Earlier quoted context omitted.
> unwilling to give up on their single family homes I think that expecting people to "give up their homes" is more than unreasonable. The reasonable compromise being that builders can build in more densely once the current owners sell it.
Absolutely. Upzoning never forces owners to "give up their home"-- maybe the issue is owners don't want their neighbors to be able to sell their homes to developers either.
Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
261–270 of 562 posts
Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
That the SFPUC's facilities are adequate to water their 2.7 million existing customers seems like a fact which proves itself.
As long as people are getting water, nothing is wrong? The city is losing 7 million gallons per day in leaks (this also includes firefighting). Are there alot of fires daily?
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-04/documents...
Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, the infrastructure can handle double its current utilization? Aren’t the sewers in SF literally over a century old? No issues with adequate water supply and sewage treatment?
These are bad faith arguments and therefore you are either debating in bad faith, or a dupe. San Francisco's gross water demand has been falling consistently for the last 50 years. Not per-capita. Gross. In 1998 the demand was 82 million gallons per day and in 2019 it was 63 million, with a population 17% greater. The more people you pile into a city, the less demand there is, because grossly wasteful activities like…
It also oddly erroneously equates water usage with some sort of negative thing in and of itself, akin to saying that rain is wasting water. It is not the use of water that is the problem, ignoring the rather minimal cost of things like moving the water, which is overwhelmingly a fixed, not variable cost. The real and only consequential problem is the contamination and pollution of water through things like significant quantities of soaps/surfactants, as well as almost unremovable harmful chemicals like birth control and other pharmaceuticals, preservatives from vehicle tires, and carcinogenic PFOA/PFOS that are now said to essentially be in EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE PLANET.
I can assure you that pumping a million gallons of water out of a well and letting it seep back into the ground is not nearly as destructive and damaging as the emission of various hormones into the municipal water system by women simply going to the bathroom.
In other words, if I were to use essentially nothing but moderate levels of natural surfactants, e.g., animal/plant fat produced soaps and did not take or use products created with "chemicals"; I could use tens of thousands of gallons of water per day and it would make no difference to the water cycle or availability. However, I could also use the amount and number of different destructive, polluting, toxic products that the average self-righteous person uses and I could pollute millions upon millions of gallons of water EVERY SINGLE DAY, all, while feeling self-righteous about my low water usage, while tossing new technology and plastic products produced by pumping tons of chemicals into Asian rivers.
A lot of these things are about perspective. You would ask that you take a step back and reexamine whether you are actually rational and using the scientific method that requires the questioning and reexamination of all assumptions and facts, or if you are being militant and extreme, aka an activist.
Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Land owners are not in the business of giving money away. That's precisely why increased taxes will not result in increased rents. After all, if they could increase rents and the market would clear it when there's a tax, why wouldn't they when there's no tax? They're not selling at cost-plus, they're trying to maximize profit.
Because renting in SF trades off in part against buying in SF at the margins (and against renting nearby to SF and against moving out of SF entirely). If buying in SF becomes more expensive due to an LVT, then renting becomes more competitive on the margin. I find it to be strangely magical thinking that land-value-taxes will precisely and surgically extract 100% of their value from landlords with no players in the g…
Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
#265Dear SF, More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly. With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to b…
Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say it’s basically impossible to recreate a dense city based on today’s codes of construction requiring numerous safety/ADA measures in the US. In an existing city, the cost to purchase land and buildings that would need to demolished, rezoned, and rebuilt as a higher density area with accompanying infrastructure is astronomical and wouldn’t be possibly by anyone other than the federal government only because…
> In an existing city, the cost to purchase land and buildings that would need to demolished, rezoned, and rebuilt as a higher density area with accompanying infrastructure is astronomical This happens all the time in NYC, though. Anywhere from a several-story small/medium apartment building to a large skyscraper. I think the limiting factor is much more likely to be air rights and zoning than safety standards.
Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have LVT proponents ever considered augmenting it with tax credits on the LVT for property improvements? To really hammer home incentives towards development in especially supply-strained markets such as S.F.
LVT is a tax only on the unimproved value of the land. Property improvements are not covered: the land owner gets to keep (or pass onto the renter) 100% of the value of such improvements. No tax credit is necessary; it's a natural consequence of how the tax is structured.
Based on the one prior attempt at LVT in the U.S., landowners don’t seem to understand its intent:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-short-life-of-pennsyl...
Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
#268Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both. I spent the last decade having these conversations with people who also grew up here and can’t afford to remain here without staying with their parents, with some of the stranger conversations devolving into my counter parties brainstorming ways to kick tech people out of the City and stop new people from moving in altogether, as if freedom of movement in the United States wasn’t really a thing. It’s not “suppl…
There so much land in the US. People don't have to live in San Fransisco. These people grew up there, they want to live in their home. You know, that emotional thing that money can't really explain. Sure they see the people arriving in, with huge paychecks that drive prices up, and them out as bad. Any human will, a rational agent won't.
Hopefully with Covid forcing more sane remote work policies across the board, fewer people are forced to live somewhere they don't want to.
Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If land is incredibly expensive and one intends to eat most of their meals out, it doesn’t actually make sense to rent a full kitchen. It is hard to beat the economies of scale of a restaurant, as much as the "you only need to factor the cost of raw food" camp like to tell otherwise. From a purely economic perspective, a kitchen at home, when other sources of food are widely available, is tough to justify. From a w…
> It is hard to beat the economies of scale of a restaurant, as much as the "you only need to factor the cost of raw food" camp like to tell otherwise I'd be interested in seeing your math on the subject, and it probably depends on location and at what rate do you "bill" your time, but restaurants have a lot of overhead ( property, staff, taxes) that offsets economies of scale. Even without going all-in with cheap fo…
The average cost to install a kitchen is around $60,000. If we assume a rate of return of 5%, that is $3,000 per year right there that the money needs to provide to justify it being invested in a kitchen and not invested elsewhere. That covers more than half of the individual restaurant cost right there and leaves only about $4 for everything else. Does $4 even begin to cover the time it would take you to make your own Big Mac meal (I agree that it isn't fair to compare with lobster) at home once, let alone twice? While the average home has 2.5 people, not just one person, we've only just scratched the cost of having a kitchen. We still have ingredients to pay for, the opportunity cost of occupying the land, electricity/gas, taxes, repairs and maintenance, etc. You're blowing your $30 budget in pretty short order. Okay, if you are one of those TV families with 14 kids, then perhaps you can gain some economies of scale at home.
Yes, if you've already invested heavily in having your own kitchen, then you can become more price competitive with a professional kitchen. Though that is true of a lot of things. After you've invested heavily in having your own silicon fab, you're going to laugh at how much Intel is charging for their chips as well. The means of production comes with a cost, though. And while it may be a sunk cost for most, it should not be ignored on that basis.
The real world is complicated, though.
1. If you're buying a used home, as most people do, they rarely come with silicon fabs but virtually always come with a kitchen, leaving you little choice in whether or not you want to invest in one. If land is cheap, it usually doesn't make sense to divest yourself from owning a kitchen. However, if land is expensive, then the calculus changes. When land is expensive, the land occupied by a kitchen can be put to more productive use that outweighs the investment you have already made.
2. Because most people are invested in home kitchens already, restaurants aren't optimized for providing food you want to eat on a regular basis. Eating a Big Mac twice a day, every day isn't sustainable. But at the other end, non-fast food restaurants focus on providing entertainment. Your kitchen can compete with them as your kitchen doesn't have to be entertaining. To be fair with them, we would have to include the cost of having a living room, TV, Netflix account, etc.