San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

sfstandard.com

271 pointsmortenjorck602 comments

Give the corresponding housing crisis in the Bay Area, one wonders if the solution is to "simply" start converting office space to living space until the corresponding demand for office space recovers from a combination of increased demand and decreased supply. Now I'm sure there are all kinds of challenges to doing that, engineering, zoning, other practicalities, but it seems overall reasonable to me, though perhaps someone with a better understanding of the situation might enlighten me.

The only way SF will be fixed is if there is massive earthquake to take care of all the nimby concerns. Can't be concerned and stop construction if you don't have a back yard anymore.

Blockbusting is a "thing" as well

People in SF have backyards? I can see NIMBY as a concern in the rest of the bay area, but SF, it's already stacked housing.

Nope. On an area-weighted basis most of SF is wasted on detached single-family homes. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7470676,-122.4914956,314m/da...

Why "wasted" ? Does everyone need to live with the least amount of space possible?

There is a large difference between a preference and a mandate. The city of San Francisco requires this development pattern. It is not known whether the owners prefer it or not. The existence of pre-down-zoning apartment buildings in this area of town suggests that the preference is not universal.

The majority of voters and neighborhood groups strongly prefer the current policy.

Prevent new housing and complain about prices is the dominant position. And elected officials comply. Democracy is functioning.

They don't. But if you want only detached single family homes you don't get to complain about prices.

Those with the homes are not the ones complaining.

But they are! It's truly bizarre. Somehow the accepted narrative is that prices are high because greedy developers focus only on luxury condos.

I often see new buildings criticized because they will raise the average rent in the area. And people accept that argument. Think about that for a moment.

It is what happened in several neighborhoods that I used to live in or work near.

New construction was expensive, so they geared the apartments towards the upper end of the market. Rents at existing places didn't go down; if anything, it gave them an incentive to go up since they wouldn't be the most expensive place anymore if they did.

Loans and what not put a price floor on the rents of new units; given how hard it is to evict bad tenants (especially with the current backlog), and how hard it is to bring prices back up in rent controlled cities, they're just as well off leaving units empty at full price as they are renting below cost just to stop the bleed.

> if you want only detached single family homes you don't get to complain about prices

Or about a collapsing tax base when stuff like a commercial real estate collapse occur.

Even in a single family detached home my last neighbor was a nightmare. He was a drunk and would be loud and throw bottles into my yard and start arguments any time anyone said anything. He was a renter so eventually he got into bad terms with his landlord and she booted him. I would dread the thought of loving even closer to someone. At least I had a fence and some concept of space from him. I could only imagine the harassment living wall to wall with this guy. For me single family detached homes are not wasted space but the minimum people should strive for.

Plus one thing that gets forgotten in dense housing is that most of them are infested (1) with HOAs (home owner associations) and associated 'management companies' that work hard to suck up the residents hard-earned funds. They, like political systems that don't have mandatory voting, take advantage of resident indifference to perpetuate astounding pilfering, malpractice, and incompetence. Most newer single family homes are also infested with these parasites so you are never safe but they almost seem to be mandatory in higher density housing; the best reason I can think of why newer homes have these is so the builder can milk the hapless buyers one last time as they usually maintain complete control of the HOA while the project is in the building phase. I pine for the old-school townhomes that were not thus infested - I suppose it is too much to hope that builders will build neighborhoods without encumbering them with this atrocity.

1: I use this term deliberately and with intention plus restraint, having suffered through these for years now. I hope you never experience the misery that is an HOA.

Americans overwhelmingly prefer single-family detached homes when given other options. How is choosing a higher-quality of life option “wasted”?

> Americans overwhelmingly prefer single-family detached homes when given other options. How is choosing a higher-quality of life option “wasted”?

It's not. But it's wasteful in an urban core, where that lack of density forgoes real economic opportunity. It also creates an easily-identified cause for the lack of housing supply.

> that lack of density forgoes real economic opportunity.

Which is why SF is so poor and underdeveloped.

> It also creates an easily-identified cause for the lack of housing supply.

An easily identified excuse. Now do suburban Tennessee.

> Which is why SF is so poor and underdeveloped.

No, it's one reason why some US cities are becoming increasingly unlivable for anyone outside the upper-middle class - those who sell your groceries, make your lunch or deliver your packages (to name only a handful of occupations).

> An easily identified excuse. Now do suburban Tennessee.

Is suburban Tennessee an urban core?

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

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

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

higher quality of life for the many who commute more than one hour each way in and out of SF this definitely is not...

Yeah most historic apartment buildings in SF actually have a rear yard.

Not again… last time was such a mess.

Might get a few covers of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoC_Kvel_vQ

Those commercial spaces make it incredibly easy to build them however you like. The access to plumbing and electrical would make it simple to convert them into small dwellings.

Modern office buildings only have plumbing available in the center of the building. The flooring is designed to function as a highly efficient membrane. If you start punching holes in the flooring to place plumbing and toilets away from the central core you weaken the floor membrane to the point where it loses the required structural integrity. If you try to build raised flooring to provide space for the plumbing the cost of the raised flooring becomes prohibitive.

For most large modern office buildings it is cheaper to take them down and build new than to try to retrofit them for residential use.

Every place I've ever lived had plumbing in the walls. Now, it also had it in the floors, so your point is well taken. But I seriously doubt that a central plumbing stack is a serious holdup on plumbing out an entire floor.

Then again, I don't have any real experience, so I'm very much being optimistic here without actual hands-on knowledge. I could be very wrong, and would love to hear why!

So, this is me reaching back aways in memory. Walls with plumbing through them are held to different standards to other walls. Walls with plumbing use 2 by 6s. Builders and architects try to optimize by making as few walls as possible walls with plumbing because they are more expensive. Your regular walls use 2 by 4s.

So yes, some walls have plumbing running through them, but not all. Any architect and contractor will try to optimize cost by having as few walls as possible with plumbing. Which is why in some apartments, neighboring bathrooms in units will be close or share some wall space.

I've never seen a wall framed with 2x6s because it had plumbing in it. It's all 2x4 regardless, here—you almost never see a 2x6 wall. Is that a California thing?

As far as I know, no. I learned about this when I lived in North Carolina. The house I grew up in had 2x6 wet walls with all other walls being 2x4.

It could be state or local building codes based. Here is a mention of it from a city in Illinois. But it definitely isn't just a California thing.

https://elmhurst.org/DocumentCenter/View/1826/Plumbing-Requi...

https://www.reference.com/world-view/standard-wall-thickness...

The most common example is a wall with a toilet drainpipe. In the US, that requires a 3" inner diameter pipe - the outer diameter is 3.5", which is exactly the same as the space inside a 2x4 wall, but if you need any fittings, it won't fit, and even if you don't, the likelihood of being pierced by nails is too high when the pipe is right against the drywall. If you have a single-story house, there would be no need for such a drainpipe, so this is primarily an issue in multi-story buildings. Sometimes there's a central chase that contains these pipes (as well as HVAC ducting), but unless all your bathrooms surround that central chase, you'll need a 2x6 wall somewhere.

> I've never seen a wall framed with 2x6s because it had plumbing in it. It's all 2x4 regardless, here—you almost never see a 2x6 wall. Is that a California thing?

My California home is all 2x4s everywhere and there's plenty of plumbing in most walls.

> Every place I've ever lived had plumbing in the walls.

In every wall and under every floor? How many sinks did you have?

Sorry, I wasn’t clear. Every house had plumbing in the walls & under the floor, but not in every wall. Normal houses, not.. a showroom for fountains!

Perhaps we’re each familiar with different codes or perhaps they do things differently where you are?

I spent 4 years as a commercial superintendent on various projects in the Caribbean, Dubai, and the DFW.

None of those projects would have any difficulty adding plumbing wherever they wish.

I see plumbing exposed in the ceiling in some of the cool fancy new lofts that were converted from offices (in NYC).

Yeah but your ceiling is the next level's floor. If drilling a 4" hole in the floor/ceiling to accomodate a toilet drain is too damaging to the structural integrity (not sure I believe that, but I'm not an engineer) then it's a non-starter.

Maybe you could build the bathrooms and kitchens along partition walls that have space behind them, so pipes could run above the floor, between walls, to the building core where all the main plumbing was designed to be.

A 4" or 6" hole won't be a problem. In fact, if you go to any commercial project you will probably find more than a few holes that shouldn't have been drilled because there was an over eager mechanical employee or someone who could not read plans properly. Those holes are often just covered up.

> Yeah but your ceiling is the next level's floor. If drilling a 4" hole in the floor/ceiling to accomodate a toilet drain is too damaging to the structural integrity (not sure I believe that, but I'm not an engineer) then it's a non-starter.

It isn’t, it’s called core drilling and it’s extensively used in commercial buildings with concrete decks for electrical conduits, electrical poke-thru devices, plumbing pipes, hot water/chilled water piping for HVAC, data cable sleeves, fire sprinkler piping, etc.

A typical commercial building floor is concrete in a metal pan that has tensioned cables in the concrete to reinforce it. A few holes aren’t going to ruin the structural integrity. A ground penetrating radar scan should be performed prior to drilling to avoid cutting the cables, if you cut one of those, then the structural integrity is affected and repairs get expensive.

Most offices have physical layouts that make conversion to residential difficult to impossible. Big things like lots of interior square footage without windows and plumbing only to a few central locations.

And while some or even most of this is fixable, major renovations are a ton of cost and effort to convert them to something that will still be expensive and weird, if even possible to meet the legal requirements of residential space.

https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/turning-downtown-...

Maybe SF should relax the legal requirements of residential space, then?

If they choose not to build sufficient housing... they can at least choose to use what they have.

A windowless room with a community bathroom doesn't sound appealing, but at a certain price point it's better than nothing.

As long as its safe to occupy for permanent living it should get permitted, not sure how its much different than a hostel/rooming house-like arrangement. You don't need a kitchen and bathroom in your unit to live.

Safety will always be a top argument to constrain and block off new housing. Look at current building codes. Sure all those things make us safer -- if you ignore the homeless left on the streets and the people who no longer have money left over for good food, education, and healthcare after paying the high price it costs to build an up-to-code house in America.

You can restrict housing practically as tight as you want by raising permitting requirements, safety assessments, and safety factors and other safety features until it's practically impossible for anyone but the rich to build.

There are people out there that would be safer in a run-down tinder-box shack than an up to code and zoned house. Not because the house is safer, but because it allows them to have an affordable roof over their head and round out their finances for other things that bring them wellbeing. Building and zoning codes fail to account for this.

China has a lot of people living in subbasements ("ant tribe", not just the immediate floor before ground, but the 3rd or 4th floor below ground). No egress, crappy ventilation (mold is a huge problem), but its cheap. Also, a lot of restaurants in Beijing have their staff sleeping out in their dining room after they close up as a form of worker dorms (people also sleep in their shops, which is why they cover the windows up after closing). So this is all very crappy housing situations, but its cheap, and one reason why China doesn't have a huge homeless problem (though still larger than the government admits).

Japan has a lot of 2.5 tatami sized apartments that you can get for $500/month (even in Tokyo). No heat, but you can plug in a space heater. Shared toilet, and no shower necessarily in building (so you have to use a bath house down the street).

America goes out of its way to avoid such living arrangements, and to avoid things like slums. I think we could do a better job at creating lower end housing, however, by sacrificing some of our livability principles. But it isn't going to fix the guy who wants to cook meth in their state provided housing.

My opinion is that the problem with SF isn’t as much housing. It is more with mental health and drug addiction. You do know where many immigrants live right? It isn’t so much on the streets. It is 16 packed into a single apartment. So the mechanisms people talk about already exist. It is that the homeless can’t work because of mental or social issues that compound with drug abuse. You need to fix the mental issues, social issues, and the drug abuse. The housing helps a little but the underlying problems are still there. I think the results already show this.

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

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

> We can just measure this.

How? Getting accurate statistics is impossible, and what we get is self reported. "I'm not on drugs anymore!" (while smoking fent) is not uncommon. Every group will roll out self reported data to support their positions, scientific studies are frowned on, if they are even possible anyways.

SF rolled out stats. Their stats did the opposite of supporting their position. Some stats are so bad that you can only lie in interpretation.

SROs were a housing solution for low-income people who were not functional[1] enough to live with roommates, but were functional enough to be able to live alone.

When we got rid of them, many of their former inhabitants ended up on the street.

[1] For an incredibly broad definition of 'not functional'.

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

> Your Democratic mayors and supervisors did that.

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

> You have mental health institutions closed down a decade earlier as well.

Mostly by that famous Democrat named Ronald Reagan?

Wrong. It was passed before Reagan got into office.

https://igeek.com/Reagan_emptied_mental_institutions_and_cau...

So you don't assign any responsibility to the people who passed it? How quaint. Why even bother to vote? BTW, one of them is governor right now.

If a Republican did it, vote them out of office too.

In the SF case that I was referring to, it really was all Democrats. I was talking just about SF. Brown opened it up. Newsom continued it.

Having trouble with basic reading comprehension, facts, and culpability? Or just biased?

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

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

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

Reagan empties the mental hospitals in California while he was governor of that state.

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

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

> It is that the homeless can’t work because of mental or social issues that compound with drug abuse.

You mean "chronic homeless." There are homeless that you don't notice because they aren't standing out. They are living in cars or maybe crashing on someone's couch. Let's not equate homelessness with mental illness drug abuse.

Agree.

But that is also key to the problem: the cost to convert these buildings is already prohibitively expensive, and converting them into dormitories cannot possibly recoup the cost.

It's like how sometimes it just doesn't make sense to refactor code because it is fundamentally designed for a different purpose. Sure you can grind it out but will it be any better or cheaper than starting fresh?

Even bigger, most of the buildings are highly leveraged. There literally is no incentive unless the mortgages can be restructured, as the ultimate prices will be forwarded to the renter.

Everyone’s underwater a there isn’t a good solution without massive price decrease (crash) or commercial space demand re-invigorates.

> most of the buildings are highly leveraged. There literally is no incentive unless the mortgages can be restructured, as the ultimate prices will be forwarded to the renter.

This is what recessions are useful for. Underwater mortgages still need to be serviced. There might be a deal in providing assistance to the lender in exchange for financing conversion.

It's called default and foreclosure, followed by liquidation by the lender.

The mortgages will fail for most new office space, because the underwriting used unrealistic assumptions about rents.

I mean, SF residential prices are still super high, it seems like it oughta pencil out.

I think flooding the market in new living spaces would decrease demand, leading to lower rent.

Sometimes it feels like the people who own these buildings would rather let them rot, than make less than premium top-dollar market value.

yes, i think there must be tax and accounting strategies that allow buildings to remain vacant, really to the detriment of all except the owner(s)

It's not prohibitively expensive... office to residential conversions have already been done in many cases.

Of course the specifics of the building matter a lot, but it's certainly cheaper than ground up net new development.

And even if the conversion leads to abnormal units per modern standards, it will still get occupied at the right price.

Seems a no brainer to rezone most office space to residential. Free market will figure it out. You can bet buying these commercial properties at firesale prices will open up a profitable path to residential

> converting them into dormitories cannot possibly recoup the cost

Once we start talking easing housing code requirements, especially if it's done in the name of increasing access to housing, the conversation becomes about just how much conversion is really necessary, and how little can be done to break even. And there's a big continuum.

If one end of this continuum is a standard college dorm setup, the other is literally just letting people camp out in an otherwise-unmodified office floor. In between are probably SRO-level accommodations, building four-wall cubicles with open ceilings for sunlight and ventilation (sometimes traditionally covered in chickenwire).

As grim as this sounds, it might actually be preferable to the current practice of allowing tent cities to proliferate downtown. The idea of an office tower slum is incredibly dystopian, but if the alternative is the properties becoming write-offs, it may be the most likely outcome.

Why should anyone care about the rich owners of the office buildings having to write off their losses and instead make it easier to accommodate people like cattle. The only way they are going to recoup some of their costs is by charging significantly for the right to live in a windowless box.

So it seems this scheme is much less about helping some poor homeless person and much more about some rich investor keeping some money.

In the event regulations are relaxed, I have absolutely zero problem haircutting the hell out of the formerly-commercial owners.

> The idea of an office tower slum is incredibly dystopian

It's hard to get more contemporary cyberpunk than an organic community nesting in an ex-Facebook office building.

> A windowless room with a community bathroom doesn't sound appealing, but at a certain price point it's better than nothing.

You make this legal and tomorrow every RE developer stops putting in windows.

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

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

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

> You make this legal and tomorrow every RE developer stops putting in windows

This sounds like new housing supply. I'm failing to see the problem. Developers still have to sell the apartment, after all.

>This sounds like new housing supply. I'm failing to see the problem

The problem is the new housing supply was always imminent - only now, it's windowless, all because developers can increase margins by 1.07% and shorten build times by a day.

Except people will pay extra for windows...

> Maybe X should relax the legal requirements of Y

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

Seems to me like lots of people in SF would rather live in an indoor box than an outdoor box.

Why not let those without homes choose if they are willing to take the risks associated with ignoring those rules over l king on the streets?

Presumably an office space would still cost more than a homeless person could afford, so it's not economical to convert an office to ultra-cheap housing.

> Presumably an office space would still cost more than a homeless person could afford, so it's not economical to convert an office to ultra-cheap housing

It may be something a marginally housed person could afford, though. Maybe that makes room in their budget for healthier food, addiction counseling or after-school tutoring. Or maybe they're already strained and would otherwise be on the street.

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

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

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

> Why not let those without homes choose if they are willing to take the risks associated with ignoring those rules over l king on the streets?

