Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
wsj.com
wsj.com
1) All three of the roommates that I had are choosing to leave either permanently or temporarily.
2) A friend who works for google who is going on a 6 month road trip in a camper van
3) A friend who is moving to Santa Cruz just to be closer to surf while we are remote
4) A friend who moved home to Australia because of how the US is handling the virus.
5) A friend who is going month to month in different cities, staying in Airbnbs, and still paying less for housing then his one bedroom in the bay area
6) A friend who moved to Austin to live with her sister
What I am seeing here is very clear also. The SIP order has removed many of the greatest parts of SF, the food, the bars, the culture, the density to be able to go anywhere and see your friends easily, and whats left are many of the problems that the city has, trash, homelessness, and exorbitant housing prices.
OP didn't say that. They said that their anecdotal experience matches the argument in the article. Somehow you decided not only to argue with OP on this point, but also to argue about the way OP's roommates and friends decided to handle remote work (from taking a road-trip to moving back home to Australia). What's your reasoning for that?
That said, I personally think now is a great time to get out into nature and travel more locally pending the regulations in your area(s).
(the friend travelling from city to city and staying in Airbnbs sounds considerably worse to me, though)
I am still considering if I should be like your friend #4 and go back to eastern Canada to wait out this disastrous response in the US. If only winter wasn't coming, I would have probably already left but my lease is only ending at the end of September.
similar on Peninsula - a neighbor couple, renters, he is at google, went back to their country for 6 month. Upon coming back they're planning to buy a house here.
About half of the tech people I know have moved out. Of those about half have left permanently, the other half are on the fence depending on long term WFH ability / if the city is able to get the quality of life issues under control / plus a lot of complaints about taxes.
-In my 6 unit building in Nob Hill (5 of which are owner occupied). 3 units including myself have moved out permanently. 1x to Austin. 1x to Palm Springs. 1x to East Bay. -5 of my 6 best friends in rent controlled units have moved out. Mostly to other cities in California. In 10 years living in SF I've never seen people willingly give up rent controlled units like this. -Other friends that were looking to move to SF that have cancelled those plans. In particular employees at large companies that were impacted by layoffs (Uber).
What are these quality of life issues, and how have other cities avoided them?
With unemployment rising and poor benefits, civil unrest, and shitty containment policies; I’m thinking about riding the rest of this out back in Canada so we don’t get robbed/assaulted.
Better come home quick. Canada is getting more than a little afraid of how badly the US is handling the covid thing. Politeness only goes so far.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53742684
"While the border closure has had significant economic and personal repercussions for the millions of people that live along it or have loved ones on the other side, the vast majority of Canadians want it to stay shut."
Remember when trump spoke of closing off new york state? Canada has actually done something similar.
https://www.gov.nl.ca/covid-19/individuals-and-households/tr...
>>When entering Newfoundland and Labrador, visitors will be required to produce two pieces of government issued identification to verify that they are a permanent resident in one of the Atlantic Provinces. One piece of identification must include a home address.
Not as much as it was. De Blasio has been an unmitigated disaster, and NYC is rapidly approaching 90s-level (if not 70s-level) squalor. Only time will tell if the voters will throw him out and elect someone who can effectively manage the city government, or double down on failure.
That's true in other cities too. But if you can't take advantage of the facilities a city has to offer, why pay $4,000/month rent to live there during the pandemic when you could pay less than half of that somewhere else?
- Homeless issues. Mentally ill people pissing and defecating on the sidewalks in every significant public space.
- Vehicle vandalism is extremely common and unchecked by police.
- Extremely high income taxes with no perceivable difference in government-provided services.
- Property tax law that advantages long-term owners over young people trying to buy at today's inflated prices.
COVID added some new ones:
- Extremely high pre-COVID rents meant many adults were living in roommate situations that seem a lot less acceptable when your health is tied to the willingness of everyone in your unit to behave responsibly.
- Bars and restaurants that made the city attractive for many are now closed
- Public transit in crisis and may no longer meet your needs
I believe the problem is more nuanced. I spoke with a retired police officer, and he said, "we can only give them a citation, and they [the vandals] know that, that they're gonna be out the same day."
In other words, the law is the problem, not the police.
The police prioritize protecting the property rights of large landowners, first and always. Don’t buy their excuses.
Even in Austin, Texas is a backwards, overtly racist, pro-big business anti-small business state that hates “freedom” unless it has to do with guns or corporate protections.
By the way, we have so many homeless because other republican heavy cities ship them here. Google ‘Haruka Weiser’ for a pretty normal example of a cop from a small town picking up a mentally unstable transient and dropping them off in downtown Austin a couple of blocks near the university.
I am glad to see that Austin has become more progressive in some ways, but being completely ineffectual in how we care for members of our community while enabling the worse consequences of untreated mental illness and homelessness isn't something to be happy about. The key factor here is "untreated". There are some cities in the US that are actually working in a positive direction to help the homeless communities in their area to improve their lives, rather than just giving them a free pass out of doors.
Homelessness is a major problem all across America, and it's also a very complex problem. There are no easy fixes, but there are some obvious things which make the conditions and problem worse. It'd be great if there were easy fixes, but the reality is that it's very difficult to help people unless they want to be helped, and there's very real human rights considerations to forcing people into mental health or addiction treatments. Our country tried that at one point too, and it also didn't end well.
In fact the mental health insttutions system of the 70's and earlier was very successful from what I've read about. It was the victim of a mass campaign of what we today would call "fake news" from activists. The result is the crisis you have today, where people that NEED help, even if they are incapable of understanding and consenting to it, can't get it and are left to fend for themselves on the streets.
Once we do have the report, even if they do get caught, nothing happens. Many months of reports and multiple trips to the courthouse and we can MAYBE get a stay away order. Usually before that point, the store management has shuffled around enough that the person handling the legal legwork has moved on.
BINGO! Isn't there a really, really old saying about not crapping where you sleep?
Why would anyone vote for the incumbents in SF’s next elections is beyond me.
The current mayor London Breed has been doing good work, her handling of the covid-19 crisis in particular has been excellent. The problem is that most supervisors hate her and block her every step of the way.
And to add to the roommate problem, I think a lot of people in sf led lives predicated on not spending that much time in their tiny housing. All of a sudden with everyone all home all the time... oof. You really need a separate office for each person so you're not spending 95% of your life in your bedroom. That's pretty unaffordable for most of the city.
My company bit the bullet and allowed permanent remote. Fifteen percent of our employees have already left sf. I suspect this will accelerate as leases expire.
Also, the stunning incompetence of sf government has led to property prices that are just stunning. A coworker bought a nice condo -- obviously elsewhere -- for less money than he was paying to have two roommates in sf. Getting out from under the ridiculous cost of living here leads to such a stark change in quality of life elsewhere.
By contrast, Seattle has been building to keep up with demand and has been able to manage prices much more effectively. We could have had a Tokyo of the West. Instead, we're left with an emptying shell of a self-agrandizing suburb.
Do you live in Seattle? Because that's not what anyone who lives here who is not making a tech salary thinks.
https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-seattle-rent-tren...
https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...
Maybe I was too much on the dropping side but the article says prices had been booming like you said for a decade and 10k units were filled and then prices stabilized.
(Full disclosure: I also own property in SF, but am in faor of all sorts of new housing, even that which will lower my home's value.)
Edit: Thanks for supporting housing even against your financial interests. I’m on the same boat (across the bay). In my case I just want to live somewhere walkable without breaking the bank.
I'm not sure I'd call it incompetence though, they are very motivated to keep existing landowners happy. Higher prices and fewer neighbors to deal with is an easy way to do that.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/It-st...
"Ronen fought to prevent the construction of a 75-unit building on the site of a laundromat. She argued that an environmental review of the building did not consider the impact of a shadow on a nearby schoolyard, even though an environmental review conducted by officials at the San Francisco Planning Department showed that the new construction, including its shadow, would not have an adverse impact on children at the schoolyard.]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Ronen
Starting at 7:41 in this video an interview with the same supervisor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI&t=547s
The tax breaks that she is referring to were roughly $10mm/year. https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-state/twitter...
The city's budget increased by nearly $6bn during the time the tax breaks were active (largely fueled by the growth from tech boom).
Who are the vandals? Why are they vandalizing? Are they related to the homeless problem?
Income/Property Taxes: Vote
Unless you're practically retired, this is not a real issue given the COVID mortality profile. The sort of people who have flatmates tend to be younger, so the idea that COVID means nobody can or should have flatmates anymore isn't backed by any sort of medical reality.
But there does seem to be an issue here with the type of people who live in SF not seeming to perceive the risks around COVID correctly. Why is Google keeping their offices closed until 2021? All you have to do is look at the stats or the history of epidemics to realise that this doesn't make sense, especially for a workforce as famously young as Google's.
It certainly is if you are one of those odd individuals whose concern for your health involves more than just near-term mortality.
But establishing an impregnable firewall is impossible, and long as the boundary between groups is porous, a higher infection rate among the young and healthy will increase the infection rate among the vulnerable, and hence the death rate.
I lived in Hayes Valley, across Warby Parker, last year and our electricity went out 3-4 times for the whole night. We paid our bills on time.
They haven't. But other cities have handled some quality of life issues differently, or better, or in some cases worse.
It's all cyclical. New York was a great place to be in the 60's, largely due to quality of life. New York in the 70's was a hellhole, largely due to quality of life. These things ebb and flow in every city. It's just SFO's turn to be on the fuzzy end of the lollipop. It'll come back.
I was active in SF housing politics when I lived there for 8 years, and my conclusion is that SF and most other US cities incompetent local governments (SF’s especially) are stuck in a mindset where they still repeatedly declare that they’re “great!” despite their blatantly subpar infrastructure and the rampant, systematic trampling of their own citizens human rights. Perhaps it is great for the elderly voters who never leave their homes in the burbs and see the “undesirables”.
They make excuses about how US culture makes tried and true solutions in other cities impossible to implement (So... are they saying US culture is just inferior?), and that things will get better just around the corner (when it costs 10x more and takes 10x longer to make any updates to the built infrastructure in US cities than anywhere else, and SF itself has built virtually nothing in the last 40 years).
Maybe it will, but I decided for myself that I’m not willing to wait around for it, and chose one of the countless cities in the world that in fact does do better.
Allowing construction will alleviate pressure on the system as a whole, but, perhaps due to a failure of my imagination, I'm not seeing ways in which it won't cost something. I think it's worth it, mind you, I'm just not seeing how to make it $0.
In 2020 SF, even the upper middle class struggle to pay for housing. If you, as a first step, allow the housing stock to double, twice as many people can afford to live in the city, and life in SF becomes much more accessible.
Sure, there will always be people out of luck needing some assistance. But it should dwindle down to a smaller core when there are places to live.
Personally, I don't believe in government run housing. It's better to help people with rent money etc. But of course, none of this will ever happen in SF, so my opinions don't matter.
What about the fact that, nation-wide, many Americans don't have access to good jobs? Especially people without college degrees, but not even limited to that. This is an economy-wide problem. The federal government could probably do something to better address that than a city government.
How about that we generally fail at mental health care, or health care in general? The former is clearly applicable to many homeless folks who are visibly suffering. The latter is a huge cost for many people, drives many personal bankruptcies, etc.
But I also place a lot of blame on state policies too - CA Prop 13 is a cancer on the whole state, incentivizing land owners to fight tooth and nail to prevent progress. I'm glad that Scott Wiener got elected, though, as he's been making solid progress at the state level to rectify these issues.
The roots of these problems are not broadly federal in my opinion and, while they certainly can help, there's a lot of work to do at the city and state level that are achievable with a small number of dedicated people - if only they cared.
Neither would I just blame the sorry state of US cities on inadequate mental health care - while healthcare broadly certainly should be better, I'm in Japan where mental health awareness is relatively speaking in the stone age compared to SF, and that hasn't resulted in the level of human tragedy you experience viscerally by existing for 5 minutes in any of the US's major metropolises. Part of the reason for that is I can get my own apartment without roommates 15 minutes from the center of Tokyo for $600/mo, largely because the local government here actually does things to make it livable (and it's not just here, it's practically everywhere besides US cities).
Hong Kong was (probably still is for now) a world class city for the rich and the free and now is on path to become a hell-hole for both.
Cities swing through a pendulum of up and down. SF might be going to ruins but it'll be back. It might have to reach rock-bottom first before re-inventing itself though.
That said, the city does not have visible homeless or crime problems of most large US cities, partly because you can legally get a coffin for $300/month.
Why not? Are there support systems to give people shelter and reduce the need for crimes of desperation?
> Tokyo could be the rare example of a once expensive city that successfully managed the difficult political process of removing planning restrictions in order to achieve affordable housing.
They didn't achieve affordable housing as a result of a clean slate. In fact housing in Tokyo was insanely expensive during the 80s. It wasn't until zoning restrictions were changed in the 90s that prices came back down. It's about the laws, not about having to contend with old buildings.
I don't know what your profession or situation is, but if you can line up a job you can pretty easily get a work visa (it's much less binding than US work visas). Japanese corporations are known to have pretty brutal work culture so that's something you ought to be aware of when searching, if you seriously pursue it. Hope it's interesting food for thought :)
I have no doubt there are racists here, especially in the rural areas. But I also have no doubt that the same holds true for places like California and Washington. You may be keeping yourself from experiencing areas of the country that you may love and would love you back.
Did your plane ride involve time travel to the 1970's?
Because of the mild weather and culture, SF is somewhat of a destination for the homeless which is less of an issue, but it wasn’t clear that the city was doing nearly enough to address the filth and human tragedy plaguing the streets.
It is also so expensive that bars and restaurants (before covid) had a hard time hiring because working at an SF restaurant meant either living in squalor packed in somewhere or living extremely far away and commuting. Thus everything opened late and closed early. The food scene was overrated, most of the artists left for the east bay or LA, and the charming things about the city seemed like they were only still there because of fantasy or stubborn inertia.
Other cities have room and willingness to build or the courage to restrict business growth if not willing to expand residential growth. People and businesses are much more willing to leave other cities, and that supply/demand elasticity makes problems fix themselves, but other cities don’t have the romanticism/reality disconnect in nearly the same way.
Whether something is too expensive is not just a function of whether you can afford it. It’s a question of whether it’s worth it at the price being offered. You make make that same conflicting point.
The affluent would simply be first movers in this type of situation as many do not need to time their exits with their leases ending. The cash poor, yet high income tech workers will be the next mass exodus.
If you think SF is a shell of a city now, just wait till 6 months from now.
If you consider a post-covid world 5 years from now, do you think that SF with it's museums, bars, restaurants, and proximity to nature will be an unattractive place to live?
Do you think that remote-first/remote-only companies where the majority of employees are outside of the bay area will be as competitive with startups which follow a more traditional model in silicon valley?
Both are things I wouldn't bet on. This is a blip. It could be a major blip, but it's a blip nonetheless and those who are betting in the complete other direction are likely to get burned.
The San Francisco of today is very different from 10 or 20 years ago, and will be very different 10 years from now. This is recoverable, sure, but its not guaranteed, and its absolutely a change of course for this city and others.
The outdoor dining has been a great addition and it looks like it might become permanent [1], which would be a big plus for the city.
There's also a lot more people biking now and I'm hopeful that it will help shape future legislation to make the city even more bike friendly. (I went to 4 different bike shops around me and they were all sold out).
https://ny.eater.com/2020/8/3/21352532/outdoor-dining-extend...
Do bikes have the largest amount of unmentioned externalities of any form of transport?
A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction. At reasonable scale, bikes are at least a 100% -> 10% reduction in all mentioned 'externalities' or should we say resource use, or 10x capacity for same resources, except for road size at maybe 3x, but still more than 10x on cost.
Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit.
To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1]. Half as many cars wouldn't fit, even if they covered every cm of the image.
[1] https://biketoeverything.com/2018/12/18/bicycle-infrastructu...
You're missing the part I replied to which was about bikes being usable 11 months of the year. If you need all the car infrastructure for 1 month, plus the bike infrastructure, that makes it overall worse, not better.
But discard that, if biking is a 60% reduction, then a walking+train world would be way more.
Your link talks of a train station building a 12,500 bike-parking garage. For comparison the busiest train station in the UK (Waterloo) has 250,000 people using it every day. Note that the pictured bike parking in Amsterdam takes up the space of two of the large multistorey hotels next to it, just to store metal, but pushes actual walking humans two hotel distances further away from their destination just to walk past unused metal storage.
Bike parking, like car parking, is a non-place in the sense of https://newworldeconomics.com//place-and-non-place/ it's not somewhere anyone wants to go, or a place where anything happens. Scale that bike parking up to 100,000 people and it would be an enormous amount of physical city-center non-place. Now count that you have to park those bikes at both ends of every journey - bike parking at the supermarket, at the clothes shops, at the pubs, at the apartment buildings - and instead of a small, dense, walkable city center, you're now measuring the total area devoted to non-place metal storage in square kilometers, and inconveniencing everyone with kilometers more walking every week just to cross the distances taken up by mega bike park bloat.
This picture is Shinjuku in Tokyo, the world's most populated city, near the world's busiest train station: https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shi... - can you imagine that street being as pleasant with 2,000 bikes barelling down it at 2x walking speed and every one of those eateries having 5-20 bike parking outside?
And there's no chance those 12,500 bikes would fit on the trains, how many bikes fit on a passenger train, maybe 15 or so? Bike+train means most people can only bike on one side of any train journey.
> Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit.
If public transit is growing, more people will be able to not-need bikes.
> To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1].
Or you, view images here: https://newworldeconomics.com/what-a-real-train-system-looks... and comparisons here https://newworldeconomics.com/the-problem-with-bicycles/
e.g. [1] "The typical U.S. solution is to surround the train station with acres and acres of free parking.[...] There are 157 acres of land in this photo. When you step off the train, you have immediate walking access to 157 acres of /nothing/"
and [2] "The better solution is to surround the station with all the highest-value property. All the best offices, stores and restaurants are as close to the train station as possible, so we can walk there from the station, and where there is the most pedestrian traffic. Plus, you also try to put as many apartment buildings there as you can, so you can easily walk to the station in less than ten minutes."
"if you want people to be able to live without automobiles, you have to make it easy to get from the train station to wherever you want to go on foot. This means you put all the good stuff right up against the train station — even build it into the train station itself if possible. When you step out of the train station, you want to land right in a wonderful pedestrian Traditional City environment, not a parking lot wasteland."
When you switch a "large" surround of car parking for a "large" surround of bike parking, that doesn't fix anything. I put "large" in quotes because the measure is not abstract meters, dollars, or kilos of concrete, the measure is human size and human footsteps - walking past 12,000 bikes is 90% of people walking further for no benefit, while the bike owners also walk further for a small benefit of part of a journey, and puts desirable city space to use by metal instead of humans.
[1] https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/vie...
[2] https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/gak...
In a city built small enough to walk, bicycles are unwanted and unneeded extra hassle, and when you occasionally do have to walk a couple of extra miles it's through a vibrant, busy, maybe even beautiful, human space not concrete void.
"It should be obvious that it is better to not need a bike than to need one. [...] we should not think about bikes-instead-of-cars, but rather getting over this unhealthy fixation on My Personal Transportation Device"
As I emphasized, cars -> bikes is not 100 -> 60, but 100 -> 10. Meaning not 1.5x nor 2.5x but 10x density. A moderately priced double-decker staggered height bicycle parking comfortably fits 20+ bikes in the place of a single car.
The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all.
In a typical not-overly-dense places, bike travel is technically faster than foot if you're going more than about 50m + about 120% of distance to parking (if not along the way).
> U.S. solution .. 157 acres of free parking
That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks.
Everything requires comparatively large bicycle parking areas. Here https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/osa... is perhaps 5-10% of the visitors bike parking, making the street 30-40% blocked and 30-40% wider for everyone.
Here https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gak... are maybe 10-20 bikes clogging up the path for thousands of people.
> I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot
Right, so if you're redesigning smaller and denser, why on earth would you build so everyone needs bikes, instead of building so everyone doesn't?
And if you're not redesigning smaller, and distances are still car-suburb distances, they're still too far for bikes for most people and most journeys. You might have to do a 20 mile round trip to get into Houston center and back, for example, that's 1.5-2hrs biking. Way outside what you could expect most people to want to do regularly compared to say a 15 minute walk.
45k people live in https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gak... this photo with a ~10 minute walk to all of those places including a train station with lots of regular large trains.
> The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas
All bicycle parking areas are comparatively large for the people who don't have bikes. "The space of a single car" is ~3 meters. You only need 30 of those to push your walking commute, trip to the shops, visit to your friends, out by +1km and +2km after a round trip. Building for the 10% of bikers compared to the 90% of non-bikers is insanity.
> That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks.
If it did, it would still be 157 acres of non-place nobody wants to go to, spend time in, and resent having to get to the other side of. The foolishness is having that much inhuman space dedicated to metal storage, not that it's dedicated to fossil fuelled vehicles instead of pedal powered vehicles.
Plus, they don't dump any particulates into your childrens' lungs.
Designing things around bikes, and then everyone needs a bike, is a worse option than designing everything around humans (instead of some kind of vehicle).
