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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

#501

Post by fakethenews2022 »

fakethenews2022 wrote: post #493
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has a lot of people living in subbasements ("ant tribe", not just the immediate floor before ground, but the 3rd or 4th floor below ground). No egress, crappy ventilation (mold is a huge problem), but its cheap. Also, a lot of restaurants in Beijing have their staff sleeping out in their dining room after they close up as a form of worker dorms (people also sleep in their shops, which is why they cover the wind…

My opinion is that the problem with SF isn’t as much housing. It is more with mental health and drug addiction. You do know where many immigrants live right? It isn’t so much on the streets. It is 16 packed into a single apartment. So the mechanisms people talk about already exist. It is that the homeless can’t work because of mental or social issues that compound with drug abuse. You need to fix the mental issues, s…

We can just measure this. What percentage of people we give just housing to get off their feet after say a year or two? What percentage of people we allow to shoot up in city approved areas go clean after a year or two? From what I have read, it is a percentage in the low single digits.

We are perpetuating a permanent dependent underclass along with a bureaucracy that is incentivized to maintain the class to maintain their power.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#502

Post by [deleted] »

Apocryphon wrote: post #458
nebula8804 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are living The American Dream that Homer Simpson made us all aspire to. It may not last but at least they were fortunate enough to experience it for now. (I wanna be there :/ )

Homer was kind of a nuclear reactor SRE if you think about it.

[deleted]

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#503

Post by spookthesunset »

Apocryphon wrote: post #198
spookthesunset wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. The pendulum is gonna swing back, it's just a matter of time. Yes there will be more remote-first companies but we will see how that pans out over 5 or so years. There is a hell of a lot more to running a tech company than just writing code. Code writing can easily be done from home but there is a lot of other roles where it isn't as easy. Plus, are people really gonna just hunker down in isolation? Ar…

What if, as a compromise, the first step is we get rid of open offices. That would go a long way towards getting rid of a near-universal complaint (at least on HN) about the pre-disease status quo, which WFH has freed tech workers from for a while. > It's kinda funny to me how so many arguments for WFH are centered around the individuals themselves. Many of those individuals may have families who they want to be arou…

> And less work commuting is inherently better for the environment.

Urban sprawl caused by everybody living in remote single family houses is bad for the environment too. I mean why would you live in a tiny apartment and zoom into work all day?

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#504

Post by __derek__ »

ryanSrich wrote: post #18
ryandrake wrote: post #6

Residential crash is potentially already upon us, at least in the outskirts (East Bay for me). We've had our house on the market for over a month now, and nobody else in the neighborhood is selling either. Big changes from only 3 months ago, when sellers were closing in days.

Turns out prices have to go down when the fed doubles rates. By my math, a 30% correction is needed to make up the difference in terms of monthly affordability - meaning a $500k house at 6% is the same as a $750k house at 3%.

Nobody's going to accept $500k to sell a house after thinking it was worth $750k, though, especially:

1. After 9% inflation

2. With a 3. If it would mean realizing a loss

4. When they can rent it for more than their PITI

Prices do not have to go anywhere.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#505

Post by lotsofpulp »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #54
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that a "crash" isn't really a "crash" if it comes after a 50% increase in 2 years. Anything short of a 20% correction is simply a reversion. If prices shot up 100% in 1 year, and then were down 3% in two months - no one would be talking about a crash.

I generally have the same rule of thumb; not a crash until down 50% from peak. But housing is leveraged. It’s not like stock where few people have margin accounts, a 20% reversion sends most people who bought recently underwater. Plus the size of the real estate market is much bigger than the stock market. The flow-on reverse wealth effect will feel like a stock crash to many people.

>a 20% reversion sends most people who bought recently underwater.

Does this matter as long as the owners can pay the mortgage?

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#506

Post by acchow »

Longlius wrote: post #101
rapind wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A windowless room with a community bathroom doesn't sound appealing, but at a certain price point it's better than nothing. You make this legal and tomorrow every RE developer stops putting in windows.

Then put restrictions on it - pass a law that allows you to convert commercial to residential during X number of years and for that converted commercial to have slightly laxer requirements than standard residential housing. Don't allow new residential construction to skirt the regulations and put a time limit on the law to keep property developers from simply building commercial with the off-chance of being able to c…

If only making laws was as simple as adding if statements in computer programs...

In the real world, you have millions of agents try to game every law and bend it into their advantage in some way.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#507

Post by buscoquadnary »

killerdhmo wrote: post #485
buscoquadnary wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ... Every time I see something like this I will point out that during the anti-police movement that happened a while back, many police started reducing their activity either because they were told to, because prosecutes would refuse to prosecute, or because they didn't want to be the…

That... is literally their job. if they are unable or unwilling to do so, maybe they should find another profession. There are countless stories on reddit of police officers actively witnessing crime taking place and doing nothing about it. Blaming it on the DA or whatever perceived political backlash they might get is akin to EMTs not taking patients because a doctor might not be able to save them.

