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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

#21

Post by davmre »

ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

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 who still couldn't afford the city would find it much easier to live within a reasonable commute.

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

#22

Post by api »

ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

In some cases it's cheaper to live in another city and fly to/from SF every single day than to live in SF.

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

#23

Post by marknutter »

The only way to fix the housing market in San Francisco without destroying what people love about living there is to reduce the number of people living in San Francisco. And the most direct and effective way of doing that is to destroy the ridiculous bias against remote working. For all the innovative, intelligent, talented people in the Valley that we haven't yet figured out how to work together to build software without physically being in the same room is pathetic. We'll look back on this in the same way we look back on child labor and seven day work weeks.

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

#24

Post by baddox »

ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

> I expect what would really happen if SF just went all in building new housing, is that prices would drop in the city slightly, allowing people to move back into the city, thus increasing demand and increasing prices back to where they were.

That seems unlikely to me, based on intuition and my admittedly elementary understanding of economics. It seems very unlikely that a significant increase in the quantity of housing units would cause no change in the price of housing units.

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

#25

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

runchberries wrote: post #17
ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

Yeah. In Palo Alto my crappy 1 bedroom apartment that I was living in 3 years ago was in the middle of suburban jungle (no restaurants or shops for a few miles in any direction) and was $1650. I looked last week and it was $2500. That was a crappy place. If you want to live by downtown PA (university Ave) its right around $2800-3000 for a 1 bedroom, for places with 20 year old appliances and no upgrades. The peninsul…

Well what they really do is live further out, displacing poorer people. Places like Sunnyvale and Santa Clara are more doable.

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

#26

Post by saint-loup »

ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

>> A way to look at it would be that SF's sphere of rent influence would end up shrinking, but the magnitude of the epicenter remains unaffected.

This is roughly the conjecture of Marchetti's constant :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant

See also induced demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

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

#27

Post by aetherson »

api wrote: post #22
ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

In some cases it's cheaper to live in another city and fly to/from SF every single day than to live in SF.

Name some of these cases.

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

#28

Post by mdb333 »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281...

Good thoughts. You failed to mention Prop 13 which was put into place a long time ago and simply doesn't make sense anymore. It's at least part of the reason it is so affordable (in relative terms) for rich people to keep second homes here when they bought them years ago.

We live in a building of 60 units where probably at least a third of those are absentee owners. They're rich enough and the cost to maintain is so low that they don't even need or want to rent those units out. We've seen our neighbors only 2-3 times in past 2 years... but if you look at the property tax bills of folks who bought 10-20+ years ago they are minuscule and are only adjusted upon sale of the property. In our case, we're paying easily 4x what the previous owners were.

We moved from DC couple years back which is also very expensive but their tax valuations are re-assessed on a regular basis so you don't have this huge disparity in what the rich old people are paying in prop tax vs the young not quite rich people are.

If values and property taxes were reassessed every 3 years or so this would put more pressure on these absentee owners to either sell or rent their units thus increasing existing inventory as well as adding to the city's coffers.

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

#29

Post by pascalxus »

I agree with the author for the most part: the ideal solution is to build lots more housing - it's the morally and ethically correct thing to do. But, SF lacks the political will to do this and we need to accept that. the 2nd best solution would be to get tech companies out of SF. I hate this solution as much as the author, but I think it's worth considering. There's no reason why tech companies must be in SF, when there's so much Software engineering talent in the rest of the US where housing is much more accessible. I can understand large companies with big budgets paying top dollar moving to SF - they can out compete other companies for talent. But, I have no sympathies for software companies that can't find labor in SF because they went to the worst possible housing location offering modest compensation.
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