> Designing things around bikes, and then everyone needs a bike, is a worse option than designing everything around humans (instead of some kind of vehicle).
I'd fully agree we should design things around humans, but where are people designing cities primarily around bikes? And what, exactly, are the problems we actually have with bikes? Not the fear-mongering made-up FUD, but real problems that exist already. Bike parking space is not an actual problem today. What is?
What does it mean - exactly - to design around humans? You could argue the problems we have are because we designed around human convenience already, and allowed our walking space to be paved and prioritized for cars.
Your arguments are vassellating between comparing to cars and then not comparing to cars. What's the goal post here? Are you demanding something perfect, or do you want to improve considerably over the crappy position we're in with cars? Is removing all vehicles entirely a realistic goal? Is redesigning all the largest cities on earth, and getting everyone to work within a mile of where they live realistic? Why are you trying so hard to lump non-motorized vehicles together with motorized vehicles? There is a large difference between having a gas-consuming engine and not having one, don't you agree?
The making of bikes, and the concrete for them to ride on, involves pollution and externalised costs. Bike tyre dust pollutes, abandoned rusting decomposing bikes pollute. Less than cars, no question. "they don't" - not true.
> And what, exactly, are the problems we actually have with bikes? Not the fear-mongering made-up FUD, but real problems that exist already.
They aren't good enough to replace cars. They aren't a good improvement over not needing to own transport. They aren't a good improvement over walking in most dimensions, and the ones they are are dimensions that would be better eliminated than papered over with bikes.
> What does it mean - exactly - to design around humans?
Design around what the human body can do (mostly) unaided. Glasses bring your eyesight back up to human norms, we don't design imformational screens so everyone needs magnifying lenses to be able to read them. Hearing aids bring your hearing back to human norms, we don't make important announcements quietly enough that everyone needs a hearing aid to be able to partake in society. Walking sticks aid balance for the disabled, we don't make waterbed rolling walkways so everyone needs an extra third point of stability to avoid falling over. If it's too far to comfortably walk every day, it's too far. If that can't be helped, mass transit. Personal transport should be a thing people don't need, but the 2% of people who ride bikes today can be the 2% who ride bikes tomorrow if they want.
> Is removing all vehicles entirely a realistic goal? Is redesigning all the largest cities on earth, and getting everyone to work within a mile of where they live realistic?
Is preventing catastrophic global climate change realistic? Is ignoring mass transit so you can strawman that everone needs to work within a mile of their home instead of everyone having work or train station within a mile of their home, reasonable?
> Why are you trying so hard to lump non-motorized vehicles together with motorized vehicles?
Because that's where they belong. The only way bikes are going to become as popular as they need to be to satisfy the pro-bike agenda is when they become motorized. They will approach "electric cars" closer and closer.
> where are people designing cities primarily around bikes?
Good question. If bikes are so great and the answer to pollution and the future, where are people designing cities primarily around bikes? Nowhere? It's old places designed around walking, and new places designed around driving, and occasional neighbourhoods redesigned around walking. Bikes are incidental in both approaches, like nobody is redesigning cities around skateboards, unicycles, Segways, hoverboards, Kangaroo boots, rollerskates, rollerblades, monowheels, pogo sticks, velocipedes, stilts, or spacewalkers. Bikes belong in the category of those things. Fine where they are, not a thing to promote for daily commuting and mass transit of world populations.
You are just joking, right? You’re exaggerating by an order of magnitude, you can literally fit 10 bikes in the space of a small car, on the road and when parked. You think bike maintenance is the same effort as car maintenance? I’m baffled by this claim, and I maintain several bikes and several cars. Cars are much harder, much more expensive to maintain, and require far more resources. Bike maintenance is something most riders can do on their own, while car maintenance is something people take to a shop.
> Do bikes have the largest amount of unmentioned externalities of any form of transport?
What on earth are you referring to? Are you comparing a few sidewalks and bike lanes in select metro areas to the 3 million miles of paved roads in the US? Are you suggesting the 1-2 ounces of oil I use on my bike chain per year is somehow worse than the average 2 metric tons of gas and oil used by the average car in a year? Are you including pollution in your list of externalities? Are you including accidents and fatalities in your calculation? I’m confused, I really can’t think of a single unmentioned externality where bikes don’t compare favorably to cars by a very wide margin.
So, it seems like the answer is a really clear and obvious no, there are other forms of transport with externalities so much larger than bikes that it makes the mere suggestion seem pretty absurd. Examples include but aren’t limited to: cars, airplanes, and cargo boats.
You are just joking, right? A Fiat 500 is 3.5 meters long and 1.6 meters wide. No way can you "literally" fit 10 bikes being ridden on the road in that space - or even 3. Parked, you might be able to fit 3 if they're staggered, but if you're going to tell me you can double-decker it, you won't also fit the stairs/ramp/elevator mechanism in that space as well.
> You think bike maintenance is the same effort as car maintenance?
You take it to a shop, drop it off, and leave it there, then get it back later? Yes, that sounds about the same effort. Except a car usually needs servicing and is still drivable, a bike is probably punctured or chain snapped and unusable, making it more hassle, and if you decide that means you have to do it yourself, more effort. Everyone remember how fun it is to take a bike wheel off and run it through the bathtub to identify the location of a puncture, yes? Never spent that much effort on taking my car to a garage.
> Bike maintenance is something most riders can do on their own, while car maintenance is something people take to a shop.
You've gone from "baffled by this claim" to "most people spend more effort on bike maintenance than car maintenance" in the space of a paragraph. No comment.
> What on earth are you referring to?
I'm referring to the things I said. If you didn't have paved roads made for cars, you would need to build them for bikes. You wouldn't need to build them for walking. Bikers never ever mention this, it's a kind of parasitism on the car infrastructure - a cost that bikers don't consider. If there were no cars, but we needed to upkeep hundreds of miles of tarmac roads, bikes would need to be taxed hugely. It's an externality in the sense that bikes need it, but aren't paying (directly) for it, and are offloading the cost onto car drivers (who currently need it more and do more damage to it).
> Are you including pollution in your list of externalities?
No I'm not including the cost of container shipping enough bikes for 500,000 people from China, or the cost of digging up the iron ore and making the steel and carbon fibre to build them, or the trash heaps where hundreds of thousands of bikes rot. Good point though, neither do bike enthusiasts.
> Are you including accidents and fatalities in your calculation?
The kind where a big heavy fast moving metal lump collides with a soft squidgy easily damaged slow-moving pedestrian? I'm not including those either, but I am against bikes being allowed anywhere pedestrians are, so let's add that in as well.
> I’m confused, I really can’t think of a single unmentioned externality where bikes don’t compare favorably to cars by a very wide margin.
Neither can I. That's a totally cherry-picked comparison because it's like saying "being stabbed compares favourably to being shot by a very wide margin". There's no unmentioned externality where walking doesn't compare favourably to bikes by a very wide margin - in a place which is designed and built for humans walking -- which all places should be because humans are more important than vehicles. Walking needs less tarmac, less machinery, less maintenance, less money, is more accessible to people of more abilities, takes less parking space, less infrastructure, causes fewer accidents, places fewer restrictions on clothing, has lower environmental cost, lower pollution, less waste, doesn't need helmets and high-visibility clothing and bike-locks, doesn't need insurance and breakdown recovery and loan-cars...
> So, it seems like the answer is a really clear and obvious no, there are other forms of transport with externalities so much larger than bikes that it makes the mere suggestion seem pretty absurd.
Cars pay for roads in terms of fuel taxes and vehicle taxes. Bikes don't pay for either. Cars often pay for car parks, bikes often use sidewalk, or car parks. Cars pay for accidents with mandatory insurance, bike riders are uninsured. That other things are worse was not my point, my point was that bikers gloss over needing roads and the cost of that, car drivers don't.
It’s just us here; acting like a bike is soooo hard to deal with isn’t going to convince me, since I know how much effort bike maintenance takes and how much car maintenance takes. I know from experience that cars are the bigger drain on time and money by many multiples. Pretending otherwise is just ensuring I have more reasons to discount what you’re saying.
> A Fiat 500 is 3.5 meters long and 1.6 meters wide. No way can you “literally” fit 10 bikes being ridden on the road in that space - or even 3. Parked, you might be able to fit 3.
Standard bike rack spacing is 12-16 inches. Mine is 14 and fits mountain bikes side by side. I’ll give you a generous 15 inches, in which you can comfortably fit 8 bikes in 3.5 meters. 1.6 meters wide is a tad narrow, but many full size adult bikes come in at just over 1.7 meters long. You ungenerously picked one of the smallest cars ever made to attempt to prove your point, but I’m happy to concede that you were wrong by 8x rather than 10x. If you picked a Honda Fit, which is on the small side of small cars, then 10 bikes actually do fit in it’s 162 inch length.
Lanes aren’t 1.6 meters wide, they are wider, and bikes don’t need to be spaced out as much as cars. The throughput can be much higher than 10x due to slower speeds and the higher density in both directions, sideways and front to back.
It seems like you decided the outcome before you thought about this very carefully.
> No, I’m not including the cost of container shipping ...
There’s a lot of snark in your answer, but you fail to acknowledge that there’s no winning the comparison against cars, which is what I was talking about. Whatever the costs of shipping and materials, cars are 20-40x the mass of bikes.
Hey, I agree with you that walking is cheaper than bikes in all ways, and I surely advocate walking. I don’t get your rage over bikes though, they’re a huge improvement over cars, and they are not otherwise causing problems relative to walking.
> my point was that bikers gloss over needing roads and the cost of that, car drivers don't.
One tiny little nit you seem to have overlooked: walkers need and use sidewalks too, so for the one “externality” you’re considering (while selectively ignoring the larger and more important ones like pollution, oil & gas, and accidents) pavement is an externality for walking too. You could claim walkers don’t need sidewalks, but bikes don’t really need sidewalks either, plenty of bikes will ride on dirt paths comfortably.
I'm going to back-pedal just a little bit. Pun intended :P I love walking as a means of transport, but...
Biking is the most energy-efficient form of transportation by a long way. https://www.exploratorium.edu/cycling/humanpower1.html#:~:te....
That answers a bunch of the questions asked in this thread. Another relevant answer to why biking is useful is that it extends the range of accessible daily activities around 10x compared to walking. You can bike further than you can walk in a given period of time.
So one of those hidden externalities you like to account for @jodrellblank, of walking vs biking is that walkers require more food consumption to sustain a daily commute of a given distance compared to bikers commuting the same distance.
Biking is the most energy-efficient form of transportation, if you ignore the fact that to get such a result you have to make bikes and make steamrollers and concrete mixers and tarmac and roads first.
> Another relevant answer to why biking is useful is that it extends the range of accessible daily activities around 10x compared to walking. You can bike further than you can walk in a given period of time.
But not 10x compared to walking + bus or walking + taxi or walking + train, and not without added inconvenience of biking; and also not if you've built your environment so plenty of daily activities people want are close enough to comfortably walk to.
> So one of those hidden externalities you like to account for @jodrellblank, of walking vs biking is that walkers require more food consumption to sustain a daily commute of a given distance compared to bikers commuting the same distance.
And walkers require paying more taxes for the infrastructure to subsidise bikers.
Buses, taxis and trains are even less efficient. You’re arguing that we should use motorized vehicles instead of bikes??
> walkers require paying more takes for the infrastructure to subsidise bikers
Bullshit. Nobody is paying walking taxes. You are enjoying the very same “externality”.
Are you going to bike 100 miles to the next city? Are you going to bike to work with a broken ankle? Are you going to bike furniture home from the furniture shop? Are you going to bike everyone's garbage to the dump? Are you going to bike building materials around?
Given that you're going to have motorized things, they should be for optional, occasional use as an assitance for walking people who then don't need a bike or a car.
Because otherwise, you're going to have motorized things, and walking people, and bikes on top, for no particular reason except a bike obsession.
> Bullshit. Nobody is paying walking taxes. You are enjoying the very same “externality”.
? Nobody is paying explicit sidewalk taxes in the same way nobody is paying explicit streetlamp taxes. People are still paying taxes for infrastructure in the environment they live in, and that covers paying for sidewalks.
Yeah, I agree, that's right. The bikers are paying for sidewalks & roads, just like everyone else. You've nicely summed up exactly why bike infrastructure is not being somehow "subsidised" by drivers and walkers.
Despite your wish to call sidewalks your own and not share them, and despite the fact that I agree with you about separating pedestrians from cyclists, sidewalks are multi-use infrastructure that everyone pays for and everyone can use. It doesn't matter that you don't like it, the intent has always included bikes as well as pedestrians and wheelbarrows and dogs and children, among many other uses.
Thus settles the red herring non-issue of externalizing taxes to pay for pavement. It's not a real thing.
Sidewalks predate bikes by roughly 4000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidewalk#History
> Despite your wish to call sidewalks your own and not share them
I don't mind sharing them with things moving at walking pace. Dogs, wheelbarrows, ice cream carts, wheelchairs, maybe skateboards.
I no more want to share them with bikes doing 10-15mph than with mopeds doing 10-15mph or sprinting people.
> The bikers are paying for sidewalks & roads, just like everyone else.
Bikers are paying diesel and petrol tax and road vehicle tax? Not in the UK they're not. Pedestrians aren't either. If they're not, that isn't "just like everyone else".
> It doesn't matter that you don't like it
But it does matter that you do like it?
> Fixing a flat takes roughly 5 minutes if you’re slow.
I googled "how long to fix a puncture" (it's a long time since I had to do that) and CyclistResource.com[1] says puncture repair glue takes 5-8 minutes to dry. My proverbial mother is not going to have her puncture fixed in the middle of a pedestrian street in 5 minutes, and when she ends frustrated and with chain oil on her tidy clothes and muddy wet hands with nowhere to wash them and I call her "slow" that will earn me a proverbial slap. Assuming she even knows what quick release is, and can find the tiny inconvenient weight-optimised tyre levers which she's sure are in her bag somewhere under all this stuff she actually cares about. It takes 5 minutes maybe true for a certain kind of bike enthusiast mechanically interested person, I doubt it's true for a majority of the population.
Going to a garage is less effort even if it takes more time. That's usually the trade off - longer, less effort. But even so that's you redirecting to cars away from walking. Nobody has to carry tyre levers and a Nike Air pump to fix even their fancy airwalk trainers, let alone their ordinary tidy going-out shoes.
I'll concede that you can pack more bikes into a parking space than I counted for, but even your estimate of approx 10 bikes per 4 meters means a city like Amsterdam of 800,000 people would need a row of bike parking 80km long just to cover a quarter of its population having a single place to park their bikes. No matter how multistorey that gets, by the time those people can park in many places (at home, work, green park, shopping, entertainment) it's a lot of city space for a benefit of a minority of people. And yes, before you say it, cars are much worse.
> It’s just us here; acting like a bike is soooo hard to deal with isn’t going to convince me, since I know how much effort bike maintenance takes and how much car maintenance takes
I also know how much effort bike maintenance takes, which is not a /lot/ but is more than I can be bothered with for the few situations they have value in. If a journey is short, walking is more convenient. If a journey is long, cars are more convenient. If there's something to carry, cars are more convenient. If there's a destination I need to go inside, walking is more convenient. If there's multiple people to go with, walking or driving are way more convenient. If there's a chance plans will change and I'll get a lift back or we'll meet up with other people, walking and cars are more convenient. Bikes only win out for people who want to ride a bike for the purpose of riding a bike (fun, exercise) or for people who have a short-car-journey distance to travel with little to carry, alone or with another biker, but don't want to use a car (for environmental, cost, or idealism reasons), or a blend of the two (a single digit mile commute they'd rather not drive).
> I don’t get your rage over bikes though, they’re a huge improvement over cars, and they are not otherwise causing problems relative to walking.
They are an improvement over cars. They aren't a huge improvement. Instead of a roof, you have to change your clothes and carry a change of clothes with you. Instead of a trunk you have to arrange your life around the limits of a bike to carry less stuff. Instead of an engine to go any distance comfortably you have to pay attention to distances and hills and how sweaty you are willing to get. Instead of freely wearing what you want, you have to wear clothes suitable for biking. Instead of having a lockable metal storage you have the inconvenience of not having that but still needing to carry bike things (helmet, lock, toolkit). Instead of being comfortbly on a sidewalk as a pedestrian or on a road in a car, you have to be annoyingly (maybe illegally) on a sidewalk or in danger on a road full of cars, or be lucky and go a diversion in the few places there happens to be a bike path.
They're a "huge" improvement over cars only if you take away all the conveniences of a car, and offload those things onto the person while pretending you aren't doing that.
> One tiny little nit you seem to have overlooked: walkers need and use sidewalks too
Walkers should get sidewalks without bikes. If I say you walk at 4mph and bike at 6mph you'll probably tell me you can average 20mph on your bike. If I say bikes don't mesh with people, and are an accident risk, you'll say bikes "use sidewalks too" and point to people sedately biking at 3mph among strolling pedestrians. If you're biking at a speed that's safe /and not annoying/ to pedestrians (i.e. not weaving between people, making them jump out of the way) then you're going slow enough that you're as well off walking. If you're going faster in a way that only a bike can, you shouldn't be on a sidewalk and need a dedicated concrete place to cycle fast.
All 800k people in imaginary Amsterdam pay taxes for sidewalks because all 800k people use them. All drivers pay fuel and road tax, all cars use roads. Bikers don't pay any special tax for roads or bike paths, which means the minority of bikers are subsidised by everyone else. It's not hyperbole, exaggeration, hatred or snark to point out this kind of thing.
> You could claim walkers don’t need sidewalks, but bikes don’t really need sidewalks either, plenty of bikes will ride on dirt paths comfortably.
Leaving a chewed up muddy plowed mess for everyone else to walk on. Walking on cobblestones is easy and comfortable, riding on them needs suspension and arms that don't mind juddering. But what I'm really claiming is that taxing 100% of the people to make sidewalks that 100% of the people use is fine. Taxing motorists for roads which their cars use is fine. Bikes get the benefit of lots of paved roadway, which they approximately need, without explicity paying in any way. If there were only sidewalks bikes would clash with people. If there weren't roadways, bikes would need them to be invented. If my mother needed a full suspension mountain bike to go to church on, she probably wouldn't. If cars vanished, bikes don't provide anything like the income for the upkeep of the roads left behind by cars if cars vanished. If instead you move to a model where bikes need hundreds of km of bike paths weaving through the city seperate from sidewalks, and then you move to a model where bikers are the people who pay for that, bikes will become a lot less desirable.
Even the limited convenience and usefulness bikes have (which is nonzero) is enhanced by leaning on a car-culture and would struggle hard to stand on its own merits.
[1] https://cyclistresource.com/how-long-does-puncture-repair-gl...
I still don’t get your angle whatsoever. Every single thing you claim to want is advanced considerably, and we get closer to walking culture, every single time someone rides a bike instead of a car.
> Any argument which makes bikes better than cars, makes walking better than bikes; you keep ignoring that and diverting back to "bikes are better than cars". Yes bikes are better than cars. Walking is better than bikes
I responded to your comparison between bikes and cars. My argument is that bikes are better than cars. So we are in full agreement. I’m not arguing about walking, I said twice already I’m in favor of walking.
> Walking is better than bikes
That depends entirely on what you mean by “better”. Bikes have a larger range, shorter travel times, and are more efficient. Walking is IMO more pleasant and a slightly safer, but not as functional for traveling more than .5 miles or carrying any cargo with you, even as small as a laptop.
Personally, I think it does a disservice to both bikers and walkers, and to the causes of human designed cities and pollution reduction, to fabricate drama by pitting bikes against walkers as if they're somehow in complete opposition. Bikers and walkers are 99.9% on the same side. I love doing both walking and biking. As a biker, I see people advocating for walking spaces and even bike-free sidewalks as a good thing that helps me. As a walker, I see people asking for bike lanes downtown as a good thing that helps me. You say you don't want bikes on your sidewalk, yet complain about how bike paths are paid for... you do realize that dedicated bike paths get bikes off the sidewalk, right?
> Going to a garage is less effort even if it takes more time.
For someone who brought the concept of externality to this thread, you’re actively trying to externalize time to exaggerate your claims. Cars are more expensive, and money requires time. You can’t count only the travel time to the shop while ignoring the extra time it takes to earn the money to buy & repair your car.
> Walkers should get sidewalks without bikes.
Irrelevant to our discussion, but I happen to agree.
> [in Amsterdam] Bikers don’t pay any special tax for roads or bike paths
This isn’t true, you are making assumptions, making things up. Citizens fund Amsterdam’s bike infrastructure. Not walkers, not drivers. Citizens.
In the city I live in, bike paths are being added by referendum. They are voted on and the funds come from multiple tax sources. I’m paying for the bike infrastructure I enjoy, and the majority of my fellow citizens are asking for improved bike infrastructure.
You are harping up a storm on a complete and total non-issue. Who pays for bike paths is not a major problem anywhere. And if it was a problem, it would be a great problem to have, because it would mean people are biking instead of driving.
A haw haw haw an ad-hom.
