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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

#401

Post by zapita »

fortran77 wrote: post #377
zapita wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, and will remain true until prop 13 is repealed. The same dynamic is at play between San Jose and Mountain View/Cupertino/Palo Alto.

What does Prop 13 have to do with the fact that they're not building enough housing?

Here’s what I replied to:

> Residents strain the city budget via things like public schools. Businesses put money into the city budget via gross receipts taxes.

Prop 13 was meant to drastically cap property taxes. It was very successful in doing so. As a result, tax revenue from property taxes has also been capped dramatically, and cities adapted by relying more heavily on taxing businesses. Hence the current situation where residents cost more in services than they bring in in property taxes, incentivizing cities to attract businesses and wiggle out of their responsibility to build more housing units.

A good illustration of this dynamic is “RHNA” process for allocating housing unit quotas to each city in California. it is a very conflictual process where city councils typically fight tooth and nail to get their quotas reduced. A recent example in Palo Alto: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/11/18/palo-alto-ass...

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

#402

Post by throwaway0a5e »

pydry wrote: post #346
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think NIMBYism only looks financially attractive because everyone who bought a square of land in a "city" since the 1970s or so and held for at least a decade has won big regardless of where. That doesn't mean that SF/SV isn't forgoing a lot of money in order to keep its NIMBY policy. Think about how much just the squares of land those single family homes and low rise buildings in SV are on would be worth if the SF…

Seriously? There are two types of people in SF: * People who have watched their property appreciate in value by 4-10x for basically doing... nothing. * People who have taken out an eye watering loan for well over a million dollars and are kept up at night by the idea that theyll owe a million dollar loan on a $750,000 home. Of course they're going to be conservative! Of course they're going to try to avoid anybody ro…

I guess they "care about property rights" in the same sense that everyone right of die hard communists cares about property rights but that's kind of like saying it's a warm day out because it's 200-something degrees above absolute zero.

If they care so much about property rights then why is it so hard for people there to do build on their own property that increase the value of that property?

Saying SF cares about property rights is like when the person who creates drama says they don't like drama.

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

#403

Post by zapita »

fortran77 wrote: post #388
pound wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not enough housing to meet demand means raising property values, which is beneficial for property owners without having to pay more taxes

I don't think every California home owner is some evil beast trying to keep others out. I support building more homes, and would love it if every single family detached home were automatically rezoned for two units on the parcel. But if it weren't for Prop 13, my home and my business would have been forced out by people moving in and paying too much money for homes next door to me. And "raising property values" only…

> But if it weren't for Prop 13, my home and my business would have been forced out by people moving in and paying too much money for homes next door to me.

Prop 13 does not solve this problem. It merely shields historical homeowners from it, while amplifying it for everyone else. Many people and businesses were forced out by speculation because of prop 13, but you and a small group of people were exempted so you don’t care.

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

#404

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

chillacy wrote: post #217
daniellarusso wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time is money. Why hold out and continuously interview potential tenants, when multiple people are literally asking you to take their money? Cash today is better than cash in a few days.

Yes this: in real estate investing this is called the vacancy rate and it eats into profits, sometimes significantly. Too much vacancy and you can’t cover the mortgage.

Unless the property is used for money laundering and it's fine to let it sit vacant for years.

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

#405

Post by fortran77 »

zapita wrote: post #403
fortran77 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think every California home owner is some evil beast trying to keep others out. I support building more homes, and would love it if every single family detached home were automatically rezoned for two units on the parcel. But if it weren't for Prop 13, my home and my business would have been forced out by people moving in and paying too much money for homes next door to me. And "raising property values" only…

> But if it weren't for Prop 13, my home and my business would have been forced out by people moving in and paying too much money for homes next door to me. Prop 13 does not solve this problem. It merely shields historical homeowners from it, while amplifying it for everyone else. Many people and businesses were forced out by speculation because of prop 13, but you and a small group of people were exempted so you don…

How dare you say "I don't care." Who are you to speculate about what I think about?

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

#406

Post by lostdog »

klipt wrote: post #295
bwest87 wrote: post #87

Oakland relaxed a lot of zoning, and permitting regulations about 5 years ago, and so now you're starting to really see production sky rocket. This article [0] mentions 2019 was had 15x more units completed than 2018. And 3x the total units from 2013-2018 combined . Anecdotally, I have several friends who've all moved to Oakland in the last year or so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and maybe, hope…

I think SF has already taken the hint that they can outsource their residents to Oakland. Residents strain the city budget via things like public schools. Businesses put money into the city budget via gross receipts taxes. SF wants the businesses but is very happy for residents to live elsewhere.

Anecdotally, I definitely came across more startups being located in the East Bay during my last job search. The founders already lived there, so they located the company there too.