I'd rather have a government that enforces a high quality of life.

As would we all, but we have to be cognizant that enforcing a high quality of life also means ignoring people who can't afford the raised minimum.

By and large, I'm a fan of American-style freedom-to-succeed-or-fail, but in the context of NIMBY anti-density housing supply crunches, it feels exceptionally cruel.

'We're going to have policies that limit supply and increase the cost of housing' + 'We're going to prevent you from finding other housing by making it illegal' is a heavy one-two punch.

Sure, but if the choice is this in the immediate term vs "a government that enforces a high quality of life" in the maybe-but-not-for-certain long term, I'd much rather take steps in that direction instead of waiting for some mythical perfect situation to present itself.

Or maybe it's government involvement that has caused the whole issue in the first place and more government involvement would lead to an even bigger problem.

An open floor plan office has plenty of space for rows of bunks. Better than sleeping outside.

> lots of people in SF would rather live in an indoor box than an outdoor box.

Yes, and people voluntarily placed themselves under indentured servitude before it was made illegal.

If there's a housing shortage, the solution isn't to remove bare minimum housing standards for everyone.

I can't say for certain, but I think most regulations about windows are about having an escape in case of disaster.

Specifically, there was house we were looking at, and one of the previous owners covered up the back porch.

However, one of the bedrooms used to overlook that back porch, and had a window on that wall.

They were not allowed to remove that window because "bedrooms have windows", even though the window was an interior window.

Similarly, we considered replacing our bedroom window with a bay window, but the code would not allow it because the windows were too small to allow egress.

I completely forgot about the fire thing, and that only strengthens my argument/stance. The Triangle fire was a terrible tragedy in American history during which a lot of women died not even because of lack of windows, but because doors and windows were barred. Now imagine how many people would be at risk if they didn't even have windows in the first place.

The windows in a 50-story skyscraper are not very useful for escape.

No, they are not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impending_Death

> Legal requirements for windows

These are mostly for fire safety, not quality of life. Turns out not having a window during a fire has killed lots of people.

California has taken housing requirements to an extreme: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-broughel-hamilto...

> Lots of legal requirements exist to protect someone

That someone is often the homeowners [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

Paywall, can't read that

There comes a time when one expects that experienced Internet and Web users know the usual workarounds, such as Archive.Is:

https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/...

>Lots of legal requirements exist to protect someone.

SF is the poster child for what happens when a bunch of people incapable or unmotivated to engage in planning more than 5min into the future write a law about everyone's pet issue.

Clearly there's a balance to be struck and it's to be struck somewhere on the less regulatory side than it is now.

In general, that may sometimes be true, but in the SF Bay Area, those restrictions on residential development have always been excessive and about protecting property values for existing home owners.

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

The requirements for residential units are primarily the International Building Code, which are the expensive ones. The city only manages planning, such as a residential use can go in a certain area. To actually build, you need a building permit which has to conform to City and State building codes [2], which right now is basically the International Building Code [1]. And yes, it would cost a fortune to convert office into residential use. However, if office buildings become truly deserted and can be bought at very low cost, then it can start making financial sense.

The building codes have evolved over time to protect life/safety of the occupants, so not something you would want to have the City bypass.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Building_Code [2] https://sfdbi.org/codes

Many of those codes have been designed to protect incombents from competition and various other forms of encouraging one form of living (car dependent) over others.

Plenty of people in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, etc live happy lives in much much smaller living areas. This makes them more affordable. But building codes in many places in the USA disallow making places that small.

Other examples of questionable codes are codes that require parking spaces, codes that require front yards, codes that require backyards, etc....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ

(I'm an Architect who has built in SF)

Parking spaces, front yards, back yards, building heights, building types, density etc are all City Planning functions, and you're right, have little to do with life/safety typically, and in many ways are quite destructive by making walkable livable cities very difficult to do now.

The Building codes, on the other hand, have evolved with each disaster over the last century or two - a building collapsing in an earthquake, people dying in fires, etc. So those have real life/safety protection as a primary directive.

One San Francisco-specific building code that might make it difficult to subdivide an office building into smaller rooms is SFBC 1204 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s... that requires almost all habitable rooms to have a window for natural light. In San Francisco, we trust mechanical ventilation, but for some reason we don’t trust electric lights. I think this code is an obsolete holdover that has nothing to do with health or safety anymore.

>But building codes in many places in the USA disallow making places that small.

Given how little exercise people get and that we are typically glued to a screen (tv, laptop, or phone) during waking hours, I could see an argument for lowering floor space minimums.

Code minimum bedroom sizes are pretty small: https://buildingcodetrainer.com/minimum-bedroom-size/

Given that we spend at least 8 hours a day working in these places, working, is anyone surprised at the resistance to return to the office? It's "basically unlivable" but ok to toil in for a third of your living day in (minus the traffic)... I'm sure I'll face a lot of backlash for placing the argument in this framing, but I think more than a few people feel this way.

> A windowless room with a community bathroom doesn't sound appealing,

It also likely doesn't meet Fire code, which is there for a pretty good reason.

> A windowless room with a community bathroom doesn't sound appealing, but at a certain price point it's better than nothing.

Last November, HN briefly discussed [1] Munger Hall at the University of California Santa Barbara, which will be just such a building. Housing 4,500 students, only 32 of 512 single rooms on each floor will have physical windows. The remaining 95% will have virtual windows that simulate sunlight.

The HN linked article [2] includes a floor plan and a rendering of an 8-room cluster with shared kitchen, dining room, and bathrooms. UC Santa Barbara has more information on the project [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29096773

[2] https://www.dezeen.com/2021/11/02/architect-resigns-grotesqu...

[3] https://sam.ucsb.edu/campus-planning-design/current-projects...

Terrible way to live for a human being. Hello Matrix.

This building is a recipe for mental illness. It’s like someone saw Kowloon Walled City and was like, let’s do that (or Chungking Mansions).

People do live there (some pretty happily) but this does not seem like a good idea for UCSB freshmen.

Can they be converted into huge units with an open floor plan and bathroom/kitchen near the center?

If someone can figure out how to make it look cool, office conversions could be the 2020s version of the warehouse loft.

Sublime. All of the people who hated working in an open office are screaming at the idea of living in one.

The corporate commune!

I am very over getting together in people’s open plan kitchen + living/family/dining room homes and being unable to have a conversation because 10 people’s voices are bouncing around one room with 10ft ceilings when there is enough space for 2 or even 3 separate rooms. And the TV volume is on for some reason. And the exhaust above the stove is on. And the kitchen faucet is running.

A lot of those conversations could have been just an email.

nice

19h century brick and concrete industrial buildings weren't built the same way. Or, obviously, to the same height. It's much easier to just gut them to the shell and then add in your modern amenities.

Half jokingly - I wonder if that is what sorta is in the works with Adam Neumann's latest project - Flow. Definitely seems similar to how the original WeWork offices were started - transforming unused loft safe into high end but communal office space. It'd probably be more like an extended stay hotel (just rooms on most floors) with a common restaurant.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2022/08/17/adam-neum...

"When Adam Neumann revealed his new venture to WeWork-ify the residential real estate sector Monday, backed by a $350 million≥."

It should be doable to take each floor and put a kitchen / bathrooms / storage in the middle with living space around the exterior windows with connecting hallways. On larger buildings split it in half or quarters (the only issue then becomes stair access, which is often along the edge of a building and would need a hallway from a central elevator). You might have some odd bedroom arrangements with long narrow rooms to get some outside light in each, but I don't think its unworkable.

They did it extensively in lower Manhattan after 9/11 I thought?

The layout doesn't seem so terrible, minus the plumbing and heating concerns.

It's like efforts to convert abandoned malls into apartments. Hard to even imagine living in a mall and the exorbitant cost to convert into something livable. Most people would rather be homeless than living in such a terrifying environment.

Doubt

Take a look at Manhattan's Financial District — seems like half of the commercial buildings have already been converted to residential. Some layouts are a bit awkward but it works fine

maybe it's the new ware-home? (warehouse home)

similar gluts caused a really vibrant music scene in Berlin

Sounds better than living in a tent on the street.

I think it is more difficult to impossible to make office to residential units conversions that fit a $/sqft that’s meets the market for normal housing (avoid huge square footage for cheap).

All of these buildings have a hub, bathrooms, and open ceilings for laying more pipes/wiring next to all the fiber cables.

Interesting point and seems pretty logical. There are a lot of warehouse/commercial spaces used for housing in places like Oakland and am sure people would want to live there (mentioned commercial spaces) if they could. Hopefully it’s safe for living, though, the Ghostship fire comes to mind specifically

Surely there is more creativity out there than this?

If industrial/warehouse spaces can be converted to lofts office spaces can be repurposed as well. Make the spaces available and affordable and let people figure it out as they go.

From my understanding, it’s just like a legacy code base. It is just easier/cheaper to start from scratch than converting the entire thing a piece at a time.

Cost isn't the only thing. Tearing down and rebuilding is probably much slower than conversion.

That's mainly how renovations go. Just easier to have the demo team demo and then have the trades come in and do their thing. Working around existing infrastructure and integrating with it is unpredictable and messy. Not to mention, once you touch something you have to bring it up to code so best to leave it alone or replace it entirely.

I did a renovation once where the idea was to preserve a few of the old wood windows that would be lost due to the nature of the renovation. The original idea was to reuse them and move them into the new renovated space and install them. Turned out it was going to cost more to carefully remove them, fit them, etc than just buying the highest end Marvin windows. So new windows were purchased and the old ones are used for parts now.

It seems like a logical thing to do. A few articles on why it is difficult.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/why-empty-offic...

https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/07/28/should-dcs-empty-of...

> why it is difficult

The argument in the Washingtonian hints at a policy solution. It cites a "lack windows on at least two sides" with cavernous floors making "direct natural light" rare. The "complexity of adding hundreds of bathrooms and kitchens (not to mention the accompanying venting and plumbing)" is real. "Turning rooftops into amenity spaces" is not.

So yes, these aren't going to become luxury apartments. Will they have less direct sunlight and no rooftop garden? Yes. Are those remotely necessary? Of course not. Fewer windows doesn't mean no windows; this isn't a safety issue. We will probably need code amendments. But that would require political will to legalize affordable housing.

The underlying issue is government preventing development of both houses and office space. If you were to build more housing in any capacity that would risk lowering housing values and people (including politicians) would lose tens or even hundreds of millions in assets. This would be incredibly unpopular and won't happen anytime soon

> The underlying issue is government preventing development of both houses and office space.

We live in a democracy. The underlying problem of government is voters.

Most home owners (especially in The Bay) refuse to allow anyone to build anything because they see that as a threat to their home value.

This guy gets it. It is NIMBYism at work. Whether it is keeping those ugly affordable apartments out of my neighborhood or wanting the housing supply restricted so I can keep my home value at peak value.

Building with no affordable units in it? Beyond the pale, the evil developers hate poor people and the units will all be bought be foreign billionaires who won't live there.

Building with x% percentage affordable units in it? Not enough affordable units and the units are not affordable enough. This will not offset the gentrification caused by the market rate units.

Building with high percentage of deeply affordable units in it? You can't just solve societal problems by throwing housing at it. The residents who will live in these deeply affordable units need social services to get their lives back on track.

Building with 100% deeply affordable units with on site social services? You can't put a homeless shelter in our neighborhood! The honest working class residents of this neighborhood have suffered enough from gentrification without having the homeless problem dumped on them too!

> We live in a democracy. The underlying problem of government is voters.

Pretty sure dictatorships have the same problem with improper zoning.

> Pretty sure dictatorships have the same problem with improper zoning

I can't find it now, but there was a study measuring the straightness of the road between capitals and their airports. The straighter the road, the more authoritarian the regime that built it.

See China and 3 gorge dams

Unless your plan is to undermine democracy I don't see how you can really fix this. With some exception, the people who decide the rules for what is and isn't allowed to be built in an area are the people who live there. I can be mad all I want that a city/township doesn't want to provide me the kind of housing I want but it would be wrong to force them.

I think it was one of the US founding fathers that said, "The primary responsibility of a democracy is the education of its citizenry".

It sounds like Bay area residents are working against their own interests (home values) by reducing housing supply, thereby making their city so unlivable that home values will collapse anyway. Getting people to see the problem and vote accordingly may be difficult, but it doesn't seem completely impossible.

DOesn't have to be this way. NIMBYism is a failure of hyperlocal politics where the population looks out for their own interests at the expense of everyone who wants to move there. It can be solved by higher level governments banning restrictive zoning. California has already begun that process with the mandatory duplex zoning.

Sure the Bay Area housing crisis can be pretty easily solved if you throw zoning laws out of the window. Don't need to convert office space for that.

But doing reasonable things without deference to “how things have always worked in our society” is unconscionable.

Think of the loss of figurative identity a minority of landlords might incur!

Where I live in the UK, they've converted multiple office blocks to student accommodation. They are also tearing down block of flats due to other structure issues. Generally it's easier to build housing on green field rather than brown sites due to contamination etc. Once you convert the office to housing, when you need office space you'll have to build it somewhere

They started promoting this in the UK in ~2013 when the planning laws were relaxed[0]. The early conversions were pretty poor I think; badly-sized and without enough natural light.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/planning-measures-will-ma...

They’re doing this in the UK, and there’s something seriously dystopian about the space it ends up creating somehow. I’m sure it’s better than nothing, but it’s not ideal.

During the summer I heard a KQED segment of some prominent examples of this from SF and why it's very expensive to do, rare to be able to pull off. Maybe it was this one: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101889483/what-would-it-take-...

Just to pick one example out of a hat, the discussion of elevators was one that made an impression on me. They said the allocation of elevators for residential vs office space is very different, and in some SF examples they had to put in entirely new elevators and staircases.

Seems there's lots of these things you wouldn't think about unless you're in that industry...

Agree, but will never ever happen thanks to commercial RE mafia errrr lobby... Most of the commercial RE is vacant but still somehow get tax breaks and they also keep the rents very inflated. I don't buy this argument of "this is not fit to be a home" - neither are the streets, parks and sidewalks. The commercial RE mafia err the lobby is very powerful and they will protect their interests no matter what. These spaces are already up to code for fire and habitability. They have bathrooms. All you need to do is put more bathrooms and have small 10x10 rooms like they have in Japan with a bed, coat hanger, table and chair. This is just temporary to house the homeless and get them off the streets. Give preference to folks that have a job. To make is sweeter for the owners, the city can keep the tax breaks that they already get for keeping the place vacant and get rid of all other tax breaks given to the commercial RE folks.

> I don't buy this argument of "this is not fit to be a home" - neither are the streets, parks and sidewalks.

Are you proposing that the city rent out licenses to live in the streets, parks and sidewalks, or are you just pooh-poohing the entire idea of housing standards? How do you feel about food standards?

I’m proposing new standards to house the homeless who sleep on the streets. Specifically if a building is empty and already fit for humans to occupy, it should be ok to put some beds there and allow people to be moved from the streets.

This post is not about food.

The real solution to the housing crisis in the bay area is to shift the center of jobs to the south - san jose. There is more land there, the city is willing to build highrises, and so on. The "crisis" is because people went from a focus on the already-crowded peninsula to the ultra-limited-space SF.

What kind of imaginary universe would allow for converting downtown SF office space into residential, but not let you simply build new houses? Both are impossible for the same reason, doing just about anything in SF is impossible.

For everyone that lives in San Francisco: the only way we'll be able to fix our city is if we get involved. That means voting and donating to pro-growth and pro-competence political groups.

That's why a4agarwal (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=a4agarwal) and I started GrowSF — we can build a better city, but only if the tech industry supports pro-growth policies and elected officials.

We'd love your support! https://growsf.org/donate

I'm a US expat (live in the UK) who is thus still registered to vote in San Francisco. Do us expats a favor and post your endorsements at least 2 months early. Our postal ballots are sent early and most sites procrastinate on their voter guides. For instance I filled and mailed my ballot for the June 2022 elections on April 28th, and I wish SFGate had published their analysis of the primary race for Insurance Commissioner sooner, I would have voted against the incumbent.

Is this actually legal?

Yes, of course, if you register as an overseas voter. You get to keep voting in the last place you lived. I couldn’t transfer my vote to Texas where it would do more good, for instance.

https://sfelections.sfgov.org/military-and-overseas-voting

When my daughter turns 18 and if we haven’t returned to the US by then, she’ll also get to vote in her hometown of San Francisco.

This makes sense in the same vein that a 2 ASCII character maximum variable length to save space made sense in 1978.

I know a us citizen can always vote in a federal election. But generally you can't vote in a local election, unless you live there. I can't tell from the link you posted... But apparently California doesn't care. And some wonder why people question election results.

> you can request to receive your ballot and voting materials by email, fax, or mail, and vote for contests in all federal, state, and local elections held in the precinct where you last lived, or where your parent/legal guardian last lived if you have never lived in the U.S.

What part of that is unclear?

With universal vote by mail, expats now don't vote too much earlier than voters in the city. For the June 2022 election, voters in SF received their ballots on May 8. So I think you got yours one or two weeks before that?

The deadline for deciding who could appear on the ballot was yesterday, September 6th, for the November 8th election. So ballots should start getting printed today and mailed to expats some time in the next week. So I think you'll get your ballot mid-to-late September.

We're currently on track to publish the voter guide on October 1st, but I'll see if we can get it up any earlier!

I do ask myself how long the WFH trend is going to last. My hypothesis is that at some point in the next 5 years we're going to starting seeing articles on HN promoting the productivity and well-being benefits of in-person interaction with your co-workers.