> You’re struggling so hard to paint bikes negatively
I'm writing pages of stuff off the top of my head, my biggest "struggle" is how you can't see any of these things exist. I haven't mentioned bike theft (compared to, say, shoe theft), noise pollution of squeaking brakes, people I see around biking while staring at their phones, the fact that we live in a car-world which is to a rough approximation the best possible world for bikes (lots of tarmac, lots of spread out things, low costs) and even then the vast majority of people don't own or regularly use bikes, and almost any other world would make bikes less convenient and more costly, making that worse. Not to mention the way you can leave maps and notes and sunshades and medical kits in your car glove box, but you always need to carry everything away from your bike, not to mention the huge change that sets in if you happen to bike at night and need lights and batteries and reflective clothes for safety, not to mention the extra difficulty of calling someone up to ask for a lift if they have nowhere on their car to put a bike, or leaving your bike out to come back to a wet rained-on saddle, or how cold your hands get held out in front of you, or how wearing a helmet messes up your hair, or how people desire a 'dashcam' experience and have to have it affixed to their helmet.
> I still don’t get your angle whatsoever. Every single thing you claim to want is advanced considerably, and we get closer to walking culture, every single time someone rides a bike instead of a car.
No we don't.
Take the "ungenerously small car" comment and look at the Top Gear clip "Driving in Lucca" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_eLViH7_YI - the ultracompact cars are the Fiat 500, the Citroen DS3 (~4m long, 1.7m wide) and a Renault Clio also ~4m long 1.7m wide. And look how they barely fit in the streets of a city built for humans. Look as they drive around, how there's no long straight roadways for a bike to get up to speed and make strong use of the vaunted efficiency and ability to cover longer distances more quickly. And if you tried, a chance of a bike popping out of any junction at any time at 10mph would make everything awful for humans who weren't biking.
At 4:30 in the clip there are ~7 bikes visible. That's approximately everywhere you can leave a bike in that scene including in front of some windows on the left. That's 7 people can bike to that street out of a city of ~85k population + tourists. There's no room there for a "small car sized parking for 10 bikes" turned sidways because the "ungenerously small car" takes up the entire human-size space and there wouldn't be room to take the bikes out and barely room to walk past.
What you get from bikes is not "closer to walking", it's "things built around distances too far to walk with the idea that people will bike those distances". Building around walking means building things close enough that nobody needs or wants to bike. It's like saying you get closer to reading by watching a short film.
> My argument is that bikes are better than cars. So we are in full agreement
I'm saying that bikes are /bad/ and you're saying bikes are /good/. That's not full agreement. Even if we both agree that cars are bad, I say bikes are bad for the same reasons, on a smaller scale, and for their own reasons on top.
> As a walker, I see people asking for bike lanes downtown as a good thing that helps me. You say you don't want bikes on your sidewalk, yet complain about how bike paths are paid for... you do realize that dedicated bike paths get bikes off the sidewalk, right?
... you're going to terrorise walkers into paying for bike lanes for you to use, so you don't have to pay for them? You do realize that doesn't sound nice or friendly, or what someone on "the same side" would say, right?
> For someone who brought the concept of externality to this thread, you’re actively trying to externalize time to exaggerate your claims. Cars are more expensive, and money requires time. You can’t count only the travel time to the shop while ignoring the extra time it takes to earn the money to buy & repair your car.
Me: cars have costs. bikes have costs.
You all: Why can't you see that cars have higer costs?
Me: I can see that. Why can't you see bikes have costs at all?
You: I don't understand how you can ignore the costs of cars are so big?
Me: I'm agree the costs of cars are high. Look at the downsides of bikes.
You: But her car emails!
Me: Stop focusing on cars. Bike costs. Annoying. Inconvenient.
You: How can you ignore the cost of cars like this!?
Hello? I know cars have high costs! I'm not /denying that/. I'm not interested in that because /I'm not supporting everyone-has-a-car-world/. I'm supporting nobody-needs-a-bike-or-car world specifically against the alternative most-people-need-a-bike-world.
> This isn’t true, you are making assumptions, making things up. Citizens fund Amsterdam’s bike infrastructure. Not walkers, not drivers. Citizens.
If everyone payes the same tax, that's another way of saying bikers dont' pay any special tax. Which is what I said and you said is made up, then said the same thing. ???
> the majority of my fellow citizens are asking for improved bike infrastructure.
Because the majority (>50%) of them want to use it? Or because they are willing to suffer paying for it to get you off the roads and sidewalks because you're annoying both pedestrians and drivers? Cycling England says there are ~160,000 bikes crossing London every day, but Transport for London says there are 2,600,000 cars registered in London.
Cycling England says "n 2018, cycling accounted for 1.7% of all trips". That's 99.3% of citizen-trips on foot and in cars and public transport "funding" 1.7% of citizen trips.
"England: 42% of people aged 5+ own or have access to a bicycle" yet "80.9% cycle less than once per month or never".
https://www.cyclinguk.org/statistics
> You are harping up a storm
A storm full of points you're completely glossing over in favour of ad-homs and diverting the talk about cars instead.
> Who pays for bike paths is not a major problem anywhere
Did I say it was a major problem? I said it was an example of something bike enthusiasts don't mention. In England 2% of journeys are by bike. That leaves "Citizens" paying for road and pavement usage for 98% of journeys and also paying bike path costs for some subset of 2% of journeys.
> And if it was a problem, it would be a great problem to have, because it would mean people are biking instead of driving.
That would be bad because you'd have a world built around distances too far to walk, far enough to want to drive, but unable to drive. What would get 80% of people to bike those distances in lieu of cars is most likely motorized bikes.
> and diverting the talk about cars instead.
You keep saying this over and over and over, yet I keep pointing out consistently that I'm primarily focused on bikes vs cars, and primarily responding to your comment here, which compared bikes to cars, and didn't even mention walking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24186001 You somehow don't even see you're the one moving the goal post.
There is an element of social unfairness where people need frequent use of tens of thousands of dollars of car to live a first-class citizen life, and doing without makes people second-class citizens in many ways. If we step away from cars (and for the moment, motorbikes and mopeds and so on), there are not many choices left, they boil down to:
1) Keep the world the same, solely switch cars for bikes.
2) Rebuild and rezone smaller and denser, but stop at bike distances.
3) Rebuild and rezone smaller and denser, to walking distances. Walking distances have to be very dense because people walk slowly.
The first is unworkable - 2% of journeys done on bikes today is not going to boost to 90%+ journeys done on bikes just by taking the cars away. The distances in the world today are built for cars.
The second has all the costs of cars but on a smaller scale. It has all the costs of rebuilding and rezoning. It has all the social unfairness of still needing a personal transportation device. And on top of that it has all the problems of bikes that I've been listing because they're not very good compared to cars.
The third, done well, has the massive advantages that you don't need a vehicle and get more money in your pocket. The cost of having to use walking effort instead of driving is offset by the fact that you don't have to walk far. The disadvantages of not having a vehicle are traded off with the advantages of not needing a vehicle. More people get a first-class experience of life.
The first is cheap but it won't work. People need cars now because everything is so far apart and it was built far apart because everyone else has cars. The second and third are not going to happen because rebuilding is expensive and people don't want to give up their cars. But if they did happen, the second is a chance to make hundreds of millions of people's lives simpler, cheaper, easier, less hassle, and lower global resource use, not done, stopped short of that, deliberately to make people have to use bikes just for the sake of people using bikes. It's a /tragedy/.
Even if the third happened perfectly, that wouldn't stop you from riding your bike to work. What it would mean is you wouldn't have to. Most people wouldn't have to, and wouldn't. If the second happened, it would mean most people couldn't avoid riding a bike to work because work was deliberately zoned too far to walk to prop up bike use.
> yet I keep pointing out consistently that I'm primarily focused on bikes vs cars
I'm primarily focused on humans vs vehicles. Bikes and cars both go on the vehicle side. I criticised biking to work, I have kept criticising biking in every reply, that's not moving goalposts unless you think I was cricitising bikes in favour of cars - I wasn't, I was just criticising bikes. Like the parent three posts to that one is "There's also a lot more people biking now and I'm hopeful that it will help shape future legislation to make the city even more bike friendly" - why? Why hope to make legislation to make the city more bike friendly instead of hoping to make the city rezone so people can live and work close enough that they don't need vehicles? "I want to see more bikes" why do you?
There is winter cycling culture in much harsher climates https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/feb/12/ice-cycles-no...
Sure, those people who can be bothered with it might pick up the cycle during the winter. Those people who can't be bothered are going to pick up their stuff and leave.
North is sparsely populated because the crops were historically poor and prone to losses due to weather conditions, not because people don't like the weather.
I ain't gonna do that.
And that was in the Seattle area, where it rarely gets all that cold.
I'm going to predict that this will not happen. More specifically, that it will be unusual in general for rents or prices anywhere to drop any more than 10%.
There's something odd going on and my best guess is that there are (a) accounting/tax practices that provide incentives for vacancy with certain nominal values and (b) real estate markets are now driven more by massive pools of capital trying to soak up opportunities than they are by demand on short-to-mid-term horizons.
But I don't know enough to say for certain and explain how, and I'm hoping that someone can tell me why/how I'm stupid.
A permanent drop in demand because more people are working from home could crash the market.
If only a handful of fools do, you will get economic devastation sooner or later, because you remove the feedbacks of capitalism and hand the reins to monkeys that just happen to have access to the money printer.
Oh yeah, take a look at the Georgists and The One Tax where land is the only thing taxed since it’s the only finite resource. It’s not impossible that we end up in a situation where holding land just to hold your wealth isn’t going to exist anymore.
It's conceivably better for major real-estate holders to rent the land out at their preferred rate one or two months in a year, and leave it unoccupied otherwise, than accept reduced rates. The former gives a fig leaf for rental value, which props up the land value, which enables refinance. The latter admits that rental value has dropped, which would lower the land value, which would cause refinancing to fail.
Kind of feels like the cliché "make it up in volume" when you're losing money on each transaction.
It's not sustainable indefinitely, but it can go on for some time. And if the economy picks up, then all is right again.
But I think about the places (bars, restaurants, clubs, galleries, small shops) I visited almost a decade ago now when I first moved to SF and a bunch of those disappeared in the good times! They were displaced by rising commercial rents or a change in their clientele because of the rapid gentrification of neighborhoods and replaced, oftentimes with more kitsch stuff but sometimes with amazing restaurants or shops, which might not survive this lockdown.
San Francisco was once destroyed by a fire and has bounced back over and over again and I don't think this time will be different. It'll be different but not in the way people are panicking about in this thread and post.
Where to? Santa Cruz, too quirky? Marin, beautiful but overdone? Santa Rosa, I like this. Now, in Silicon Valley, there’s a sense of being out there; Mountain View, Los Gatos; attractive smaller enclaves.
Inner neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, SoMa, Union Square, Nob Hill, Lower Nob Hill, the Russian Hill, etc. Will probably need a lot of infusion to keep the cartels from fighting over territory. With a deficit so big, its hard to see an easy way forward.
A 8.5+ earthquake would be a city changing event. Entire neighborhoods with URMs would probably no longer exist afterwards (Chinatown, Tenderloin, Soma, etc).
The winning city, without any doubt, is Washington, D.C.
Also beating San Francisco:
Houston, TX
Huntsville, AL
Pearlington, MS
Kennedy Space Center, FL
Dayton, OH
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Chantilly, VA
Ashland, NE
Chicago's Art Institute is not good. Chicago does however have a couple good museums: Museum of Science and Industry, Field Museum of Natural History,
Boston's MFA is not good. Boston does however have Fort Warren and the USS Constitution.
These two statements aren't even related, and while the first is subjective, the second is misleading in regards DeYoung, which is not focussed on modern art.
No, though like most museums it has and actively promotes special exhibits.
The DeYoung permanent collections, IIRC, are mostly non-European regional collections, with some particular-media focussed collections
I suspect the major SF art museum you'd probably dislike the least is the Legion of Honor.
I'd much prefer to see a Saturn V, mummy, XB-70, stegosaurus fossil, Space Shuttle, enigma machine, US constitution, SR-71, or moon rock.
The best museum in San Francisco is probably the cable car museum.
I see you put Chantilly, VA on your list. The main museum of Chantilly is Udvar-Hazy, also part of the Smithsonian. Like the Smithsonian, it's free, though there's a parking fee (and it's in the middle of nowhere, so you do need a car.) It has many of the large aircraft that don't fit in the downtown Air and Space Museum, including a Space Shuttle, a Concorde, and an SR-71. Highly recommended.
They ain't.
It's where the most tech jobs are, it's where the VC money is, and if you're in your early twenties and straight out of college, it beats living in a bedroom community on the peninsula.
So if it's a 10 or 20 year "major" blip does that make it longer than "temporary"?
Locals tend to go to museums once or never, lots of places have good bars and restaurants and the idea of SF having a proximity to real nature is a joke. I guess time will tell if you, I or someone else is ultimately correct, but the pull of SF was the jobs above all else; if that's gone then I'd argue there are much better places to live for the amenities. NYC is in a similar boat - you move there for the people and what they bring when packing too many people in too small a physical space. This doesn't seem what most are looking for now or in the near/mid term.
* Most of my friends are members of one museum (or have season tickets to SHN/SFJazz/etc)
* Most of my friends go hiking in Marin or Big Basin or whenever at least once a month, and spend a weekend somewhere like Big Sur or Yosemite a couple times a year. Bay Area nature is unparalleled.
SF may be in a tough place for a while, but don’t underestimate why it’s special.
Puget Sound and Denver metros might disagree
The only reason I live in the Bay Area is because my net worth goes up WAY more here per year than it does elsewhere.. If that changes, I'm out
1.) Family/spouse
2.) Where they can get the best-paying job
If you offer most people 50% more money, and they aren't tied down by family obligations, they'll skip town for that new job in a heartbeat.
If you've gotta drive 4 hours to get there, it isn't 'Bay Area nature'... There are very few places in this vast and beautiful country that aren't 3-4 hours away from jaw-dropping scenery - in fact I doubt you could find a single one.
I have to assume that there's a place in Kansas/Nebraska somewhere in the Great Plains that you have to drive 4 hours to see anything other than fields.
Friday's weather was an exception and I'm glad you were able to enjoy it!
Granted, it may turn out that my new home will be the same as my old home, but, at least being forced to be remote is getting the wheels turning.
- earthquakes and still the same wooden housing which faciliated the burning of the whole city the last time. - forest fires.
#2 suggestion: Chicago, IL. Museums (check), bars (check), restaurants (also a Michelin city), nature (Lake Michigan).
#3 suggestion: Boston
I will 100% grant that the weather in the Bay Area is generally better than all three of those places - but if you don't highly rank outdoor activities, does that matter as much?
Come now, you aren't suggesting that the National Mall counts as "proximity to nature" ;-)
I've spent some time in all three cities and live in one; none of them really offer the same ease of access to nature as does San Francisco, if you count nature as necessarily including some level of remoteness from the built-up environment.
With density that I until recently used to consider as an unquestionable positive becoming at least temporarily moot with covid (and frankly becoming permanently soured by the out of control protests - I realized I prefer my density Singapore style, with CCTVs and harsh sentencing), I can see why people would move out. I'd probably be out of Seattle, at the very least to the burbs nearby with the same access to everything and few of the downsides, if it was just me making the decision. Same applies to SF (I've lived in SF and Mountain View before, I'd say it's even more acute in SF, quality of life is just terrible even for someone who loves dense cities - might was well move to peninsula or east bay for better access to nature in essentially the same place).
To be fair, I've never been to Rock Creek Park, but photos of it make it look like any number of state- and municipal-level parks near me. :-)
https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/51st-congress...
If you're willing to travel as much as it takes you to get to Big Sur from San Francisco, you can easily visit Shenandoah or the Blue Ridge, both bona-fide up-to-snuff pre-approved Real™ Beautiful™ National Parks from DC. There's also the Chesapeake, tons of magnificent beaches and state parks in the surrounding area---many beautiful sites on the east coast had already been state parks far before the notion of a national park was invented. That doesn't make them less beautiful or grandiose, however.
And at that point, you lose a lot of what makes SF appealing versus other cities.
As for weather, some people do value not having snow or typical summer heat/humidity (or both). But SF isn't the only place with a nice climate (and, for many, SF is gray and foggy relative to even other nearby California options).
What are other options for similar mild weather? LA/San Diego gets too hot, Atlanta gets humid as well, Boston and NYC get too hot and humid in the summer, and are snowy in winter (though I don't mind that so much). Seattle's got too much rain.
But coastal California (which, as you say, is mostly somewhat different from SF specifically) is the only real Mediterranean climate in the US.
This particularly unpleasant spell of weather we had until a couple of days ago notwithstanding, New England generally isn't bad in the summer especially once you get out of the cities. You're rarely going to be too uncomfortable on the Maine coast in the summer even without AC. But, yes, it's cold and snowy in the winter.
Due to tech money and location, it occupies a weird place in the various lists of world's cities. It is just tiny a small city compared to other cities in the world, and geography and politics aren't about to let that change any time soon.
Maybe. I do know a couple who live in SF who don't own a car but they sure use a lot of Ubers and do rentals.
More generally, and I'm probably just showing personal bias, but for me living in SF without the ability to just hop in a car and go to mountains etc. seems like it would be cutting myself off from much of what makes SF more interesting than comparably-sized cities.
But my quality of life went way up once I bit the bullet and got a car. Skiing, surfing, and hiking all became way easier. I was already occasionally renting cars to do those things, but the friction of picking up/returning the cars and the marginal cost of each trip were big drags. Now I don't think twice about a 1-2 week long backpacking trip, where previously I would have been dissuaded by that expensive rental car sitting unused in the parking lot.
It's not a personal bias when most Americans share the same bias. I've found Americans are only slightly weirder about their attachment to owning guns than owning a car, but far more Americans have this religious attachment to having a car.
The pandemic has even driven car sales, so it's entirely normal. https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Car-sales-surge...
https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/best-small-cities-in... lots of cities on that list are <10k and almost all are <100k
As long as the city & county and state governments are as bad as they are, yes. San Francisco was easily the most disgusting American city I have ever been to. It somehow has managed to land in an anti-sweet spot of repressive laws aimed at the middle classes, while not enforcing any laws against the mentally ill who do things like defecate in public, urinate on the floors of even nice bars, accost one on the street and so forth.
San Francisco needs someone to do for it what Hercules did for the Augean stables.
The suburban area was much nicer, but still hellaciously expensive, way out of proportion to the quality of life. There's a reason why people are fleeing California in general, and San Francisco in particular.
I've lived in SF my whole life, and I'm pushing 50. My parents live here, I'm raising my kids here. Every day I wonder if I made the right decision. There's still time to leave. It hurts, feeling this way, because in many ways I still really love the place where I grew up, and I feel like a lot of my life is woven in here.
I said all that to make it clear that I agree with you And yet, there's still room for disagreement about how severe it is.
I've been on long walks (something I like doing in urban areas) since COVID hit. Where I go often depends on something I need to do in an area, an errand I have to run. I walked a long distance through the outer sunset along the great highway (closed to cars right now). From Washington and Presidio out through Clement street, for a ways. I surf, too, and while the waves don't have the shape of a point or reef break (think Santa Cruz), I'd much rather spread out in the beach break and find the occasional open corner than crowd in with a bunch of surfers all competing for the take-off spot (I felt this way before COVID, let alone now).
Plenty of others (Carl Nolte wrote about a walk of his own in the Chronicle this sunday[1]), I don't need to list them all. I have glorious days here, still - there is some intrusion from urban blight even on those glorious walks, but in some cases it was a still pretty minor. I was not accosted, nor did I have to constantly dodge human feces. The city showed well, the houses and buildings were interesting looking, the views were glorious, the people around were friendly. There are comments who make it sound like every square block of SF is like escape from New York. It isn't, though it's getting worse, and I'm worried. Some of this, I think, is motivated by a desire to disparage left-wing government (I'm ok with holding progressive San Francisco accountable for what the city has become, though I do think we need to consider macro factors beyond what they can control - not to dismiss the considerable role of SF's policies, but as part of the discussion).
I've also been downtown in plenty of other US cities - most recently, Seattle and Milwaukee. In some ways, the remarkable thing about SF's downtown is that it was inhabitable recently. Many cities wrote off their version of market street long, long ago. I do agree that parts of SF are pretty disgusting, and SF does win the top prize in this regard, but I actually don't agree that it is uniquely disgusting.
Anyway, this is just a disagreement about degree, and some hyperbole is intended as a kind of satire or comic rant. Overall, I agree, we have a really serious problem in SF.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-city-Republi...
Absolutely. Lower overhead, greater access to talent, and assertions that the Silicon Valley model is somehow better than a remote-first model are frequently worthy of a big ol' [citation needed].
This won't make San Francisco a shell, it could even make it a nicer place to be.
Aren't these two sides of the same coin?
Very few people base their housing choices on cost alone. Other livability factors play a huge role. That's why real estate developers put amenities in their apartment buildings, and fight over location: Because people are willing to pay more in rent if the livability is higher than a cheaper alternative.
