Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, this is me reaching back aways in memory. Walls with plumbing through them are held to different standards to other walls. Walls with plumbing use 2 by 6s. Builders and architects try to optimize by making as few walls as possible walls with plumbing because they are more expensive. Your regular walls use 2 by 4s. So yes, some walls have plumbing running through them, but not all. Any architect and contractor wil…
I've never seen a wall framed with 2x6s because it had plumbing in it. It's all 2x4 regardless, here—you almost never see a 2x6 wall. Is that a California thing?
San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
431–440 of 622 posts
Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
#432Earlier 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.
While I do get your point, it also has been generally true, for most modern cities for a long time (excluding short term fluctuations). Prices will go up as, as long as city is desirable to live in.
It holds true, long as cities don't collapse, which policies that lead to increasing prices of housing also can contribute to, by making city not desirable to live in.
Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cities should have capped populations for efficiency. There has to be high income, medium income and low income housing ratio to have a balanced and economically diverse population. We just have to build another city with great infrastructure and network it to other cities when we have an influx of population due to jobs or organic population growth. It’s like how they say.. When there is a surfeit of sardines, we bu…
> high density isn’t sustainable On almost every measure, high-density housing is less energy and resource intensive. > cities should have capped populations for efficiency This is rationing. China is trying it. Agglomeration effects are real, so this will always turn into a political exercise around allocating people to more and less desirable places, and thereby pruning their opportunity set.
Let us take water. California is a desert. Water is becoming more and more expensive. We are certainly rationing water per person by increasing density.
The measure of ‘sustainability’ is here is to restrict consumption. China has a more sustainable rationing policy when it comes to high density because of their billion plus population. It doesn’t apply to America. Rationing in California is just out of spite and political clickbait because we insist on measures like housing the homeless in the overcrowded Bay Area.
Meanwhile there is abundant water in the mid west. Are they less sustainable or living in less abundance because they don’t engage in high density sustainable philosophy?
Some resources are fixed and at that point it’s a numbers game. A cake can be distributed amongst 10 people or between 100. Getting a sliver of cake instead of slice of cake is not sustainable.
It is the very definition of rationing by mandate when high density becomes mandatory housing policy. It is also artificial and installed on purpose to manufacture wider and artificial housing affordability.
As in: A tech worker drawing 200k cannot afford a home in the Bay Area. Because we want to build sustainable and affordable homes for minimum wage workers that the builder passes on to market rate home buyers in order to subsidize said affordable home. Sustainability doesn’t figure anywhere and is just greenwashing.
Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
Californians and the like are moving to Idaho, so the COL there will gradually increase towards parity. And perhaps Arkansas eventually? https://www.camdenarknews.com/news/2022/aug/31/will-climate-...
As someone who moved to ID because I have in laws in the area I can tell you it is a terrible place, no one should move here, the locals are rude and crude, it is freezing 8 months out of the year. Everyone here is an avid Trump supporter and openly racist. They drive big pickup trucks everywhere. The mountains are too far away and horrible, everything here is terrible in every way no one should move here the entire…
Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
#435The 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…
Yes there's drug use and filth everywhere. So understand this: they were not special snowflakes, got traumas ripped into them or badly educated or coerced into using drugs. Or, or, or, evicted. Those guys are evicted, you're sneering on them because they couldn't make that landlord totally pleased at the same time as his best friend the boss was totally pleased. Dude fucking impossible rent, like at Stanford economics class they quote $1200, no it's $4000, who knows. Like if the landlord who is a poker player essentially detects you being over a barrel who knows. Like I was talking to an activist this conversation flipped her from NIMBY to YIMBY, I told her look in Santiago there's basically no enforcement of zoning in many places, so people build really high, $200 rent in a good location. She figured they only built housing for rich people in SF, true but then those rich people move to that housing leaving behind empty housing less rich people move into, who leave behind less expensive housing, and so on. Hermit crabs. But not $4000 rent.
So also those people are wretched, which you are not. Some are absurd but they suffer for their drug use not in the future every week. And their public suffering is a service to the landlord in his negotiations which he pays absolutely nothing to them for, I was telling Jonathan Ramos for being wretched on the sidewalk for everybody to treat you like you're invisible, that coercion is worth $3000 a month to the landlord rather than getting bargained down, put in an auction, having to compete against a new building going up right next door (in some neighborhoods there's less of that), the evicteds are valuable to the landlord. Landlord should pay a tax on rent to compensate them for breathing fear into tenants. Like oh my god, if I lose my job I'll get evicted, then I'll get raped! Gasp! Yeah dude people suffering, and from all over America SF takes them all in, because they can survive at night in winter there. You ever worked in construction? You ever stopped a crime? I've stopped 31, no losses, in SF in particular in Chinatown next to the Mission where all those strap-ups do all their advertising on everything about their super-cool credit cards, and advertising platforms. Yes it's cool, no it's not cool.
It is super expensive. Landlord's fault really. And by now the fundamental economics of the city is messed up, though there's plenty of 4 story buildings in place of 60 story buildings.
And you know? Twitter when it was a respectable business (sort of they asked for homework, make them a whole app) stedda censoring a sitting president, no matter what he said, they opened an office in the Tenderloin. I went near there, I think to the Square office which for convenience was adjacent. Dude rough neighborhood, but you gotta let the junkie get something, somewhere, like crack is due to flourine overdose, that's why there was a crack epidemic in America and not elsewhere, and black those hit hardest are very sensitive to flourine. They think it tastes like shit, so that's why they buy bottled water always--an apparently false pejorative stereotype that's true and positive--that's why they don't have every single one of their kids with some psychiatric birth defect. It's the most toxic thing there is, more than plutonium. Corrodes everything, gold even. And it causes sugar cravings, so even for the purpose of better teeth it's counterproductive. That's why there's so many busted fat people in America and not Europe, there's running water in Europe in America? Only brine. Salted on purpose, poisoned hard. Good for your teeth yeah, only reacts with teeth, no other cell, and 97% of the periodic table, literally only 3 molecules that don't react to it in the whole universe.
Eh, flag for human review. Guess it's too strong, this subject. Maybe I'm a little pissed. Must be the salt.
Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Oh dear God, here we go...
Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
#437Trivia note: there are certain words that only appear in headlines. Like "brace" to mean "prepare." (Although I think that one might occasionally show up in normal text.) What else? "eye" as a verb. ("Supervisors eye relaxing building codes")
https://xkcd.com/2584/ a few delightful examples.
https://variety.com/1935/film/news/sticks-nix-hick-pix-11179...
Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
#438The 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.
Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
#439"The root of this—of course—is the pandemic and the way that it has completely transformed work patterns in the city.." And, of course, insane delusional liberal policies that allow degradation of quality of life, violence and property crime, drugs, filthy streets, etc. The media never wants to address the elephant in the room.
Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash
#440Give 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…
Most offices have physical layouts that make conversion to residential difficult to impossible. Big things like lots of interior square footage without windows and plumbing only to a few central locations. And while some or even most of this is fixable, major renovations are a ton of cost and effort to convert them to something that will still be expensive and weird, if even possible to meet the legal requirements of…