From where I'm standing, productivity doesn't look so great. It's an open secret in my remote-heavy, North American west-coast social circle that everyone knocks off at 1-2pm when the east coast people are definitely logged off. Probably the east coast people are doing the same thing, but in the morning. Lots of happily phoning it in.

And many of these same folks have a propensity to being shut-ins. A few of the more outdoorsy types are out there living their best lives.

But from a large-scale, long-term economic competitivity standpoint, this arrangement doesn't feel sustainable. I pose myself the question: What will be the confluence of circumstances that will demand that we take our jobs more seriously?

Edit: speling

>From where I'm standing, productivity doesn't look so great. It's an open secret in my remote-heavy, North American west-coast social circle that everyone knocks off at 1-2pm when the east coast people are definitely logged off. Probably the east coast people are doing the same thing, but in the morning. Lots of happily phoning it in.

That hasn't been my experience at all. I work for a multinational company with teams spread across the globe - daily meetings with West Coast, London, and Mumbai and productivity has been fantastic in the past 2 years across all R&D teams (can't speak for others). Are you sure this isn't just an issue with your internal culture?

To be sure, my (observationally biased) sample set includes ~3x more "friends working in tech for multinationals" than coworkers.

Can confirm like 80% of my Google friends are 3 hour/day types. But then again, it was only 5-6 hours/day before COVID anyway.

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

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

has anyone moved US nuclear infrastructure to kubernetes yet?

He was ahead of the curve in so many ways including quiet quitting.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYXzHjbfMDk

I mean it all depends on what they do. 3 hours a day of coding is huge amount of work. 3 hours a day of zoom meetings is meh.

> What will be the confluence of circumstances that will demand that we take our jobs more seriously? I can think of one "confluence of circumstances" that would make me take my job more seriously: Higher salaries

I can only add my own anecdotal data but this is certainly not been the situation at my midsized tech company. We were already starting to transition to a permanent work from home situation well before Covid struck so maybe that had something to do with it, but our metrics in terms of deliverables for our projects have never looked better and the engineering department is certainly a lot happier being able to work comfortably from home and without the drudge of a commute.

Eh, some people are working way way more. It was always easy enough to only work an hour or two in a office anyway.

People were "working but not working" when we were all in offices as well. WFH just made it easier / more efficient I guess.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people zone out at work too. Office breaks, lunches, and general chit chat probably take a lot of time away from work too. We are after all, not machines.

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

I'd argue that a "crash" isn't really a "crash" if it comes after a 50% increase in 2 years.

Anything short of a 20% correction is simply a reversion.

If prices shot up 100% in 1 year, and then were down 3% in two months - no one would be talking about a crash.

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

A 20% reversion is back to early 2021 prices..

Given the long history of ever increasing housing prices people have become accustomed to treating asset price inflation on property as income. Why work a 9-5 when your house can make your money (and your banks money) go to work for you. A lot of that money is spent - it's very difficult to un-spend it for a downturn. Plus a chunk of the recent nominal price inflation is due to general inflation and regressing to the same price 2 years ago is a loss in absolute real terms. Plus going forward people who could assume a $100K yearly increase in wealth from a property have lost that $100K in 'income' and must make up the shortfall from elsewhere. It's a huge marginal difference. Then there is the erosion of the tax base; governments make a percentage of the capital gains on nominal inflation as kind of a wealth tax. During a deflationary period this money disappears and can take a very long time to come back. The shortfall again must be made up for by further taxing the taxpayers or by borrowing with the expectation that the same taxpayers will pay it off later. These are the same taxpayers who lost their $100K in 'income' so they're not exactly flush with money.

In China for decades, the average house appreciated more in one year than the average person made after taxes in a life-time.

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

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

Most Americans move every 7 years. Being locked into a home means fewer economic opportunities.

> Most Americans move every 7 years

No, most don't. That’s the average, not the mode (and even moreso not a fact about the majority.)

Particularly, poor and socially disadvantaged people are forced to move a lot more, and average income and, even moreso, rich people, especially from advantaged backgrounds, move significantly less.

For the USA specifically, does being underwater actually matter as long as you can afford the repayment? It's my understanding that most mortgages are fixed for 30 years so your interest rates won't be changing?

Of course it matters, losing wealth matters even if it’s not ‘crystallized’ by selling. Your options are much more limited. Fixed low rates are only helpful so long as you can maintain sufficient income which in a severe recession becomes more difficult. Additionally if the property continues to depreciate it may be wise to cut one’s losses go bankrupt and start over. Historically those who held on were bailed out in short order by the inflation of subsequent bigger bubble. The size of this recession may get too big to bail out so we could enter new territory. Or maybe we kick the can down the road again, I don’t know, but it’s a risk.

It makes it difficult to move

But notably its only people who bought recently. I purchased 5 years ago, and our home's price would have to go down by half for us to get back to even, then a bit further to be truly underwater. And that's with us having put down only 5% -- anyone putting 10-20% down would have more buffer still. Someone who purchased 2 years ago might have less of a buffer, but still perhaps 20-30%. Our neighbors who purchased 7 years ago can lose ~70% and still be ok.

Not meant to downplay how awful it can be for some folks, just meant for perspective.

Well, it's going to be a crash when all of our 401(k) and pension money that was shuffled into the "always increasing" real estate market last year disappears.

This is a pointless semantic argument.

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

Yeah, but a lot of people are willing to bet that rates won't stay high for long.

If the average person is buying a house to hold for 7 years - and you're expecting only 2 years to be at elevated rates before you can refinance at 3% or less - then you'll settle for a lot less than a 30% correction.

Does your 30% figure doesn't include property tax - or mortgage interest deduction? If you include those - I'd imagine you're looking at a <20% correction.

“There was a statistician that drowned crossing a river... It was 3 feet deep on average.”

I think we’re going to see a lot of new things this recession. The high inflation preventing ‘quantitive easing’. Usually the middle class can bear all kinds of hardships but from my observations they’re reaching a point where they’re tapped out and can bear no more. Many landlords think they’ll simply raise rents to cover increases in interest rates because renters are less able to buy their own property due to the same high rates. But tapped out renters cannot afford the higher rents for long and landlords will have to take a bath. If we go into a reverse wealth effect deflationary spiral we can’t lower interest rates to get out of it due to the risk component of interest will start to dominate over the risk free rate.

Doesn't matter if they are willing to make that bet if the bank isn't and banks are going to be underwriting their loan based on the current mortgage payment and interest rate.

Are those numbers reversed?

Should it be a $750k house at 3% is a $500k house at 6%?

Yes, you are correct. I mistyped.

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

1. After 9% inflation

2. With a <3% mortgage rate

3. If it would mean realizing a loss

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

Prices do not have to go anywhere.

OH NO A WHOLE MONTH!!

Inventory of listed homes remains extremely low. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUCA

Median days on market still near all-time lows

SF: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDDAYONMAR41860

Cal: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDDAYONMARCA

USA: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDDAYONMARUS

> inventory of listed homes remains extremely low

Those are statewide statistics. Oakland is seeing a ~20% increase in days on market and 5% decrease in price from last year [1]. Population and income shocks hit poor neighborhoods first [2].

[1] https://www.redfin.com/city/13654/CA/Oakland/housing-market

[2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.23...

> Population and income shocks hit poor neighborhoods first

Oakland has a Median HH Income of $80k - which is 20% higher than the US median HH income, and above median for California.

Oakland as a whole is definitely not poor.

The problem with median income is income inequality far outpacing inflation.

You can have most of a city making minimum wage (~30k pre-tax), but enough CEO's and mil/billionaires to completely skew the medium far higher than it should be.

We need to look at income without the high outliers to get a real sense of the population.

This is why the shocks always hit the poor first- they are the real representation of the population.

You can look at HH income by decile.

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

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

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

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

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

That's cool, much appreciated. I don't think any of them are livable on the minimum wage.

The charts are terrifying.

Add the highest gas and now electric prices in the US, California is headed for a reckoning.

I know myself and several associates are looking at getting out, with some of us looking at north Washington to be close to the Canadian border.

The great thing about skyrocketing everything in California on top of their already insane prices, is that it makes other places that may have seemed out of reach cheaper by comparison now.

It's pushed me personally to finally open another business. Not because I was ready- or even wanted to again, but because I'm tired of making others rich for nothing.

I've a friend who is maintenence for Marriott properties- they just had a housekeeper hit 20 years with the company and she is still making minimum wage (bonus- it's the 14/hr not 15/hr because Marriott properties consider each location a separate business, so they don't think they should have to oay the 15/hr for employers with more than 26 employees).

Not even a $.05 raise a year.

Really opened his eyes, he is now looking at taking a year off to enjoy himself since he doesn't have rent or anything.

Sad, truly.

You're comparing 20%ile incomes against 50%ile rents. I imagine SF 20%ile rent is not 42% higher than Oakland's 20%ile rent

> but enough CEO's and mil/billionaires to completely skew the medium far higher than it should be

Are you confusing median for arithmetic mean?

Median is meant to avoid the skew from the top 1% (or top 10% or 20% or whatever). Half the population is above the median and half below.

The Monthly Supply of New Houses in the United States is considered by some to be a more reliable leading indicator of the housing market and it is at historical highs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSACSR

Days on market is going up dramatically in July where normally it should be going down. The inventory of listed homes is going up as well- overall in all those graphs there is a clear trend in the housing market towards a reversal- saying things are still historically low ignores the trend and ignoring other leading indicator data that is at historical highs.

New homes are not that great of a signal because they are a small part of the market and have a tendency to exist in the most speculative places. Certainly in the context of Oakland the nationwide inventory of new homes is all but irrelevant.

Hey, just so you know, that “share links” button leads to some of the best share options I’ve ever seen on a data website. You could combine those three lines on one chart and share as a static image for example.

Only sharing bc I was late to the party on them too.

I have a move to the East Bay area planned in next 6-8 months or so, if you can hold out for that long haha.

For those who've been wondering what's behind the constant drumbeat of "back to the office" stories, thinkpieces, and harangues, this is the motivator.

Office real estate represents a tremendous financial investment and asset class. Its disruption portends tremendous shifts in wealth, power, and influence. The full realisation of those impacts could be held off for a time, but that capacity seems to be burning thin some 30 months or so into the Covid-19 era.

What will be interesting is how widely this spreads --- San Francisco is exposed, but not uniquely so --- and where and how far the impacts will fall elsewhere. Given the significance of these asset classes in bank and investors' balance sheets, this will also play a role both in wider asset-class values (see John Kenneth Galbriath's The Great Crash: 1929, for a pithy observation on how bad assets can wipe out good in a rush to liquidity), as well as central banks' efforts at containing inflation --- the falling bank balance sheets will wipe out much of the monetary supply.

I had always thought the supposed end of automaker dominance Detroit-style doomsday scenario was impossible for S.F., but turns out the normalization of remote work was all it took. The American software industry didn't need to end, it just had to go home.

NYC is doing great, as are quality-of-life focused cities like KC, Miami and Columbus.

Maybe calling every critic in your town names and letting QoL go to absolute crap is the real driver of movement.

By what metrics is NYC doing "great"? The amount of crime and visible urban decay/blight seems just as pronounced (in Lower Manhattan) as it does in San Francisco

By rent inflation?

>The amount of crime and visible urban decay/blight seems just as pronounced (in Lower Manhattan) as it does in San Francisco

The crime/urban blight angle is a red-herring; It implies that there was anytime in the last 30 years that New York/San Francisco was anywhere nearly comparable to a city like Tokyo.

Manhattan is already seeing a net influx in people moving back into the city.[1]

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-covid-recovery-nyc...

Name an intersection- I’m all over town and things seem normal downtown. Times Square has gotten worse I suppose.

Those cities are also not reliant on one market sector that has happened to have a spectacular 20 year run. I guess Financial Services might be the closest thing, but there's a lot more to NYC than Wall Street.

The comparison to Detroit seems apt. When the automakers scaled down, there was no "Plan B" and the city leaders were too incompetent/corrupt to actually lead.

SF could be a beautiful town in a wonderful location - if only it wasn't so expensive.

The "worst" scenario for SF in the event of a work-from-home sea change is that the COL regresses to a "normal" level for a city with its (impressive) amenities and natural environment, and it stops being propped up due to proximity of so many fatcat tech workers.

"Worst" is in quotation marks for a reason, because this feels like a highly desirable outcome for everybody (except for the fatcat real estate owners doing the rent seeking).

"The root of this—of course—is the pandemic and the way that it has completely transformed work patterns in the city.."

And, of course, insane delusional liberal policies that allow degradation of quality of life, violence and property crime, drugs, filthy streets, etc. The media never wants to address the elephant in the room.

The pandemic was a precipitant. The root is the insane delusional liberal policies.

I feel sorry for individuals that struggle because of this, but collectively, the schadenfreude is delicious. You get what you vote for.

> You get what you vote for. Not often the case, economic and social maps don’t align with voting maps. Especially in landlocked environment like the peninsula can be totally dominated by SF, where you have to go for services, business, jobs, school, etc.

Another point of influence is SFO – owned and operated by San Francisco. They can screw the air travel for many of their non-constituents.

As much as this is going to hurt, it needed to happen. Prime realestate has resulted in square footage being more valuable than peoples time. Worse so, not renting out that 'square footage' can also be valuable by driving down supply.

This is a toxic cycle that produces nothing for society other than big numbers going up. America needs to eliminate rent seeking entirely, its toxic and prevents businesses from forming if they have the audacity to require space...

My only hope is we don't bail out these cancerous REIT groups and let them burn to the ground, even if it takes my 401k with it.

How's this compare in other cities? Just annecdotally speaking, I feel like I know a lot more people who used to live and work in San Francisco who don't anymore post pandemic, as opposed to friends of mine who left and came back to Austin/New York/Seattle

Linked from the article, the Urban Displacement Project's recovery ranking dashboards [1] place San Francisco dead last amongst 60 major North American cities.

[1] https://www.downtownrecovery.com/dashboards/recovery_ranking...

Whoa, not only last, but last by a long shot. Most of the cities toward the bottom in that list are in the lower 50s and upper 40s. Then you have the bottom 3—Portland at 41%, Cleveland at 36% and San Francisco at 31%.

That's quite a drop off.

That's mostly looking at downtown though?

SF is small and its downtown has an oversized impact on its financials. There couple of relatively large areas with older residential buildings that pay fairly low property tax and have mostly small businesses. Business related revenue from relatively small area is what allows San Francisco its breathing space in the budget.

Really interesting that Salt Lake is at the top, and that's the only city I know of that (at least reportedly) had an innovative solution to tackling homelessness. I just tried to search for their solution, but was overwhelmed by links from the past few months talking about how homelessness is swelling in that city. Perhaps every city is just dying of homelessness right now. Makes me wonder if those numbers for downtown recovery are manipulated or accurate. How to tell?

I read some updates about the housing first program you’re talking about a while back. If I recall correctly it fell apart after a year or two and was quietly abandoned. The reasons why aren’t very clearly explained, but the coverage I recall insinuated that the government failed to fund it or build new affordable housing

NYC looks the same as before but with outdoor dining and legal weed.

Manhattan was packed on the weekend, it seems more crowded than pre-covid. Fridays in the office districts not so busy but still people. It has the benefit that people there actually like living in cities.

I just spent a week in Minneapolis and the downtown core is as clean, new, well maintained and well ordered as I have ever seen it.

It was also dead.

Weekday morning skyway traffic looked like a weekend or a holiday. New office campuses … tumbleweeds. My hotel was almost empty.

That’s an enormous amount of (relatively recent) investment that is now of questionable value.

My impression is that London is fairly thriving… after a period of people leaving for calmer/cheaper places during the pandemic, anecdotally I’ve heard of a lot of people returning for whatever reason (missed the buzz of it, had to go back in to the office a few days a week and the commute sucks, small town/country life not all its cracked up to be, etc).

Apparently demand vs supply for rental properties is quite crazy, with places going off the market within hours and people getting into bidding wars (not normal for rentals in the UK in my experience).

Most people I know are back in the office at least a few days in week, though a lot of tech companies (certainly smaller ones) are letting people work fully remote.

I work remotely so can’t say what the number of people on public transport going to work is like, but pubs and restaurants seem to be doing well again, which is great to see.

In a way I'm glad that a large chunk of San Francisco's population is getting exactly what they have wanted for years – to get rid of big tech takeover of the city. Maybe they will actually fare better with a significantly reduced number of tech workers and jobs, or maybe they won't. At least we'll know for certain now, and can stop all the whining.

Worked well for Detroit

I was born in San Francisco (so was my Dad, my Mom was born in Oakland and so were her parents etc.) and my family has been through many ups and downs in the Bay Area over many generations. SF used to actually be a cheaper place to live than a lot of parts of Los Angeles. There is no way it will be Detroit though. It's just too desirable of a place to live.

Don't underestimate the possibility of a death spiral. It's already happened once. Read Gray Brechin's excellent book Imperial San Francisco. SF used to be the undisputed capital of the entire North American West Coast, and arguably even the entire Pacific. In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, it lost that position to LA.

I lived in SF for 19 years, moved to London (family reasons, elderly parents with health issues) and are planning to return to the US. My wife put an absolute veto on returning to SF itself because of how dire the law and order situation has become.

Sad to say, but the city really needs a 1990s vintage Rudy Giuliani to clean house. Otherwise what it will get is Bernie Goetz (yes, I know, I am showing my age with my references). It seems unthinkable today, but in the 1950s and 60s SF was actually a fairly right-wing city, all mayors from 1912 to 1964 were Republicans.

1912-1964 Republicans may not have been particularly right wing.