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

#407

Post by randomdata »

ashtonkem wrote: post #318
randomdata wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

This doesn't pass the sniff test to me, at least for most COL levels. The only way that our household was able to reduce our food budget by eating out was to massively reduce quality in order to meet caloric needs. For roughly the equivalent quality of ingredients it was much cheaper for us to cook at home. And that's before we got a bigger house in a lower COL area with a chest freezer, which allows us to bank high…

> This doesn't pass the sniff test to me

Is that because, based on other comments here, you're already invested in a kitchen and, as a result, are forgetting to factor in that substantial cost? But that would be like if you owned your own silicon fab. You would no doubt also wonder how anyone could afford to buy their processors from Intel for hundreds of dollars when you can make your own for pennies. But you're not actually making them for pennies when you need to lay the capital upfront.

> Subjectively, I don't think that cooking at home is a "luxury".

The luxury isn't cooking. The luxury is being able to have a large room full of machinery dedicated to preparing meals for, on average, 2.5 people. These days, average people can barely afford living spaces as-is. That room adds to the cost substantially and is not likely to be recouped against eating out, unless eating out means eating at places that are selling entertainment alongside food.

It is true that the typical home kitchen can be more cost effective than food entertainment, but that's only because your home kitchen does not have to provide the entertainment portion. I do not see these being reasonably comparable when talking about the cost of prepared food. Once you add the cost of equivalent entertainment at home, the food entertainment restaurant looks pretty cheap again.

> Generally speaking only the lowest economic strata of the working poor depend heavily on fast & packaged food

Generally speaking, the poor have to buy used houses that already have kitchens for a lot of historical reasons. They have little opportunity to not become invested in the means of production, even when it is not ideal from a purely economic point of view. There are exceptions of places without kitchens, as mentioned earlier in the thread, but they are typically only found where land values are high, where the cost of keeping an existing kitchen is higher than repurposing it.

The wealthy, who are most likely to build new houses, that will one day be sold to the poor, want the luxury of having a kitchen even when it is not economically sound, and so the cycle continues.

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

#408

Post by random314 »

pound wrote: post #384
fortran77 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Prop 13 have to do with the fact that they're not building enough housing?

not enough housing to meet demand means raising property values, which is beneficial for property owners without having to pay more taxes

Are you in favor of a wealth tax in general, or only property taxes?

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

#409

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

bfirsh wrote: post #88
ozzyoli wrote: post #54

Don't ask, Don't get. Everyone I know who has asked for a discount has got the discount. After several months of the pandemic, and noticing the adjacent apartment being relisted by my landlord at a discount I emailed my landlord and asked if I could have my rent adjusted by the same discount. They said yes, if I committed to another years lease. Saving 5% of rent, at the cost of a one year commitment didn't seem like…

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.

It's still a better deal for them, sometimes. Decreasing the rent can decrease the implied value of the property, which can be problematic with financing of multi-family or commercial properties. Letting it sit, collecting no rent, won't hurt the property's value. Which is a strange loophole in the system.

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

#410

Post by abalone »

SllX wrote: post #13
NineStarPoint wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they ignore it, or are they using it for their own gain? For people who actually own property in San Fransisco, consider how enriched they have become by the obscenely rising rent/real estate prices. This comes along with them getting to keep their neighborhoods static instead of having to have a gigantic shadow erected across the street. Sure there are downsides, but you can always just sell and get our with a pr…

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…

You’re mischaracterizing the left-wing / long term renter position here. This is a very common tactic among local SF “YIMBYs” for some reason.

Progressives are not objecting solely on the basis of “character of the city” and in fact regularly poll in favor of development. What they fight for is affordable housing development.

Underlying this problem is a massive income disparity between techies and working class folks. Essentially the YIMBY position is if you build market rate housing for techies it will trickle down to the working class because “supply and demand didn’tyoutakeeconomics???” But Econ 101 has within it the concept of inelasticity that explains why increasing supply does not always move the price much under certain conditions. Like those of say a massive boom economy where tons of high income earners and speculators from around the world are waiting to snatch up new inventory. SF has had many experiences with such boom/bust cycles.

It’s a real estate developer’s dream and it helps us rich-ish techies (hence heavy YIMBY presence on HN) but it doesn’t necessarily translate into lowering rents for the working class. Thus, progressive supervisors are focused on public investment in affordable housing and taxing the rich to fund it, not just serving the needs of the wealthy.

YIMBYs absolutely hate this characterization because they like to claim they are on the side of the poor. But they are 100% aligned with and politically funded by the real estate industry, and that’s why they prefer to mischaracterize progressives who are actually prioritizing the needs of the most vulnerable.

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