My point was about the other group that is leaving: more established professionals / homeowners / parents. For that group, saving on housing in the short terms isn't actually a major factor. Many are likely moving to other expensive places. The main thing keeping them in SF was their offices, professional network, or their children. In other words they were in SF despite the declining quality of life. With those constraints gone, they are leavings en mass as well.
Then again, a large contribution to pre-Covid/BC-era "declining quality of life" was due to the city bursting at the seams (the city's population grew far in excess of the number of new housing units being built), and the troubles that came with that.
Do you think those quality of life issues are temporary or permanent? I mean, many of the things that make SF great are temporarily closed down (its geography and architecture are notable exceptions). That said, I think SF also has more negatives than many other cities (aggressive homeless population, tons of property crime, very high taxes but with services that are comparable, or worse, to other cities). Will be interesting to see what happens in 6-12 months.
But that's been true for a long, long time about most major cities. Wasn't a big plot point in the ending of Friends in the 90s that Monica and Chandler were starting a family thus they were moving out to the suburbs? I don't see any big permanent change here except for perhaps people willing to relocate to somewhere way more out there than just the 'burbs.
I think it's important to recognize that unless you know people from a broad selection of socioeconomic groups, it's easy to have observer bias.
But I guess some people are only here because they have to be for their job, and haven't cared to put down roots. I won't mourn their disappearance, frankly. Lower cost of living for those of us who actually want to be here would be delightful.
And good for you! I admittedly don’t have many roots. Most people I know who are leaving are those who were renting and didn’t have kids. I’ve seen rents dropping so I’m sure you can benefit from the exodus as well (if you’re renting). They still haven’t dropped enough for staying to be worth it to me though
Everyone wants to make more and pay less to clean up their mess.
“I’m voting cognitive dissonance for 2020!”
Did they sell those units or are the owners just holding them empty? I think there is a lot of that going on. For those that bought a long time ago, there might be a comfortable equity cushion that can let them hold units like these empty for years.
How are we supposed to reconcile this is all the insanely wealthy people saying they will move out of California because of a wealth tax they can easily afford without even noticing it?
But debt and interest have been with us for thousands of years and it is likely that there has never been such low cost liquidity for durable assets (houses) as there is now.
When you think about why THAT is, it should make you worried to buy that house.
Mortgage interest could be 0.5% and lenders would...probably still make the deal.
The property itself is collateral for the loan. If the value of the property tanks, and then the owner is also unable to pay their mortgage due to not having a job, then in many cases the bank ends up holding the bag. This happened quite a bit during the Great Recession.
Also, given the way that the Fed has been pushing interest rates to near zero, and with the chance that they could go negative (which I find pretty unlikely, but everything seems so wild right now so who knows) there is a chance that inflation could come into play and keep property values high.
The mechanics you describe are not so much factors any more. Lenders don't keep properties on their books, too much risk and plenty of opportunity to sell and diversify. In that model, flows matter, not values.
And inflation- in my read inflation is due to a scarcity of money- it is an output of money scarcity, not an input- and what we have now is an abundance. So it is exceptionally unlikely.
But at a macro level, values are still extremely important. If there is perception of deflation, flow drops. And there are more govt structures set up to maintain values. I just have less confidence in their ultimate efficacy, and more confidence that politics will change and immigration policies will change and building policies will change.
Cheers.
What limited regulation was added after the crisis has been largely undermined.
https://www.fanniemae.com/resources/file/ir/pdf/quarterly-an...
What happens next is a very complex balancing act where some of the loans- mostly lower performing- are kept on Fannie's and Freddie's books, while others- mostly higher performing- are packaged into securities.
And again, what matters are the flows, not the values. The actual value of a property can be seen from auction/foreclosure sales, which are inevitably at a fraction of the prior sale price.
But Fannie/Freddie and holders of larger mortgages that are not performing manage the flow into foreclosure very carefully, in order to maintain prices and confidence.
This is a very, very complex machine. Maintaining values on one side and liquidity on the other is the purpose of this machine. I make no claims to deeply understanding it. I see the value of flows, of getting more commitments from people to feed their income into this machine, and see that reflected in the change in rates, and in the change in valuations. In terms of buying in- what is one buying into?
The other side of this argument is- what actually happens if someone is not able to make their payments? There seems also to be accumulating evidence that there is far more forgiveness for failing to pay a mortgage- even before COVID.
That all smells to me like a value bubble that pops when the end game for COVID is clear, with collateral damage for those who have commitments to flows for the long term but who may need to make changes in the short term.
Best wishes.
Physical dollars are an important medium of global liquidity. Taking them out of circulation is not in anyone's interest. In fact, taking them out of circulation would be extremely bad. Hard to communicate how bad this would be. Pretty much a crossing the streams/total protonic reversal outcome.
Could bad outcomes be prevented? Stunts like what was done with Indian currency, or a move to all-digital currency? I don't see it.
Since hoarding of the polymer bills seems like a likely outcome of negative rates hitting consumers, and this would be bad, and in the absence of other preventative measures, I highly doubt we'll see negative rates at the consumer level.
Also, Trump or even his successor might juice the economy quantitative easing, meaning that cash you are saving in the bank becomes worth less anyways. This isn’t an easy decision to make.
When the economy was roaring a couple years ago the Fed was starting to bump rates up it shook the markets bad. Started ratcheting down since.
If they can somehow get inflation higher then I could see rates moving up a bit. But it just hasn’t happened. So much of the rest of the world has lower rates (much lower) as well.
Suburban SFH is performing very well.
Ergo more living space and noise exclusion is suddenly at a premium even if just suburbia.
I wonder if a lot of Californians are coming to WA because of this
1) Rent vs own - everyone i know in the own category is staying for now, and actually exhibiting the opposite tendencies and digging in for the long haul
2) School is now officially going full remote. This was a unknown for many families and now we will see what they choose to do.
Plus, with everything starting remotely, the fact that school starts tomorrow doesn't really matter. Even for a school with a strong sense of community, in which us as parents are deeply involved, it still feels fairly impersonal. My own child is pretty indifferent as to where they go to school at this point.
That said, sticking it out isn't the wrong call either. This is a great city, it's just that with everything related to COVID, its becoming less worth it.
Other people I know at my company have renegotiated rents. Most but not all are open to the idea of moving back depending on how things play out over the next 6-12 months.
I think their is still a big career advantage to being in the Bay Area due to the big tech companies having offices here and face time being important for career advancement.
I would expect somewhat of a swing back away from remote work when we get a vaccine. That being said, I think the wild card is city/state taxes in the aftermath of all this.
I think a lot of people will move back to where offices are located, but I'm wondering if we'll see an increase in people who fly in for a few days every few weeks for meetings then jet back home to a cheaper part of the country. Relationships are hugely important -- and deep relationships are almost always only built in-person -- but we're overselling how much facetime you get in a full week vs. a very impactful 2-3 day trip with time for lunch/drinks etc.
The city already wildly undertaxes due to Prop 13. So the effect is minimal.
I was able to get a large, modern, luxury 1BR in a decent location for under $3K + almost a 1 month concession and no deposit.
Being a single, young(ish) guy, it still makes sense to be in a city. I have more space than I need now, and I can afford the rent. Maybe things aren’t that nice right now, but I’m hoping they’ll get back to semi-normality in a few months. Plus, I’m still banking on there being more opportunity to level up in my career much more here.
Luxury buildings are the primary ones offering more 1-2 month concessions, which really means rent has dropped another 18% than what is listed.
And this is without evictions on tenants, or foreclosures on homeowners. Both of which can't really get started until November or January due to local regulations and now backlog. This is with purely voluntary departures.
This sounds like a joke about just how absurd SF rents are.
Yes SF rents are generally insane.
Luxury studios are going to $2400 already though.
Expecting further drops.
Yes, there are many people in Central Valley who can now afford to live out their dream of being in "the city".
A change of scenery is a change of scenery. I've met suddenly unencumbered East Coasters that roadtripped across during Phase 1 Shelter in Place, and they are content with the new environment.
I don't see these as demand drivers, as the replacements are not the economic powerhouses that were here: subsidized college kids and tech workers. So its nice if the city gets a diverse culture again, but in the topic of rent and housing prices, I wouldn't expect a rebound so optimistically.
But the other factor, which I think everyone is still neglecting, is that the exodus was only voluntarily exits. Evictions and foreclosures aren't happening and there is a massive backlog when they do. So with only the current date, November - January is when the fireworks start.
I've left now but I miss the SoCal weather badly.
What is not subjective is from summer to winter, SF has the least variance in average temperature due to its unique geography.
So, in the tenderloin? Suddenly not a great deal.
No absolutely not. It's literally only a problem in Civic Center/Downtown/SOMA.
Closer to Golden Gate Park / Pac Heights is gorgeous.
Not most of the city, no. You moved right into its epicenter.
For comparison I own a 2br apartment in Melbourne, Australia. It takes about 15 minutes to walk from here to the heart of the city. My mortgage repayments (including interest) are about $700usd/month.
Problem with SF is some neighborhoods are being neglected. There’s no penalty for lawless vagrancy, not even a “shoo shoo”. I’ve seen portapotties set up next to tent camps. I guess that’s better than street shitting but it’s a major disappointment to see tent cities encouraged.
Melbourne is not cheap, there must be more to this story. The average house price in Melbourne is $855,428. A $600k unit, 20% deposit, 25y mortgage, cheap 2% rate is $1.4k or USD 1k. + strata fees
The numbers work out because I had a decent deposit when I bought - which I should have mentioned above since it certainly brings the repayments down. And (I think) let my mortgage broker negotiate for better rates.
I guess it's possible if you took out an interest-only loan for only a fraction of the purchase price, but then you've painted a highly misleading picture.
$3k might have been common at the high end, but I don't think that was typical.
I'm not assuming anything.
However, most landlords in non-managed buildings are fairly reasonable about only raising rent 2-5% a year. Your mileage may vary.
https://www.spur.org/sites/default/files/publications_pdfs/S...
[0] https://sfrb.org/article/summary-ab-1482-california-tenant-p...
Maybe I was being a cheapskate for keeping my rent under $2k per month when I lived there, but I never lived in an apartment that wasn’t rent controlled.
California adopted statewide rent control as of 1 January 2020. [0] If not already under rent control, rental units older than 15 years are now under rent control.
[0] https://la.curbed.com/2019/9/24/20868937/california-rent-con...
A city, yes. SF? No. By far it's the worst place for this I've ever seen.
San Jose is worse. As was the suburb I just moved from. But, yes, point taken.
Also, you can... pretty much, walk around town with a "to go" beer now which is really nice. It reminds me of Europe and taking a nice long walk, and then grabbing a bevvy is a nice change of pace from sitting at a bar in the before times.
A lot of stuff is still really empty, bike traffic is booming, the subways are surprisingly enjoyable to ride on due to the decreased numbers, and the beach is fantastic.
I don't have too many worries about the recovery here. Especially since the populace seems pretty good about masks. Hoping my rent drops a bit though!
Other things that I hope remain post COVID are some of the streets being closed off to traffic with lots of tables in the roads.
At the community board meetings they're already discussing whether or not they'll take a lot of the office space around me and end up converting it to residential. I think it's a bit premature for that but the city seems ready to adapt and thrive.
After being in my 1br in the Tendernob for 10 years ($1675/mo), I upgraded to a larger (similar layout) apt for just over $2K in Nob Hill. I received two-months concession for a 15-month lease.
I'm long past wanting to blow $200+ a night on bars and restaurants every day and because I love being in SF, I'm really happy.
Thinking 36k/year (more then the total comp of many workers in America) is cheap housing is a Bay-area distortion.
Even the 25min commute from Hoboken would make me sad. I want to be able to walk or take local transit to where I want to hang out.
> Thinking 36k/year is cheap housing is a Bay-area distortion.
I don't think anyone's making that claim?
That's a hell of a jump. What about rural South Jersey appealed to them?
IMO it is too early to judge the permanent impact of this to the city.
I'm right on the fence. I've been at my current place ~6 years, prices have just started to get to about what I'm paying (rent controlled). I'm hoping it drops some more so I can negotiate a reduction.
...with permanent WFH I too want to leave, head to Europe (I'm a citizen). With travel restrictions in place, and my employer saying they'd adjust my pay to reflect local cost of living I'm not sure what would be best.
This "local cost of living" and "regional market" argument is a farce. Remote workers are competing in a global market by definition. They might as well be honest and say, "we think we can get away with paying you less."
Yeah, exactly. The prices on that global market are miles away of the prices local to Silicon Valley.
My argument being that If I remain local but because of a long commute and choose to be full time remote, how would they really know the difference.
I'm from Portugal so I was thinking of being there, 8am here is 4pm there, and 5pm here is 1am there. I kind of like the idea of having my morning to myself, and working in the evening. With lock down that's been my work schedule now. I do exercise, chores, and cooking in the morning, and actual work in the evening (the occasional meeting tends to occurs as I bake/boil/chop something).
I spend a half the year in my Sunnyvale, CA home. I never go to SF to see shows, concerts, etc. Several times a year, when I'm in the U.S., I'll put together a trip to NY, LA, etc, to see several events over a long weekend. And/or go to Tanglewood, Monterey Jazz, Cabrillo music festivals.
People who visit me are shocked to learn that I live 40 miles from SF and never go there. (Especially because I'm a gay man.)
SF really needs to build more housing, and get the homelessness and crime problem under control. Pre-pandemic, SF had 2.5x the violent crime rate of NYC. (That may be different now that crime has spiked in NY.)
The sources of the data is the FBI "UCR" rates. Why do you believe the FBI is not accurate? That's an odd claim.
food - most of what i saw was not good food. hipsterish overpriced food made by chefs trying to show off by putting a twist on dishes -not to be good, just to be different or weird. tiny portions, not tasting above average, on a huge plate. all presentation, not actual taste.
culture: there is no culture. culture was when i lived in versailles. sf is all snooty people with no content, trying to show off. culture is down to earth, with class.
bars -there are very few attractive girls at bars, or at offices, or even on the street, compared to just about anywhere in the world. and if that's not why you go to bars, i have to ask -you'd enjoy going to bars with mostly men? because that's cool too -once in a rare while.
density is poor in sf. in good cities, you can walk where you want in a few minutes. sf is uber heaven. i've lived in cities with amicable density - without a car, and maybe grabbing a cab once a month. sf ain't it.
the weather's not bad, a little windy. and the ocean is close by. housing prices are being kept artificially high by sf itself -not letting people build housing.
so i can't see anything about sf that'd make people want to live there other than higher salaries. and the first chance they have to earn that salary elsewhere or remote, they jump on it.
so i think that's what's happening now. nothing to do with covid directly -just people who would never live there in the 1st place if it wasn't for the job, leaving as soon as the job lets them.
i think all this analysis of what people are doing and why weirdly avoids the very simple explanation -everyone's just doing what work lets them do. it's entirely dictated by employers.
The city could be more dense in some areas but it’s far more walkable than almost any US city outside of NY. Maybe go to the Mission next time and show me how LA, Miami, etc. are more walkable after
It's like pointing at little people as an example to show that 5'6" is heaps tall.
Sure I could compare to Portland but it’s small and honestly not that different from SF in terms of the kind of farm to table food and wine that’s served
What are the numerous cities I am missing that have better food and are more walkable than SF and not counting NY? I honesty haven’t found them
fresh produce is shipped overnight anywhere nowadays. being near a farm no longer gets you fresher produce. and keep in mind, produce is grown in many, many places. heck, in chicago we got farmer's markets every few blocks.
miami is one little street that's walkable, and a run down city of trash. i never said it was better. la was the example i gave of a city that is not walkable, like sf is not walkable. so density is not sf's pro, which the comment i replied to claimed.
as far as discerning taste, i've lived in moscow, versailles, catalonia, and tokyo. i've had good food. sf wasn't it. it was regular food, presented in weird ways, just to be different. putting avocado on something or drinking sake cold doesn't make it good -it just makes it different.
You went to a few sushi roll places and now you want to demean the quality compared to Tokyo? Give me a break. I’ve spent months in both and you’re not painting a very fair picture. Tokyo is the sushi capital of the world. No one would dispute that the Japanese have the widest variety of amazing sushi. But San Francisco is way up there and if anything the problem is there are too many unaffordable omakase menus with the best fish from Tsukiji market in Tokyo or from Monterey Bay. There are places that sell California rolls to tourists like everywhere, but San Francisco has so much actual Japanese food and so much omakase that I find it absurd that you characterize it that way. There is no way Chicago can go toe to toe on Japanese restaurants and you know it.
As for drinking sake cold, if you spent much time in Japan you’d know they typically serve crappy sake warm to disguise the impurities of not having polished the rice enough before making it. A good Junmai Ginjo will be served cold. You are welcome to have sake however you want, but don’t blame San Francisco for knowing how to drink sake properly. In fact, San Francisco has the only sake store in America (True Sake) because there are so many Japanese people and it’s so popular.
as far as sake.. i don't drink anymore, for a while now, but you're wrong. serving it warm brings out the taste, and makes any cheap nastiness worse. serving it cold is what hides it. having a store that only sells sake does not make it 'the store for sake.' there are many stores stateside that have a good sake selection. they also sell japanese beer and plum wine. and in the style of true sf culture, you just said japan has crappy sake, which is why they serve it warm, while sf is doing the traditional japanese wine correctly. this -people like you on every corner, is why i didn't like sf. it's the culture -or lack thereof.
https://boutiquejapan.com/sake101/#:~:text=At%20the%20risk%2...
"At the risk of overgeneralizing, many sake experts say that ginjo and daiginjo sakes are usually best not warmed (since being served chilled enhances their flavors and aromas)"
It is bizarre you go on these rants about how people on Hacker News aren't cultured like you after all your time in foreign cities, but you didn't visit the main neighborhoods, chose a few bad restaurants on Yelp, and clearly don't know how the locals prefer to drink their sake even after bragging about all your experience. Since you don't even drink, maybe you should listen to the people who do and who have toured the sake factories.
Way to be totally obnoxious and ruin the normally polite discourse here. You're posting on a brand new account and already getting flagged for abusive posting. You're not even trying to have a productive conversation. Go argue with people on Reddit.
The purpose of changing the temperature, as you pointed out, is to change the flavor notes. Having a particular sake cold may bring out fruitier notes while warming it up gives it an extra layer of vanilla. This is just an example. All sake have different notes and it can be really subjective on what notes are being registered. The ability to change the flavor drastically just by temperature is what makes sake interesting. This legit use isn’t just limited to subpar sake, but to the entire quality spectrum sake as well. So it really depends on many factors like the intended temperature consumption by the brewery or the establishment you are consuming the sake at (they want particular notes to come up so it goes well with the pairing of a dish, for example), or the most important: consumers palate.
Playing with the temperature is akin to whisky drinking: neat vs on the rocks vs water dropper. Each preparation changes the flavor and aren’t necessary bad.
You are correct that warming up bad quality sake can mask the undesirable attributes.
"At the risk of overgeneralizing, many sake experts say that ginjo and daiginjo sakes are usually best not warmed (since being served chilled enhances their flavors and aromas), while many junmai and honjozo sakes do well either way (since warming these types of sakes tends to draw out their complex flavors and smooth them out a bit)."
So yes I agree certain styles will be served warm and might have different and interesting taste profiles depending on temperature like your whisky example. But ultimately, warming the sake will tend to hide the subtle flavors that the sake maker did all the extra rice polishing to achieve, so it wouldn’t be recommended for a nice Junmai Daiginjo. The poster I replied to tried to falsely claim that hot sake would better pull out these subtle flavors, which I cannot find any reference for and does not agree with my experience drinking and reading about sake.
"farm to table" does not mean the meat is not aged. It just means the restaurant buys directly from the farm. No good restaurant would ever serve you an un-aged steak.
Ok, you lost me there. I've lived in SF for 10 years and there's sushi all over the place. Actual, real sashimi, nigiri, whatever you want. A la carte, set meals, omakase, whatever. Some of it is pretty high end, and you'll pay more in SF for an equivalent meal in Tokyo.
Beyond that, it's a little weird to bring up Tokyo as an example... the sushi in Tokyo is better than the sushi in pretty much any place in the US, perhaps in pretty much any place outside Japan. Not really a fair comparison.
Regardless, I kinda just think that you were visiting the wrong places when you visited SF. I agree that there's an annoying amount of of mediocre food that seems to exist more to look nice than to taste amazing, but that's true of many cities. (But these places tend not to last that long.) There's lots of fantastic food in SF, and frankly it's not even that hard to find, so I'm baffled by your bad experience.
Or just are following shallow, presentation-focussed hipster-targetting marketing and being surprised that it leads you to presentation-focussed hipster-targetted food offerings.
Heh.
Reliance on numerical ratings in online reviews isn't particularly different than reliance on marketing with a specific demographic targeting and, yeah, surprisingly enough it does tend to lead you to the more instagram-ready establishments.
The OP literally stated a reason to live in SF is the food. That's simply false. It's not poor quality, but it's no reason to live there. It's not better than in an average city.
There are distinct demographic trends in online reviews activity that are broadly similar to those involved in instagramming meals, which makes the biases in using aggregate ratings similar to those in favoring Instagram or marketing targeting the same demographic, yes.