My understanding is that prior to the "Southern Strategy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) of the 1960s, the Democratic Party was largely right wing, and the Republican Party was largely left wing.

So San Francisco flipping from Republican to Democrat aligns pretty much squarely with the change in politics of the parties due to the Southern Strategy.

This implies that in fact, San Francisco has always been fairly left-wing.

I know people miss SF as it was before the boom, but can it actually readjust to substantially less tax revenue with the city government + responsibilities it has now?

From what I read about Detroit, once businesses started shrinking or leaving the tax base shrank.

The city was unable to cut down on services and spending, so it raised taxes on everyone remaining and the squeeze of more tax and worse QoL made people leave even faster.

I'd love to hear if anyone has examples of a city's tax revenue shrinking at least ~20% in a couple years where the city correctly adjusts their services and scope to match, without facing some runaway decline or lost decade.

Open to discussion on this.

EDIT:

Thinking aloud, maybe the people leaving Detroit due to loss of services/QoL were simply in the parts that Detroit was abandoning to make ends meet?

It seems the faster people leave, the cheaper the housing gets which attracts more people.

Will the millions of people clamoring to move into SF or any dense US city turn into a negative number?

That's true - the hills, whales, architecture, and density that attracted bohemians before aren't going anywhere

The people on the sidelines will definitely provide a floor to the prices of the homes.

Home prices aside though the loss of the lucrative office workers buying lunch and renting offices will decrease tax revenue.

Unless someone has any examples of a city that has navigated a downsizing well I do believe the QoL in 5 years will be worse than today's (provided we don't see an epic return to office).

The question for people invested in the region is: "how much would demand from sideline people for these properties change if QoL was worse?"

EDIT: Reworded the heck out of this

EDIT: again

> but can it actually readjust to substantially less tax revenue with the city government + responsibilities it has now

That's the question isn't it? San Francisco has by far the highest per-capita city budget in the country. It spends more on homeless services in a year than most cities of similar size spend on everything. The city is simply addicted to spending money, and looking at the deterioration of street conditions, increase in homelessness and addiction, increase in property crime and more, they are clearly not getting its worth.

Theoretically could the city make do with a 30% budget cut year over year? It absolutely could. Columbus, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Fort Worth, Memphis, and even San Jose and San Diego somehow survive on 1/5 - 1/10 the money despite supporting similar sized populations. It remains to be seen whether San Francisco can make the correct cuts and not drive away the remaining tax generating citizens and companies.

The lesson of "you get what you incentivize" seems to be lost on them.

The SF bureaucracy and homeless nonprofits have metastasized into a self licking ice cream cone of immense magnitude. There is no way to adjust downward without someone actually having to suffer a moment of accountability. That will be bitterly resisted indeed.

By my back of the envelope calculations the city bureaucracy absorbed in salaries and benefits at least 40% of the +110% increase in city budget between 2008 and 2021. That's even before considering the welfare-industrial complex.

This is degentrification, and it's happening in Seattle too. We're reverting to the dirty, grimey cities of olde, where only the starving artists were indifferent enough to live there.

You would have to be stark raving mad to open a business in San Francisco. Not only is the downtown filthy and unsafe, but the government, when it can stir itself from its torpid incompetence, is absolutely malevolent towards businesses.

> but the government ... is absolutely malevolent towards businesses.

How so?

It kind of depends.

Opening a restaurant is an absolutely hostile experience -- there are numerous articles discussing people's experiences.

Opening a tech company in SF is very smooth sailing in the small (interaction with the government, registering, paying taxes, etc). Source: did it.

Where SF fucks tech companies extraordinarily hard is housing costs (insane), commute times / options (even more insane, shockingly incompetent), and the horrible provision of education, a major concern for parents.

Given this experience, would you start a company in SF again? If not, where?

I'd definitely do it in sf again. I'd have a 4 person + one large conference room office for sales and meetings. Everybody else would be remote, with individual teams roughly colocated, and hence capable of 3-5 days/month in person.

The problem with sf is good fucking luck convincing anybody to move there if they're over, say, 25; or are married; or have kids; etc. One glance at the housing prices and they're gone. If they can work through the housing prices they glance at the school situation, price in $30k/year of private education, and then they're really gone.

Gross receipts tax of 0.69% plus 1.5% payroll tax [1]. $20,000 trash cans [2] and arcane permitting processes for brick and mortar businesses. The city's leadership has their head so far up their ass about going after rich techies that they proposed a tax which was intended to target Amazon, but was so poorly written that they asked to retract it off the ballot because Amazon wasn't subject to the tax but small businesses were [3].

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

[2] https://sfstandard.com/politics/heres-what-a-san-francisco-2...

[3] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-activists-wanted-...

Not to mention allowing camping and undesirability, and property crime like smashed windows and stolen bikes, open air drug use, just to name a few. Source - lived in East Bay, worked in SF for almost a decade.

I'm not a SF resident, but a 1.5% payroll tax doesn't seem that bad? NYC's is over double that.

$20,000 for a pilot trash can is pretty ridiculous, however.

  $20,000 for a pilot trash can is pretty ridiculous, however.

$20,000 was for a one off (well, each of the three custom designs cost about that much) garbage can. The off-the-shelf models cost between $600 and $2,800 and the city budgeted no more than $3,000 per can.

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/for-a-trash-can-in-san...

Not to press this point too hard, but "no more than $3,000 per can" is still ridiculous. They're $175 apiece here[1].

I can understand spending $20,000 (or even $60,000) on the pilot designs. But TFA makes it sound like the city was billed $20,000 just to fabricate it.

Edit: Updated the link to a better article.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-04/new-york-...

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

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

"The Planning Department, like always, required him to notify neighbors of the plan and allowed any one of them within 150 feet to object. Neighbors learned about the project in late February and had until mid-April to complain. And someone did complain, triggering a hearing at the Planning Commission, which can take 12 weeks to schedule. That’s many months of rent flushed away because one neighbor doesn’t like what’s allowed by the city.

San Francisco stands out among American cities for many reasons, and this ridiculous system is sadly one of them.

In Yu’s case, the complaining neighbor was a competing ice cream shop. It doesn’t take a genius to see why that shop might gripe, but nevertheless Yu had to hire a lawyer and wait until the hearing on June 11 to do any more work on his shop."

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bi...

In the Castro business owners are threatening to stop paying taxes. It could be another historically important example of San Franciscans using civil disobedience to great effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eSL-ZFmFpY

> Not only is the downtown filthy and unsafe

That's why tons of companies have moved out of the old downtown and created a new downtown in the east cut. It's clean and organized.

NYC is already starting to see office-to-residential (apartments) conversions, even down near Wall Street. Sad that this article doesn't even consider that (I searched for "residen" and found only a single match, for "president".

If SF has a surplus of office space and a shortage of housing stock, well the buildings are already built.

I don't see why you couldn't do both: Saleforce tower could have some residential floors and office floors.

What % of office buildings do you think can be converted into residential?

Seems to me the main constraint would be floor/window ratios. Apartment buildings often have windows just along one wall, and that works.

So I don't see why 100% of class A office space couldn't be converted, not that I'm any kind of expert.

Actually that's extra optimistic. Perhaps most skyscraper office buildings, but not the "strip mall style" office buildings common in the Valley.

Other commercial space (retail, warehouse, etc) I would guess very little. For example enclosed shopping malls don't have many windows and it would probably be cheaper just to tear them down. Ditto big box stores. But those vast acres of shopping malls and big box shops could be redeveloped into mixed-use developments.

> Seems to me the main constraint would be floor/window ratios

Also the location of plumbing.

The buildings with smaller floors can convert fine (for example, see 100 Van Ness). The ones with larger floors much harder

Good point — few people want to leave their apartment and use a communal facility! I can imagine you could easily retrofit the water supply, but the drains sound harder. Still, these projects in NYC think they can pull it off — will be interesting to see. There is a precedent: many of the lower Manhattan residences (LES, SOHO etc) were factories.

I just did a quick DDG search for “commercial to residential conversion” and to my (unjustified surprise) there were a lot of links from architects and contractors.

NYT article from a few months ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/realestate/10posting-fina...

Trivia note: there are certain words that only appear in headlines. Like "brace" to mean "prepare." (Although I think that one might occasionally show up in normal text.)

What else? "eye" as a verb. ("Supervisors eye relaxing building codes")

What? I've seen both of those used plenty before outside of headlines. I've also heard them used in television, movies and songs. Those aren't uncommon. "Brace" especially.

brace yourself

brace for impact

you need to brace before squatting

If these are in frequent use around you may I suggest driving lessons or an increase in dietary fiber?

Perhaps instead I can suggest to you airline travel or an exercise regimen?

I know, it was just a funny collection of words.

https://xkcd.com/2584/

a few delightful examples.

all time favorite:

https://variety.com/1935/film/news/sticks-nix-hick-pix-11179...

len("brace") == 5

len("prepare") == 7

len("eye") == 3

len("consider") == 8

Exactly.

len("mull") == 4

len("consider") == 8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese

I have some knowledge of companies that went to WFH and are trying to sublease at a quarter of what they're paying in rent and they can't find a tenant.

Boston is recovering quite well, as biotech, healthcare, and education need physically present people (for now at least). SF was so insanely focused on tech that it collapsed quite suddenly.

If I owned a $1 million+ property in SF I would be selling ASAP - the pain is just getting started

Still waiting for Vancouver real estate to follow suit but feels weird that in Vancouver its' socially acceptable for people without homes single out a certain ethnic group every cycle. Used to Japanese in the 1980s, Hong Kongers in 90s, Taiwanese in 00s and Chinese in 10s. This type of scapegoating doesn't seem prevalent in other real estate markets like California, their money is correct on high wage disparity between tech workers and those with stagnating wages. In both markets there is surprising silence on REITs and corporations buying up residential living spaces and flipping it. Wouldn't be surprised if those special interest groups also own/influence local media as well.

> In both markets there is surprising silence on REITs and corporations buying up residential living spaces and flipping it. Wouldn't be surprised if those special interest groups also own/influence local media as well.

I imagine that they're all financing YIMBY organizations, whose aims would do nothing but increase the value of their holdings.

Makes sense, buy wholesale, arbitrage, and deflect blame by creating scapegoats through mass media.

Hold up, since when do YIMBY organizations increase the values? Isn't NIMBY all about protecting home values, and YIMBY about actually building more homes?

YIMBYs increase land values, decrease property values.

Yes, YIMBYs are notorious for wanting housing to be scarcer and more expensive...

The impact of foreign investment has been much greater in Vancouver, though. 40% of the population was born outside of Canada.

Not saying it’s a bad thing, but it’s not just seething racism at play, there were major waves of immigration into the city, which drove up housing prices.

> This type of scapegoating doesn't seem prevalent in other real estate markets like California

At least from 2012-2018 - in my circles - everyone was blaming "Chinese cash-buyers" for a lot of problems.

I think 3 things:

1) Vancouver has a MUCH higher ratio of immigrants - especially immigrants that feel comfortable enough with their long-term situation - to purchase than in LA or San Diego. The Bay area might be close.

2) Although the percentage of foreign buyers is less than 10% in Vancouver and not the actual reason for the problem - that ratio is a lot higher than in LA, San Diego, or The Bay. It's closer to 1% in CA.

3) Most importantly, Vancouver's price to rent & income (after taxes) are BAT$HIT insane compared to California.

So although it's not the reason for Vancouver's high prices - and no one should be talking about it - it's not surprising that people talk about it more in Vancouver than in LA.

So the commercial real estate problem is real, but this article also is concerned with the impacts to the municipal government. How important are those really?

> The city’s budget office expects property tax revenues to continue to grow. But Howard Chernick, an economics professor at Hunter College and co-author of the report that forecast an up to 43% decline in SF’s property values, paints a much worse picture: His team sees a decline of up to 15% in property tax collections amounting to a roughly 4% drop in total revenues.

This data is several years old, but in a ranking of large American cities by budget per citizen, SF was at #2 only behind DC which is a kind of special case. At that time, the SF budget was 7.9B, whereas now it's 14B, which put it near $15.8K per person. I have to believe that our problem isn't actually fluctuations in property tax revenue but how we spend.

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

https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/AAO%20FY2022-23%2...

https://sf.gov/news/mayor-breed-signs-balanced-budget-sets-s...

  This data is several years old, but in a ranking of large American cities by budget per citizen

That is an incredibly disingenuous metric and it's not surprising at all that DC and SF are at the top of the list. Washington DC is a quasi-state masquerading as a city and San Francisco is a consolidated city and county. The budgets of those two cities encompass things that are externalized in other cities.

Ok, but San Francisco also seems to be spending a lot more per person than any other consolidated city and county, so while that may explain part of SF's budget, it doesn't seem like a complete explanation. In that list, the next consolidated city/county is Honolulu, and SF was at that point spending close to 50% more per person. (I think that specific example also suggests that SF's spending is not just because local cost of living is high.) Other large city/county examples like Denver, Philadelphia and New Orleans are nowhere close.

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

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

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

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

I'm not convinced that we're getting what we pay for, or that we're funding the most important things -- no one's life is being ruined by an insufficient quantity of library books, or access to too few museums.

I'm glad we have the hetch hetchy water we do. I'm glad when the East Bay has brownouts SF often doesn't. The botanical gardens are _nice_. But again: ~$16k per head.

For comparison, I checked and Denver is presently at 2.04B for ~740k people. The _difference_ in per-capita budget between these two consolidated city-counties is _almost_ the same as a year of in-state tuition at a UC. Think about that -- people save for years to send their kids to college, and for every single resident, we're spending a sum comparable to tuition at a competitive research university.

Perhaps your way of living in the city is fundamentally different than mine, and you extract a commensurate amount of value out of the public services here. I think it indicates there must be a lot of waste.

Other things SF has:

- the highest paid mayor in the country

- an endless parade of corruption revelations that don't even feel scandalous anymore

- safe sleeping sites that cost more per tent than a 1BD apartment

So if, as the article says, the city has a 4% drop in revenues, I feel like we have a lot of non-critical stuff that we should be able to cut.

  I feel like we have a lot of non-critical stuff that we should be able to cut.

Right. And if you don't value books, music, or art then San Francisco is not for you. There are plenty of other more bare bones cities to live in. Even in the Bay Area. You would likely be much happier in a city like Emeryville or Denver.

It costs more to do more. San Francisco does a lot of things that other consolidated cities push off onto the state or private companies. Speaking of world class education, City College is run by San Francisco. Denver's community college is run by the state and doesn't even have a dedicated campus. Muni was servicing well more than half a million trips daily and is funded in large part through the city budget. Denver's got a regional transit district funded independently and the whole region only sees about 200,000 riders.

I mean, look, I get that you're tap dancing around cutting social services. Who wants to pay to deal with homeless people or drug addicts? However, that's only part of the puzzle. All of the other cities (except for NY and DC) either push off the cost of the services San Francisco funds or they simply don't offer them at all.

I think that's a really condescending response. I'm happy to live here; that doesn't mean that I don't get to take issues with the actions of our government. And you don't get to pretend that SF "isn't for" people who disagree with your specific views, nor do you get to claim that I don't value books, music or art (which is nowhere indicated in my prior posts).

I did not say anything about cutting services for the homeless, and I think it's in poor form for you to try to ascribe any belief to me which I have not actually expressed. When I say that the safe sleeping sites cost more per tent than market-rate 1BDs, it's because it's pretty stupid that during the pandemic we didn't actually just put people in apartments -- it's not the services that we've rendered but the cruel and inefficient way we've insisted on delivering them. It's also stupid that we pay cops to do street sweeps, we pay DPW to install boulders on sidewalks to prevent people sleeping there, both of which are only moving symptoms. It's also stupid that Breed prematurely started shutting down the room-key program when there was still plenty of _federal_ funding available for it. If anything, I would say that SF is being simultaneously inefficient and lacking in empathy.

What we should cut is anyone in municipal government who has come within a 3 meters of parties involved in the ongoing corruption revelations. We should cut out any future work with the contracting firms involved in the Twin Peaks tunnel retrofit that had to be done twice, or the Central Subway project blew past all timeline and budget expectations, and we should seriously look at the relationships between specific people in city hall and the firms that get lucrative contracts. When the city is over-paying, I think it's frequently because someone in city government has something to gain.

If you don't think there's stuff we can prune easily, I think you're not looking.

- SFUSD needs to support actual teachers, but it seems like there's plenty of room to cut administrators. I wonder how many of those administrators had a personal connection inside the system prior to landing their role? https://48hills.org/2022/03/sfusds-big-administrative-expens...

- How about stopping the Cultural Districts program which lacks a basic ability to engage with the cultures it claims to honor? The Leather & LGBT district commissioned art from queer artists which it refused to even display. The whole thing arrived after most of the relevant businesses had folded. Largely the result is some land+hardscaping by The Eagle.

- What about stuff that we spend money on that the city just can't do competently regardless of resources? I think the federal reaction to the conditions at Laguna Honda is heavy-handed, but given that there have been problems for multiple years, the administration can't credibly promise to resolve them in any pre-stated timeline. Maybe there's a reason other cities don't try to run long-term nursing facilities.

And frankly, a bunch of the stuff you listed earlier is pretty regressive. There's a strong relationship between neighborhood, income, and who goes to the legion of honor or De Young. Most of the people who enter the botanical garden for free as SF residents could easily pay for entry. Why should Bayshore residents subsidize Sunset residents spending their day in a garden? And other stuff could be means tested without destroying the primary benefit. I think the Free City program at City College is a great idea for giving people access to college -- but there's no compelling reason that a well-paid techie who wants to do a language or arts class on the side needs to be subsidized.

