Just got offered office space in San Francisco (SOMA) for the same price as 2009
twitter.com
twitter.com
Now the Peninsula is too expensive for the young, and full of experienced people.
Could the next step be companies forming on the Peninsula by experienced execs with many remote workers?
Regardless - office rental prices have a way to fall in SF.
SF is now so bad that people don't feel safe walking to their offices there. In the peninsula and south bay that is almost never the case.
However, this is not fundamentally about SF versus other areas. The real point of this Twitter post is to show how low demand is for office space. It's low everywhere, because it's hard to get funding to start a company when everyone is expecting a recession to start any time now.
Companies who are processing every single datapoint they can get their little paws on 24/7 are consistently saying we’re in for a recession. They aren’t going to be saying stuff like this out of the blue because it’s ‘harmful’ and the politicians want a different message to be heard.
Second, there’s absolutely no way increasing interest rates couldn’t lead to bad economic outcomes. If your company is profitable while paying 2% on debt and it goes up over that then something has to give. Maybe you cut staff, maybe quit giving employees free catered brunch and massages.
There’s too many people out there who only know a virtually 0% interest rate business environment as it’s been that way for quite a while.
I thought we have been in a recession
Someone should try that - instead of offices, give people small, offices/bachelor apartments with small kitchens, bathrooms, and sleeping quarters.
Have them work for 4 days where they are totally tuned in and productive with their team, and then give them 3 days off, where they can go home to their family and completely forget about work.
Sort of like the oil rig model, but for tech workers.
Wouldn't have to live in high COL areas, and have only one commute per week.
This is probably a horrible idea, but then again, the standard workweek that most in office workers adhere to right now isn't super stellar or efficient either...
As someone with a life outside of work, this does indeed sound like a horrible idea.
Yeah but at least they get to see their spouses and children every day.
Despite the narrative about tech workers you see in the media, the vast majority of them are normal people with families who work normal hours Monday through Friday and are satisfied with their work-life balance.
Honestly, even working from home, I wouldn't outright dismiss the idea of 4/3 split, or even 2/2/2/1 split - the normal cadence means that, during the work week, I only get little low-quality/low-intensity time with my kids just after they wake up, and just before they go to sleep.
Who does this idea benefit? Who would want this arrangement? This only makes sense for folks who want/need to go all in on their job... in order to live in a crappy apartment that they do not own. This may make sense for some founders/early career founding teams. But I don't see it making sense outside of that. Most potential customers, investors, and future employees would likely be skeptical of a team that worked in this manner.
It used to be common for startups to do this really early on. Founders would rent a 3 bedroom and make it an "office" until they out grew it and could afford commercial.
What makes SF charming is wooden Victorians, brick Beaux Arts apartment buildings, and hills. SOMA has none of that, but it has an extra dose of street crime.
https://sfist.com/2023/01/05/walgreens-ceo-says-maybe-we-cri...
Also, Portrero Hill and Dogpatch are just east of the Mission. Dogpatch is (was) on the up and up before the pandemic.
what about the marina. or noe valley? or corona heights?
i think tech people live/visit in soma/mission/market and then write off the entire city based on that--like the only place to live in 7th and minna and everything else isn't close enough to.... something....
I currently live in Haight, it's nearly just as bad as those you listed. I'm on Divisidero right now, there is poo everywhere and I can see needles in some gutters nearby.
The areas where there are only single family homes are fairly clean, but anywhere people actually go when they leave their homes is filthy.
In 30 years of being around SF, this is really only accurate of Tenderloin,
Civic Center, SOMA, Market and Mission St, roughly 10% of SF
You're right in that it's not "Most" in the sense that there's a lot more areas of SF, but if you work/life basically anywhere boxed in East of Van Ness, South of California St. , North of 16th street (Potrero Hill area) Then you're going to experience that daily. I'm a decent sized guy and I was physically assaulted twice in by homeless(mentally unstable) people.
I had enough of it, and left California.
SOMA was mostly residential hotels before those were converted into nice apartments and the residents were kicked to the streets. Before the ballpark there was never really any reason for tech workers to go in there.