(You can get better information from online reviews, but it takes more than blindly following aggregate ratings.)
Also this:
> there are very few attractive girls at bars, or at offices, or even on the street, compared to just about anywhere in the world. and if that's not why you go to bars, i have to ask -you'd enjoy going to bars with mostly men? because that's cool too -once in a rare while
Is so awful that the only explanation is that the whole thing is a shitpost.
Boom, mystery solved. Case closed.
I've visited SF about four times over the last few years - staying between one and three weeks each time.
I think you may have forgotten the question.
I've lived in San Francisco for a couple of years now, and I'll tell you why I have no current plans to leave: the startup ecosystem.
When I moved to San Francisco, my goal was (and still is) to move into entrepreneurship. Some people working in tech might move away, but the startup community, venture community, and general notion of SF being a "startup capital" seems like it's going to be more or less unaffected by the pandemic.
Food is expensive and a lot of it's designed to be instagrammed. There are definitely some great spots but not that many and really not that diverse (lacks middle eastern, greek, british, American bbq, spanish)
Nightlife is horrible, bars pretty much close at 1am, hardly any live music, gender imbalance, and not much density so it often just feels "dead" in a lot of places
the weather is ok. there's usually a few hours per day where it's pristine but quickly gets too cold/windy. And it's too uncomfortable to eat outside for dinner.
Public transit is unpleasant and slow, so most people who can afford it resort to 100% rideshare. And having your own car here is also a pretty bad experience (though some people would say this is a feature not a bug)
Petty crime is high. My friends regularly have to deal with car break-ins. (yes the same person would have multiple break ins in a single year, and no they don't keep anything in their car)
It's hard for me to speak to the culture, most of my network is in tech, and most people I know intend to leave at some point. Living in a city that people don't plan on living in for very long does not create a very good community or culture.
I live here because this is where my job is and where my friends are, but I want to leave pretty badly. I just don't really have anywhere else to go, if not my home country
As a southern Californian, I can attest to this. It's pathetic that our bars have last call at 2am (effectively many close at 1:30a).
There's been push after push to get last-call to 4am like it is in NY but they never go anywhere in the state legislature.
It's always seemed crazy to create a sudden spike in the number of impaired drivers.
What I'd like to see is a comparison of statistics from areas with early last call laws and other jurisdictions with later last call or no restrictions. It would be great to move past what feels good and use some actual data to make a our policies.
Exactly. It is known to have a scene. It is a great place for people who like to go to restaurants. For people who like good food, not so much. I remember going to a tea tasting in SF's chinatown while at a conference there. My friend (a local) asked if we had such good tea in Vancouver. The shop owner who was serving us interrupted: "They do. My brother has a shop there. He sent me this tea."
Since you mentioned Vancouver, I searched for Burmese food on Yelp. Only 7 restaurants total come back total.
2 are "Burmese / Thai / Malaysian" Asian fusion places Three of 3 are a generic Asian chain called Noodlebox that has one item called "Burmese naan" 1 is a Thai restaurant with one "Burmese curry" dish 1 is a Vietnamese restaurant that mentions its near one of the Burmese / Thai / Malaysian fusion restaurants
So Yelp has 7 total Burmese restaurants in Vancouver, not one of them is actually Burmese, and almost all of them don't even have Burmese dishes (where is the tea leaf salad? Burmese naan doesn't count)
So you can act like San Francisco is just known for having a food scene, but when you don't even have access to many of the same world cuisines in other cities it is hard for me to take you seriously when you say its not a place for people who like "good food."
You know the majority of American produce is grown in California? Do the vegetables get better when they're shipped for a few days to the east coast?
btw the british school of cuisine is one of the most famous in the world. not scene-wise though, but good food is for eating, not instagram.
sf is definitely not known for tasty food. it's known for showing off food. good for bored tourists. not good to live there. and no, sf doesn't habe good greek food or middle-eastern food. i've been to greece and the middle east quite a bit, and they have better food at has stations.
sf is all show and hype. that's not what locals want.
Yes, it is.
It's mostly orthogonal to the trendy food scene, and if you follow the latter hoping to find the former you’ll likely be disappointed, but SF is known for excellent examples of both a wide variety of authentic ethnic cuisines and a wide variety of excellent unique creative/fusion offerings apart from the trendy scene.
the south is known for great bbq. chicago is the meat capitol, with deep dish and greektown. maryland for crab and maine for lobster, nyc has authentic jew-food that rivals what i ate in israel and jordan.
what is the food sf is known for? because if i literally ask anyone i know, the answer will be 'fusion.' or 'pizza' with ranch and lettuce in it.
you're known for california rolls. the big mac of sushi.
known doesn't mean known just to you.
you may have some good restaurants here and there that people can uber to. the rest is fusion of hipster and lsd microdoses.
in a city i want to live in, i walk outside and pick from 5 good places. you take an uber across town to those. people are leaving now that work doesn't require them there. to a cities with better food.
Can't think of any place I've known so many people (and not just of any one national background) who live well outside the immediate area go to regularly specifically because of the quality of some particular cuisine (often, people of non-US origin going for their own national cuisine) that is there, though.
That doesn't really tell me anything about SF, but it does tell me a lot about the people you know.
> you're known for california rolls.
Me? I mean, I live in (approximately) Sacramento, not SF; of course, it's LA that is known for California rolls, anyway.
> known doesn't mean known just to you.
Yeah, I mean “known in media and culture”; not for a particular regional cuisine, but for the cosmopolitan variety of high-quality cuisine available.
> in a city i want to live in, i walk outside and pick from 5 good places.
Sounds like SF to me.
The good places and the popular, large, heavily marketed and online-reviewed places with glaring signage, though, only occasionally overlap.
Always love to grab myself one when I'm in the UK though.
Discovered the other day a restaurant that sells afternoon cream teas - perfect!
That said, that grill, and the traditional English fry-up are pretty unhealthy; I think I'm better off not living near one.
I've personally had great examples of all of those except Spanish in SF (and that exception may be because I've never sought out Spanish in SF.)
Serious question. Are there many night clubs and any day clubs? I was last out so late/early quite a few years ago but in most (possibly all?) Australian cities there are night clubs that were open through the night until 6am. I can recall one place in Melbourne that opened at, I think, midnight and didn't kick people out until 10am.
There were also a few day clubs in Sydney and Melbourne, which are like a night club but not opening until night clubs are just closing.
Personally, I've not been to San Francisco. I'm just staggered that given the cities fame the night life is so constrained.
As someone who actually lived in Versailles, this made me laugh outloud. It’s a boring upper-class suburb which happens to have a big castle in it. Culturally it’s at the same level as the Hamptons, just with older buildings and more royalists.
I don't think everyone goes to pubs or bars for the same reasons as you might.
If a guy's out having a nice time with his boyfriends, there's no reason to belittle him for that. ;)
The only reason a lot of people live in SF is solely that it's a really good place for a career in the technology industry or to do a startup. That's why I was there.
You probably selected places to eat by either marketing presentation or talking to novelty-seeking hipsters, and so found presentation-heavy novelty-focussed hipster food.
San Francisco has plenty of good food—and it's usually much cheaper than the food of the type you describe. Of course, if you live in a hipster bubble and don't communicate outside of it, and don't actively explore, you might have trouble finding the real gems.
> culture: there is no culture. culture was when i lived in versailles. sf is all snooty people with no content, trying to show off. culture is down to earth, with class.
There's plenty of culture in SF, but this also sounds like you spent your time in the same kind of hipster bubble your food impression reflects.
Personally I only go to bars to socialize with people I know. I have never spoken to a stranger at a bar and I used to go once/twice a month.
So I'm in the South Bay and only visit SF once in a blue moon now that I've got a family, but when I was younger & single there were quirky events that I've never seen in any other city. Things like Bring Your Own Big Wheel, Bay to Breakers, a random pillow fight with thousands of attendees (I guess San Jose has this as well, but it only drew a few dozen), scavenger hunts that covered multiple city blocks, poetry readings in the unpermitted basement of an antique shop, a game fair where indie game developers tested out their street games on the public, Carnivale, the Folsom Street Fair, etc. Maybe it's gotten too expensive since and this all moved out, but at the time it was worth making the trek up from the South Bay just for the events that you couldn't get anywhere else.
I liked the food a lot. I got giant, tasty, burritos in the mission for like $8. Of course you have to go to a side street, not something right on mission.
Didn't really go to bars so not sure about that.
To me the city is absolutely beautiful. Seeing the city from twin peaks, walking to the beach through golden gate park, or cycling across the golden gate bridge are all incredible experiences.
Tenderloin is trash though.
I tried it for 6 months. It was easy because I had a sister who lived in NYC for a time and essentially I could wash up there and not have to pay outrageous campground prices for temporary stays to seek a shower when needed. I stayed on the street there for 6 weeks mostly around Flatbush area and in Brooklyn elsewhere but also on the street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This was the most fun part of the trip. It was really a trip (I wasnt on drugs by the way). I saw a rocker getting into a cab with a woman hanging on him and he had to like push her away "no baby - it's over" right in front of me as he got into the cab. She was hot. It was a deeply personal thing that I shouldn't be reporting on but synchronicity somehow drew me to that event. I was there seeing it go down and I wished I could haved helped her. I couldn't buy her food because I lived in a van, and that story would have to come out in the first 5 minutes or I'd be a sleezebag who didn't explain to women what his deal was yet the deal wasn't completely unworkable. She could have had her own place and have been interested in me intellectually for long enough for it to be fun, and maybe a relationship could have blossumed out of that. Instead I got back in my van and lived a normal life as a vandweller who was afraid to hit on her. She deserved something.
These kinds of antedotes came up throughout the van ride out west (to San Francisco) too and basically I had fun but was stuck too often in situations where I needed to fess up to being a van dweller around attractive women in a way that I couldn't cover myself for doing well back then due to societal norms not having van dwelling being real back then. In today's world it might be OK. I'd talk about tiny houses first and how Twitter helped make them become popular and how a van is almost the same thing underneigth. It's just better looking to be honest (once you have the inside paneled). You need a rising platform (in the back) up on stilts like made of wood with storage space underneath giving you just the right about of headroom with a futon installed above it. A real carpender helped me and it was easy relative to fancy stuff that people do with RVS. You need to really have a second battery with an alternator cut-off solenoid in it so that the second battery charges off of the first and automatically ensures it cannot drain the first if you forget about it. This enables you to run 4 or 5 fans in the back that are mounted above if you can and basically that's it. Enjoy your rig.
Civic places I hung out: - Portland Oregon - Downtown Oakland - SF proper (Haight parking is possible) - Colorado (hotel stay needed - it was too cold sometimes) - Las Vegas (hotel stay needed - the other temperature extreme) - Chicago - and many other places along the way
For an introvert who hates these sorts of things, and wants to own a house, I'm hoping companies stay this way and people become more open to remote work.
I feel no benifit from living in NYC or SF but I need to be close to these places for work. I hope that if things continue o can buy a house in and just work from home. Never needing to worry about commuting again.
It was sad leaving, but my productivity is massively up. Right now we’re enjoying seeing other parts of the west coast, while playing the waiting game. I want to know how much of a pay cut I’d face if I moved permanently (company hasn’t said yet), and I’m also nervous about the winter coming up and how different regions will handle what I’m afraid will be an inevitable super-surge.
I'm a bit older than that in my thirties, and I haven't really observed this effect yet among my peer group. A lot of people are leaving temporarily, one person moved to Marin (but that's where their family is and I think they may have done that anyway), another friend was already planning a cross-country move and just did it a little earlier due to covid. On the other hand, looking at a lot of my younger friends and coworkers over the past few years, it feels like maybe a third to half of them always ended up leaving the city after a few years, and this was before covid.
I saw someone tweet this about NY, and it's my best guess about the present situation too - that it's likely most of the people leaving permanently due to the pandemic were going to leave the city in the next 3-5 years anyway. People have been moving to New York and then leaving after a few years for decades if not centuries (and writing nostalgic essays about doing so so often it has become a whole genre). And now that SF is such a hub for tech opportunities, in the same way that NY has always been for many different industries, I think this is just as true here as well.
For us, we have wanted to leave for several years, but the ability to WFH for my wife actually makes it possible now. More space, owning vs renting, and more local friends elsewhere all are big drivers.
Not the GP, but the social changes that happen with population density may make starting friendships more difficult (e.g. people adapting by being more standoffish than welcoming due to the sheer number of people they have to interact with in a dense environment).
Yeah? I've lived in SF and Santa Cruz. The quality of surf in Santa Cruz is vastly better, but the crowds are intense and at times pretty angry. I found it was less about localism, more about the anger of a large number of often very talented surfers competing for a scarce resource. I got longer, better rides in SC than I typically did in SF (by a 20-1 margin), but I'd have to maneuver for an hour to get priority for a few rides. They were glorious waves, though. Up here in SF, I tend to spread out on the beach break and find an uncrowded corner. Every thing has to line up just right to get a long, open, peeling wave out of a sand bar at OB or nearby beaches - whereas SC beaches (steamer lane, the point) generate this stuff pretty routinely.
But that's why it gets so edgy in SC. Everyone's in there, you finally get into position, it's your moment, you get maybe two of these every hour, and... someone paddles through the peak. Someone drops in. Even worse, that a someone is you, and you'll get barked at, at best (and while maybe the guy's being a dick about it, you really did fuck up). It's just too edgy, just boils over too much for my tastes. I know people say "well, don't do those things", but you'd be surprised how difficult that is. How do you know if you're deepest on a wave that breaks both directions? Did you drop in, or did someone snake? If you sit too far out, you'll miss the wave, and if you make it, there will be a sea of people you have to dodge. If you sit too far in, you may be staring down the barrel of a dozen surfers all taking off on the peak - and they'll either run you over, buzz you, or kick out of the wave and be really pissed that you ruined the ride that they spent the last 30 minutes getting ready for. Or, if someone does that to you, you kick out (better that than run the guy over), and now you're now caught inside and pissing off the next guy.
I surf regularly, and I'd much rather be in SF or Pacifica than in Santa Cruz. It's a trade off, though. If you want consistently high quality waves, SC does have more to offer.
I'm not a climber at all, but I've done a little bit of climbing on an indoor wall, and a crowded day means you need to wait longer, which is a hassle, but I get the feeling there's a much clearer sense of how to wait for your turn, with less interference when it is your turn. No idea if this is the case for outdoor climbing, though, or at more advanced sites. I'd still prefer a less crowded day with shorter lines of course - but crowds on a surf break don't just make it take longer to get the experience of a ride, they can pretty well ruin it. That's a big part of why I only surf uncrowded beach break.
Crowds can be a problem at good beginner-friendly single-pitch crags, but yeah lining up for a popular route is pretty straightforward if annoying.
in the end for me ob is to hit or miss and the season is really only fall. 8ft+ ob when the solid winter swell come in gets crazy. spring and summer just blown wind. pacifica has weird locals and crap waves. hmb barely breaks and traffic sucks. fall surf at ocean beach is about as good as it gets though, ill miss that for sure. post covid ill get my perfect wave fill in hawaii, indo, central america i guess, ive saved so much money the last few months
It seems plausible that SF already had such low inventory numbers that any change would look huge on a chart like this, though that doesn’t appear to be the case in the other highly competitive markets seen here. I’d love to see the actual monthly figures... maybe it’s true that there’s an exodus afoot, or maybe SF was that much worse off from an inventory perspective until now.
It also seems plausible that SF has a unique combination of factors that put it in a bad spot right now. It’s insanely expensive, quality of life has been on the decline for some time, and the types of companies that made real estate there so expensive in the first place are also likely to be the ones that adopt remote work quickly and wholeheartedly.
SF aside, my best guess at this point is that many American cities are and will continue to actually see some amount of people leaving for lower cost and more spacious markets, especially if remote work optionality sticks in the way it looks like it will. But cities have enduring appeal - proximity to people and culture and things to do is just as much a factor as proximity to work. I think any exodus we see in most markets will amount mostly to a pull-forward of people who would have left cities anyway because of life stage, but did it a year or two early if they could.
But isn't the point of the article that San Francisco specifically is seeing an exceptional exodus? The story even mentions San Jose as a regional counter example to the observations being made of SF.
It is obvious from the charts that something unusual happened in SF. But that is different from it being sustained, not about to reverse or even important. The dust hasn't even finished rising from COVID-19 yet, let alone settled. And it isn't even clear this is COVID-19 related.
Bingo
Its a delta of a delta
I like the ones that show rent and pricing drops more
This chart is an additional footnote but not one to make an article about in isolation
I think this is key right here. For the foreseeable future, those things won't be any more available in an expensive city compared to an inexpensive rural area. So why buy a 1 bedroom for $2 million or rent one for $3500 a month if I can do the exact same amount of networking and see the exact same amount of museums while paying significantly less?
One example for instance is the vast amount of unique natural beauty surrounding the Bay Area.
Even rural places that have that are also expensive- though admittedly not nearly as much so. This is generally reflected in salary though.
Basically, the optimal solution right now is to not go anywhere or see anyone unless you absolutely have to. Which if all someone should be doing is sitting at home or getting groceries, they could do that for a lot less than SF prices.
Outside of a few extremely popular spots it is not restricted in Washington, at least to my knowledge. If it is in the Bay/CA then it is news to me.
In any case, that stuff will still be there when the pandemic is over. It won’t be anywhere east of the Rockies.
On trails with 90+F weather you have to put your mask on every 30 seconds with how many people there are, it's a mess.
My mental health is not improving when there are a million people all trying to do outdoor activities in the limited space we have nearby.
What's strange about now is that the little neighborhood walks that lead down to beaches and other "hikes" like that are completely packed with people at all times, especially on weekends. It's actually to the point where people are parking multiple blocks away and then walking to the trailhead. It didn't used to be that way.
In my experience, you bring a mask with you when you hike, and occasionally put it on for maybe twenty seconds out of every five or ten minutes (or even rarer intervals when hiking in the more remote areas like the national parks) when you pass by someone on a trail and can't maintain distance. You hardly ever have to wear it.
And aside from this past weekend, it hasn't cracked 90 in the Bay Area pretty much all summer IIRC, and rarely even gets over 80.
Otherwise, your point about there still being plenty of healthy ways to get out of the home, both practically and in accordance with official guidelines, is well-made.
I have worked 100% remotely for almost two years now and love it but now I live somewhere with a crappy job market. Yes I save money but I live in constant fear of having to take a 50% pay cut if I can’t find more remote work.
I love working remotely and I think it’s a great idea but I don’t think people realize how much of a leash it is when you choose to work in SV but live in the middle of nowhere.
The local paper ran a story saying that the median house price in the city proper went up $15K in one month[1] and wages are not budging. 84% of the city is zoned for single family homes. Downtown pre-lockdown had 80K cars fighting for 18K parking spots.
I live in a one bedroom penthouse Downtown for $2K a month. I don't have care. It's only the 7th floor though, and on a 5 lane highway that the city has asked the state to narrow (the state refused)[2]. It's very loud from the red state types driving through with big diesel trucks and obnoxious motorcycles.
Most of the metro treats Downtown Boise as a parking lot[3]. The largest private land owner downtown is the power company (for parking lots)[4]. And the nature outside the city requires driving hours in a place that desperately needs less traffic pollution and more transit.
I'm pretty set on decamping to Boston soon to be in real tower in a city with transit.
[1] https://boisedev.com/news/2020/08/12/boise-idaho-home-sales-...
[2] https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/ar...
[3] https://www.idahopress.com/news/local/eagle-narrows-where-ap...
[4] https://boisedev.com/news/2020/07/28/idaho-power-plans-to-co...
But that's not what you move to most cities for. SF may be exceptional in having that stuff as well, but for most cities, if you lock down the social/cultural aspects, then the natural beauty is elsewhere.
I imagine people at the fringes in the city (and region really), born and raised, with local family ties making it harder to leave, might feel that this "bad spot" appeared some time ago.
But way too early to tell, I'm still never expecting to move back there.
Proximity to people may be something that loses appeal in the medium term.
This is a suspicion rather than anything that can be evidenced yet, we'll see how it plays out, but I think it might start counting as a negative, or less as a positive, for a while.
But secondly, that's not really what I meant, I meant that for the next several years people's motivations and choices are likely to be impacted by the virus. This may result in a larger percentage of people moving away from cities or choosing not to move to them.
i.e. I'm not talking about an individual holding the thought in their head that "I don't want to be in a city, in the medium term, but may move back later", but a population which is less favourable to city life in the medium term, and holds a greater proportion of people who think "I don't want to live in the big smoke at all"
I may be wrong, of course, but I think we're already seeing it to a small extent.
> It should be noted that San Francisco had an unusually low inventory relative to other large cities prior to the pandemic. Historically, the ratio of homes for sale relative to total housing has been a quarter of New York's.
But then they go on to assert that this is important regardless, but don't actually provide any information to back it up.
> Regardless, the 96% year on year change in inventory marks a significant moment.
I would assume if it was so self evident, it would be easy for them to include even a sentence that alludes as to why.
They say other nearby markets don't see the same shift but other nearby markets were never like SF anyway, so I'm not sure why they would indicate something in a market already known to be dissimilar.