Don't try to put words in my mouth, and don't try to act like you get to be a gatekeeper on who belongs in this city.

  Don't try to put words in my mouth, and don't try to act like you get to
  be a gatekeeper on who belongs in this city.

If you don't like it, leave. If you're not getting value from the things that the city/county budget funds, leave. It's that simple.

Denver is also a consolidated city and county as well as the Colorado state capital. Denver’s budget per citizen is 1/4 San Francisco’s and 1/8 DC’s. Why is Denver not higher if what you’ve identified as making SF special has such a large impact?

Part of this is tying property taxes to real property values (yes I know SF's hands are bound by CA law and prop 13 in particular).

These days I live in NZ here rates (the local name for our property tax equivalent) are determined by relative property values. Effectively the City decides it needs to raise $N this year - your property tax will be the fraction of this determined by the value of your land divided by the value of all the land in the city - times that $N.

What this means is that if all property values double (or halve) your property tax doesn't change.

If you're worried that cities will raise property tax too much - limit increases in that $N (you'll have to allow for simple inflation).

My understanding is that that is the rule in most states. Is where I live. I don't know about CA.

States and counties are starting to move away from this.

Michigan essentially has a prop 13 that limits property tax increases to below what the average inflation rate is (far below average home price appreciation).

Counties like Allegheny in Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh) simply just haven't reassessed properties since 2012 - which is actually even more regressive than Prop 13 in CA and the equivalent in Michigan.

I imagine in the near future Prop 13 equivalents will become more common, not less.

Voters vote for what's good for them, not what's fair.

In Allegheny myself (perhaps you saw that). You are right that having such a law doesn't mean that it will be enforced. That's what the courts are for.

https://www.publicsource.org/allegheny-county-property-tax-a...

I didn't see that - but thanks for the link [=

This is normal in all states except CA is different with prop 13.

Companies will force their employees back in person. Already seeing it happen.

Companies will have power to do this in a downturn.

To what benefit though? Surely they're not better off by having to pay power/water costs in the office when people come back, right?

They'll crush employee moral with return to office and blow up productive teams as the technical leaders leave. They'll say to their shareholders they are trying to downsize but they'll be left with an unproductive shell of mediocre/bad unhappy workers.

Seeing this here at my work. Everyone good left. Talking about technically excellent peer leaders making 180k but providing millions in value.

Yes, that's the likely outcome, but what's the intended outcome? What's the steelman argument for making people come back to an office they'll have to pay bills for?

Really depends on the nature of the work, I'd say on the order of at least 90% of my friends in the tech industry are making the "work from home benefit" a line in the sand.

And honestly, they've got the collective clout to force the issue.

What about residential? I thought prices were high but manageable. New mortgages are all over 5% now, that makes those all too common $2-4 mil house prices insane.

All the people I talked to today are now over 6% on a 30 year.

A lot of people who own residential property in SF can afford to take a loss indefinitely on the assumption that prices/buyers will eventually return. Especially if those same people's wages keep up roughly with inflation.

The lawyers will do well - with work challenging assessments. The city will be fine - they'll extract their pound of flesh. The owners will do fine - they play a long game. I think the state will have issues. They can't tax workers who don't live in the state. Also businesses in SF who cater to office workers will have issues.

Can they repurpose these dead offices as homeless shelters?

It may happen naturally.

Worked for a company once who boasted surviving the hard times of the dot com bubble by selling their headquarters and renting it back until things got better.

Has this happened yet or are owners still holding onto their real estate for own use?

There are no buyers. Nobody wants San Francisco office space.

The point isn't that a buyer wants office space, the buyer wants an investment that goes up in value.

That's the core issue, right?

It’s very unusual for companies to own the buildings they have offices in, so this strategy would be non-applicable in most cases.

Zynga did this a few years ago.

If housing is not an option for reasons articulated comments, could all this empty very (eventually) cheap high rise real estate become vertical farms? At what price point do the economics work for this?

I can't wait. Could use some downward pressure on commercial real estate so that we can get good startup-sized offices here. Not seeing any big movement on loopnet yet.

This is a labour union issue and not a prop 13 or even a NIMBY issue.

https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/labor-unions-have...

Those commenting here don’t understand how labour unions in CA have the Senate and Assembly by the balls.

As long as the public keeps focusing on imaginary enemies amongst themselves and we keep lobbing ‘prop 13’and ‘nimby’ balls at each other, we lose.

Nobody here on HN is going to be able to live in the new high density housing. It is meant for affordable housing and to move vote banks from other counties. Oldest universal political trick from the books to stay in power.

Who benefits from high density subsidized housing homes for those who can’t afford living in the most expensive cities in the state? How is it helping the homeless or the economically vulnerable? Who is being served here?

There is a bigger picture. There are more powerful forces. They just want the voters fighting amongst ourselves while they decide our fate.

> is meant for affordable housing and to move vote banks from other counties

We have this in New York. It's far from as cancerous as the situation in California. When Marc Andreessen is talking about building housing in California while screaming about it in his backyard, you have the poster child for the problem [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-18/atherton-...

Cities should have capped populations for efficiency. There has to be high income, medium income and low income housing ratio to have a balanced and economically diverse population.

We just have to build another city with great infrastructure and network it to other cities when we have an influx of population due to jobs or organic population growth.

It’s like how they say.. When there is a surfeit of sardines, we buy more cans to fill..we don’t not overstuff the same limited number of already overstuffed sardines to deal with the abundance. Our schools, our public transport, our roads, our hospitals, our basic facilities are all over stretched because we keep stuffing the same cities with more and more people.

In America, everyone deserves to live in sustainable housing. And high density isn’t sustainable. It is a cope when resources are limited and population surges. The demand for high density in the Bay Area is artificial and politically motivated. This will implode. Time will tell that I am right.

> high density isn’t sustainable

On almost every measure, high-density housing is less energy and resource intensive.

> cities should have capped populations for efficiency

This is rationing. China is trying it. Agglomeration effects are real, so this will always turn into a political exercise around allocating people to more and less desirable places, and thereby pruning their opportunity set.

Except it is not sustainable. There was a study that found that tall high density residential towers require less resources to build, but they consume more energy than suburban housing.

Let us take water. California is a desert. Water is becoming more and more expensive. We are certainly rationing water per person by increasing density.

The measure of ‘sustainability’ is here is to restrict consumption. China has a more sustainable rationing policy when it comes to high density because of their billion plus population. It doesn’t apply to America. Rationing in California is just out of spite and political clickbait because we insist on measures like housing the homeless in the overcrowded Bay Area.

Meanwhile there is abundant water in the mid west. Are they less sustainable or living in less abundance because they don’t engage in high density sustainable philosophy?

Some resources are fixed and at that point it’s a numbers game. A cake can be distributed amongst 10 people or between 100. Getting a sliver of cake instead of slice of cake is not sustainable.

It is the very definition of rationing by mandate when high density becomes mandatory housing policy. It is also artificial and installed on purpose to manufacture wider and artificial housing affordability.

As in: A tech worker drawing 200k cannot afford a home in the Bay Area. Because we want to build sustainable and affordable homes for minimum wage workers that the builder passes on to market rate home buyers in order to subsidize said affordable home. Sustainability doesn’t figure anywhere and is just greenwashing.

> We just have to build another city with great infrastructure and network it to other cities when we have an influx of population due to jobs or organic population growth.

Ah, the cyberpunk solution.

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Night_City#Inception_(1990...

The future. The rumors of a cyberpunk dystopia are unfounded!

for added consternation, check out "Millennium Tower"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisc...

It's hard to believe that anyone would want to live in any building, much less a freaking ultra high rise, with any sort of foundational issues, especially after the Miami condo collapse.

That would actually be great and all that could be used for infill mixed use development.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4

I was half-way ready to expect that this article is about about Millennium Tower

I had a cab driver that was from Brazil last week. He said SF was a shit hole and more dangerous than any place in Brazil which is why he left and moved to another state. Thought that was interesting.

Brazil's murder rate is ~10x SF.

San Francisco can still make a turnaround and bring things back. But they'd better prioritize crime and homelessness ASAP.

Without a 'broken windows' cleanup a speedy recovery seems unlikely.

At least for residential, you can reassess every year, not on sale as attested to by the article. I know because I did that during the Great Recession.

Americans has been priced out of America.

We're all paying our wages / rent to mega-corps who own everything and don't have to lower rent to become competitive.

I do empathize with the comments complaining about the homeless in Downtown SF. We have a similar problem in PDX and it really does kill any motivation to go downtown. I also visited SF last June and the homeless issue there was INSANE. It is all anyone can talk about! Everybody is pissed off about it! And for good reason, it is miserable for everyone involved! But nothing is being done about it.

The other day i saw a woman covered in filth sitting on the sidewalk with no pants on, staring blankly in front of her. I walked a few more blocks and saw a man writhing on the ground clearly high.

I'm not a "tough on crime" guy. I have a massive amount of empathy for these people who are likely developmentally disabled, or somewhere in life made the decision to do drugs that lead them to living on the street, concerned with nothing but getting the next hit. But the current state of affairs cannot go on.

I'm at a loss of what to do.

On one hand, being poor and disabled ( through birth or drugs ) should not be a crime. Locking them up doesn't help at all. Besides: our jails and prisons are already full of people. We see that with news stories of dangerous people being allowed to leave jail and go on to immediately do more crimes.

On the other hand: are these people entitled to rule the streets? Shooting up junk and leaving their shit anywhere they please? Setting up tents and piling their junk up blocking sidewalks? Raving mad, starving hysterical naked at anyone who slouches by?

Are we not entitled to protecting my city's prosperity from being bled before my eyes? And if so: How? Arresting them and placing them into FEMA camps? Where? With what workforce? Who is going to cook and clean and counsel these people?

Or give them housing. I'm not opposed to this either, but we've kind-of seen the bad side of this before with cabrini green. And again: Where. With whose buildings. In whose neighborhood. With what workforce to maintain them.

People hiss and spit at their local government but in my eyes, we are backed into a MUCH more dangerous corner than a lot of people realize. The holocaust started well before 1939. People all over Europe were shipping the people they don't want around to the next country over. We need federal action, leaving it up to the states isn't working.

Very nicely put.

Remote work has made cities largely obsolete anyway for pretty much any desk job. Good time to have a long bet against CRE.

The political class and a big section of the electorate (mostly boomers that have been living here for a while) have been hell-bent to squeeze all the juice out of the tech boom while providing little value to the rest of society.

This mostly came in the form of insane real estate prices due to restricted supply, making the city residential market essentially an oligopoly and filling the pockets of the landowners. But it also came in outright extortion of the tech scene: gross receipt taxes, income taxes, etc.

Every time they try to squeeze wealth out of tech they end up hurting the city.

The most recent one was the so-called Amazon tax, where TODCO's John Elberling (a local crony) drafted a bill to tax large e-commerce companies. His motivation was to "tax Jeff Bezos' ass"[0]. But instead the bill would tax small and medium retailers in SF... and would not tax Amazon because the guy was dumb enough to spend $400k on the bill without actually estimating the intended impact of the bill, let alone secondary effects.

Mike Solana writes about the extractive tendencies of the SF establishment quite clearly in his "Extract or Die" blog post [1].

I love San Francisco, and hate what the local establishment has done. I have hopes that the crisis will crater support for the establishment (perfectly represented by supervisors Aaron Peskin and Dean Preston) and boost support for serious organizations (e.g. GrowSF [2], Yimby Action [3]) trying to make this city as functional as it is beautiful.

[0] https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-housing-todco-... [1] https://www.piratewires.com/p/extract-or-die [2] https://growsf.org/ [3] https://yimbyaction.org/

in June 2022, i was in SOMA for the first time since Feb. 2020. it was like a ghost town compared to back then. absolutley wild.

Thanks

Not just SF

I see For Lease signs on commercial real estate at all price points everywhere I go. WFH has been a paradigm shift and commercial real estate hasn't caught up to the reality yet. Companies that embrace WFH will have access to an entire nations' worth of talent and will end up with a competitive advantage. Requiring RTO means employees must be within thirty miles or so of campus, and lots of talent won't go for that anymore. I don't recommend anyone relocate for a job unless they are very young and its just a matter of renting. I'm not selling my house for any employer at this point.

Many tech companies also overbuilt. I predict Google will pull the plug (or massively downscale) on their San Jose "transit" campus...there's no way that Google needs another 25k desks in addition to their existing real estate building/buying binge, particularly with recent talk over headcount. Fortunately for Google, simply by virtue of announcing the San Jose campus, they've raised the value for the undeveloped real estate and will be able to sell it at a profit.

WFH is going to be a defining trend...I predict it will be a survive/die issue for companies.

To piggyback off of this, for those companies where WFH doesn't work (lab equipment, etc), now is a fantastic time to negotiate a deal.

I’m not near a big tech center, but I know of exactly 3 businesses in my town that no longer exist because they would not allow their employees to work remotely. Two of them were owned by former clients of mine.

They allowed themselves to fail because they wanted to make their employees’ lives more difficult. It was that simple. There was no need for either business to have a brick and mortar location at all. No need for all the overhead. But as the saying goes: “the cruelty is the point.”

We as an industry are still sailing through the air thinking things are fine with WFH, but in reality the engines have stalled and we're gliding.

What I mean by that is that the industry has all the benefits of in-person work, having social connections, having gotten jobs through networking, and of knowing the ins and outs of a domain from pre-covid standards.

As time goes on, I think the working population will have more trouble networking for jobs, have less enjoyment from their work, less interaction with other human beings, and fewer people will be able to "break in" from college or from non-IT roles into technology. We are insulating ourselves from spontaneous interactions, and that's a bad thing for evolution.

TLDR - Not all RTO is about cruelty.

Hi manager! :-)

No, we don’t go back to the office.

I would expect managers to be pleased that it's more difficult to network and leave them for a better manager.

It might be harder to find a better manager, but it's far easier to leave.

I'm "just" a worker who has also benefited from remote work.

It's annoying to see people attack anyone who thinks there is a chance of a negative side effect of WFH.

Then the pendulum will swing back towards hybrid, people will drift towards in-person-first companies such as Apple, and trends will shift again. Perhaps owners and management will get smart and try to woo workers with personal offices instead of the open office default.

What you're describing won't last forever, either.

I also think there are a lot of people in California who don't want to RTO who aren't thinking about competing with jobs with people in a state with COL like Arkansas or Idaho. WFH is really going to depress wages for most tech workers.

Californians and the like are moving to Idaho, so the COL there will gradually increase towards parity.

And perhaps Arkansas eventually?

https://www.camdenarknews.com/news/2022/aug/31/will-climate-...

As someone who moved to ID because I have in laws in the area I can tell you it is a terrible place, no one should move here, the locals are rude and crude, it is freezing 8 months out of the year.

Everyone here is an avid Trump supporter and openly racist. They drive big pickup trucks everywhere. The mountains are too far away and horrible, everything here is terrible in every way no one should move here the entire state is terrible. The fish have 3 eyes and it is ugly as sin year round, again days 10 below are 0 are common and the roads are never taken care of. Thousands die every year trapped in their home from their houses freezing solid.

Again I warn you stay away Idaho sucks, tell all your friends. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1o33skCSN8

EDIT: Bug, bugs are everywhere, every horrible thing you have ever heard about any state multiple by 6 and Idaho is still worse. Everyone is carrying a gun everywhere, because you have to constantly shoot away wild animals and other people that try and maul you and eat you. If you've ever played a game in the Fallout series that is what all of Idaho is like. Idaho sucks tell all your friends.

EDIT EDIT: If you've already moved to ID it's not too late you can still escape to somewhere better, flee flee for your lives.

3rd EDIT: There is no shopping here either, Amazon can take over a week to deliver, we mostly barter at the country general store in potatoes, not to mention children are mauled by the dozens by bears just walking home from school, which is a one room school house 40 miles away. We have the worst schools in the country. Stay away if you value your children's future.

You're late by at least two years, Boise is the new Austin, sorry but that's how it goes. At least the real estate market seems to have corrected recently there?

The Fallout series is literally (mostly) set in California.

Instructions confusing. Just rented AirBnB in Idaho.

Heh, that's what we tried to tell people about Austin, back in the day. Didn't work.

I guess Micron must be using slave and child labor in the fabs at this rate.

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

Plus, are people really gonna just hunker down in isolation? Aren't they gonna get a little stir crazy?

We will see.

PS: The fact that suggesting WFH isn't all peaches and roses gets one so harshly attacked suggests that there is some serious unspoken ulterior motives at play. It's kinda funny to me how so many arguments for WFH are centered around the individuals themselves. None of them are really arguing that WFH is actually the best for a business.

What if, as a compromise, the first step is we get rid of open offices. That would go a long way towards getting rid of a near-universal complaint (at least on HN) about the pre-disease status quo, which WFH has freed tech workers from for a while.

> It's kinda funny to me how so many arguments for WFH are centered around the individuals themselves.

Many of those individuals may have families who they want to be around more, or help with, during the day.

And less work commuting is inherently better for the environment.

> None of them are really arguing that WFH is actually the best for a business.

So far, we need to see more signal that businesses, namely the tech companies located in say SF, are being adversely impacted.

Yep. I am working hybridly - where I am in my office 2-3 days per week, and remote the rest. It's insane how less stress I have when I WFH. I have to work onsite those days due to the nature of my job.

Less traffic, especially the early money school --> downtown rush. My office space has poor ventilation, the HVAC is outdated and has no natural light at all. And the less that can be said for my cafeteria food the better. Honestly, if you as a company want my seat in the chair, you do need to provide facilities that make it worth it.

