city either, unless you have seen fit to purchase property there.

Re: Evicted in San Francisco

#200

Post by 100k »

desuma wrote: post #162

The article is a Rorschach test for housing policy. Do you see yourself as the vulnerable elderly tenant, forced to move and abandon your longtime existence? Or the kindly landlord, trapped between two contradictory legal regimes? I live in San Francisco, and own a 2-unit building in the heart of the tech shuttle stops near Dolores Park. I had rented in the city for years before that. I couldn't have bought my place…

Granted it is very hard to evict a rent-controlled tenant in San Francisco, so I can understand your trepidation, but San Francisco rent control already works pretty much like your prescription: there is an annual allowed rent increase, and rents reset when the tenant moves out.

In other words, this is "soft" rent control as opposed to "hard" rent control where prices are fixed, essentially forever.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.9.1.99

Post reply on HN