Mission was quite dangerous to walk around after night before it was deemed hip and thus gentrified.
The period around the 2010 era was the nicest SF has ever been since Mark Twain walked the sidewalks.
As in, chosing to have an electorate strangle hold over a shitty city vs being competitive in a thriving one.
I have no evidence of this being a conscious choice other than not being able to find an alternative explanation.
city imploded
it got so bad, i still remember when vandalism tourism was a thing in detroit
this was in the middle of a good economy (2014)
theres no reason to think SF will fare any better once people bail.
Excpet the majority of downtown will be owned by banks vs decaying onetime industry and real estate titans.
Not to mention that it’s not a one-industry town. Don’t think biotech, for instance, has been affected like software has. Let alone finance and so forth.
We need leaders who can make decisive actions on generational time scales.
To a first approximation, everybody agrees that we should plant trees for our grandchildren to sit under.
Blake Masters, a Thyle acolyte, is a literal monarchist. That is not generational thinking, it’s looking at Rome and thinking it would be swell to live under Augustus if you’re already at least a bit rich. I have never campaigned in Arizona, and I donated heavily in Maricopa county in the last Senate cycle.
Ha! Did that unintentionally.
Which works right until their actions are to ensure their future generations have the most power and money while yours have the least power and money.
Maybe they aren’t that smart after all? Being good at computers and getting rich doesn’t mean somebody is a genius.
Never understood why we reserve that term for Russians.
Not saying it’s right! But that was a very specific and rare set of circumstances that maybe deserves it’s own recognition.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-31/twitter-s...
You seem to recognize that the three people you mentioned are, by any objective standard, awful people. Depending on which billionaire you look at, you'll see variations of this. For example, the billionaires (eg Koch, Musk) who spend huge sums in derailing (pun intended) any effort to build public transport infrastructure in the US (eg [1][2]).
The question then becomes why. There are really three roads you can go down:
1. You blame a specific group (eg ethnicity, religion, etc). We'll call this the Kanye Road to Antisemitism;
2. You see such individuals as simply bad apples, exceptions. If however you look you'll find pretty much any billionaire is awful and in some way is seeking to destroy the system that made (and continues to make) their very wealthy possible; or
3. You realize this is a systemic problem.
I would put to you that the problem is (3).
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
[2]: https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-cali...
I don't know about yikes. Hard to make the case that there's a ton of value in commericial space with the crime, drugs, and filth that constitutes soma, especially now that office space is just an incidental thing to most SF companies.
Essentially, "wow, the circumstances are so bad that this obviously bad outcome is happening. Yikes at those circumstances."
Never seen such a desolate place, and I say this as someone who has been homeless before and slept in homeless shelters. Homeless shelters in Boulder, CO were about x10 less sketchy than the streets I walked around in downtown SF.
I'm not sure where we were exactly, but there was homeless shooting up in the street at least once every few blocks, plus garbage everywhere and human waste.
What the absolute fuck is going on down there
The latest estimate for 2022 is 7,754 people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco – https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population
That gives an estimate of $390,000,000/year spent on homelessness in San Francisco alone.
Mind you the official definition of “homeless” is a lot stricter than people assume. Living in a car makes you not-homeless. Here’s a good podcast episode about that: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/according-to-need-cha...
My first question whenever thinking about these numbers is: If we just give them that money, will they stay homeless? I bet many would be more than able to get their life in order, if you gave them 50k … that’s more than minimum wage for SF.
The average person who experiences homelessness stays homeless for 237 days[1]. That’s the highest estimate I could find on google. Some were as low as 90 day average.
I bet a lot of those people could fix the problem a lot faster, if you gave them minimum wage money for a year.
[1] https://embed.clearimpact.com/Measure/Embed?id=100076098
Many wallets are being filled here, and there is no oversight on where the money is going and if it's working.
ps: this post does not mean I'm on the right or that the right has all the solutions. But I do tend to think many left solutions are counter productive and I think SF is good example of unintended consequences.