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

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

Are you claiming the last two years have greatly accelerated the construction of single-family homes over higher-density housing?

Plenty of people are going to work to Zoom into with others, so sounds like that suboptimal experience is happening both at home and in the office.

We're 2.5 years into the big, unplanned WFH experiment. I would think all of the in-person benefits you mention would be visibly expiring by now. Are they? I'm sure in some cases they definitely are, but industry-wide I would think we'd see more clear evidence by now if that was the case.

I honestly think it will take half a decade or more. It will take seeing the long term effects on new entrants to the fields (college hires) as well as seeing those people trying to get new jobs at new places.

The businesses literally shut down because of that? They were that stubborn? Or they noticed it too late?

The one I was most familiar with was a business that edited wedding photos and videos. The owner insisted that each employee be on site each day.

There were other factors too such as the fact that he forced them to work on Windows machines when each employee had M1 Macs at home.

He made the fatal mistake of saying “if you don’t like it, go start your own business.”

Well, two of them did. My wife and I gave them the money they needed to do a bit of marketing and hooked them up with our attorneys. Now they work wherever they wish.

The owner made a lot of entertaining social media posts afterwards about how lazy workers are ruining this country. The guy was a walking stereotype

How can you be sure that the business itself didn't fail?

It did fail. He had no employees and he didn't know how to perform the work himself. In our local FB and Nextdoor groups, there were many brides complaining about not receiving their photos/videos for months after their weddings. He wasn't bright enough to outsource. He ended just returning all the original photos/videos and refunding deposits. The building he leased is still vacant today.

Whenever my wife saw someone complain, she would refer them to the former employees who went and started their own LLC.

Because many methods of making money are cruel, a lot of stupid people develop an intuition that the best business decision no matter what is the one the people beneath you least want you to do. They see a world where they're trying to get all they can out of lazy employees that are constantly trying to get one over on them. Those employees' tricks are what is standing between them and retiring on passive income. This is like 85% of small business owners.

If you like working from home, working from home is bad for the business.

It's a bit protestant. Like the idea that food is unhealthy exactly to the degree of how good it tastes.

What you described is seen all over small towns here in the South. So many of my peers think that their employees owe them something. As a tradesman, I hear the same thing from so many of my peers in the real estate repair/building industry.

What most of them don't realize is that they are actually successful exploiters of labor rather than successful business people. I judge a company by how well they treat the lowest man on the totem pole.

All around me you'll find small business owners who send their kids to private school, their wives drive fully loaded Yukons/Tahoes, they have lake homes and boats, they have healthcare, they take multiple vacations per year, etc. Yet not a single one of their employees can enjoy a single one of those amenities.

So you effectively have 15-20 skilled tradesmen working full time to support the lifestyle of one family.

When you have all of that, but your employees have none of it, you're exploiting their labor.

Times like this I am reminded of all those Swiss CNC shops that offer to train people out of high school sometimes for 4+ years fully paid and then offer them a full time job often a lifetime position. These businesses have operated for generation some for 100+ years now. We are starting to see bits of this come back but I wonder if this country still has the culture to make it stick.

[1]:https://youtu.be/kWBQHicfyfQ?t=254

If you think about it, we’re a bunch of suckers here in the US. We spend money and lose years of income to obtain education for the privilege of being someone’s employee.

This sounds great right now but scary long term for employees. As talent develops across the country and pushes wages down, I guess the gravy train had to end for tech workers. I don't think there is any other growth industry left to achieve the American dream.

The city officials are asleep at the wheel. Blame it on remote work and pandemic as much as you want, but the reality is that the city was in decline even before that.

It is too expensive to live in the city.

It is too expensive to commute to the city.

It is too expensive to feed yourself in the city.

Crime is rampant. Drug use and filth is everywhere.

Most importantly city has been hostile to tech and business owners.

None of this makes it lucrative for individuals and businesses to go there, which creates this feedback loop that makes it even worse for few that want to.

> city officials are asleep at the wheel

Eh, San Francisco's voters have been drinking crazy water for some time. New developments blocked by renters. Stringent building codes and environmental reviews defended by those who think they're being compassionate to the poor. Scolding tech companies for hiring in the city and then panicking when they stop hiring in the city. This obviously isn't all of them. But it's not like this wasn't predictable over the past decade.

Yea, people love blaming (elected) city officials but NIMBYism and "Housing is an investment that should only go up in price" will eventually kill any market.

> "Housing is an investment that should only go up in price" will eventually kill any market

It doesn't have to. Housing can be affordable while going up in nominal terms.

Neither do I think most San Francisco homeowners think about housing supply strategically. They're pissed off about a specific view being blocked. Or construction noise. Or their area's average rent going up. (?!?) Alternatively, they're comfortable and can't imagine someone might be better off housed in worse conditions, cheaply, than struggling to make rent in a decked-out flat.

> It doesn't have to. Housing can be affordable while going up in nominal terms.

For how long? If housing is a good investment, eventually the cost of housing will outpace the ability of new entrants to the market to afford it. If you're already "in the market", you might be OK. But if you're not, even the down payment may be completely out of reach.

> For how long?

Infinitely. Wages go up in nominal terms, too. What matters is the real housing price hovering around zero. (Slightly above, localized, is also fine if balanced by migration.)

Real "house price" for a given house should actually go down over time, because it gets older and worn down and just not quite as good as the new hotness.

> Real "house price" for a given house should actually go down over time, because it gets older

House, as in structure, yes. Home, as in structure + land, probably not. Real wages are higher today than they were in the 80s [1]. One would expect some of that to filter into land value.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Most people are constantly doing upgrades to their homes, as well as maintenance.

Inflation and real wage growth.

> Housing can be affordable while going up in nominal terms.

Housing cannot be affordable if it goes up in real terms though. In an ideal world house prices would increase 1:1 with wage growth from an affordable baseline.

There are 2 ways to fix it: either crash the market or introduce policies which will cause either stagnation or below inflation growth in housing prices for at least 20 or 30 years.

> In an ideal world house prices would increase 1:1 with wage growth from an affordable baseline.

There's only one way to do that - a command economy, with all housing owned and doled out by the government. That just doesn't work, anywhere, ever.

You have to work very hard to ignore the fact that some places are more desirable than others to live in, and sometimes those desirable places change. Also, different people have different priorities, desires, and ability to afford both for their housing. How do you accommodate that pressure without 100% control over the entire real estate market?

It's a good question and how we "did" it in the past might need to be investigated.

House prices and appreciation were basically the same throughout the US until something like the 1950s, when places like CA began to far outstrip other parts of the country. I don't think that CA became a desirable place to live suddenly in the 50s, but perhaps it did?

It became a lot easier to move across the country with the rise of cars and commercial flying, and CA is a really nice place (from a climate and natural beauty perspective, plus the thriving industries). So it may not be the only reason, but I think if prices were equal, many people would choose CA over Indiana for example, if they were looking to move somewhere new.

In the 50’s, the population of the U.S. was under half of what it is now. And lots of professionals (and their high wages) like to live, or must live, in urban areas driving prices up in those same areas.

Supply and demand, combined with “rugged individualism” valued so highly in the states. That individualism is largely what drives NIMBY mentalities.

The relevant metric is did a place become far more desirable to far more people. Which seems obvious when information becomes more and more available, culminating with instant transmission of pictures and videos and forums that create lists of the most scenic or best weather or best beaches, etc.

This is also ignoring sheer population growth, and the unrivaled economic behemoths that have come out of California since the 1950s and produced a ton of wealth for Californians.

Huge population growth without corresponding new home growth.

>That just doesn't work, anywhere, ever.

Except for Vienna.

Yes Vienna does an amazing job but nobody in other cities seems to notice :(

You don't need to have "100% control" of the market. Government policies can help steer the situation in one direction or other. It's not like there must be either 100% or 0%. There are 50 shades of gray in between.

Nobody's trying to realistically get to the "ideal world". What you want is an "improved world".

> and doled out by the government

Not necessary. A land value tax provides a market-based solution to this problem.

Singapore?

> a command economy, with all housing owned and doled out by the government. That just doesn't work, anywhere, ever.

We need a shared definition of "working" then. There are plenty of ways to disincentivize low-density real estate development and incentivize high density and affordable housing, and all of them involve regulation and tax reform to control the market to some degree.

This post apparently assumes any non-free-market structure that "doesn't work" would be a worse outcome than we have currently, where there are more vacant homes than homeless people.

Why can’t new housing reflect the actual cost of materials and labor, with a marginal land value, and existing housing generally increase in land value because it is more desirable? That’s the way it used to work, and many people gained appreciation in their houses simply because of growth.

The real underlying problem is a lack of new housing stock, at least partly due to the decade long neglect in the construction trade following the housing bubble collapse.

I think in an ideal world housing would continually fall in price (in real terms), just like other goods and services. Why shouldn't it? In most places, there's plenty of space, plenty of room to increase density, and in most western countries population isn't growing that fast (if at all). Any policy designed to prop up housing prices is just welfare for the rich.

> Housing cannot be affordable if it goes up in real terms though.

Yes it can. It just cannot be better than other comparable investments. If single family housing appreciated, on average, 0.25% per year in real terms, we'd likely be looking at an entirely different housing market.

I agree that nimbyism is harmful, however I also think that the organizations owning large portfolios of properties can generally find a way to maintain scarcity levels in the presence of additional construction.

How? If you own 10% of the rental units in San Francisco, how do you enforce scarcity except by trying to prevent construction?

I’d claim that if a person owns 10 percent they can afford to fill 9 percent of those and push up prices such that it becomes a net gain. It seems as though housing is priced on the edges of supply and demand and that a slight excess of either can shift prices for the future units being bought or rented.

I once spoke with a general manager of a large hotel that explained to me how certain levels of vacancy were targeted for this reason. I feel as though the methodology would be somewhat analogous.

Further, there is statistical modeling for sale that indicates what can be afforded in geographic locations. I’d claim that additional housing would be priced to what’s affordable rather than attempting to outbid the lowest listing as housing is a price-inelastic good.

If we in increased or decreases the number of units in San Francisco by 0.1%, i.e. added added 400 units. How much would that affect price?

We can then reason backwards on what's the minimum sized landlord that would benefit from artificially restricting supply.

NIMBYism is only a problem because you aren't allowed to build anywhere but their back yards.

Maybe when all of this commercial real estate dies they'll rezone/remove zoning and allow people to build where they can.

Sure residents can be NIMBYs but FAANG doesn't want to have their beautiful campuses flanked by the poors either.

Yes, but I don't think SF is an exception here. The whole Bay Area is a NIMBY nest that looks frozen in time with infrastructure similar to what was in Europe in the 1950s. That's how my SF neighbor pays 30x less property tax than I do though, so there's that.

Too much local democracy: "I don't want someone in Sacramento deciding for me" is how you end up with this expression of pure individualism, where Atherton residents who have never taken public transportation in their life can block Caltrain development used by the working mass.

> The whole Bay Area is a NIMBY nest

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

Every property owner is NIMBY. Renters don't have to care and can just fly away.

A very small percentage of renters do not have to care and can just fly away.

Smart, ethical people-- like the ones here-- can be YIMBYs. Suburb I live in everyone is mad about: "McMansions" (whatever that means), multi-family homes and any development particularly apartment buildings. These people need to be shamed for their selfishness. I am a homeowner and a YIMBY. Join me!

Great so will you volunteer to support a high rise behind you overlooking your house and backyard, a methadone clinic to your left, and train tracks to your right? Throw in a homeless encampment or two across the road to appease your bleeding heart.

Sorry for being facetious, I sound like a jerk, but there must exist a threshold in willingness to devalue what is typically one's greatest asset and more importantly decrease your quality of life. By all means be as selfless and altruistic as you would like but do not expect everyone else to follow suit.

> Great so will you volunteer to support a high rise behind you overlooking your house and backyard, a methadone clinic to your left, and train tracks to your right? Throw in a homeless encampment or two across the road to appease your bleeding heart.

Your argument boils down to "if you allow anything more than a single family home this worst-case scenario is what will come of it".

Most of those issues are issues caused by current zoning practices. If moderate density was allowed almost everywhere, then there wouldn't be this stark divide between the 99 lots that are single family homes and the 1 lot that the developer has spent 12 years getting a development agreement for and needs to build a high rise to recoup the cost. If you can build more housing almost everywhere, you eliminate much of the housing and homelessness crisis. If there are specific land uses that are incompatible with residential areas, that can be addressed.

No one who is pushing for more development wants a chemical refinery in your back yard. But maybe your the house on the corner might get turned into a modest 8 unit apartment building, same as happened widely before the 1970s.

Yes. In. My. Back. Yard. Please.

I don't see the point of adding homeless encampments. We already have those. What I want is a Housing First model as it's proven to effectively address homelessness in multiple countries around the world.

But yes, I would love public transit coming closer to my house, I would love a dense living situation that's walkable with cafes, pubs, and shops underneath. I want to live in a so-called "5 minute neighborhood" and/or "15 minute city". I hate having to drive 20+ minutes through traffic lights to do anything.

I wanted these things before I bought my house, but it's too expensive to buy a large enough space for my needs in a place that has all of these things nearby. Not because it has to be, but because zoning laws enforced by NIMBYs enforce it.

McMansions (whatever that means)

A cookie-cutter, mass-produced home that has no clear architectural style and prizes superficial appearance and size over quality.

https://mcmansionhell.com/

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

That's a great mapping tool! Yes, much of NYC would be the exception that proves the rule. However, if you turn on the R-1 to R-4 layers (which corresponds to single and two-family housing with off-street parking required for each unit), you see vast swathes of Queens highlighted in yellow, much of it within a very short walk to rail transit. Check how strict the requirements are for an R-4 Infill development (and then realize that that is much much easier than densification of any other NA city R zoning that I'm aware of)

Long time resident. There are three groups in SF: Long term renters (on rent control), renters that will leave and owners. Basically, only the long time renters and owners vote. Owners don't want any new construction. Long time renters don't want rent raised. So there you go. Nothing gets done.

> "Housing is an investment that should only go up in price" will eventually kill any market

While I do get your point, it also has been generally true, for most modern cities for a long time (excluding short term fluctuations). Prices will go up as, as long as city is desirable to live in.

It holds true, long as cities don't collapse, which policies that lead to increasing prices of housing also can contribute to, by making city not desirable to live in.

> New developments blocked by renters.

I wonder how much of this is renters who feel they are just one IPO or acquisition away from being owners.

> wonder how much of this is renters who feel they are just one IPO or acquisition away from being owners

I don't think they're the ones protesting. One, it's irrational: if a windfall is around the corner, you want prices temporarily depressed. Two, political nihilism and detachment have been fashionable among San Francisco's political middle class for a few decades now. They are more likely to be proudly refusing to vote than attending town halls, speaking to their electeds or participating in protests. (I say this with sardonic affection for dear friends.)

The second point is starting to change. But culture has inertia. It will take time.

It's fine to block new residential developments if you also block new commercial developments.

Maintain a ratio of residential to commercial and you don't have housing crunches and can keep your city at the density your residents choose.

Maybe the poop on the street has made its way into the water supply and that is affecting the management?

I guess we got the elected we voted for. Now unfortunately, we did not have much choice. Nonetheless they are supposed to plan for this city. They should recognize that NIMBism is not sustainable. The BoS needs to act swiftly and help convert most of the commercial into residential units. This could help mitigate the issue. If Wework started to not pay its property tax, maybe converting those square feet in residential condos would at least bring some property tax money.

For real. I really don't know why people would bother opening offices there. Especially post pandemic

"Investment", VCs are all around the US now and those who refuse to invest outside of city boundaries are going to have a bad time. At this point even setting shop in LA might be cheaper and give you a nicer scenery.

"Talent", hire remotely for the most talent-sensitive positions. Your react app is not rocket science.

The NIMBYs are right, we should stop moving there and stop paying them those extortionate rents.

I wish I could find it, but I recall some research indicating that elected officials are very good at giving voters the stuff they want (even if it’s internally inconsistent) e.g. voters want more spending on education, healthcare and don’t want cuts anywhere else + plus want less deficit spending/balanced budget = impossible, but as the politician understood that they’d rewarded for increasing spending in your important areas, and can live with you blaming for the deficit spending because hey, what you wanted wasn’t possible…

It doesn't take much "research" to arrive at "politicians will give voters what they want and pass the buck on paying it."

Put any other way, biters will say they want a balanced budget, then when you ask them where we should increase and decrease spending, it turns out they actually didn’t want a bladed budget, and that the politicians had given them exactly why they wanted (despite protestations to the contrary)

Drug use isn't associated with crime and filth until we make it so via harsh city policies. I would, however, like someone to clean the 4 different instances of poop I saw on my 3 block walk this morning.

You think drug use doesn't lead to crime?

What crimes will drug users commit if drugs are legally available like alcohol?

Alcohol might be a bad example since it does lead to lowered inhibitions and, depending on the environment, often more brawling or risky driving than would happen without it.

The key here is probably the 'depending on the environment' bit. Hashish used to be closely associated with political assassinations, now... not so much. But it could be again, given the right(?) culture.

Evidence from Portland, which decriminalized all drugs via Measure 101, the answer is, "Whatever crimes are necessary to enable people to afford their drug of choice."

Not all drugs are equal. You can't drink your way into effectively schizophrenia, but you can get there in no time with the currently available super-potent variety of meth. Some drugs completely wreck your ability to live in a way compatible with holding down a job, which means that you'll pretty quickly have to turn to crime if you want to keep doing them.

