Mega landlords own majority of the San Francisco Bay Area | Hacker News Reader

Mega landlords own majority of the San Francisco Bay Area

fastcompany.com

64 pointsmoneycantbuy11 comments

Fastcompany seems to have invented that headline from whole cloth. For one thing, the study concerned rental properties. Secondly, nowhere in the original SF Chronicle story (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/bay-area-housing-p...) can I find a claim about a majority of even rental properties. The story itself begins with "12 [rental property owners] includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families in nearly 7,000 assessor-defined properties from San Jose to Santa Rosa." Note that the study aggregated nine Bay Area counties, so "tens of thousands" of families is relative to a total population of nearly 8 million.

The numbers get even muddier because some of these companies have national holdings, and the SF Chronicle mixes large national numbers with smaller regional numbers for effect.

The study itself is interesting for how they attempt to algorithmically link property titles with beneficial [corporate] owners, but it seems they felt they needed to juice things up with rhetoric and innuendo to actually sell it. I cancelled my SF Chronicle subscription awhile ago as the paper is hardly any better than FOX News. They really work hard to stick to their narratives, which is a real shame as it's the newspaper of record in SF. (The odd thing is that the comments section to every article almost reads like an actual comments thread from foxnews.com. That is, most of the people engaged enough to comment seem to be at the polar opposite of the political spectrum. Which makes every article doubly useless--the journalists and the commenters lobbing endless non-sequiturs --and also raises some fascinating questions about to whom is the paper actually trying to appeal, etc.)

The SF Chronicle has a long history of shenanigans and bias. I'm not saying this is necessarily the case for this landlord story, but for sheer amusement, it's worth reading up on the Chronicle's founder, Charles D Young [1].

I first learned of this story after stumbling upon Charles's tomb [2] in Colma, just south of San Francisco. It's where they moved all the dead after the 1909 earthquake liquified the ground to the point of bodies popping out – Zombie apocalypse style. Every cemetery was moved except one veteran and one pet cemetery.

Charles and his brother started the Chronicle as a sort of tabloid. Charles had a long running feud with a reverend that culminated in Charles shooting him and then going on the run. The reverend survived and went on to successfully run for SF mayor. Not long after, Charles returned to SF and was promptly murdered in the Chronicle building by the reverend's son. It's the kind of crazy story just waiting to be turned into a Netflix or HBO series.

If you really want to go deep, dig around for the newspaper articles from the time [3].

[1] https://www.guardiansofthecity.org/sheriff/inmates/deyoung.h...

[2] https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/10617171/charles-de_youn...

[3] http://sfmuseum.org/hist11/murdervictorious.html

Very interesting.

Before people point fingers at the SF Chronicle, I just wanted to point out that a lot of early newspapers were started as biased tabloids by very “colorful” characters.

Read: A History of News by Mitchell Stephens https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1854941W/A_history_of_news

Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French_journalism

The Chronicle was bought by Hearst in 2000.

Replace "San Fransisco Bay Area" with "the world" and unfortunately this headline would be just as accurate.

https://commercialobserver.com/2021/07/how-blackstone-became...

So that is what is keeping the land price sky-high: monopoly.

it's not monopoly, but demand that's keeping real estate prices sky high.

No, it’s not demand. It’s lack of supply caused by a post-1970 boom of NIMBYist overregulation which prevents home construction at any useful density, and by SF illegally failing to meet its housing targets set under California law.

A mismatch between supply and demand can be solved by bringing supply up or demand down.

Since they’re not doing the first they’re trying the second via prices and all the other attempts to make people move out.

> A mismatch between supply and demand can be solved by bringing supply up or demand down.

Not really. Supply and demand are curves (quantity X supplied / demanded at price Y), and where they intersect is the equilibrium price. Artificially fiddling around with prices does not move the curves or where they intersect, so you can't solve anything with this - you prevent equilibrium and get deadweight loss for both the sellers and the buyers.

If this is interesting to you, have a look at Irvine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company

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