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San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

sfstandard.com

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Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#251

Post by PKop »

bluejekyll wrote: post #171
darth_avocado wrote: post #127

The city officials are asleep at the wheel. Blame it on remote work and pandemic as much as you want, but the reality is that the city was in decline even before that. It is too expensive to live in the city. It is too expensive to commute to the city. It is too expensive to feed yourself in the city. Crime is rampant. Drug use and filth is everywhere. Most importantly city has been hostile to tech and business owner…

> Crime is rampant According to the data, crime in SF is lower that it was a few years ago: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californ... > Drug use and filth is everywhere. Voters can’t seem to wrap their head around better housing policies to get people off the street. It’s disappointing, the entire Bay Area is guilty of this.

This delusion that if only we build houses, the homeless, mentally ill and drug addicted will magically disappear from the streets...is based on what exactly? What does "housing policy" mean in the context of streets lined with tent cities filled with drug addicts?

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#252

Post by thatfrenchguy »

coding123 wrote: post #9
downrightmike wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way SF will be fixed is if there is massive earthquake to take care of all the nimby concerns. Can't be concerned and stop construction if you don't have a back yard anymore.

People in SF have backyards? I can see NIMBY as a concern in the rest of the bay area, but SF, it's already stacked housing.

Yeah most historic apartment buildings in SF actually have a rear yard.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#253

Post by jmyeet »

ricardobayes wrote: post #233
cpursley wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money goes to where it's treated best and people vote with their feet. I know people thumb their nose on the state, but Florida is open for business. But the real secret is Puerto Rico and their incredible tax incentives for software companies.

The real real secret is Portugal, can't beat 10 years tax-free on foreign income.

If you're aUS citizen or permanent resident, the US will still tax that (beyond the Foreign Income Tax Credit).

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#254

Post by foobiekr »

bragr wrote: post #2

Give the corresponding housing crisis in the Bay Area, one wonders if the solution is to "simply" start converting office space to living space until the corresponding demand for office space recovers from a combination of increased demand and decreased supply. Now I'm sure there are all kinds of challenges to doing that, engineering, zoning, other practicalities, but it seems overall reasonable to me, though perhaps…

The real solution to the housing crisis in the bay area is to shift the center of jobs to the south - san jose. There is more land there, the city is willing to build highrises, and so on. The "crisis" is because people went from a focus on the already-crowded peninsula to the ultra-limited-space SF.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#255

Post by 5d8767c68926 »

gernb wrote: post #156
gibsonf1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirements for residential units are primarily the International Building Code, which are the expensive ones. The city only manages planning, such as a residential use can go in a certain area. To actually build, you need a building permit which has to conform to City and State building codes [2], which right now is basically the International Building Code [1]. And yes, it would cost a fortune to convert offic…

Many of those codes have been designed to protect incombents from competition and various other forms of encouraging one form of living (car dependent) over others. Plenty of people in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, etc live happy lives in much much smaller living areas. This makes them more affordable. But building codes in many places in the USA disallow making places that small. Other examples of questionable codes are…

>But building codes in many places in the USA disallow making places that small.

Given how little exercise people get and that we are typically glued to a screen (tv, laptop, or phone) during waking hours, I could see an argument for lowering floor space minimums.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#256

Post by bvanderveen »

anthonybsd wrote: post #243
bvanderveen wrote: post #182

I do ask myself how long the WFH trend is going to last. My hypothesis is that at some point in the next 5 years we're going to starting seeing articles on HN promoting the productivity and well-being benefits of in-person interaction with your co-workers. From where I'm standing, productivity doesn't look so great. It's an open secret in my remote-heavy, North American west-coast social circle that everyone knocks o…

>From where I'm standing, productivity doesn't look so great. It's an open secret in my remote-heavy, North American west-coast social circle that everyone knocks off at 1-2pm when the east coast people are definitely logged off. Probably the east coast people are doing the same thing, but in the morning. Lots of happily phoning it in. That hasn't been my experience at all. I work for a multinational company with tea…

To be sure, my (observationally biased) sample set includes ~3x more "friends working in tech for multinationals" than coworkers.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#257

Post by mbfg »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #212
bluejekyll wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crime is rampant According to the data, crime in SF is lower that it was a few years ago: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californ... > Drug use and filth is everywhere. Voters can’t seem to wrap their head around better housing policies to get people off the street. It’s disappointing, the entire Bay Area is guilty of this.

> According to the data, crime in SF is lower that it was a few years ago: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californ ... Every time I see something like this I will point out that during the anti-police movement that happened a while back, many police started reducing their activity either because they were told to, because prosecutes would refuse to prosecute, or because they didn't want to be the…

do you have statistics/links for this "crime not being lower, only reporting is lower" claim?

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#258

Post by inferiorhuman »

woodruffw wrote: post #140
ceeplusplus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross receipts tax of 0.69% plus 1.5% payroll tax [1]. $20,000 trash cans [2] and arcane permitting processes for brick and mortar businesses. The city's leadership has their head so far up their ass about going after rich techies that they proposed a tax which was intended to target Amazon, but was so poorly written that they asked to retract it off the ballot because Amazon wasn't subject to the tax but small busin…

I'm not a SF resident, but a 1.5% payroll tax doesn't seem that bad? NYC's is over double that. $20,000 for a pilot trash can is pretty ridiculous, however.

  $20,000 for a pilot trash can is pretty ridiculous, however.
$20,000 was for a one off (well, each of the three custom designs cost about that much) garbage can. The off-the-shelf models cost between $600 and $2,800 and the city budgeted no more than $3,000 per can.

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/for-a-trash-can-in-san...

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#259

Post by mochomocha »

pixl97 wrote: post #166
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> city officials are asleep at the wheel Eh, San Francisco's voters have been drinking crazy water for some time. New developments blocked by renters. Stringent building codes and environmental reviews defended by those who think they're being compassionate to the poor. Scolding tech companies for hiring in the city and then panicking when they stop hiring in the city. This obviously isn't all of them. But it's not l…

Yea, people love blaming (elected) city officials but NIMBYism and "Housing is an investment that should only go up in price" will eventually kill any market.

Yes, but I don't think SF is an exception here. The whole Bay Area is a NIMBY nest that looks frozen in time with infrastructure similar to what was in Europe in the 1950s. That's how my SF neighbor pays 30x less property tax than I do though, so there's that.

Too much local democracy: "I don't want someone in Sacramento deciding for me" is how you end up with this expression of pure individualism, where Atherton residents who have never taken public transportation in their life can block Caltrain development used by the working mass.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#260

Post by bluedino »

andreilys wrote: post #209
bluejekyll wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crime is rampant According to the data, crime in SF is lower that it was a few years ago: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californ... > Drug use and filth is everywhere. Voters can’t seem to wrap their head around better housing policies to get people off the street. It’s disappointing, the entire Bay Area is guilty of this.

Anecdotally a lot of friends in SF don’t bother reporting crimes because they know the police won’t do anything and it’ll be just a waste of their time reporting it.

Or if you call the police, they just never show up, or when they do, tell you not even bother filing a report.

Citizen: Someone stole my backpack and laptop out of my car!

Police: And?

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