Is there any evidence that Measure 101 was a pivot? My limited understanding is that drugs and craziness were pervasive and on the rise in Portland well before that. The idea that criminalization controls drug use isn't clearly supported by historical evidence at this point.

I think the problem is decriminalization is just one half of the solution. It doesn't make the supply of drugs more available, it just removes a penalty for the people who are caught with possession.

What's worked very well in other nations is to literally supply people with as many drugs as they'd like.

The government handles the manufacture and distribution. All of it for free. In return:

1. The government knows who and how many drug users there are

2. Rehabilitation services can be provided. They may even be a requirement for someone to obtain the drugs.

3. Addicts can begin to lead a much more stable life due to a consistent supply. This has positive impacts on the society for many obvious reasons (e.g. little incentive for crime)

4. It is much easier for someone to ween off a drug if quality/supply is consistent.

The same ones they are committing now? I don't think anyone in this thread is saying that they are upset with those people just because they do illegal drugs, thus making them criminals just by the virtue of doing those drugs. It's all the other non-drug criminal stuff that they do (presumably under influence, but not necessarily) that people are upset about.

No one is a criminal in my eyes for just doing whatever drugs they do. You are, however, a criminal if you run around chasing people on the streets with an axe, screaming at them, and then steal a car[0] (I am aware that this is Seattle, not SF, but the point still stands).

And I honestly don't think that officially legalizing fentanyl or meth or whatever else they were on would have helped, especially since drug consumption crimes are de-facto non-enforced in Seattle (which imo is not a bad thing at all, I am totally fine with consumption not being a crime).

0. https://komonews.com/news/local/axe-wielding-man-apparently-...

Look at what happens when drug use is legalized and regulated. Did crime spike with weed legalization in any major city?

Other drugs are worse on both user and their environment (including alcohol), but they're not the source of the other problems. Rather, we are, when we reject such people and force them to live in squalor with no options.

I don't think _anyone_ has a legitimate justification to be smoking mystery substances on the street corner like I see, but that alone doesn't make them criminals unless _we_ make it so through our policies.

You made a much stronger claim in your original post:

>"Drug use isn't associated with crime and filth until we make it so via harsh city policies."

Now you're saying that legalizing and regulating does not lead to a 'crime spike', which is a very different position.

Researchers seem to believe that it is virtually impossible to lead a functional (non-criminal) life when addicted to certain substances (like certain opiates, methamphetamines, and crack cocaine). From my personal experiences, this seems to be true; are you arguing that people addicted to these substances will lead healthy lives if the drugs are legalized?

For the record, I am in favor of fully legalizing everything, but I don't believe it'll somehow reduce or solve the crime issues.

I've known many marijuana and alcohol users in my time, some of them quite heavy users. I can't say any of it led to crime.

DUIs are one of the most common crimes in the US.

Reducing DUI by reducing the amount of "necessary driving" would be a much better use of our time than trying to criminalize all sorts of other things.

Hell, having the government pay for your uber if you can blow high enough on the drink-o-meter would probably only cost some billions and save tremendous amounts of lives and money.

Drug prohibition clearly leads to crime. Drug users would rather use drugs than commit crimes, but paying for a drug habit when drugs are expensive and you have a hard time holding down a 9-5 job (usually due to mental illness) forces people to do things they don't want to do.

Ending prohibition and diverting some resources from police to mental health and preventative services is just a sensible thing to do.

> but paying for a drug habit when drugs are expensive and you have a hard time holding down a 9-5 job (usually due to mental illness)

I would imagine mental illness would be a bigger barrier to handling a 9-5 job than drug use.

IIUC, the majority of people that drink alcohol and smoke weed daily work 9-5 just fine.

Is the same true for the majority of people that have mental illness? What are we even considering mental illness?

I don't think the visibly homeless crazy people have mild mental illness. I think their mental illness is a bigger problem then drug addiction if they even have that problem.

Nobody wants to talk about it but we really need to decriminalize hiring druggies.

Drug addicts can work quite well in the trades (drywall hangers are famous for being meth-heads in some areas) but once "enforcement" starts cracking down on hiring them, they can't find work.

is it a crime to hire drug addicts? what enforcement are you talking about?

If it's not directly illegal (certain "high risk" jobs) it's practically illegal because of insurance requirements.

Counterpoint: Oregon has done exactly that via Measure 101. It's been a complete mess. Every societal ill that comes along with drug use has gotten substantially worse. In theory, ending prohibition and diverting resources is a good idea, but it sure hasn't worked out that way in practice and I wouldn't encourage anyone in the U.S. to vote for it or trust that it will be well implemented here.

Ending prohibition would, at best, depress prices and increase use. You don't need to legalize the use or sale of methamphetamine or fentanyl or crack to offer more mental health and preventative services.

It would also decouple two different difficult problems {housing, drug abuse} from needing to be solved by the same solution.

While I agree prohibition certainly does more harm than good, spending time in parts of SF where crack/meth/heroin/fentanyl are effectively legal has convinced me a firm hand is also needed to contain the externalities. It destroys a place and makes it unlivable. You can't just allow it wherever.

>Drug use isn't associated with crime and filth until we make it so via harsh city policies.

In an ideal world, sure. You can't establish causality here for sure but correlation, definitely.

Drug use is absolutely associated with erratic behavior including violence.

I am pro-decriminalization but we need to be honest about the effects of chronic drug usage, especially methamphetamine.

> especially methamphetamine.

Why especially Meth and not Heroin or other opioids?

Meth gives people lots of energy and prolonged use causes psychosis. Heroin makes people feel content and sleepy.

> Heroin makes people feel content and sleepy

Only until they come down and go into withdrawal later and need to pay for a fix.

Drug induced psychosis.

I don't live in San Francisco, so please humor me, but are you talking about dog poop or human poop? I know this is an absurd question -- I've never seen human poop on a sidewalk in my entire life -- but I've heard stories about SF...

Against the health code for someone to not cleanup their dog's poop in SF

SEC. 40. DOG TO BE CONTROLLED SO AS NOT TO COMMIT NUISANCES. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person owning or having control or custody of any dog to permit the animal to defecate upon the public property of this City or upon the private property of another unless the person immediately remove the feces and properly dispose of it; provided, however, that nothing herein contained authorizes such person to enter upon the private property of another without permission. (b) It shall be unlawful for any person to walk a dog on public property of this City or upon the private property of another without carrying at all times a suitable container or other suitable instrument for the removal and disposal of dog feces.

Most people do, but I still see plenty around where I live in the Sunset. Enforcement is basically nonexistent like the leash law.

If it's in the downtown and immediate areas it's probably human, further out into the burbs it's mostly dog.

Almost certainly human poop

Dog poop is an annoying side-effect of city living in some cities - there have been articles about it, and how hard it is to change a given city.

But SF poop is not the dog poop.

Definitely human, I’ve seen it being dispensed multiple times on the sidewalk.

> Drug use isn’t associated with crime and filth until we make it so via harsh city policies

It absolutely is. The more addictive and mind altering a drug is, the more it contributes to users who contribute to crime and filth. Forget drugs, even high alcohol consumption is directly related to more crime and filth.

Alcohol is actually one of the more potent drugs, saying "even alcohol can do it" severely underestimates its destructive power.

100% agreed. Ben Shapiro did a pretty in-depth analysis of this on the Joe Rogan Experience.

> Crime is rampant

According to the data, crime in SF is lower that it was a few years ago: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californ...

> Drug use and filth is everywhere.

Voters can’t seem to wrap their head around better housing policies to get people off the street. It’s disappointing, the entire Bay Area is guilty of this.

Crime is down - but so is population.

Is the decrease statistically significant after adjusting for population loss?

Violent Crime IS low in SF. It's pushed into Oakland. Property crime is insane and artificially held low by apathy with regard to reporting and redefining offense levels.

Also wondering how much this has to do with Shoplifting and other crimes simply being decriminalized.

  Shoplifting and other crimes simply being decriminalized.

Shoplifting was never (formally) decriminalized. SFPD stopped bringing anything to the DA because he was investigating and prosecuting police misconduct. Now that the mayor's installed a new DA and the new DA's disbanded the group that investigates police misconduct the police have started bringing more cases forward. Unsurprisingly the new DA is not prosecuting cases at a higher rate.

https://missionlocal.org/2022/08/jenkins-removed-prosecutor-...

https://missionlocal.org/2022/08/narcotics-enforcement-spike...

https://missionlocal.org/2022/07/mayors-office-takes-hands-o...

I have never met a homeless person that wanted to get work, have a steady income and pay for housing that didn't eventually make it. (I lived on the streets)

Those that were overcome by drugs and mental issues would either destroy the housing or simply leave it or never take free housing.

(yes, there are many homeless that actually do _not_ want an apartment/house to take care of)

Regarding crime, that data only goes to 2019. I'd be shocked if things are not much worse now.

Anecdotally a lot of friends in SF don’t bother reporting crimes because they know the police won’t do anything and it’ll be just a waste of their time reporting it.

Or if you call the police, they just never show up, or when they do, tell you not even bother filing a report.

Citizen: Someone stole my backpack and laptop out of my car!

Police: And?

Ok, imagine for me the society for which you can file a police report for a stolen backpack, and you relatively efficiently have your backpack returned, and the perpetrator brought to justice. What does that society look like? How does that happen?

Unbelievably, I had a stolen bike returned to me two years later by the sheriff, so it is possible if the item is registered and reported as stolen. No perp justice, but getting the bike back was a pleasant surprise.

This is my experience even in some of the poorer parts of Europe. You describe stolen items or provide photos of them and the police usually have a rough idea of who might have stolen it or have recently arrested someone in possession of your items.

That you won't get it back doesn't mean that it's not useful to count the crime. It won't get counted if not reported.

I agree. I just think expecting to get back a stolen backpack, at any measurable rate is pretty unrealistic, unless the society in question is so draconian that the solution is worse than the problem.

So file a report online.

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/get-service/police-report...

https://www.oaklandca.gov/services/report-a-crime-online

https://www.sjpd.org/reporting-crime/report-crimes-online

And have nothing come of that? Been there, done that. They do not give a shit.

If you want to make an insurance claim don't insurance companies require a police report? I would assume this is the case regardless where you live.

Few people are going to make an insurance claim for a few thousand dollars, especially with what the premiums would be in areas with high crime. It is not a big enough loss to have to deal with filing a claim and then being subject to even higher premiums. You either replace it with your savings, or you learn to live without.

I wouldn't be so sure about the official stats. We've had a similar phenomenon in Vancouver, where perceived crime has been going up in downtown core, especially during the lockdowns. However, people have given up on calling the police for property crimes and random attacks on residents. This has led to lower crime stats.

> According to the data, crime in SF is lower that it was a few years ago: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californ...

Every time I see something like this I will point out that during the anti-police movement that happened a while back, many police started reducing their activity either because they were told to, because prosecutes would refuse to prosecute, or because they didn't want to be the next person on the news. Many people in the LE community that I knew reduced the proactive policing, because of the hostile nature of it.

Every single one of them predicted that crimes would stop being reported and recorded, and that a year from now everyone was going to point to the fact crime has gone down as proof that things are getting better, when the reality was that people were going to stop using or relying on the police for help because they police wouldn't do anything because they had been instructed not to.

Crime isn't any lower, reported crime is.

This theory falls down when you look at murders. They're down with all the others on that link, and they're highly unlikely to go unreported.

for 3 year old data, yes - but they are up 30% over that in 2021

[1] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

Looking at that link murders are down from 34 to 33, not exactly stunning success. Especially if a murder is ruled something else.

Not sure which link you're looking at; the link I see shows murders going from a peak of 100 in 2007 to 40 in 2019.

2017: 56 2018: 46 2019: 41 2020: 48 2021: 56 2022: 50 (projected)

In fact, it looks like murders in San Francisco have been in roughly that range since 2009 (https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/murde...).

When people talk about "high crime areas" they are usually not talking about murder or arson.

They're usually talking about large amounts of more "petty crimes" - because even in the murder capital of the US (currently St Louis) it is 64.54 per 100,000 residents. Just not that many overall and you probably won't actually know someone who was murdered, especially if you're more toward the richer parts of town.

But the other crimes are much more common and you will see them relatively often if they occur. I wonder what percentage of people have seen shoplifting or had a car broken into, etc.

It's more about the "feel" of the city than the "real", unfortunately.

> It's more about the "feel" of the city than the "real", unfortunately.

Well, yes, that's the problem. It's a perception easily manipulated, by media breathlessly covering the latest incident, interest groups like police unions making false claims, etc. Americans have a wildly incorrect perception of what crime has done over the last ~50 years.

Being murdered isn't what most ordinary citizens (and voters) are worried about. There is no reason to think that murder and arson rates are correlated to everyday property crime rates.

Put another way, the guy stealing your catalytic converter isn't doing it because he's afraid to kill you or burn your house down. He's doing it because he has every reasonable expectation of getting away with it and getting paid for it.

> Put another way, the guy stealing your catalytic converter isn't doing it because he's scared to burn your house down. He's doing it because he has every reasonable expectation of getting away with it and getting paid for it.

Catalytic converter thefts are up everywhere, though. Not just in liberal bastions, but in places like Arkansas and Mississippi, too.

Cops saying "if you just gave us more money and toys, we'd stop crime" is a claim that should come with significant evidence to accept.

True to some extent, certainly. But if a cop in Arkansas catches you stealing a catalytic converter, the rest of your day is going to play out very differently compared to how things would have gone in SF.

> But if a cop in Arkansas catches you stealing a catalytic converter, the rest of your day is going to play out very differently compared to how things would have gone in SF.

I don't doubt it. I doubt the cops' unsupported claim that said difference is an effective deterrent against the crime.

I disagree with your premise that effective law enforcement isn't a deterrent, but the trouble is that there seems to be no fair way to settle the debate. The population density in SF, vehicle ownership demographics, even the typical location and security of parking spots is radically different compared to what you'd find in other areas.

We'd need some solid numbers on converter theft rates relative to the car-owning population. But even then the numbers wouldn't be comparable, so it'll always come down to my "common sense" versus yours. My common sense says that when cops see a crime in progress and walk away whistling, it encourages further crime... and also discourages the victim from bothering to report it.

Heck, if an uninvolved local sees you stealing a catalytic converter in Arkansas there's a "high enough you can't write it off" chance you'll get their footwear on your ribcage. In SF the bystanders will probably just film.

do you have statistics/links for this "crime not being lower, only reporting is lower" claim?

That isn’t easily shown in official studies as it only makes them look bad. Do this for me; in the middle of the day, go park your car with some boxes in the back near embarcadero, go to lunch, come back to broken windows and call the police. No one will come to take your report, then let me know what you think.

i would report it, so i don't think it would effect the stats in your way.

Possibly true if you look at property crimes and misdemeanours. But you can't "hide a body" or fail to report an arson. Major crimes are down too: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

The narrative that reported crime is down because of underreporting is very credulous of LEOs, because it's in the interest of police departments embroiled in controversy to make things look bad to justify their own budgets/jobs. Hence all the news stories about how SF is a crime-ridden hellhole. However, the police department's own numbers contradict this and they are forced to lean on "vibes".

So you can totally "hide a body" but using %s with homicide is a bit unclear as homicide is less that 100, so the 2.9% drop is only a difference from 34 down to 33.

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

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

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

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

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

Crime can be down but still remain rampant. Your own link says that crime in SF is "higher than in 94.1% of US cities".

> According to the data, crime in SF is lower that it was a few years ago:

I think the data on the page you linked to only goes through 2019.

In addition, anecdotally, there is a decent amount of property crime that is not being reported because it is felt is is not worth the effort as the police are not able to do anything about it.

This delusion that if only we build houses, the homeless, mentally ill and drug addicted will magically disappear from the streets...is based on what exactly? What does "housing policy" mean in the context of streets lined with tent cities filled with drug addicts?

surely you are not arguing it won't go down at all, right? So the question really is, what amount of homelessness will disappear. It may be that it is not cost effective. That is a reasonable possibility, i suppose. I think tho, it is a difficult prediction to make, and so shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

You'll be subsidizing their drug habit, and increasing the number of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicted people that reside in your city that taxes will have to pay for (simply to exist in the houses you gave them, and keep abusing drugs). Of course it won't be cost effective because it's not accomplishing anything except paying them to ruin whatever building you give them, which they likely won't stay in anyways. They're out there because they want to be out there doing drugs. At the very least, the drug addiction would have to be stopped, which isn't likely in any case, but certainly not by just giving them a house.

There's an entire thriving economy in SF with jobs these people could be doing. What aren't they doing them? If cost of living is too expensive there, why not go to a cheaper city and do work there? If they have skills to be a white collar worker, SF is a great place to do that work and easily afford housing. Why aren't they doing it? Mental illness and drugs dominate the problem by such an order of magnitude that anything else save for harsh imprisonment to get off streets....especially subsidization of their lifestyle, will accomplish less than nothing.

> This delusion that if only we build houses, the homeless, mentally ill and drug addicted will magically disappear from the streets...is based on what exactly?

Peer-reviewed research: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20063061/ & https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/183666

i agree that this is delusional and i see it repeated a lot -- homelessness isn't just a byproduct of a lack of housing or a lack of affordable housing.

i remember having a conversation with a LICSW who did a tremendous amount of work with drug addicted and homeless populations; she explained that when she really needed to, she could "beg, borrow, or steal" a way to find better housing for someone, but that really wasn't the crux of solving the individual's problems, it's only one facet.

even if someone who has untreated mental illness or drug addiction suddenly has a great new place to live, they're not going to stay at that address long if their other needs aren't treated.

i'm not saying there shouldn't be more affordable housing ASAP, or that it wouldn't radically improve some lives, but i get the impression that a lot of folks think homelessness is mainly a housing problem when it's really not so simple, and i think that needs to change if the problems have any chance at getting improved.

