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Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

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Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#351

Post by cam0 »

epistasis wrote: post #300
mola wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though this is not an uncommon view in SF at the moment, I find it horrifying. What has made SF such a great place from the 1970s to ~2010 has been its willingness to accept new people, including the strange and the weird. That's not to say that it's been a great city for everyone , the first-wave gentrifiers from the 1960s pushed out Black people from the neighborhoods they took over, like Haight Ashbury, and the do…

I think you make a lot of good points here, but I think a little more weight needs to be placed on the "big paychecks" part. When my wife and I bought a house here (in SF) a couple of years ago, we had to make offers on nearly 20 homes over the course of 18 months before we had an offer accepted, and we were coming in with an all cash offer at or above asking price every time. The problem we ran into was that there were usually ~7 offers ahead of us (also all cash obviously, but even higher over asking). The income disparity is so extreme these days, and I hesitate to say "income" because these are not senior engineers at FAANG that we were bidding against, these were people who likely earn 10s of millions a year and/or come from extreme family wealth. The wealth gap really is staggering.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#352

Post by epistasis »

bnralt wrote: post #344
epistasis wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly didn't say "unending population increases" or "above all else." But if you think that building enough housing for the people means unending population increases, that's really in line with the garden variety xenophobic anti-immigrant thinking I grew up with in the Midwest. The zero-sum philosophy of a newcomer arriving meaning that a current resident loses out, or that the newcomer is "extracting" from th…

> I certainly didn't say "unending population increases" or "above all else." If you don't think that, then there's a certain density level where it's considered fine to oppose it, and there are certain things one could prioritize above population increases that could lead people to favor restrictions. Maybe some of the people favoring restrictions think the high point of density has been reached, or perhaps they fav…

Pointing out specific, xenophobic viewpoints doesn't mean dismissing everybody as xenophobic. If they have legitimate density complaints, please bring them. But I will also point out that these density complaints are even more xenophobic in origin. Density restrictions and zoning in San were invented a century ago to push the Chinese populations out of their neighborhoods.

And for me, this isn't about more or less restrictions. This is about meeting the needs of the people of a city. Not just the wealthy, not just keeping buildings the same, not just the people that have lived there the longest. The needs of the entire people. Which includes people that don't yet live in the city but need access to the economic resources.

So I definitely think that there should be density restrictions, but rather than maximums there should be density minimus. It should be illegal to build a single unit on a 5000 square foot lot anywhere in San Francisco. When somebody tears down a tiny Victorian, they had better replace it with many homes rather than just one. And if somebody remodels those exclusionary Pacific Heights homes, they better be adding more units, IMHO.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#353

Post by ashtonkem »

momokoko wrote: post #56
duxup wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a semi related note, I've seen a lot more 'stop' and 'stop it' on the internet lately. Arguably the various forms of saying the same thing come and go in terms of what is commonly used, but I've been surprised to see such empty words suddenly so common. Personally I would be a bit embarrassed to just tell people to 'stop it' as to me it seems sort of childish, but apparently not everyone. It's strange.

Because it gets old listening to the same tired uninformed troupes from some random person on the internet that is just regurgitating misinformation. For people that actually live in San Francisco this is a real issue that affects our daily lives. Having some random person spreading more incorrect info is insulting and actually potentially harmful to the people that actually live here and have to pay those rents like…

> Because it gets old listening to the same tired uninformed troupes[sic] from some random person on the internet that is just regurgitating misinformation.

Not to be harsh, but your frustrations are yours alone. Nobody else is terribly motivated by your pet peeves, and when you snap at people with "stop it" their response is going to be less "they must be tired of something" and more "what an unreasonable ".

> For people that actually live in San Francisco this is a real issue that affects our daily lives.

Living in a city does not give you exclusive right to discuss its issues, nor does it give you a monopoly on information about that city.

And by your own theory, you shouldn't be talking about Vancouver, since apparently you do not live there.

> Having some random person spreading more incorrect info is insulting

"You're wrong and shut up" (paraphrased) doesn't stop people from repeating what you perceive to be misinformation. All it does is convince them that you're an unreasonable person to interact with. If you want to actually stop the "misinformation", provide arguments. Because I guarantee you that nobody here will respect your preposterous order to "stop it".

> and actually potentially harmful to the people that actually live here and have to pay those rents like I do.

I know that there's an increasing trend towards viewing speech as violence, but this is ridiculous. My opinion on rents in SF is not harming you, least of all because I have literally no power to affect policy in a city over 500 miles away from me.

And even if you still persist in believing that we're somehow hurting you by talking about your city, then a dismissive attempt to shut down the conversation is doing you no favors, because you haven't convinced anyone here that they're wrong. They'll just keep repeating what they believe after they've finished downvoting your complaints into oblivion.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#354

Post by imtringued »

CalRobert wrote: post #176
WhompingWindows wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about mixed-cost buildings? Some higher-cost "luxury" units whose price/rent subsidizes the lower cost "essential" units, where firemen, teachers, local people can live.

Why should we subsidize homes for firefighters?

I don't know about firefighters but some public services are dependent on workers who commute from outside of San Francisco.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#355

Post by jefftk »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #322
bluedino wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There ar e plenty of commercial buildings in the USA that have been empty twenty years.

Really? Any in/near a major city?