It's a bit of a difference, but many of them are which is exacerbating the problems is that everyone who can in some of these places are leaving for other jobs.

But the difference between the EMT scenario is that there is that there is a potential that by getting involved you may not go home to see your family that night. In addition if you get involved and something goes wrong, you're going to be the next police officer on the news for "police brutality" and the rest of your life you'll forever be in fear of your life even if you did everything right. Furthermore the job of the police is not to protect citizens or stop crimes the supreme court has ruled as much, the police are an investigative force.

With the DA angle makes it even worse, because you spend the time and effort to arrest somebody and then they are back on the street a day later, what's the point in the first place. To put it other terms let's imagine for a second every day your boss took all the code you wrote and deleted it all, deleted all the backups and everything else, are you going to continue putting your best effort into coding, are you going to make sure the code compiles and the unit tests past? No you're going to do just enough to not get fired.

We can argue it shouldn't be that way but that is the reality of the situation, it turns out when you demonize a large group of people simply because they do their job, and criticize all of them as inhuman monsters and tell people that every single one of them is a bad person they start to lose some motivation.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#508

Post by inferiorhuman »

abeppu wrote: post #467
inferiorhuman wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This data is several years old, but in a ranking of large American cities by budget per citizen That is an incredibly disingenuous metric and it's not surprising at all that DC and SF are at the top of the list. Washington DC is a quasi-state masquerading as a city and San Francisco is a consolidated city and county. The budgets of those two cities encompass things that are externalized in other cities.

Ok, but San Francisco also seems to be spending a lot more per person than any other consolidated city and county, so while that may explain part of SF's budget, it doesn't seem like a complete explanation. In that list, the next consolidated city/county is Honolulu, and SF was at that point spending close to 50% more per person. (I think that specific example also suggests that SF's spending is not just because loca…

First off – nobody, not even me, is claiming that San Francisco spends a small amount of money. However you're not comparing like for like here. The San Francisco expenditures are a combination of factors including high cost of living, high level of infrastructure and social services, and state funding. Honolulu is expensive mainly because of the Jones Act, not because they're providing a particularly high level of services. If you check out Ballotpedia you'll see that the states chip in a much smaller portion of the expenditures in San Francisco and New York than they do in the other consolidated cities.

On that list Philly comes close with transit but SF and NY are far, far more comprehensive. Muni's goal is that every SF resident is within a quarter mile of a stop that's served for something like 18 hours a day. Honolulu? lol. Denver has about the same number of library branches as San Francisco and a tenth the number of items in circulation. San Francisco PUC (which oversees water distribution and some power generation/distribution) is part of the city government, Denver Water is not. Two of the most prominent museums in San Francisco are owned by the city and run in a public-private partnership. The San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center is publicly owned (and one of the largest in the nation). Meanwhile Denver's opera and museums are an entirely private affairs. San Francisco's botanical gardens are owned by the city and county, Denver's are owned and operated by a non-profit.

It costs more to do more, and I'd venture to guess most residents prefer it that way. It's not all hurr durr homeless people taxes poop bad big government scary yahtzee.

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

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#509

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

effingwewt wrote: post #478
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Population and income shocks hit poor neighborhoods first Oakland has a Median HH Income of $80k - which is 20% higher than the US median HH income, and above median for California. Oakland as a whole is definitely not poor.

The problem with median income is income inequality far outpacing inflation. You can have most of a city making minimum wage (~30k pre-tax), but enough CEO's and mil/billionaires to completely skew the medium far higher than it should be. We need to look at income without the high outliers to get a real sense of the population. This is why the shocks always hit the poor first- they are the real representation of the…

You can look at HH income by decile.

SF: https://statisticalatlas.com/place/California/San-Francisco/...

Oakland: https://statisticalatlas.com/place/California/Oakland/Househ...

Considering rents - I would imagine you are FAR worse off in the bottom 20% in SF than Oakland.

The income for the bottom 20% is 30% higher in SF.

Median rent in SF is $4k. It's 42% higher than rent in Oakland at $2.8k

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#510

Post by inferiorhuman »

woodruffw wrote: post #322
inferiorhuman wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20,000 for a pilot trash can is pretty ridiculous, however. $20,000 was for a one off (well, each of the three custom designs cost about that much) garbage can. The off-the-shelf models cost between $600 and $2,800 and the city budgeted no more than $3,000 per can. https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/for-a-trash-can-in-san...

Not to press this point too hard, but "no more than $3,000 per can" is still ridiculous. They're $175 apiece here[1]. I can understand spending $20,000 (or even $60,000) on the pilot designs . But TFA makes it sound like the city was billed $20,000 just to fabricate it. Edit: Updated the link to a better article. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-04/new-york-...

The VOA article seems to me to imply that the whole development cost was $20,000.

  It is proving to be a costly project. One of the trash cans under consideration
  cost more than $20,000 and took four years to make.
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