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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

#561

Post by TedShiller »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #538
bluedino wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be even cheaper if they'd quit doing drugs.

Great! Clearly we both agree! Because the data shows that these facilities actual lead to more people quitting these addictions. Safe injection sites are always (to my knowledge) used as the start of a funnel to educational materials about rehab. As such long term wins are even better for the tax payer than what I said above. Especially when these people rejoin the workforce.

It's a perfect example of Biden Logic (TM): The best way to stop addicts from using drugs is to give them even more free drugs.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#562

Post by fakethenews2022 »

fakethenews2022 wrote: post #558
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your Democratic mayors and supervisors did that. You mean: the people who run the cities did that, who all happen to be incredibly Democratic. They also did it in San Diego, where I bet a Republican mayor was in power at the time (since you know, that was mostly true in the 80s, 90s, and 00s), but economics rather than political ideology was the main driver of the gentrification. > You have mental health institutio…

Wrong. It was passed before Reagan got into office. https://igeek.com/Reagan_emptied_mental_institutions_and_cau... So you don't assign any responsibility to the people who passed it? How quaint. Why even bother to vote? BTW, one of them is governor right now. If a Republican did it, vote them out of office too. In the SF case that I was referring to, it really was all Democrats. I was talking just about SF. Brown op…

I grew up in SF and I was astounded how a city that had trouble getting anything built managed to tear down a neighborhood in such short order. It was as if Brown was in cahoots with powerful developers and used his political power to push it through. Up went a bridge to his liking, down went the Embarcadero, up went a ballpark, and all the SROs went poof. Newsom goes and continues all the policies. Development after development.

Now twenty years later, you have Newsom as governor and angling for the Presidency. Not one peep about how his policies helped cause those problems.

Why was it so easy to build all those tech campuses and tech dorms yet so hard to build anywhere else in the city? People complain about NIMBY SF but where was the NIMBY there and then?

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#563

Post by fakethenews2022 »

vkou wrote: post #546
fakethenews2022 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Your Democratic mayors and supervisors did that. They tore down the SOMA SROs and replaced them with tech campuses without a plan of where to house those people. But it is multi-factorial. You have mental health institutions closed down a decade earlier as well. They should have been reformed instead of closed down.

This has happened across the entire country, in big towns and small, in red states and blue, (and, to a great extent, across the rest of the developed world). I assure you, the Democratic boogiemen are not responsible for such a broad international failure.

It wasn’t Democrat boogeyman. It was those people fronting for those interests. Those people in SF happened to be Democrats. And those Democrats are still fronting for those interests. I disagree with the fronting of interests and those Democrats were complicit and still are. If there is a Democrat who won’t front for those interests, I will gladly vote for them. In fact I have.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#564

Post by kyleee »

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.

has anyone moved US nuclear infrastructure to kubernetes yet?

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#565

Post by awad »

SECProto wrote: post #405
mochomocha wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I don't think SF is an exception here. The whole Bay Area is a NIMBY nest that looks frozen in time with infrastructure similar to what was in Europe in the 1950s. That's how my SF neighbor pays 30x less property tax than I do though, so there's that. Too much local democracy: "I don't want someone in Sacramento deciding for me" is how you end up with this expression of pure individualism, where Atherton res…

> The whole Bay Area is a NIMBY nest The whole every urban area of North America is a NIMBY nest. Pretty much every city is stuck with swathes of land zoned only for single family homes, with any density needing development agreements and land use change hearings and etc. Some cities are less geographically constrained (more sprawl is possible) or slower growing (the zoning changes can accommodate the growth) but the…

You can search through the New York City zoning map here and would be hard pressed to find areas zoned exclusively for single family homes....https://zola.planning.nyc.gov/

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#566

Post by fakethenews2022 »

fakethenews2022 wrote: post #534
inferiorhuman wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Muni is entirely owned and operated by the city and county of San Francisco and larger than both BART and CalTrain. Muni's got 150 trams, 27 cable cars, a handful of vintage trams, and however many hundred buses. CalTrain has 29 locomotives, BART aims to have 775 cars (around 75 trains).

If you are a visitor/commuter from the burbs, you most likely aren't riding MUNI much except for rare occasions or for short trips. Otherwise you are asking for a ridiculously long commute. They still pay the fare. People tend to drive if the trip is ridiculously long by transit. Go tell people how much SF residents pay for museums and how much they pay if they are low income. Compare that to people who don't live in…

BART and CalTrain have very few connection points with Muni. The CalTrain people would get off at 4th & King and a relatively small percentage would take the 3rd street streetcar.

The primary BART connection points are near the Embarcadero. Muni is so slow from the SOMA that it is often easier and faster to walk to/from those BART stops. Oftentimes, instead of MUNI, you saw people with scooters or bikes.

The people going to the other BART stops don't need to connect to MUNI. They could be working for the city and can just get right out and walk a few blocks.

The tech people I knew detested BART and completely ignored MUNI. It was Uber for them.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#567

Post by bluefirebrand »

lghh wrote: post #310
entropicdrifter wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's how you get the haves taking even greater advantage of the have-nots, to the point of injury, illness, and death in the name of slightly greater profits.

How? By letting them sleep inside? I don't understand.

By lowering acceptable living standards, the haves, aka the landlords, would be able to cheaply produce bottom of the barrel, barely acceptable living spaces and then since there is a housing crisis they could charge a premium for the have nots, aka the renters, in order to live in those shitty, barely acceptable homes.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#568

Post by HereIGoAgain »

silicon2401 wrote: post #80
ethbr0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe SF should relax the legal requirements of residential space, then? If they choose not to build sufficient housing... they can at least choose to use what they have. A windowless room with a community bathroom doesn't sound appealing, but at a certain price point it's better than nothing.

> Maybe X should relax the legal requirements of Y That's a slippery slope. Lots of legal requirements exist to protect someone. Legal requirements for windows are pretty reasonable to ensure people have at least some bare minimum of access to natural light in their home, rather than just living in a box.

This is SF (and a major US city) we are talking about.. A whole shitload of those "requirements" are meant to keep prop values up and exert total control over who and what gets built and when.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#569

Post by smcl »

pessimizer wrote: post #214
smcl wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if people were given the choice - particularly somewhere like San Francisco - they'd would much prefer to live in an apartment they could reasonably afford vs a detached home they could only afford if they travelled back in time 30+ years.

They're given the choice, which is overwhelmingly taken by 99.9% of the people in the world, of not living in SF.

Very clever, but there is more than one city in the USA and, in fact, the world. Current trend is for people to choose to move from towns and villages - where detached housing is the norm - to cities where apartments are more common.

Re: San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

#570

Post by picsao »

ptmcc wrote: post #8
bragr wrote: post #2

Give 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…

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