Edit: I and the parent comment were referring to the SFGate article from another submission that got merged I to this one, as we were before the merge.
Conversely, if you're a building manager and you an X% occupancy rate target, you're going to need to cut prices in order to maintain that rate if a bunch of tenants don't renew.
This is pretty much textbook microeconomics 101.
Going a bit further, occupancy rate is a signal that both sides of the market can (noisily) observe, so if the prior non-occupancy rate was very low, you'd expect a shock that doubles the rate (say, 5% -> 10%) to lead to perhaps a larger price change than in a less tight market (such as 10% -> 15%)
One example, it makes more sense to give someone 3-6 months free at price $X than to get them in at .5 or .75 $X.
It depends on the landlord. If they were reasonable, then yes, I'd bargain with them. If they were total pricks for most of the time I was there, then screw them. I can get my lower rent and hurt them in the process. I'll try that option! (At least, I bet that's the thinking of many people.)
The premise I was responding to is that noting change in inventory will show much larger swings if there's relatively few units on the market, and that may be a poor indicator of what's going on.
Simplified, it's the difference between a market of 100 units of this 10 are avaiable inventory, and seeing an increase of 3 units (30% raise in available inventory) and a a market of 100 units that has 1 unit available and sees an increase of 2 units (200% increase in available inventory). There was an increase in inventory, and it helps, but probably not as much as 200% would lead one to believe.
The article itself noted the latter was the case in SF as there was "unusually low inventory" compared to other cities beforehand. Of course the difference is going to look outsized, in that case.
> if the prior non-occupancy rate was very low, you'd expect a shock that doubles the rate (say, 5% -> 10%) to lead to perhaps a larger price change than in a less tight market (such as 10% -> 15%)
That depends on so many other factors that I think you can't easily generalize like that for housing. If the inventory is still very low, and now instead of being uber-rich you just need to be very-rich, you're still so constrained in your potential customers that the price range may not change significantly, or if you're still catering to a class of people that do or don't traditionally commute, or if the price is hovering near the break even for a lot of people for commuting vs living local, or whether the work in the area that many of the potential customers does can be done remotely (as these articles are about), etc. Housing is one of the most complicated markets, and there are numerous counterexamples of the exact opposite happening to what you describe
That said, a lot of folks in SF are on month-to-month leases so they can just give a 30-day notice and peace out.
Maybe one day the media will be forced to change for the better of society!!! As of now too many people are sheep to it (all sides)... I find local media in my small town city to be much more digestible and better for society.
I do wonder if people consider the huge advantages city living can provide?
I'm reading constantly that current dream is buying a plot of land in the middle no where, signing up for StarLink and growing watermelons while trying to work a full time engineering job.
The thing is though, this is all just a temporary thing, even if this pandemic meanders on for another 3-5 years. It's nothing in the course of history.People will still go to cities because the best opportunities, education, entertainment and social scenes will exist there. People who live in cities will have advantages and children will want to move there from the country to be with other young people.
I'm not saying that there aren't advantages to the country lifestyle, I've spent time in rural areas too and had plenty of family who lived, I understand the romantic allure of it.
But cities were popular before this, and they'll be popular after this too.
We need livable towns and cities with good schools where anybody can move anywhere.
(source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/521886/travel-time-spent...)
I'm in a very livable town. It's just not walkable given the acres of land with just a few houses around me.
edit: instead of downvoting, maybe help me understand why I might be looking at this wrong?
That said, I do expect you see a decrease in premiums being paid for high CoL areas to the degree that living there becomes an employee lifestyle choice and a rise for tech workers in low CoL areas who can work remotely. I expect you end up somewhere in the middle.
It's important to remember that these economic concepts flow both directions. Power dynamics fluctuate over time, but don't let anyone convince you that you're always on the short end of the stick. You're not.
On the other hand, I have read about a growing interest in returning to the office. A growing number of people are feeling unproductive working from home. A company could position itself towards shareholders as more productive and innovative with more butts in the seat than it's competitors who outsource. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
Anyway, if any HN folks are planning road trips across America, you wouldn't regret passing through that part of the country. Dubuque is in the Driftless Area, a tiny sliver of North America that wasn't covered by glaciers during the last ice age and therefore wasn't scoured flat when they receded. There are lots of steep hills and deep ravines, exposed rock and springs that pop out of the ground for a while and then go back underground. Dubuque sits on a fairly picturesque part of the Mississippi River and has many hills and valleys in town. It even has a funicular!
A very significant element of comp is about relationships, not skills or productivity or labor markets or other fictions people believe.
In-person relationships are infinitely stronger, on balance, than remote.
Remote talent will be cheaper than in-person talent, on balance, AND, in-person talent will always be comped better than remote.
The way work is structured as tech continues to change will also reflect relationships, and low-relationship roles will continue to see their comp reduced.
So, yes, the range of roles that can be comped less and are remote will grow, creating a much lower median. But in person relationship leverage will only get stronger.
Hope that helps.
I think the "good ol' days" of tech companies hiring the best and brightest from around the world to sell exploitive products is over with. If those people want to move here, become US citizens, bring over their immediate family, and rescind their foreign country citizenship great. On the backend of this pandemic, you're going to see a gargantuan backlash against exploitive companies period.
Put your effort into making sure whatever you are doing is efficient and don't get too invested in your current employer.
Has this changed?
The reason is that you are only required to renounce "allegiance" to other countries during the naturalization ceremony. This has nothing to do with citizenship.
The things is, I work remotely now and have for a while, while I find a lot of pleasure in it, I can see the selfish side of it too.
One important change I've noticed in working for remotes is, we tend to hire experienced people, IMO for the following reason....
We, still don't know how to mentor juniors remotely. This is from an emotional and technical perspective.
I've also never received promotions as a remote person either. I feel there's a long way to go with fully remote workforce being the ideal situation for most people.
I also don’t get a ton out of cultural experiences like art exhibits and high end dining. For me, I recharge by sitting in some dirt next to a campfire with friends I’ve had since grade school.
Like I said, everyone is different, but for me the city was all cost and no payoff.
If I knew I could work remote indefinitely, I’d find a nice house in a bikeable neighborhood with a good school district and have a lot of bbqs with the neighbors.
However, to give some perspective, I grew up in a rural/suburban "flyover" town. There are parts of my childhood that I would love my own children to have - running outdoors, opportunities to try things without committing to the (sure, I'll sign up for the baseball team and see what happens), etc
But what I realize that I missed was the knowledge of how big the world was. I thought going to the local state college was "making it." I didn't understand how the world worked or what was possible. I missed out on opportunities because I didn't realize that I should be looking for them.
A great book on the subject is Hillbilly Elegy. It tracks closely with my own experiences (though I can say that I am fortunate to not have some of the challenges that the author faced).
Based on my experiences, I have chosen to expose my children to the wide world of opportunities out there. Yes, I am terrified of the stress and anxiety that might accompany that, but I am also confident that it is what would set them up to be successful in this global society
There's nothing about living in a smaller town that says you have to compromise the expectations you set for your kids. For some reason, native-born Americans often fall into that trap, while immigrant parents understand and push their children regardless. Moving outside of a major city isn't about completely giving up, its about choosing a different track for your life.
I think the impact that parents have is much larger than location. Period.
I didn't mean to imply that big city = success, small town = giving up. My apologies if it came across that way
My experience was that my parents didn't have the knowledge to know how to push (not their fault - their parents also didn't have that perspective). In small towns, unless you have parents showing you the world, it is hard to find it on your own
Your kids will be living a lonely lifestyle. People don't live in rural areas and still manage to do lots of travel, have a great education, and so forth. Your kids will be the exception... I grew up in smaller towns (4,000 7+ years, 5,000 6+ years, 20,000 3 years) that were 3+ hours from a major city. I had never even visited the city before I was 18 because my parents couldn't afford traveling. I don't think my experience was too uncommon.
And education? Eh - real bad. At least in a major city you have a choice between a few schools and you could theoretically find a nice private school too.
> But what I realize that I missed was the knowledge of how big the world was. I thought going to the local state college was "making it." I didn't understand how the world worked or what was possible. I missed out on opportunities because I didn't realize that I should be looking for them.
This hits it on the head. If you grow up in a region without opportunity, you just don't know that it exists elsewhere.
The biggest problem I had with living in rural areas was the lack of opportunity. I was always taking the most "advanced" classes - but at schools in cities - I found out I was barely keeping up. Even then, many classes weren't offered at my schools because there just wasn't the demand and/or sufficient funding (I went to an unusually poor school district - we only went to school 4 days a week because it was so poor). This translated to a very poor transition to entering a very competitive college and a very competitive city life. I grew up not having to work as hard to compete and then suddenly being wildly underprepared for the global market I was entering where most of the people I was working with were from wealthy families, grew up in major cities, and had a world class education at every stage of their life. It's not like all those people had horrible anxiety either... A lot of them were happy at all stages of their life. The ones with the anxiety I think were like me - ones who had never had this much competition and were feeling so far behind.
Now I'm trying to make it but without all the background built up that would help me succeed. It's a lonely path that I don't know any doing on their own. I know one person from a similar background as mine and in the bay area but if they weren't married to an incredible human being - I don't know if they'd be here. Even then, they struggle and they feel it comes back to their more rural roots.
So is country for different people at different times.
Besides I think 'revolt against cities' seems like reaction of this constant bombardment of news about how yuppies love cities and how desolate and terrible life must be for people not living in cities. In last decade I only had one job in city rest all were in burbs. I didn't much care about dining and culture options on my work days. I would think of just getting the hell of out workplace as early as possible and reach home on time. Also exploring city on weekend is always an option.
All things you listed great about city is true. Something I see missing from discussions is what percentage of population really love or afford to access them and with what frequency.
Now as you say cities may be the future for most of the people. Similarly ad economy and constant surveillance also seems to be the future. To me none of these looks to be good.
The last American urban exodus started in the 1950s and wasn't fully reversed until the early 2000s.
Many cities never recovered in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. Even the most expensive cities, like San Francisco, LA, and New York, had neighborhoods that were run down and dilapidated, ignored for decades, until very recently.
I'm not saying this will necessarily happen again, but it certainly could. Cities are incredibly expensive to maintain, and most American cities have already spent their "rainy day" funds in just a few months of lock-downs. All the while depolicing is gaining steam.
The whole thesis of the strongtowns.org website, with lots of data and references to back it up, is that medium dense city centers and town centers are the only parts of a city/town that are revenue positive. Commercial strip mall areas and suburbs do not generate enough sales tax and property tax revenue (and often require tax breaks) to pay for the infrastructure: miles of roads and streets, sewers, utilities, etc. Density, when you have lots of people and economic activity in a smaller area, can pay for its infrastructure, even if it might be more expensive than a country road.
Otherwise, I do agree, it is cyclical, cities were over-hyped for a while, with the tech boom in many east and west coast cities, but now remote work might reverse that. However, as Europe has shown, with a few precautions and some sacrifice such as concerts and night-clubs, a lot of city activities can go on, and with less rent pressure, we might be headed toward a good balance.
Think about it: one mile of sewer, one mile of street, supports X people in a suburb, or 50X people in a dense city.
Even if the wear costs in the city are double or even four times that, the city comes out way ahead.
https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2016/11/10/meanwhile-u-s-sub...
It’s exactly like the paradigm between coastal states and welfare states.
I love cities, but I always wonder if the combination of a high speed internet, plenty of space and fresh air, solar electricity, and a good electric car to go to town in weekends, wouldn't be better.
Simply speaking, my gut tells me this isn't just about San Francisco. They don't have a monopoly on overexpensive housing, homelessness, drug problems, feces, violence, or taxes.
Again, anecdotal, but I think the exodus is real, and it's not hard to see why. We're going to soon hit a point where apologists for cities will no longer be able to defend them. I would love to live in a city if it didn't both punish success and fail to help those whom are truly in need.
Interesting take. It seems like a domino too far, but it could conceivably contribute to a collapse that was already going to happen.
I’ve never heard this put so succinctly, or I can relate to it more now.
I like dating “spiritual” women but I have seriously considered living in a shittier place in SF so they didn't feel uneasy or “misaligned” as they say. I have literally heard “makes me suspicious” [0]. Working professionals love the place/decor/view though but they aren’t as fun.
There are self-proclaimed communists in SF and coastal east bay towns. Its a little jarring.
[0] One of my boys - who is twice my age - said “if you want to attract trust funded hippies, just say you are a drug dealer but that you only have thc edibles right now”. I have yet to do that but I could see that working well, from my own observations.
Maybe not the best environment if there are places that celebrate material success but also dont cost as much or have favelas literally at the ground level.
I don't think most people realize how similar the dynamics are in developed economies across the world, and, consequently, what a big impact this, along with everything else going on, could have on the global economy.
For sure, the immediate cause of the issue is the corona virus, but a large economic impact might not be easy to just roll back, even after that (hopefully) is resolved.
I live in such an European capital city (Bucharest) and in fact we can go out to meet our friends and the like, outdoor restaurants and coffee shops are open (they have been since the beginning of June), parks are open. Yes, concerts are still heavily restricted (some do happen, but only outdoors and with a limited number of spectators) and of course you cannot attend any sporting event just yet, but that's pretty manageable.
It's not. I live in the Northeast and it seems like every day on the local news there is a story about businesses and residents fleeing NYC. 5 months of WFH (and knowing a lot of people personally touched by Covid) is starting to reshape a lot of attitudes about what is really important in life. It's also opened a lot of eyes to the fact that company culture and organizational inertia were the main impediments to remote work, not technology. I don't think the genie can be put back in the bottle.
That being said, I do agree that the genie probably can't be put back in the bottle and there will be an at least semi-permanent shift of people away from cities.
If you’re earning over $1,000,000 per year, yes.
SF median income is below 100K.
The 1.5% tax they're talking was the 1.5% payroll tax that SF had in place until 2012 [1]. Payroll tax isn't quite the same as an income tax because the onus isn't on the employee to figure it out like state and federal, but it still did cost most businesses in SF an extra 1.5% on every employee's salary to be there.
Prop E shifted most of this to a gross receipts tax instead (although there's still a 0.38% payroll expense tax in place [2]). Again, the numbers your parent is talking about are out of date, but the spirit of it is right in that it does just fundamentally cost a company quite a bit more to have an employee in SF.
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[1] https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/gross-receipts-t...
[2] https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/payroll-expense-...
Lets say that property taxes were 1 million dollars a year, per apartment.
What do you think would happen? What I think would happen is that property owners would abandon their property/destroy it/remove it from the market, because they don't want to pay that 1 million dollars a year.
This would effect support of housing, meaning that price would go up.
Yes, rents are effected by supply and demand. And property taxes can have an effect on supply. This is clear, in our extreme example of 1 million dollars a year, per apartment.
On the other hand we do know what happens if the tax rate goes to zero, because there are many rental properties in San Francisco which are essentially untaxed. These properties have the same rents as any other, following the market price up and down. We can say with good empirical basis that halving and doubling the property tax rate has no effect on rents.
It helps us at least establish that property taxes effect supply.
If there is an additional cost for holding a certain supply, then this will discourage people from holding it.
For other examples, you can think about how it would discourage people from building new supply because that supply is less valuable, due to the additional costs of holding it.
> These properties have the same rents as any other
It is not about the effect on existing properties. Instead, this is about the effect that at tax has on the supply of housing.
Higher costs and higher taxes disincentives the ownership of, or creation of new supply.
> We can say with good empirical basis that halving and doubling the property tax rate has no effect on rents.
No. Because you are ignoring the effect that costs have on supply of housing. The higher that costs are, for both building housing, holding housing, or any other cost at all, means that owning that property is less valuable, and it means that less future housing is produced, due to higher costs.
But, in general, if there are not laws that put a maximum on housing supply in the area, THEN property taxes would effect supply, as the bottleneck to new housing is costs and profitability, and not laws.
The situation jeffbee is talking about sounds like one where property taxes constitute a small enough percentage of annual rental revenue that, even in cases where they're very high, they're not high enough to create a genuine squeeze on the landlord. Thus, demand sets the price.
In a hypothetical situation where property taxes rose high enough that the landlord was no longer making a profit, then yes, they would probably have to raise their rents. In such a situation, it is likely, but not certain, that property taxes would be rising by similar amounts for that landlord's competitors, so rents would simply go up (even more) across the board. If they didn't, and that landlord was just very unlucky, then they'd end up having to make some other kind of structural change to their real estate business or exit the market.
As a tenant would you pay 20% more for a similar property?
Caveat: the rental market isn’t optimized, there’s the application process, long rental terms, penalties, etc
Private capital will chase the best money making opportunities regardless. They will just avoid buying property if they don’t think they can make enough money on it. Property tax rates definitely play a role in that.
If you bought your house a decade ago it's going to be worth WAY more now than it is now. In a healthy market you might then either try to roll that extra equity into another place by either upsizing to get something that more fits your needs, or downsizing if that makes sense.
However, because of the property tax mechanisms if you move from a $1m house to another $1m house your property taxes will go up substantially even if it is a side grade. That means that you are less likely to move (in fact you may not be able to afford even a side grade depending on your circumstances).
This keeps housing inventory low, which keeps prices rising.
Thanks to Prop 13, many homeowners do pay quite tiny property taxes. But this turns out to be extremely nefarious because along with removing a fair tax base and liquidity from the market, it also means that the disproportionate burden for paying California property tax is placed on new home buyers, who are often younger people/young families.
New entrants are often paying incredible levels of property tax (as it's a percentage of the already highly inflated prices), and because they're disproportionately more likely to be working, they're also the ones paying state and federal tax, along with the miscellaneous municipal taxes which can also be quite high in cities like San Francisco.
Meanwhile, legacy owners make off like bandits. I looked up the property I rent in once, owned by a large real estate holder that's decades old, and it was assessed at a few hundred thousand — for a 5 unit building in central SF. I don't know what the actual value would be, but it'd be closer to a ballpark of $3 to $6M. A differential of ~20x, and this isn't uncommon.
It's this framework that gets you to "lowest in the nation". I tend to think about it as _both_ the highest and the lowest in the nation, largely determined based on when your family moved here.
Some people are very poor at remote. If too many are thus, it may end.
If taxes are as high as you claim, it would be more rational to argue that the high prices are indirectly caused by that tax, rather than prices being held down by taxes.
Several causes seems more likely for a change in inventory, or pricing.
An extremely high cost of housing and the consequently smaller than average living spaces, which people are spending more time in due to covid has probably led some people to re-evaluate their priorities. It has in less heated markets.
Increased possibilities of remote work even in tech companies traditionally against it, and as tech drives SF, this is going to affect a majority of people living there.
Expectations of recession due to one of 1) covid 2) some of the giants getting pushback from an administration that is fickle at best 3) new competition from non US companies in driving markets, eg TikTok 4) ... and more.
There are plenty of somewhat plausible reasons to get out of the highest priced housing market in the US, especially if you can't handle a significant downturn in prices.
You could argue taxes too, if the market prices were average, or below average, but in the current situation any economic sensitivity is caused by an overheated housing market, nothing else can even touch the force of a market as hot as the SF one.
However, if a market with 1/4 the inventory of NY increase its inventory, even when it's with about 100%, one really can't tell anything. It's the hottest of the hot markets that's cooled down a little, and it doesn't really tell anything yet, except that the market has changed somehow.
Source: moved to Austin in June.
Cities take note and start rolling our fiber as fast as you can.
So, yeah, i can't really imagine being angry that you're being asked to contribute back to the society. Especially when you make 250k.
Marginal rate for high earners includes: 37% federal. 13.3% state, plus FICA, social security, local taxes, etc. not to mention employer payroll tax and insurance premiums that are essentially passed on to employees but baked into tax in Europe).
Taxes are significantly higher in California than Europe for high earners (like the people leaving SF). There seems to be a major misconception about this even among Americans. Take France for example. Uses a simliar marginal rate system but caps out at 48%. https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/france/individual/taxes-on-pers...
- 37% federal requires $510k income (after $12k personal exemption and probably $20k retirement savings)
- 13.3% state in California requires $1M income
- Social security is included in FICA and does not count towards the marginal rate for high earners (you pay no social security tax on income above $137k)
- Local taxes?
- 37% federal requires $510k income (after $12k personal exemption and probably $20k retirement savings). YES BUT ITS 35% ABOVE $207k
- 13.3% state in California requires $1M income. YES BUT IT'S 9.3% ABOVE $57k, and 10.3% ABOVE $295k
- Social security is included in FICA and does not count towards the marginal rate for high earners (you pay no social security tax on income above $137k). THERE IS NO CAP ON THE EMPLOYEE PORTION MEDICARE TAX. PLUS NOT ALL OF THEM ARE IN FICA. THERE ARE BOTH FEDERAL (IN FICA) AND STATE INSURANCE TAXES IN CALIFORNIA FOR EXAMPLE.
- Local taxes? SF HAS A PAYROLL TAX OF 1.5% FOR EXAMPLE.
California effective tax rate: 36% France effective tax rate: 48%
Using a different calculator with $19000 into 401k and the California effective tax drops to 32%
https://us.icalculator.info/salary-calculator/california.htm... https://www.icalculator.info/france.html
401k is not tax free, it's tax deferred. You still pay tax, just when you cash out.