But there are mountains of evidence! (In the form of an endless stream of low-quality sociology studies.)
Ok, let's get into some definitions and corrections.
SF isn't a lefty paradise. It's a liberal paradise. "Liberal" has pretty much become synonymous with "neoliberal". And by "liberal" i include the vast majority of Democrat and Republican voters (certainly as neoliberals). Liberalism is really about aesthetics and is performative, like how racism famously ended when we elected a black president or misogyny ended when we appointed a female Supreme Court justice.
The primary differentiating factor between Democrat and Republican voters are social issues but here's why it's aesthetic/performative. Democrats might tend to self-identify as being against racism but, as you see in the Bay Area, will tend to adamanatly oppose any effort to build more or cheaper housing.
The entire political spectrum in US politics still works at the behest of corporate interests, first and foremost.
My point here is that you cannot separate economic from social policy, which is why such labels as "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" are fundamentally flawed.
If SF were truly a "lefty paradise", it would attack the core issue of homelessness and poverty (and the resulting crime), which is housing. But instead, you have superficial/aesthetic policies aimed at reducing the appearance of homelessness (eg clearing out homeless encampments).
There is no meaningful "lefty" or "leftist" movement anywhere in the United States. What many people label as "lefty" or "liberal" anywhere else in the world would be labelled as "center right" politics.
The most die hard (mainstream) rightwinger in my country would be labeled a die hard socialist by more or less anyone in america.
Europeans, even right-leaning Europeans, will generally support universal access to affordable healthcare. That's just one example.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tweeted-my-cartoon-wo...
That’s just… your definitions.
> What many people label as "lefty" or "liberal" anywhere else in the world would be labelled as "center right" politics.
That sounds like a meme that only Americans believe in.
And the whole corporate conspiracy canard simply doesn't work in this city, either. All the "pro corporate" reforms from the past decade were responses to the city absolutely freaking out about companies fleeing and the city losing the billions in revenue it relies upon for its social program expenditures, which on a per capita basis might exceed even most European cities, let alone other cities in the U.S.
But you're absolutely correct that the one thing the left doesn't do is the one thing that would help the most: reduce the cost of housing development. (As opposed to what the city has done and continues to do--create tens of thousands of 100% publicly funded units for the homeless, which because even the city is obliged to follow its own anti-housing policies, results in unfathomably poor RoI for the already unfathomably huge sums of money dumped into these projects. And which because it's become a drug addict mecca, generates homeless addicts faster than it can house them. Though, to be sure, the city has been this way regarding drugs for decades. My mother does in-home care with older drug addicts in assisted living facilities, and stories about how they got sucked into the SF drug culture in the 1970s and 1980s are common. Though unlike today, Marin was also an epicenter of predatory drug culture, the human detritus--and I mean that to insult Marin, not the individuals who suffered and continued to suffer--of which typically ended up in SF.)
The majority of SF residents are renters. And a good number of homeowners would be happy to relinquish some control regarding zoning to improve the bureaucratic situation--certainly anyone who has owned property in this city for any significant length of time has come to appreciate the excessive cost in both time and money of doing anything to their properties.
But national politics has completely overshadowed local politics. Renters oppose easing development costs (even when they come with extraordinary dislocation protections, such as mandatory, multi-year rent cost reimbursements) because the national political ideology of the left has daemonized any and all development as gentrification, which is intrinsically evil. It's a sister phenomenon to anti-corporatism--corporations are intrinsically evil, and therefore anything which might benefit corporations is to be rejected. No wonder politics on the left has become performative--that's exactly what the ideology and its advocates now demand. (The same is true of drug policy--precisely nobody in SF, or perhaps most of the U.S., IMO, opposes "harm reduction" as a primary consideration and target for drug and homelessness policies. But the left has transformed "harm reduction" into a rigid set of performative policy mandates.)
> There is no meaningful "lefty" or "leftist" movement anywhere in the United States
I think Chesa Boudin would be offended.
Other states that have single-party Republican rule have just as severe governance failures and corruption.
Temperate weather and relatively little rainfall.