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San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

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Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#291

Post by inferiorhuman »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #248
hattmall wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violent Crime IS low in SF. It's pushed into Oakland. Property crime is insane and artificially held low by apathy with regard to reporting and redefining offense levels.

Also wondering how much this has to do with Shoplifting and other crimes simply being decriminalized.

  Shoplifting and other crimes simply being decriminalized.
Shoplifting was never (formally) decriminalized. SFPD stopped bringing anything to the DA because he was investigating and prosecuting police misconduct. Now that the mayor's installed a new DA and the new DA's disbanded the group that investigates police misconduct the police have started bringing more cases forward. Unsurprisingly the new DA is not prosecuting cases at a higher rate.

https://missionlocal.org/2022/08/jenkins-removed-prosecutor-...

https://missionlocal.org/2022/08/narcotics-enforcement-spike...

https://missionlocal.org/2022/07/mayors-office-takes-hands-o...

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#292

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #187
gfodor wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think drug use doesn't lead to crime?

I've known many marijuana and alcohol users in my time, some of them quite heavy users. I can't say any of it led to crime.

DUIs are one of the most common crimes in the US.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#293

Post by swearwolf »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #196
gfodor wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think drug use doesn't lead to crime?

Drug prohibition clearly leads to crime. Drug users would rather use drugs than commit crimes, but paying for a drug habit when drugs are expensive and you have a hard time holding down a 9-5 job (usually due to mental illness) forces people to do things they don't want to do. Ending prohibition and diverting some resources from police to mental health and preventative services is just a sensible thing to do.

Counterpoint: Oregon has done exactly that via Measure 101. It's been a complete mess. Every societal ill that comes along with drug use has gotten substantially worse. In theory, ending prohibition and diverting resources is a good idea, but it sure hasn't worked out that way in practice and I wouldn't encourage anyone in the U.S. to vote for it or trust that it will be well implemented here.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#294

Post by LatteLazy »

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…

Cities need social services to work, because of the density of people. It is a problem when my neighbour is crazy and screams for 18h a day when we live on top of each other in a city. It isn't when we live in the middle of no where and are separated by 50miles.

Only America is specifically designed to prevent any sort of social services, because people have the freedom to come into town to use those services and then leave before it's time to pay the tax for them.

This is why American cities have so many issues compared to European ones. From public transport to healthcare to education to crime, American is designed to be 100% individualistic and that is incompatible with how cities work. Cities are forced to subsidise surrounding areas.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#295

Post by AndrewKemendo »

55555 wrote: post #244
inamberclad wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drug use isn't associated with crime and filth until we make it so via harsh city policies. I would, however, like someone to clean the 4 different instances of poop I saw on my 3 block walk this morning.

I don't live in San Francisco, so please humor me, but are you talking about dog poop or human poop? I know this is an absurd question -- I've never seen human poop on a sidewalk in my entire life -- but I've heard stories about SF...

Almost certainly human poop

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#296

Post by pessimizer »

hollywood_court wrote: post #13
newaccount2021 wrote: post #3

Not just SF I see For Lease signs on commercial real estate at all price points everywhere I go. WFH has been a paradigm shift and commercial real estate hasn't caught up to the reality yet. Companies that embrace WFH will have access to an entire nations' worth of talent and will end up with a competitive advantage. Requiring RTO means employees must be within thirty miles or so of campus, and lots of talent won't g…

I’m not near a big tech center, but I know of exactly 3 businesses in my town that no longer exist because they would not allow their employees to work remotely. Two of them were owned by former clients of mine. They allowed themselves to fail because they wanted to make their employees’ lives more difficult. It was that simple. There was no need for either business to have a brick and mortar location at all. No need…

Because many methods of making money are cruel, a lot of stupid people develop an intuition that the best business decision no matter what is the one the people beneath you least want you to do. They see a world where they're trying to get all they can out of lazy employees that are constantly trying to get one over on them. Those employees' tricks are what is standing between them and retiring on passive income. This is like 85% of small business owners.

If you like working from home, working from home is bad for the business.

It's a bit protestant. Like the idea that food is unhealthy exactly to the degree of how good it tastes.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#297

Post by mysticllama »

PKop wrote: post #251
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.

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?

i agree that this is delusional and i see it repeated a lot -- homelessness isn't just a byproduct of a lack of housing or a lack of affordable housing.

i remember having a conversation with a LICSW who did a tremendous amount of work with drug addicted and homeless populations; she explained that when she really needed to, she could "beg, borrow, or steal" a way to find better housing for someone, but that really wasn't the crux of solving the individual's problems, it's only one facet.

even if someone who has untreated mental illness or drug addiction suddenly has a great new place to live, they're not going to stay at that address long if their other needs aren't treated.

i'm not saying there shouldn't be more affordable housing ASAP, or that it wouldn't radically improve some lives, but i get the impression that a lot of folks think homelessness is mainly a housing problem when it's really not so simple, and i think that needs to change if the problems have any chance at getting improved.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#298

Post by xrd »

brandur wrote: post #63
sidvit wrote: post #34

How's this compare in other cities? Just annecdotally speaking, I feel like I know a lot more people who used to live and work in San Francisco who don't anymore post pandemic, as opposed to friends of mine who left and came back to Austin/New York/Seattle

Linked from the article, the Urban Displacement Project's recovery ranking dashboards [1] place San Francisco dead last amongst 60 major North American cities. [1] https://www.downtownrecovery.com/dashboards/recovery_ranking...

Really interesting that Salt Lake is at the top, and that's the only city I know of that (at least reportedly) had an innovative solution to tackling homelessness. I just tried to search for their solution, but was overwhelmed by links from the past few months talking about how homelessness is swelling in that city. Perhaps every city is just dying of homelessness right now. Makes me wonder if those numbers for downtown recovery are manipulated or accurate. How to tell?

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#299

Post by abeppu »

So the commercial real estate problem is real, but this article also is concerned with the impacts to the municipal government. How important are those really?

> The city’s budget office expects property tax revenues to continue to grow. But Howard Chernick, an economics professor at Hunter College and co-author of the report that forecast an up to 43% decline in SF’s property values, paints a much worse picture: His team sees a decline of up to 15% in property tax collections amounting to a roughly 4% drop in total revenues.

This data is several years old, but in a ranking of large American cities by budget per citizen, SF was at #2 only behind DC which is a kind of special case. At that time, the SF budget was 7.9B, whereas now it's 14B, which put it near $15.8K per person. I have to believe that our problem isn't actually fluctuations in property tax revenue but how we spend.

https://ballotpedia.org/Analysis_of_spending_in_America%27s_...

https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/AAO%20FY2022-23%2...

https://sf.gov/news/mayor-breed-signs-balanced-budget-sets-s...

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