Personally, by far my largest tax is income tax (which is far lower in CA than France for my level of income). Everything else is basically meaningless in comparison.
"Healthcare" also isn't a particularly strong case for the scenario you're proposing. If you're making $250k, you've probably got pretty good employer sponsored health insurance. Personally I pay nothing for a fairly good plan with low deductibles and copays. Health insurance in the US sucks for the unemployed and for low-income workers, but it's not at all bad for high earners.
401k taxation is also much more nuanced than you're making it out to be: it's taxed on withdrawal, at the rate you're withdrawing it. If you're retired — which is when you'd withdraw — your other income is probably zero, so your 401k is taxed in a very low bracket since it's your only income, and you're only withdrawing as much as you need to spend — as opposed to income earlier in life, where you're trying to make much more than you spend in order to build up savings. So while it's not exactly tax-free, it's extremely low tax generally. Presumably any other money you're relying on at that point you'd structure as long-term capital gains, which are also taxed at a low rate.
The average home price in The Bay is $1.3M. Because of prop 13, most owners aren't paying tax on that much, but most renters are paying pretty close (most units are relatively new stock). This comes out to $23,400 a year in taxes per house/condo. SF median salary is $96k.
Obviously the average person making $96k ($67k after income taxes) isn't paying $23k in property tax, but I think it helps give an idea at how big of an expense this is to most renters...
The other difference is that as individual you almost get nothing for your taxes. Childcare, college education, health care, pensions, everything is private and something you or your employer has to pay.
In Europe paying taxes feels better since in many countries you actually lot of this stuff for free in an exchange from the taxes you pay.
"asked to contribute back to the society" is a generalization. how much should people be asked to give back? Similarly, even if a rate was fair, isn't it understandable that someone might prefer to pay less in taxes? We aren't talking about tax evasion, rather considering regional differences in taxation as part of the cost benefit analysis of moving. I imagine many in california share your beliefs and feel they are giving back a fair share of their labor. but it feels you are advocating for avoiding the conversation, or perhaps too quick to dismiss them as selfish, which seems to be less productive than understanding why others behave differently.
The point is that your basic needs are well being exceeded at even like 80k, at which point you’re already in the top 5-10%. It’s obnoxious and greedy to be concerned about such low amounts of money when you’re making $250k, in the top 1% and have so many more opportunities than other people.
It's obnoxious and a greedy for you to feel like you have some right to say what somebody else should do with their hard-earned money.
It's a simple problem of who has the strongest ability to contribute to pay for the things we all need to keep our society growing.
Bitching and moaning about having to pay $20k when you have 250k and are in the top 1% of wealth in society is unseemly.
Reread this comment and find why most of “regular” America hates the coasts and tech elites.
I expect California to try some sort of remote worker tax soon to try and stop the bleeding. Best of luck to everyone out in search of greener pastures. Remember not to enact the same city policies that turned California into what it is today.
There are local politicians in NJ now talking about this. With so many commuters possibly not going back to an office there’s potentially a few billion in tax revenues at stake.
Most states have reciprocal deals with neighboring states so that you pay taxes where you live even if you work in the adjacent state. NY does not and for obvious reasons. California either and I’ve heard California will claim your owe taxes even if you move far away but the company only has an office in CA.
As reports of these states chasing down money that is arguably not theirs gets around it will be interesting to see if congress acts. Especially if CA’s wealth tax happens which they claim will tax any wealth over a threshold even after you’ve been out of state for years.
Of course the pandemic is changing things considerably everywhere and it’s definitely different this time, but the cities are still the cities. SF has access to amazing nature and is a beautiful city. New York is going to be New York. They’ll come back. I’m not mad at having a cheaper, weirder, grittier city though. It’s the reason I fell in love with the city as a kid in the first place.
Unlike many of my tech peers, I love San Francisco and the Bay Area. It's a beautiful city and surrounded in all directions by even more beautiful places. The food, music, and art scenes are all amazing. Oh and it happens to have near-unlimited job options for my career of choice.
The only reason I wasn't thinking about buying and staying forever was because the economy there makes absolutely no sense. Housing prices are out of control and the stock is of pretty low quality. Food, drink, and entertainment prices are also super high with no low end at all. NYC might be just as expensive but you can still get a dollar slice of pizza if you want it. You know SF is bad when all I could think in my first month in central London was "wow it's so cheap here".
If things come down to earth a little bit, even if it's still a Top-3 most expensive city in the US, I think I'll go back to SF and stay there.
And I think the current exodus is a win-win. People who were only there because their jobs forced them to be there were the source of a lot of the natives-vs-techies clashes which made the environment seem hostile at times.
I think you're possibly the first and last person to have that thought ;)
That probably says more about Ireland than it does about London though.
Rent is definitely lower in London.
That said salaries are lower in London too, so the relative "cost of living" may be higher here. I'm still thinking in America Bucks.
The big productivity culling is coming, overhiring was so easy, all seemed justified.
Careful of marking yourself as replaceable with remote labor. You might not like just how remote management will go :)
In earnest, whom did you actually envision to be "essential" then?
What will probably happen is the company will want to lower the workers salary based on the local market that the IC is operating in. If you aren't trying to wage arb, then you could keep your job, and potentially be happy.
-Mark
The primary problem I see is that offshoring tech work to India has been an option for a long time, but has largely failed for a variety of reasons - US companies seem to feel they get better value paying a much higher price for talent in tech hubs. It's not clear how the calculus would be different now.
My interpretation of "essential" with it comes it ICs is someone with a vast amount of domain knowledge which is critical for the continued operation of the company.
I've worked at many places where essential workers were in other countries, and I didn't know if they worked in an office, from home, or from a ski resort. But it didn't matter because they had the information I needed.
But if that was it, why isn't NYC seeing the same? Are apartments actually bigger there or more commonly single occupant or something?
It is going to be starkest probably in San Francisco though because 1. Rents were actually higher there to begin with (though they had begun to deteriorate) 2. The employers there are weighted more heavily toward companies able and willing to embrace remote work (that is, tech companies).
Real estate markets around the city (NJ, CN) are on fire right now. People that were maybe thinking about getting more space now have the choice made for them.
When you calculate the tax money you save it opens a world of possibilities. And it’s not like NJ or CN are low tax places! Lots of people moving to Texas and Florida as well I’ve read.
I agree, but I have found it so interesting that so many people on the peninsula or south bay are completely fearful of San Francisco! Its the opposite view of what you wrote.
More of a classic "everything is scary except my suburb" misconception. I've seen it in other places before but I found it so surprising from so many people in San Mateo, Redwood City etc
The only time I've ever heard of a friend getting mugged was in SF.
Its easy not to know that its not where to go.
Trendy transplants hang out on Valencia St in The Mission and towards Delores Park. Or on Union St in the Marina and towards the water. Or on the lawn in the Presidio. Or at Ocean beach. You will never see any strife, out of sight out of mind. These areas are still doing great for socializing and a brief escape. There are quite a few others places as well of course but I dont think I really want peninsula and south bay suburbanites coming to them lol.
Visitors are corralled into areas by Union Square, Embarcadero, Market St and the worst parts of SOMA. Its logical to want to go there but its a mistake. Commuters and sports fans are only familiar with that area, along with the parking garages being plentiful. But for a recreational visit, use this post as a guide.
Can you expound on this for someone who does not live in that area?
1. All the bay area companies realize they can employ the best talent remotely from around the country (globe?) successfully. The SF pay premium drops.
2. Bay Area companies pay according to cost of living, many remotely. Some people move, some stay. SF pay premium holds.
3. Everyone realizes the pre pandemic normal was right all along and having a lot of talented people in the same building matters a lot for company success. SF pay premium holds.
They probably still pay a local premium but that isn’t different from the Bay Area in general.
If Austin or Denver offer employees at a discount, why not Manila and Bangalore?
Many of the communication problems are rapidly addressed with constant realtime communication that happens in a shared office but doesn't with teams working separate hours.
Exhibit A: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/01/tech/cisco-lawsuit-caste-disc...
Cut too much and it is "pay peanuts and get monkeys". This isn't implying any innate inferiority of foreign nationals but that at large if they could already get $200k/yr instead of $20k/yr of course they would heavily bias the talent towards it leaving the average far worse. Plus businesses around then already should have learned a painful lesson during previous failed cost cutting attempts that IT isn't factory drudge work.
2 comes first (and arguably already exists - many large employers already adjust pay by locality). If 2 is sustained long enough, there's an implied drop in demand within SF/SV (or Seattle or NYC) which leads to 1.
These would be one pay scale at each office for the workers in that office, and one pay scale for all remote workers.
The pay scales for each office would take into account the cost of living in the area of that office.
The pay scale for remote workers would not take into account the cost of living of any particular employee's location.
This is because as far as the company is concerned, "remote" is one location. All that they need to do is pay enough so that they can fill all their remote openings.
That's already how they do things within cities. Cost of living varies considerable from neighborhood to neighborhood in most big cites but do you often see companies having different pay scales on a per neighborhood basis? When I worked at a company in Santa Monica, for instance, I don't think anyone doing the same job with the same experience as me would have gotten very far saying the company needs to pay them more than me because they lived in Beverly Hills and I lived in Pasadena.
If you didn't do a basic cost-of-living comparison, then it's probably good that you didn't go work for a bank.
SF was a desirable place to live before all the techies (such as myself) crowded in, and it will continue to be after many leave. I'm sticking around; I love this city for reasons that can't be destroyed by a virus, despite all its problems.
And it's not like other cities are doing great; at least in the US, all cities are being damaged by covid-19 to varying degrees. Why would I move to NYC or Chicago or Boston or Seattle or wherever else? They all have similar covid-related problems, and they're unfamiliar places where I'd have no or a minimal support network. I'm not a suburb/rural guy (grew up that way, not going back), so I don't feel the pull to move out of a city entirely.
SF still has the same underlying problems it had before covid-19, and some of them have worsened in recent months. It's going to be a difficult few years getting out of this and figuring out what the next chapter will be, but this is home for me. For the people who are leaving (who are only here because they have to be for their job), that's fine; I'd rather be left with people who actually care about this place enough to stick with it.
But I'm fully aware this will be a temporary move, lest I give up most of my career prospects. Job opportunities, networking, contacts... all of them are way lower in the countryside compared to the big city. Also I do believe that remote workers are at a disadvantage in terms of career progression compared with collocated workers.
Unless company cultures change significantly and it is possible to have the same career success fully remote, I won't be moving away for long anytime soon.
HN folks love to complain about the lack of value of cities (SF in particular), but as someone in NYC, the pandemic has only affirmed that I want to be here and see value in it. Even in the limited state, so many things I have access to simply wouldn't be in other areas, and I know many people who moved away temporarily for economic reasons who are very much not doing as well mentally and are looking forward to being back in the city.
I don't see why we have to polarize or categorize this trend as it seems like a win/win if this continues: people who don't like cities move out, that lowers prices, and suddenly more people who do enjoy city living can afford them. This has the potential to solve diversity issues in cities, both in class/culture (potentially slowing or even reversing gentrification) and industry (less tech people in SF). This sounds like it could be a second wave of white flight, sans racism, and I'm here for it.
If you don't like cities, I am truly happy for you to move out, both for your own mental state and happiness and for freeing up space in the city for people who will be happier. How long this trend lasts as remote work lessens along with the eventual (macro) end of the pandemic, we will have to wait and see.
As for "white flight" it's more of a "white collar flight" where people with money and resources and higher income remote jobs will leave as long as living conditions suck.
Right now, I've basically reallocated my budget of city activities towards local restaurants, and I've been eating a ton of great delivery. As the cases have slowed, I'm cautiously considering outdoor dining. Either way, I'm eating great food right now.
I live in Brooklyn, so Prospect Park (central park of the borough) is always nice for walks or distanced picnics with friends. My local neighborhood is also just generally pleasant for walks. Many outdoor farmers markets are still in full swing.
There's an outdoor climbing gym in Dumbo that I can walk to from my apartment, and I go there now as well even. Full contact tracing, check-in/out, reservation system, the whole nine yards. Not many places have a large outdoor climbing gym.
All of this is also powered by people actually following mask laws and it being summer. I'm fully aware winter is going to be less fun, but I'm ready to weather that and order lots of good delivery.
> As for "white flight" it's more of a "white collar flight" where people with money and resources and higher income remote jobs will leave as long as living conditions suck.
Well put, and I think that will be a big positive for cities if it continues.
You can't beat the efficiency of an urban environment though.
All of this to say, it depends on what you value :)
My complaint about all these articles is prices have barely changed in NY and SF but they all like to proclaim some huge shift. Every time I check to see if there really are major discounts and I’m disappointed.
There was an interesting article in the guardian newspaper early in the UK lockdown that looked at the implicit social contract in city life - I may live in a small apartment, perhaps even sharing it with several others, but that is less important when the city is outside my door, it's just somewhere to sleep. If the city effectively ceases to be outside your door for weeks or months, you may decide that having a bigger place of your own with your own outdoor space is actually a pretty good prospect. And that thought may not go away even when things open up again.
I think the key here is that even in the pandemic, while things have adapted and taken a different form, this isn't true. We lost some things, but solutions have popped up. Due to outdoor dining, in many ways the streets in my area have become more pedestrian friendly. Many blocks are actually now shut down to cars and are designated explicitly for pedestrians.
It's back, and pretty vibrant, in the small city I live in now. But that social contract in a small city is different anyway - even pretty near the centre I have a good sized house and some outdoor space of my own.
From my searching in NYC prices, it seems like this is happening not in average prices but in the bottom of the market, and within specific neighborhoods. West Village prices aren't going to drop, but some places like say Astoria, Gowanus, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and the like are going to have more decent places hit some record lows. I recently found a place 5 blocks from me that was 1.2K cheaper a month. Yes, it lacked some amenities and the location is worse, but that type of gap would have never existed pre-pandemic.
I know someone who explicitly moved into my neighborhood off of one of these deals, and without it they would have been in a much cheaper neighborhood. I suspect that type of movement is going to have ripple effects into outer borough pricing which could then make cheaper space.
I think we also are still not done seeing the shoe fall. These moves take time, even if already planned. The sublet market is going to shit in most cities on the seller side, which won't be reflected until those leases end. West Village prices might not fall in 2020, but they may in 2021. As time goes on with this pandemic, we also have to factor in that stagnation can also effectively be a drop.
I personally do think because of the eviction moratorium that we will see bigger decreases to come, but I also think it will rebound hard in main areas as you say because everyone always wants to be in the Village
That stereotyping goes both ways, as this is nothing like my walk to my gym.
> My gym is 2 blocks away. Within 2 blocks I have about 10 restaurants.
Does that density hold for the 30 minute walk radius from your dwelling in all directions? There's a big difference between living in the "main street" area of a suburban area and that type of environment.
In fact the nature is much larger than the city, and it’s most entirely empty if you aren’t intentionally visiting the most popular spots.
And I understand the stereotype of the techie who thinks Yosemite Valley reservations is the only way to enjoy nature, but I don’t think that’s me. I’ve been on dozens of trips to the Sierras and I’m fairly experienced with the various permit systems. That said, I’m sure there are still less-travelled gems that I haven’t discovered. :)
The retail businesses in the city are open, with precautions, just like in the suburbs. That isn't really a difference. The difference is that shops and restaurants in the city were more plentiful and better to begin with.
Now, try getting food (restaurant or grocery) delivery for a reasonable price in your typical suburb. Suburban folks didn't get stuff delivered before COVID, they hopped in their car. Many suburbs and exurbs don't really do delivery outside of your typical pizza places, and if they do they cost a lot for each delivery. I know a more rural friend who constantly has delivery apps cancel due to a lack of available drivers.
The city already had the delivery advantage in the first place, which is in turn a COVID advantage. I know people who get delivery for 100% of their goods and don't own a car at all, and these deliveries were far cheaper than the suburbs due to the density.
Not only that, when the only safe thing to do is go outside, I think the city wins, at least for me. City dwellers already walk and go outside more than people in the suburbs. In contrast, my relatives in the suburbs and exurbs can't really go on walks outside of their sub-development because the sidewalks disappear and it turns into a 55-mph zone.
Why do you think they're not doing as well mentally? Isolation? Lack of things to do?
I've noticed that the pandemic really emphasizes my relationships with my neighbors. We've never been so close, and now all of our world is smaller, so we're talking a lot more from our balconies, sharing recipes and planting tips. It's nice but certainly a throwback to older times where you knew all of your neighbors.
FWIW, I'm actually not interacting much with neighbors but I'm glad to hear you are and would not be surprised to find a macro increase in that right now. Interesting to see how people are adapting in different ways!
I don't think it's as simple as one group replacing another so it's a wash. I don't know if the WSJ article dives into it but cities seem to care what type of workers they attract because higher-salaried employees (e.g. tech workers) provide a higher tax base. This was demonstrated by various cities falling over themselves trying to attract Amazon's HQ2 with the promise of high tech jobs. Cities aren't on a public campaign to attract more bohemian artists. It's the high tech workers that are currently more desirable.
If tech workers exodus of San Francisco is a real sustained phenomenon, are the replacement workers' taxable income higher/lower/same? Since you envisioned lower prices for housing, doesn't that mean it would be caused by lower income workers?
Your specific examples are interesting though, as NYC's population explicitly rejected Amazon's HQ2 with public backlash. NYC has always been defined by being a city of many industries, both white collar and creative. The day that's not true is the day NYC is no longer NYC. I think SF is a great example of what that looks like if you even compare SF of 2000 to 2020. I was between the two cities when I graduated college, and the diversity of industries is one of the main reasons I chose NYC. I don't want to be socially surrounded by my day job.
NYC has gotten along just fine without having a large tech worker population (in terms of percentages), and there are also plenty of tech workers like me that are staying. While some of my coworkers have moved since pandemic, most have not and are still contributing to NYC taxes you're concerned with.
These are all open questions that we need to answer, but the reason I look at this as a good thing still is that as a lover of cities, I'd much rather have these new issues. The mass influx of tech and wealth that cities have struggled with in the past 5+ years were/are eroding many of the things that define the actual cores of said cities, and when that's complete, you end up with more unhappy people on all sides. SF is certainly the closest to that point, and this exodus, if real, just might give it a chance to be saved.
When people can start things without institutional funding, they can build interesting, speculative things. Some of those speculative things end up making lots of money, while most go bust, but either way it's an interesting environment to be part of.
By this poll [1], 36% opposed it. While it may not be a majority, over a third of people is notable. I'm not looking to rehash this in gruesome detail, but I think your qualm is with much more nuance than "a very small, vocal group killed it".
[1] https://files.constantcontact.com/9c83fb30501/c25e9a3a-d06b-...
The bigger issue is that the media overestimates how much money SF gets from "tech". SF has a very diverse economy.
> There are plenty of cities to move to that are not SF or NYC
If you are a city lover of my ilk, in the US, there are actually quite few options that hold the same traits beyond these two. Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and LA would be maybe the other four. For reference, those values generally would be things like good public transit / lack of car need, high density of food and cultures, walkability, arts/culture scenes (many museums, local art scenes, local music scenes), etc.
That's not to say you can't find mini versions of these among a set of 10-20 smaller US cities, but for those who primarily value these things, options are actually quite limited and thats IMO one of the big reasons we see huge rising city prices as the group who has these values grow. It's a supply problem. My theory is that if smaller cities started invested in public transit projects, that alone could alleviate some of the crazy city pricing we see today.
I think it's short sighted to think that Covid won't impact on the numbers of the latter, who may re-evaluate whether they actually love big cities at all.
I also think that these categories are not fixed, I have been in both, and Covid may alter the dynamics of how many change between which groups and at what ages.
Such as? I genuinely don’t see any appeal in living in a city during a global pandemic when there are massive restrictions on what you can do. Yes pre-covid the appeal of a City was great. But post covid? I think you get a lot more bang for your buck outside of the city (I.e. living in Tahoe or even smaller cities like San Diego)
SF is also incredibly dysfunctional as a city. Walking down market street can be traumatic and disheartening. It truly boggles the mind that the local government does nothing to help the situation and often puts policies in place that exacerbate the situation.
You can learn to cook (or hell even hire your own private chef with the money you save) while living near an actual mountain with much better rock climbing capabilities and ample access to rock climbing coaches.
It is also different more dangerous sport then wall climbing (which is pretty safe).
Pardon my cynicism, but too many tax dollars are spent on just maintaining the status quo. And a lot of them go into the maintainers' management fee.
The city will survive, but the coming years will be tough. It’s not as diversified economy as it once was, and the financial underpinnings of NY state and city are very much tied to a pretty shockingly small number of people.
You might say “government? Whatevs”, but remember that things like Medicaid keep the wheels on the NYC bus so to speak, and the city and state fund half of that.
Be careful what you wish for. If the gentrified tech and finance bros pull out, the city is going to be well fucked.
NYC is a legit megacity - New York has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world.
SF is small by comparison. Only a small portion of SF is walkable and even then the blocks are long. Transit is sparse and dirty and most people end up owning cars. Despite this housing is more expensive than NYC.