If the "the homeless, mentally ill and drug addicted" can live in a tent they can live in a house. They may need assistance, the house may be nearly a blast-proof concrete box, but it can be made to work.

Houston has done it, and it can be done: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...

That data is 3 years old, and only accounts for reported crime. If you look at the numbers for 2021, it doesn't look so good - and that doesn't account for all of the non-reported crime, or incidents where the cops just don't show up.

[1] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

Having worked with PD crime data before (we were trying to make heat maps of crime levels across cities), I wouldn't put a lot of weight on it. High quality data collection doesn't seem to be a priority for most police departments, which is especially obvious when you compare across cities. Based on friends in SF, property crime in SF is at ridiculous levels, especially in the seedier parts like the Tenderloin. One friend started maintaining a car window replacement fund, because they lost multiple windows over the last year.

Elites constrain candidate choice and voters are too distracted staying afloat to demand different. City officials are not expected to do better.

I suspect this will inevitably be blamed on greedy capitalist building owners, but the crazy tax assessors have some blame here, too. They value these buildings in the hundreds of millions of dollars and asses taxes based on that valuation - and that was "ok" because the building owners could extract that kind of value from the buildings by raising the rents. Now they can't - but the valuation and the taxes owed stay the same. If they hadn't tried to squeeze every last tax dollar out of the real estate market in the first place, the buildings wouldn't have become so expensive to begin with.

Yes, but there are still "greedy capitalist building owners" willing to sign up for the deal. So the taxes seems to be following supply and demand. At some point as the article claims, that may change. If/when it does, then both parties will change.

  I suspect this will inevitably be blamed on greedy capitalist building
  owners, but the crazy tax assessors have some blame here, too. They value
  these buildings in the hundreds of millions of dollars and asses taxes
  based on that valuation - and that was "ok" because the building owners
  could extract that kind of value from the buildings by raising the rents.
  Now they can't - but the valuation and the taxes owed stay the same. If
  they hadn't tried to squeeze every last tax dollar out of the real estate
  market in the first place, the buildings wouldn't have become so expensive
  to begin with.

What?

Prop 13 ensures that most of these office buildings are not being taxed on the market value of the property. Prop 8 ensures that tax assessments go down when the market value of the property declines. Property tax is not the primary reason rent is so expensive in San Francisco.

It's arguably part of the reason things get "stuck" as they are, because selling a property triggers revaluation.

But prop 13 had no reason to apply to commercial property anyway, but good luck ever changing that.

In The city You're screwed when you rent a home or office. You're screwed when you own a home. You're screwed when you eat. You're screwed when you drink. You're screwed when you commute. You're screwed when you walk the streets. You're screwed when you (pay) park your car on the street.

homeless? neglected commuters? neglected business owners? neglected public workers? neglected tourists? neglected

I just don't know what sort of people the city wants ?

Speculators?

Who is doing all the screwing??

The officials are just a reflection of the populace: most of whom would rather than SF were a sleepy neighbourhood rather than the city that it is. This is exacerbated by the fact that the majority of the local populace sort of missed the bus on the boom that happened and consequently dislike that it happened at all. So they're using the tool they have: politics.

FWIW, I know a lot of locals who graduated into tech or who were adjacent (EAs, front-office, etc.) and their lives are better for it, but there are lots who weren't appropriately positioned and missed the boat on the whole thing.

Money goes to where it's treated best and people vote with their feet.

I know people thumb their nose on the state, but Florida is open for business.

But the real secret is Puerto Rico and their incredible tax incentives for software companies.

Florida is not a good environment for companies that have female employees, as due to FL's draconian anti-abortion law, state surveillance of pregnancies is now required as miscarriages past 15 weeks now need to be treated as potential homicides.

A swing to the Right will often cause a swing to the Left. In Florida, registered Republicans lead Democrats by less than one percentage point as of August 2022, and there are more than 10M women in Florida, half the population, and only 4.5M senior citizens, less than a quarter of the population. It is my optimistic belief that DeSantis' days in politics are numbered, mostly due to his association with a certain mentally ill and criminally-inclined one-termer president, but also because his "semi-fascism" isn't really working for him either. The Republican playbook is to prevent (usually minority-member) Democrats from voting by any means necessary, but this just can't keep working successfully forever.

And speaking of Puerto Ricans, where do you think all the Hurricane Maria refugees went?

At least 50K of them moved to Florida, but it's no sure bet they're Democratic votes. Neither of the two main Puerto Rican political parties fit the Democdatic-Republican binary of national politics.

The real real secret is Portugal, can't beat 10 years tax-free on foreign income.

If you're aUS citizen or permanent resident, the US will still tax that (beyond the Foreign Income Tax Credit).

Yeah, that law needs scrapping. Feel bad for the seppos getting double dicked on tax.

This made me curious so I googled. It looks like you need to still pay tax in the other country (DTA), so, for example, as an American, I'd need to pay tax in America. Ofcourse I could get the FEIE but that only solves the problem for the first 110k USD. If you're paying 0% on more than 110k, where are u from? I guess most countries don't have worldwide taxation so you would just pay 0% in Portugal and 0% in the other country. Thanks for helping...

This problem solves itself as I can't say I have seen many remote jobs that truly pay a US salary but allow you to live abroad permanently. Many people say they support location-independent salaries but reality says otherwise. Portugal has so low living costs you can live like a king on half of that, many german pensioners live there drawing a 1.5k pension a month and they eat at restaurants for basically every meal. I know someone who hasn't turned on the oven at home for 17 years. That said, southern europe is not so 'anti-alised' as parts of US, but it's pretty nice, the quality of life is amazing. Lisbon even has its own Golden Gate Bridge, called the '25 de Abril' Bridge.

"The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal" from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32677473

I almost mentioned Portugal but decided to keep it domestic.

The Puerto Rico tax deal is the best available for US citizens, still.

I was looking at Florida as a place to move to. After evaluating everything, I have no confidence in the State government to do well for families which means that I would likely end up putting my kids in private school which is not cheap. Also, Florida Man/Woman.

I mean, comparing San Francisco and Florida is crazy. One is a medium-density place with one of the best climate on earth and vaguely decent state politics, the other one is a soon-to-be-sinking-in-the-water mostly red state with cities that are just suburbs with crazy traffic and stupid laws.

People don't live in SF because they want to live in a detached SFH and stay inside most of the day, I could do that anywhere in the US.

California climate is nice indeed. But Florida has some amazing beaches and nature and nice weather most of the year.

I feel you on the density. But reality is most of California is also suburbia. In Florida there are some smaller towns with some walk/bike-ability.

Florida could be a real option vs SF but not with Fascists in charge.

Do you consider all people who are politically conservative to be fascist or just Trump supporters?

Trump supporters and their (potential unwittingly) ideologic leanings seem to tick a lot of the boxes: "Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy."

Source: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Fascism

Speech codes, redefinition of words, 2nd Amendment infringements, byzantine and contradictory government approval processes, centrally-planned price floors and caps... The CA legislature literally just passed a bill last week criminalizing wrongthink from doctors that don't agree with Ministry of Truth's definition of misinformation. California is a great place, but I'd take Florida's legislature any day versus the big brother government we have here.

Good grief, is anyone right of center considered "fascist" now?

When you use political power to replace political enemies, what do you call that?

Try stepping out of your mothers basement every once in a while and chat up somebody who doesn't share your same zip code. Of course that means you might learn that your neighbor (across town) is actually more tolerant than you are.

I don't think it's that different to any major city anywhere on the planet. Most cities have rough areas and hotspots to avoid. My personal experience is that it's a rather nice place apart from a few streets in SOMA.

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

  - - Yogi Berra

Companies needs people. It is the most important resource. Cities not hospitable for humans, are bad for business. Local authorities in Vienna,Austria, still has control over 25% of the real estate. This ensures that the city will be affordable for many years to come.

Cities need social services to work, because of the density of people. It is a problem when my neighbour is crazy and screams for 18h a day when we live on top of each other in a city. It isn't when we live in the middle of no where and are separated by 50miles.

Only America is specifically designed to prevent any sort of social services, because people have the freedom to come into town to use those services and then leave before it's time to pay the tax for them.

This is why American cities have so many issues compared to European ones. From public transport to healthcare to education to crime, American is designed to be 100% individualistic and that is incompatible with how cities work. Cities are forced to subsidise surrounding areas.

Cities already make visitors pay. First there is usually a higher sales tax. Furthermore, many cities have additional taxes on lodging and entertainment. These taxes are quite substantial.

Furthermore look at decaying cities in the 70s. The cities weren't subsidizing surrounding areas by providing services. Instead, many businesses and services straight moved out of cities to surrounding areas. So did many people.

It was only in the 90s when cities became hip again and services sprang back up in cities.

According to your notion, surrounding areas were subsidizing cities in the 70s.

It would be like saying that Santa Clara was subsidizing San Francisco residents when those residents attend a 49ers games.

The ways you list are fine for getting a few extra dollars our of tourists. But there nothing compared the millions who commute in and out daily to work and pay no property taxes. And that's without counting criminals or people with mental health issues or 101 other groups who travel in and become the cities problem.

Read the article. It disproves your point completely. The commercial property owner is paying taxes and very high ones at that if it is recently purchased property. Do you know what the rents were per sq ft in SF? They were Manhattan level. SF was collecting on that.

According to your notion, why isn't the town the employee resides also collecting commercial property tax on where the employee works? That town provides services too.

Do you know the transportation agencies were regionally paid for? It wasn't just SF that was paying for BART or CalTrain.

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

If you are a visitor/commuter from the burbs, you most likely aren't riding MUNI much except for rare occasions or for short trips. Otherwise you are asking for a ridiculously long commute. They still pay the fare. People tend to drive if the trip is ridiculously long by transit.

Go tell people how much SF residents pay for museums and how much they pay if they are low income. Compare that to people who don't live in SF but are low income.

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

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

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

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

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

I've no idea what point you're trying to make, but you've demonstrated quite clearly why tech workers get treated with so much disdain. Not to put too fine a point on it but a bunch of carpetbaggers who are too good to be seen near th proles sneering down at you from their ivory towers isn't a good look. It's especially ungrateful after the city created the 83X - Tech Bro Express that connects Caltrain to Market.

As for Muni (it's an abbreviation not an acronym), every BART station within San Francisco (and the Daly City station) gets Muni service except for Glen Park. The Glen Park station is a short walk from the J.

Also is it your notion that SF wasn't receiving enough taxes even though it was 5x equivalent sized cities in California? Is spending 50k per homeless not enough?

Also it is quite telling that when measures that accord with your attitude were passed, the businesses and services that you tout were more than happy to move out. And this was pre-COVID. 49ers poof. Stripe poof.

No more people coming into the city and freeloading.

You also seem ignorant of the history of SF before 2015 or so. The dynamic of people living in the suburbs and working in SF was reversed.

Ever hear of the protests against Google buses? The young people wanted to live in SF but the jobs were down in Silicon Valley. To attract them, the tech giants bused them from SF to Mountain View, Cupertino, Menlo Park, etc...

Was SF freeloading off of Silicon Valley suburbs then? Your notion doesn't stand the test of history and data.

BTW, the busing is still going on.

Also what percentage of tech workers working in SF lived in SF? From my circle it was around 70%. Do you know who didn't live in SF? Often parents and people who couldn't afford to live there.

The "cities are forced to subsidize the surrounding areas" can be solved by pushing services up to the county or state level, if needed.

What has happened is people can move and cities weren't ready for that. Moving things to the federal level is the final backstop against it, but even that eventually runs out.

I agree, though counties have the same issue with out counties and states with other states. This is one of the reasons the US federal government is fought over so much: many many things ultimately either have to be done federally or not at all. This is because only the federal government does not have to compete with someone "next door" exporting liabilities and importing assets.

Just look at the recent big name moves from California to Texas: Joe Rogan and Elon Musk (just two very public names) needed California's support to start their fortunes, now they have them best move to Texas for lower taxes. You can always fly back for the odd meeting, use their educated workforces and infrastructure and save $.

These are all small problems compared to the pension system exploding.

We can fix it, but only if we get organized. Sachin Agarwal (co-founder of Posterous) and I founded GrowSF to fix the city. We're less than two years in and already the #2 most influential voter guide in the city.

We must elect pro-growth and pro-tech people who can bring competence to government. There's no other way out of this mess.

We'd love your support! https://growsf.org/donate

Donated! Huge fan of the voter guide!

Thank you! We can only win together :)

Love what you're doing!

I find it curious though that your guide only endorses a single candidate, when the voters can rank multiple candidates.. Surely there are multiple candidates that stand out above the rest, and bringing attention to that set would help get better people into office?

Is that really the case? Wasn't London Breed supposed to be ostensible a pragmatic centrist to solve the city's woes? During the 2020 election she ultimately backed Bloomberg after Harris dropped out.

"Most importantly city has been hostile to tech and business owners."

You are laughable. The reason the City is in this state is because it pandered to tech firms that wanted the "coolness' without paying anything for it (and if anything, getting special dispensations for their own). They got tax breaks and perks, screwing every small local business and middle class residential tenant in sight, for big tech that didn't and doesn't care.

What? The only ones who got tax breaks were those who moved to Mid Market, a depressed area. Twitter was going to move out of the city when they outgrew their Folsom St office, instead they moved to Mid-Market. It's gotten a lot better now, so the tax breaks did their job.

No it's not hostile it's just not sucking them either, you want a beautiful world-class city there's taxes, and those taxes bring things like public transport, which is the biggest draw.

Yes there's drug use and filth everywhere. So understand this: they were not special snowflakes, got traumas ripped into them or badly educated or coerced into using drugs. Or, or, or, evicted. Those guys are evicted, you're sneering on them because they couldn't make that landlord totally pleased at the same time as his best friend the boss was totally pleased. Dude fucking impossible rent, like at Stanford economics class they quote $1200, no it's $4000, who knows. Like if the landlord who is a poker player essentially detects you being over a barrel who knows. Like I was talking to an activist this conversation flipped her from NIMBY to YIMBY, I told her look in Santiago there's basically no enforcement of zoning in many places, so people build really high, $200 rent in a good location. She figured they only built housing for rich people in SF, true but then those rich people move to that housing leaving behind empty housing less rich people move into, who leave behind less expensive housing, and so on. Hermit crabs. But not $4000 rent.

So also those people are wretched, which you are not. Some are absurd but they suffer for their drug use not in the future every week. And their public suffering is a service to the landlord in his negotiations which he pays absolutely nothing to them for, I was telling Jonathan Ramos for being wretched on the sidewalk for everybody to treat you like you're invisible, that coercion is worth $3000 a month to the landlord rather than getting bargained down, put in an auction, having to compete against a new building going up right next door (in some neighborhoods there's less of that), the evicteds are valuable to the landlord. Landlord should pay a tax on rent to compensate them for breathing fear into tenants. Like oh my god, if I lose my job I'll get evicted, then I'll get raped! Gasp! Yeah dude people suffering, and from all over America SF takes them all in, because they can survive at night in winter there. You ever worked in construction? You ever stopped a crime? I've stopped 31, no losses, in SF in particular in Chinatown next to the Mission where all those strap-ups do all their advertising on everything about their super-cool credit cards, and advertising platforms. Yes it's cool, no it's not cool.

It is super expensive. Landlord's fault really. And by now the fundamental economics of the city is messed up, though there's plenty of 4 story buildings in place of 60 story buildings.

And you know? Twitter when it was a respectable business (sort of they asked for homework, make them a whole app) stedda censoring a sitting president, no matter what he said, they opened an office in the Tenderloin. I went near there, I think to the Square office which for convenience was adjacent. Dude rough neighborhood, but you gotta let the junkie get something, somewhere, like crack is due to flourine overdose, that's why there was a crack epidemic in America and not elsewhere, and black those hit hardest are very sensitive to flourine. They think it tastes like shit, so that's why they buy bottled water always--an apparently false pejorative stereotype that's true and positive--that's why they don't have every single one of their kids with some psychiatric birth defect. It's the most toxic thing there is, more than plutonium. Corrodes everything, gold even. And it causes sugar cravings, so even for the purpose of better teeth it's counterproductive. That's why there's so many busted fat people in America and not Europe, there's running water in Europe in America? Only brine. Salted on purpose, poisoned hard. Good for your teeth yeah, only reacts with teeth, no other cell, and 97% of the periodic table, literally only 3 molecules that don't react to it in the whole universe.

Eh, flag for human review. Guess it's too strong, this subject. Maybe I'm a little pissed. Must be the salt.

How many times has this been predicted in my lifetime?

How many pandemics in your lifetime?

This could work out. Most of the emptying buildings are in low-lying fill areas. Those will need to be demolished as the glaciers melt.

It's definitely overbuilt and many areas are not built on solid ground.

Most of downtown is a dozen+ feet above sea level, new waterfront construction (the new ferry docks in particular) are all built to the new standard, by ~2077 or whatever the waterfront will be ready for new sea level standards. There's a plan in place to put a tidal lock in front of mission bay canal. Downtown is on a fill, but you're talking less than six inches next to the transamerica building, and less than two meters heading east toward the ferry building. The big fill area is south of Oracle Park which is sitting on 8-12 feet of poor-grade fill like trash and random construction debris, although most (all?) of those buildings are sitting on stilts going down to bedrock, in particular those in the 3 blocks closest to the water.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com