It's not 20 years, but the old Circuit City building in Assembly Square (just outside of Boston) has been vacant for 11.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#356

Post by Kalium »

imtringued wrote: post #349
Kalium wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California requires winning a plebiscite to build public housing. This is not optional. When it does manage to build public housing, SF spends approximately a million dollars a unit to do so. That's purely to get a habitable unit. It includes none of the maintenance costs, which will increase over time, or the social services required to make public housing work as intended. With that in mind, giving literally 100% o…

>With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does. You are skipping over the part where the government can change the relevant laws that make public housing expensive. Public housing also doesn't have to be built b…

I believe that that's such a good idea that SF already agrees with you, has for years, and put it into practice long ago. The people who labor on public housing construction projects in SF are rarely city employees directly and generally employees of construction companies.

The items that make this expensive have to do with the standards that must be met, zoning and approval processes, and so on. These are things that a private construction firm, under contract with SF, does not find easier or cheaper.

Personally, I like the idea of SF maybe getting in the way of housing construction a bit less. But I also understand that voters seem to like the system as it is. Plus, only some of these laws are readily changed by SF - the plebiscite for public housing law is a state prop from the 70s. Many of the other requirements are also propositions at either state or local levels.

As you say, it's completely true that the government can change the relevant laws. It's just perhaps more subtle than that, as there are multiple levels of government involved and some of the relevant laws are quite challenging to change.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#357

Post by epistasis »

cam0 wrote: post #351
epistasis wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though this is not an uncommon view in SF at the moment, I find it horrifying. What has made SF such a great place from the 1970s to ~2010 has been its willingness to accept new people, including the strange and the weird. That's not to say that it's been a great city for everyone , the first-wave gentrifiers from the 1960s pushed out Black people from the neighborhoods they took over, like Haight Ashbury, and the do…

I think you make a lot of good points here, but I think a little more weight needs to be placed on the "big paychecks" part. When my wife and I bought a house here (in SF) a couple of years ago, we had to make offers on nearly 20 homes over the course of 18 months before we had an offer accepted, and we were coming in with an all cash offer at or above asking price every time. The problem we ran into was that there w…

Right, and imagine that if instead of all your money going to the profits of the previous owner, your money could be used productively to pay labor to build new housing for you!

Instead of your wealth being transferred to a laborer who has less wealthy, it was transferred to somebody who is likely quite a bit more wealthy. And instead of your wealth being used to improve the city, it was all used for the profits of somebody els.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#358

Post by nostrademons »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #332
nostrademons wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there are a couple effects here. One is that $15/hr is a dramatic underestimate of the opportunity cost for many of the people who would otherwise be eating out. Minimum wage in Mountain View & Sunnyvale is $16.05/hour. My wife & my salaries, if converted to hourly, would be several hundred / hour. We cook at home because we're salaried and so don't actually reap that opportunity cost in cash, and becaus…

> One is that $15/hr is a dramatic underestimate of the opportunity cost for many of the people who would otherwise be eating out. Minimum wage in Mountain View & Sunnyvale is $16.05/hour. My wife & my salaries, if converted to hourly, would be several hundred / hour. We cook at home because we're salaried and so don't actually reap that opportunity cost in cash, You can’t say that your opportunity cost is $x and the…

Sure I can, because this post is not about me. I'm an example to illustrate a point. The point is actually about the economic rationality of centralized food production - whether it is more efficient for one person to cook for many, or for each person to cook for themselves, in aggregate. Economics doesn't care about individual people; it cares about incentives, efficiency, and the behavior of abstract firms in response to those.

The rest of my post was about specific ways that the behavior of individual firms (using myself as an example) may diverge from what the economic model predicts, specifically because of transaction costs. That and a counterfactual (Taiwan) where these transaction costs don't exist, to illustrate how behavior then converges on what economics would predict.

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#359

Post by pembrook »

jjeaff wrote: post #336
bfirsh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a data point: I asked for 25% off my 1 bedroom rent (which seemed like roughly market rate). They said something along the lines of "we're not lowering any rents because we're struggling due to the economy". So, I left and they got nothing. I doubt they're going to rent it out again for a while.

This behavior is very common and just baffling to me. In many markets right now, there is just no way they are going to rent that out. The only explanation I have heard is that lenders allow a certain amount of vacancy increases in the terms without triggering a reevaluation of the property value. Whereas lowering the rent will more quickly trigger that new valuation. And the way many commercial loans are setup, they…

They’re able to slip this into agreements because conventional wisdom (even post 2009) still thinks real estate never drops in value. Momentum is the strongest inefficiency in most financial markets because humans have short memories.

If I’m a dumb real estate investor in SF pre-2020, I don’t care if the bank puts that kind of requirement on me, because rents in SF always go up!

Re: Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

#360

Post by Leherenn »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #244
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but you can buy an apartment 25 miles / 30 min from the city center with a minimum wage salary (I know, I have friends who did it). Try doing that in the Bay.

Do you have any more details on that? I'd like to know more. Either apartments outside of Paris are dirt cheap or minimum wage in France is really high. A dev from Paris I met in Germany said he left due to how unaffordable housing was so something doesn't add up.

I assume it's just that some places are quite cheap, if you're fine with living in council flat from the 60s in a poor neighborhood.

From what I can find, minimum wage is around €1500/m, before taxes.

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