Unless you think it's reasonable to pay $4k a month for a one bedroom in Indianapolis it doesn't make sense to stay in SF.
[ADDED: OK. Not really fair but what make SF unique is very tied into its geography.]
I live in a rural city and paid less than $150k, I saw the equivalent home in SF for $9mil.
Location matters for sure.
Browse https://www.reddit.com/r/CityPorn a bit and you'll see plenty of beautifully located cities with comparable size to SF.
> "Only a small portion of SF is walkable"
This depends on the person :) I've found that on the peninsula, anything from the inner sunset to the water, bounded by the bottom of the mission, can be walked if someone wants and takes their time. Of course that's going to be mainly young able bodied people given the hills, but it does work for a subset of people. Let's also not discount downtown Oakland and the 45 minute walk zone around that either.
there's no need to qualify its walkability either. for most destinations, you can avoid steep hills and don't particularly need to be either young nor fit.
Food? Meh. Another thing that NYC and LA trounce SF on.
People, politics? SF is ground zero for nativism and wealth inequality. There's abject poverty around every corner and the long time residents have no trouble pushing policies to exacerbate it.
Exactly. And it seems well planned cities with outdoors/health/lifestyle perks are extremely attractive to these folks who love cities right now (as opposed to polluted concrete rat race).
Will be interesting when nightlife/irl events resume. FOMO to reconnect irl on the horizon?
What’s interesting to me is who must remain in the city. Obviously you have hands-on essential workers who tend to be poorly paid. But I think long term you will also have some of the best paid people in the city required to remain - managers and executives and anyone else for whom communication is a voluminous and essential part of their job. There really is no substitute for face to face when it comes to quality and once the pandemic is history these people will be back at the office.
Paul Krugman had an interesting video he made shortly after the pandemic pointing out that companies had already begun moving certain workers out of the expensive cities long before this. They figured out they could move, say, the HR department from Manhattan to New Jersey. IT services going to suburbs or even offshore (except for some people on site to be hands on). With tech companies you tended to see this with functions that for better or worse they valued less (for example content moderators). This will continue.
Now we see mainline engineers (who are definitely valued) allowed to leave, because communication is less important for their job than for a manager (even one at same salary level like a PM). But a lot of people will remain or come to cities. And I think it’s worth noting that those folks are probably less likely to make any moves right now than the people moving out. Moving out reduces economic risk in the short term. Moving somewhere more expensive is something people will put off until there is more certainty. But rents will spike up at some point as people who like or need cities make their move (I am not saying they will return to prior levels though).
The housing supply is essentially fixed in the short and medium term, so we will mostly see an equilibriation in prices to keep them mostly full. So it's trivially true that some people will move in as prices fall.
However, it's mistaken to think that all the people were in the city but now are leaving were there for jobs. There is a large population of folks who work south of SF, who moved there (and reverse commute) for the benefits of city living, but have now left because those benefits are largely absent with the pandemic.
The same has happened in SF.
I've gotten many women to come back to the city because they were going crazy in whatever part of the frontier they ventured out into, or even worse: being an adult at their parent's house in Bumbawhat, USA.
Many people find the value systems and insensitivities in the rest of the country to be completely foreign and shocking. So they are looking for any excuse to be back here, even if just to visit someone.
> COVID creates an exodus of one, but people in the latter category are also moving into cities as well as prices drop and they are no longer priced out.
That doesn't offset housing/rental price drop. Not that you claimed it did, just pointing that out.
My only activities right now are eating out and walking, so cities are actually still very appealing - lots of places to walk to and lots of restaurant options. And some day, maybe 8 or 9 months from now, I might even be able to go to a museum. I love museums and most cities seem to be full of them.
Relocating to the Bay area is completely out of the question for me, especially now that so many tech companies will let me work remote due to COVID-driven changes. The end result here is that my company is going to end up losing me to a competitor who can accommodate me working where I am.
The additional upside is that Vancouver real estate is so expensive that even many relatively wealthy techies are locked out of buying, so this is an opportunity for people to buy something.
When nightclubs, irl events & meetups etc. reopen, I think there'll be a rush back to healthy cities, as opposed to looking at remote spots. Humans tend to love irl connection.
However,
B) A different article, dated 8/3/2020, claims: "In San Francisco, Zillow says rent prices declined 3.2 percent compared to the same time last year."
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/08/03/in-bay-areas-co...
PadMapper shows the range for a 1 bedroom rental as ~$2k-$4k, and 2 bedrooms as ~$3k-$5k.
A 3.2% drop on a $4k rental takes the price down to $3.9k. Not a big 'fall' in the scheme of finding affordable housing.
https://www.padmapper.com/apartments/san-francisco-ca/2-beds...
I also negotiated my own rent down in my studio after my lease was up. Only 5% but kept my month-to-month.
I've been in SF or Palo Alto for 15 years since graduating. I'm single, most of my friends are here and the rest are in NYC. I love the idea of moving somewhere more spread out, maybe close to the beach or in the woods, but not at the expense of being isolated. Sure, I know a couple people who've moved away but the vast majority are staying in the city.
If anything, this will improve the live of those who can't move out of big cities. And cities will hopefully have some breathing room to make different kind of decisions now that some of the citizens have left.
Maybe. Will that still be true if transit systems and city services generally are in disarray and many of your nice restaurants, cafes, and bars shuttered?
2. I always prefered large cities but I wouldn't say it was mostly due to restaurants, bars and cafes. These I can find anywhere and are cheap to setup. Large city facilities and institutions like museums, theatres, government offices, sports venues, these are just some of the impossible to replace and important things that large cities still and will always have.
I don't know. If I want museums and theatres, I can always take a long weekend at one of the relative handful of cities that have world-class ones (that doesn't really include SF). Though, in normal times, I do have a local theatre that I attend a half-dozen times a year that's about an hour drive away. Don't care about sports. I hope to not have to go into government offices.
I do like visiting nice cities but I don't need to live in one full-time to take advantage of many of the amenities.
As for the transit, many cities are facing incredible budget crunches right now. There's a story in the NYT just today. And it's not just the exodus; people who don't have to aren't taking public transit. I've heard numbers like 75%+ decreases in ridership.
Look at 70s and 80s New York for what happens when all the affluent people leave a city.
Currently based in Los Angeles and my organization is allowing us to work remote. Looking to just move abroad to Ukraine and lower my costs of living while immersing myself into a new culture and escaping the discord in my homeland. Might never come back if remote work is not longer taboo for DevOps and Infrastructure admins.
For those of you leaving the Metro areas, I encourage you to integrate in your new communities and be open minded. You will be welcomed if you leave your old ways behind and bring your talent and generosity to where you stay. Good luck!
(That WSJ Article comment section is hilarious btw, don't prove them right.)
It requires some flexibility but it's been an amazing adventure.
I bounced between hostels and luxury hotels and airbnbs in central Europe last year, it was about $600 per month. With the luxury hotels being subsidized by reward points.
I pay over 10x more than that for pretty decadent living in SF. Not a complaint, I know what I'm doing. Just perspective.
I would highly recommend living abroad indefinitely.
And from there you can get into Schengen if you aspire for that. Its not an Schengen wide policy so I wont say more. There are a lot of relationships in Europe.
Ukraine is probably cheaper but its up to you.
Transit/zoning/policing is only half the story though IMO. The other half is just how toxic a lot of the discourse here is. There seems to be an especially strong preference here for private reason over public reason that I think underpins much of the social issues here between rose tinted nostalgia for bygone area, strong nativism and exclusionary localism that IMO is quite MAGA-esque.
I suspect that the cost of providing basic services rises faster than CoL of an area, just by looking at CA as a whole. Setting aside the possibility of bad management, it seems that CA is incapable of providing basic services(reliable electricity, well maintained roads, water, sewer, housing, etc) despite being the 5th largest economy on the planet. Is CA a victim of its success?
It is absolutely a concern for us if something happens that makes it more difficult for us to keep up this charade, especially if it coincides with a dramatic recession that gives management a reason to sniff around for cost savings.
The past 2 months the streets in my NYC neighborhood have been littered with moving vans and my floor has all but emptied out.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/business/pandemic-work-fr...
> but why do work-from-homers assume that everyone else likes to work that way?
How did you get from 60% to "everyone else"?
Other than that? No fucking contest! At home, I have a more comfortable desk and chair, and everything is setup exactly how I want it. I can play my favorite music on my speakers, meaning I don't have to wear headphones, and I don't have to hear all the chatter from people who work on crap I don't give 2 fucks about.
I suppose that last part is relevant only if you work at a company that does a lot more than just produce software. I work in an office with ~300 people, and only about 20 of us are programmers. It's 2 giant rooms, and we don't have enough meeting rooms, so I'm constantly hearing about shipping things, billing things, stuff that other people in the other engineering departments are concerned about, and so on.
At home? None of that. Oh that's so nice.
Plus I can live wherever, I don't have to deal with commuting, and the office isn't really in a particularly alluring location anyway.
I suppose it'd be different if I was a <15 minute walk away from a quiet office in a building with a sweet view, where awesome cheap food places are a short walk away from that.
That'd be legit. As it is, when I take a phone call I have to walk outside and usually my call is interrupted by someone driving by with no exhaust on their civic or something. Grr.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22080410
Looking at U-Haul's website today, that price has remained the same. Maybe there's a upper limit on their rate calculator? Or maybe demand has stayed mostly the same.
Have you ever picked up trash? Or helped build a trail? Or gone to a city town hall meeting? Written to a local committee? Volunteered at the food bank?
If you’re like me and have the privilege of affording to live here, before and during COVID, this is still a lovely place to live an interesting, fulfilling and content life.
Be here, take part :)
It's terrible for the inhabitants of these cities as it makes them unaffordable, and it's terrible for everyone else as it makes it impossible for them to accumulate wealth and drains the rest of the country of talent. The only beneficiaries are pre-existing property owners in these cities, and banks to some extent.
I wouldn’t lump all of Silicon Valley in with San Francisco. The suburbs outside the city still enjoy a high quality of life.
Not to mention companies like Apple, Facebook, Google spent billions on long term leases in Silicon Valley. They will have their workers come back to the office when it’s safe.
The exodus is interesting ... I don’t see a return of those displaced by tech. But I hope there is some return to balance.
The last couple of months during the quarantine I saved more as double than I did in the two years before that.
I'm not selling my decision. Be adults, make your own.
and Zillow report:
https://www.zillow.com/research/2020-urb-suburb-market-repor...
But I was assured rents are not affected by supply & demand :-)
here's the one for 2019 https://www.uhaul.com/Articles/About/19966/U-Haul-Migration-...
Anyone moving away isn't set on urban living and the type of community that's here. A city offers a mix of cultures, personalities, and ideas that don't form around people sitting at home taking meetings over zoom and hyping up the latest fad.
Those that stay and invest in the downturn caused by the pandemic are the ones that belong here anyway. They'll be the ones getting once in a generation housing discounts, leasing cheap retail store fronts and warehouses, and building enriched relationships.
It is a boom and bust town, and for the savviest entrepreneurs, a bust is worth more than a boom.
https://paragonpublic.blob.core.windows.net/dash-v2-blog-ima...
Not because there is trash everywhere, the infrastructure is crumbling, the goverment is dysfunctional, the housing mafia won't let high rises rise and provide public transportation for higher density - all these things are true, but mainly because it stays shitty in this feedback loop - more talent leads to more companies settling here which leads to more talent which leads to even more companies settling here.
This feedback loop is the only reason SF bay area is surviving. Since for decades things haven't improved, it is not surprising why people are leaving. Once the feedback loop exits, it is a downward spiral from now on.
Who knew?!?
That's a very ugly sentence.
Its is not "the homeless" who made the city uninviting. That is like saying "the sick made this hospital uninviting".
Homeless people need help. They are people in distress.
Those who made the city uninviting are self-centered voters, who apparently can't give two shits about the situation, and keep voting people into power who don't do anything to help those who need help.
But the sick do make a hospital uninviting! Think of all those heart attack patients who opted not to visit their local emergency department. Heart attacks are still happening regardless of how many additional patients are at the hospital due to infection.
The existence of a large homeless population is concerning for reasons you allude to, but because a more appropriate analogy might be "the piles of corpses made the hospital uninviting". The point of a city is to not have homeless people and so something fundamental went wrong if there is a big homeless population.
And the purpose of society is to provide for its people. All of them.
It is unquestionably, irrefutably, unarguably true that seeing homeless people everywhere in the city is indeed uninviting.
I agree, we should fix homelessness. But saying that "Homelessness should not be criticized" is unproductive. In fact, criticizing homelessness is how we can force the governments to improve the situation.
You complain about symptoms with no regard for the root cause.
I mention all that to be very clear about what I mean when I say, I wouldn’t agree to live near a San Francisco homeless shelter either. I just can’t tolerate people screaming at me all the time or scattering used needles on the sidewalk outside, and definitely couldn’t ask friends or family to tolerate it.
But everyone can move to somewhere functional.
Moving to a city that already has a functioning society is something one person can do without permission. So people do.
They all have something wrong with them, but only SF has it's unique set of problems.
So everyone has to figure out what tradeoff works for them.
To me the biggest flaw in SF is the institutionalized Nimby-ocracy and the resulting housing and homelessness crisis, which I think poisons most areas of society.
Texas seems like it has that side of society figured out. It has other serious problems, I know.
But for the majority, who have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues, a shelter or home often makes little difference.
Witness for example the experiment in Manhattan to provide some homeless men with hotel rooms. They literally go downstairs to poop in the street, harass or attack passersby, and trash the hotel. There's not a one-size-fits-all solution to homelessness.
What we really need is restoration of residential mental care facilities that were largely torn down in the 1970s in favor of mainstreaming the mentally ill.
We also need some kind of analog to the old rooming house districts where men down on their luck could get a bed and a hot meal for a dollar or so.
What we don't need is the status quo which is ripping apart the social fabric of our society.
I'm afraid also that Finland's socio-economic situation is rather different from that of the U.S. Up until quite recently, they have had a homogeneous culture, a much smaller population, and more social stability, versus the U.S. with its vast and highly diverse population and relative instability. I don't see how a Finnish solution would quite fit our situation, though we should of course study their methodology since they tend to have good ideas :)
It does though. Cities like Philadelphia and states like Utah solve it this way and both the homeless per capita + the return-to-homeless rate are nationally very low:
Together with our many nonprofit partners, the City provides 11,503 emergency, temporary and permanent “beds.” Last year we helped 970 families and individuals from-homeless-to-housed. Our permanent housing programs have an average 90% success rate in preventing a return to homelessness.
http://philadelphiaofficeofhomelessservices.org/know-homeles...
IMO, the SF public sees the right to disturb others as an extension of personal liberties, and hence this solution won't work very well.
I mean you'd think people would be excited about homeless people pooping in their free housing instead of on the sidewalk.
> But for the majority, who have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues, a shelter or home often makes little difference.
I'd question your stats about mental illness and substance misuse disorder, but even if we accept that most homeless people are either mentally ill, or addicted, or both: how do you expect them to engage with treatment when they're living on the street?
"Homes first" is a key part of many homeless health programmes. See this example, called "housing first": https://hfe.homeless.org.uk/about-housing-first
> is restoration of residential mental care facilities that were largely torn down in the 1970s in favor of mainstreaming the mentally ill.
We really really don't need to go back to the days of asylums that held people for many years for relatively mild mental ill health.
The numbers are also very low, around 10k 'chronics' for the entire bay area as far as I remember.
You need different solutions for different types. The poor / down on their luck types are definitely helped by free housing.
San Francisco just happens to attract more homeless for various reasons.
Perhaps a more solution oriented statement:
Somehow completely ignoring the issue with how tech has made the homeless in many areas of the city uninvited.
These people would easily prefer to be in DevOps, can learn to run other people's software and call it a job, as we all do, except maybe for issues encountered along the way (housing, direct or indirect mental health crises, food insecurity). Our indifference to, or what we considered not to be priority is coming to the surface.
What I saw astounded me. It was like the scene from Grapes of Wrath, crossed with the Beverley Hillbillies, crossed with Tokyo Drift.
I saw people leaving in droves but nowhere was it as bad as in California. There is a mass exodus of the state and no one seems to notice it.
People/families are buying vans, even ford/chevy service vans to live in due to them looking commercial(less hassle from people /police), and having blacked out windows. They are also far cheaper than an rv.
Speaking of rvs some people are having to buy non running ones cheap and permapark somewhere. This includes families with pets, with no other recourse.
Every rest stop/flying j was people leaving or homeless people permacamped. I spoke to them regularly and the stories were truly heart wrenching.
I also saw more paper plates (license plates) than regular ones (this is hyperbole but not far off the truth I'm sure even people not traveling have noticed this). Many of these people seemed to not know or care how to drive. I can't begin to guess as to the reasons but people in cars with paper plates were 90 percent of the time a-holes on the road, and I saw many of them in accidents.
I'm sorry for the rant, I just am trying to say I've traveled the US extensively over my 40 years, but this one broke me. We have failed as a society, we do nothing for our most vulnerable, and its hurting us all.
I advise everyone to (when its safe) go to your local rest stops and flying j/pilot/whatever rest stop and talk to some of these people. Those homeless people I see so many complain about here (they're crazy, druggies, they stink!) <-all can be true, but they are still human deserving of your understanding and empathy, and I say this as someone who had a homeless guy threaten to eat my dogs. Obviously he had issues so I just left, but someone called the cops. Thankfully Santa Monica has mental health professionals the local police can rely on for such issues, so when I told them he did not threaten me or my life, he was left alone until mental health services could arrive. But I've seen far worse from the police in regards to homelessness in say, Bakersfield.
Also you will meet regular families, many now homeless, who have children with them or grandparents. Who worked their whole lives, some were even approved for unemployment months ago but never got a dime. Most families in the US can't weather missing a single paycheck and these folks were asked to wait indefinitely, and its already been what, 6 months?
Or just talk to the ones who are moving, but don't know where. Did you know that many property rental companies, at least in California, now demand 3 recent check stubs and proof of work, unemployment does not count. We literally have families who have money and still have to move out of state because by the time they got their money its been months since they last worked?
The moratorium on evictions was supposed to help people but guess what? Just like everything else it was perverted into something to hurt the people it was meant to help. Now no one wants a tenant that even may possibly be a risk in the future. We will see how long their properties are vacant before they begin begging for those families back.
Im sorry, I'm done, just all of this is so heartbreaking.
super late edit to add- the sheer volume of people I've met who were absolutely convinced coronavirus isnt real was mind blogging, especially since I lost several people close to me and know many others who were sick. These people came from all walks of life, all races and creeds. But all were positive it was all some big conspiracy. I didn't ever speak on it myself because how do you respond without anger when you've had people taken by it?
Edited for spelling and clarity and to add some stuff.
If many of these people are leaving California, where are they going, and why? Did any of them tell you?
It seems to me that if you're down and out you are probably better off actually staying in California, but not in a big city, because we have a pretty big tradition of tolerance and state aid. Are they hoping for better in Nevada or Arizona?
Sure enough a few paragraphs down:
> It should be noted that San Francisco had an unusually low inventory relative to other large cities prior to the pandemic.
Maybe there are a lot of people selling, but you can ignore this particular stat.
Also I've seen a few creative people that are admitting defeat on (say) Detroit.
My memories from each visit is the smell of urine and people who need help using bullhorns to scream their thoughts. I thought to myself this is the charm of San Francisco (circa 2008) I use to hear about in song?
Also a lot of people hanging on to their property values as their entire nest egg.
There is a vast difference between American liberals and left-wing politics.
They aren't the same (thank god - the original Bolsheviks were psychotics!) but plenty of resemblences. There is still the absurd supply-and-demand denialism common to both the area and the self-proclaimed left-wing. Then there is the whole "fight new higher density housing as gentrification" making everyone worse off as the supply doesn't rise but rents do anyway.
Extreme-left wingers in my view stand head to head with extreme-right wingers. These people are the cancer of the society IMO.
There aren't any Maoist (or any of the other descendants of Leninism) governing parties in the Bay Area, either.
There are right wings in Europe that carry very strong albeit slightly different conservative beliefs.
In any society, there will be conservative views and liberal ones. It just seems like there is a difference in how those beliefs are exercised. Extremism in one side just brings extremism to the other side.
"Extreme" left used to be about worker rights, universal health care, sheltering the poor, or reducing global strife (say the anti-war movements of the 60s/70s).
Bay Area left is now about grievance politics, defunding the police, being anti-tech (represented as being anti-gentrification, or anti-billionaire, but the deeper issue is usually anti-tech, which is seen as what made living in SF/Oakland unaffordable, as opposed to say, obstructionism), etc. It's gotten a lot more extreme in recent years, and I hesitate to even call it "left" because it's more like they've branch off along a new dimension on the axis. You get some of that in Europe too, but it's nowhere near as radicalized.
It's less that the extremes are on two opposite ends, but just two flavors of the right of the economic ideology spectrum who share a goal of not wanting to be taxed and don't wish to fund/provide public services.
If the above were to change, I would definitely move. Not sure where but my top considerations are: - great school district - lower taxes and cost of living - Great outdoors / scenery around