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Comment by innocentfelon | Hacker News Reader

It’s time we passed a moratorium on building articles like this that fail to address the real villain in this affair: vacant properties deliberately kept vacant, because tenants drive property values way down.

San Francisco bears way too much resemblance to an end-stage game of Monopoly, where one player owns almost all the properties, there’s no more paper money in the bank, and there are no more houses or hotels left in the box. That last $150 house on Marvin Gardens (the only misspelled property) isn’t getting built to generate a good ROI- it’s built to either ruin the competition when they stay there (driving them to the poor house- sound familiar?), or because there’s literally no more places to stash your wealth.

Tossing the game board sure sounds like the only good move left to make. That, or getting up to leave.

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Looking at data from the US Census [1], in 2017 the SF-Oakland-Hayward metro area had:

* a rental vacancy rate of 4.2% (8th lowest out of the 75 largest metro areas)

* a homeowner vacancy rate of 0.7% (11th lowest)

The rates were similar for the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area. It's possible there are issues with this data, or that it's not measuring the phenomenon you're discussing, but this certainly seems to suggest that SF doesn't have a ton of vacant properties.

[1] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/ann17ind.html

There needs to be a similar moratorium on this red herring of an argument.

Buildings off the rental market don’t count as vacant rentals. Failure to understand this normally subtle distinction retards the progress of this discussion.

If I said there are very few single women in SF because 98% of marriage-minded women are married, you’d see the flaw in the reasoning I’m talking about.

This is not a very effective way to convince bystanders that have not yet already come to a conclusion.

I'm left wondering what you mean, but also afraid to engage because you're pretty hostile to what seems to be some great data around what you're saying. But to address that data, you now say that clearly what we thought you were saying was not what you meant, and that we should be disallowed from bringing up data?

But at the risk that I'm continuing to misunderstand what you're saying, could you point out an example of a building that should be for rent but that is vacant instead, as an example so that we can understand you?

What mechanism do you suggest that can find such buildings and compel them to become rented?

Are you suggesting something like building on vacant land or underutilized land (the YIMBY position), or just existing buildings?

  I'm left wondering what you mean,

As you can tell from the fact the rental vacancy rate is 4.2%, the homeowner vacancy rate is 0.7%, and the gross vacancy rate is higher than either at 6.0%, there are vacant properties that don't fall into either rental or homeowner.

For example properties for occasional use, properties empty for repairs or renovation, those used as offices or storage, guest houses and AirBnB properties, properties where the owner hasn't decided what to do, and so on.

If you look at [1] (which sadly doesn't provide breakdowns by individual metropolitan area) you'll find that inside US metropolitan statistical areas, 2.4% of properties are vacant but for rent; while 4.8% of properties are "Held off market"

In other words, for every one vacant rental home, there are two homes that aren't on the rental or sale market.

[1] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/q218ind.html Table 10. Percent Distribution by Type of Vacant by Metro/Nonmetro Area [XLSX - 375 KB]

Thank you, that explains the data. I'm not following innocentfelon's point though, because it doesn't look like that can be the real villain here.

SF's population has increased 10% since 2010, and I don't know how many people have been priced out, but it's probably at least on that order of magnitude. Held off existing properties don't make much of a dent into that delta, and it's unclear how to lower them even more if they're already so low. It's also unclear why it shouldn't be allowed to be brought up.

This latest batch of census numbers still hinges on the subset of structures considered to be rental housing or owner-occupied housing.

And I believe the census goes by what the property owner claims. “My 120-unit condo building with nobody living in it? Yeah, that’s not housing, Ms. census taker.” “Ok.”

And even that doesn’t include industrial, commercial, and office properties that should be converted to housing in response to fair market demand, artificially withheld to make them more liquid as stores of value. The town is full of these and few people notice because they’re not housing and they’re not for rent.

Is there a 120 unit condo building in SF that's being held off the market? Has a person lied to the census taker that's it's not housing? These seem like important accusations and if true I'd be as upset as you are, but I certainly haven't seen that.

As for commercial space that's not housing, that's up to the city government to change, and the city government and resients who show up to planning meetings oppose that sort of rezoning. This being a conscious action of owners of industrial and commercial property. Are commercial sites more valuable than residential right now in SF? What sort of use brings these owners more gain than renting our properties that they are legally allowed to rent?

Remember the Ghost Ship fire? The proprietors were charged with involuntary manslaughter for using a warehouse as housing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Oakland_warehouse_fire

I guess I'm just very confused about what you consider to be very obvious. I can't see evidence of people hoarding buildings that could be used for housing. I do see SF residents preventing more buildings being used for housing, and preventing the building of more housing on infill sites.

I don’t have a horse in this fight, but: In ordinary speech, the word “vacant” is generally synonymous with “empty”, and makes no implication about market status. You use the word the same way above, actually. So it’s lame to characterize that “we thought you were saying” vacancies in the politically defined sense of some not-yet-linked data.

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