Enough Empty Office Space for 160k People in San Francisco
socketsite.com
socketsite.com
Man we will do anything to not use the metric system. ;)
I have come to both agree and disagree with you.
When I was a geeky kid, I would groan whenever someone used "football fields" as a form of relative measurement. All the time, on TV, I would be watching something educational and the host would describe something as being "more than 2 and a half football fields large!" It used to be really common and I just assumed that people were either dumb or way too obsessed with football.
As a fully grown adult, I actually came to respect the football-field as a legitimate unit of measurement. It's something we are all familiar and can wrap our minds around in a way that traditional units don't. Same thing goes for pints, cups, etc. For Silicon Valley types, maybe "Salesforce tower floors" can mean something. haha
Inches, however, can die in a bloody fire. The meter scale will always be more straight forward than having to think twice about which friggin' fraction of an inch is bigger or smaller than another.
1. SF fixes the crime problem so its safe to be downtown. This requires many policy changes.
2. The rents are lowered to the point where the space is all used. This will cause many buildings to go bankrupt, be bought at huge discount by new owners, then enabling the cheaper rent. Painful but necessary.
However, if 2 happens without 1, the space will remain empty.
I used to commute by bike to work in SF downtown office space every day - it was ideal. But because of 1., I no longer consider that an option, or just working down there at all.
If downtown becomes some safe green utopia, rents triple
downtown SF has a limited amount of square footage available to buy or rent. If it becomes an amazing place 1,000,000 workers will want those 160,000 spaces
Eventually the price gets low enough that people come back. Then we get mad about "gentrification" and create policies that invite crime back. Rinse and Repeat.
"White flight" was definitely about more than just crime
> Boustan, who made the Great Migration and white flight the subject of her 2016 book Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets, cautions that few whites who moved from cities to suburbs in the decades after World War II “left personal accounts, and they may not have been able to articulate exactly why they moved.” She concludes that “only a portion of white flight can be traced back to the now-classic dynamic of racial turnover.” Other motivators included a wish to reside in less densely populated communities and concerns about tax burdens and public services. Ascribing white flight solely to racism is “reductive,” says Charles Marohn, founder of the nonprofit Strong Towns. As Marohn writes, “for an individual or a family whose home is losing value, when another home on the outskirts of town—one that just happens to be newer, more spacious, and served by better schools—is gaining value, it’s very logical to make that move given the opportunity.”
TLDR;
> The contention that white racism caused white flight, which then caused disinvestment, is suspiciously tidy.
https://www.city-journal.org/truth-about-white-flight-from-c...
if and when things get better, they will pretty much go back to higher than pre pandemic overnight, with Manhattan as a very good example (also very limited square footage, every came running back, rents are completely out of control)
This is an epic crisis for the property owners of these buildings. But the big issue is that without SF being safe again, lower rents won't get people to come back - I sure won't risk my life for cheap rent downtown when its so easy to work elsewhere.
There is little correlation between carrying cost (mortgage, insurance, etc) of a building, and rent charged.
> I sure won't risk my life for cheap rent downtown
SF does not have a violent crime problem[0]. SF has a property crime problem.
0: All crime is a problem. SF's violent crime stats aren't significantly worse than the rest of the state/country.
Nothing is static. It is called gentrification. Rents have to get cheap to get some people to move back despite the crime and the government needs to get the crime problem under control. Then things slowly improve and rents slowly increase again reflecting the lower crime risk.
As someone who just got their second 50% rent increase in NYC (33% higher than pre-pandemic). When people wan't back, they wan't back, and the landlords do not hesitate
Are your rents allowed to go up that much year to year or are you moving and rents are increasing this quickly?
In Canada, renter protection laws mean rents for a tenant that stays year to year can only go up by a maximum amount set by the government, usually around inflation (though significantly less than inflation in 2022). The only way to get huge rent increases is if tenants leave the next tenant will pay whatever is agreed to with the landlord which is not capped. Many landlords try to push long term, low paying tenants out in order to turn over the unit to a new tenant at market rates, but the same renter protection laws make that challenging.
San Francisco has to build but ultimately there is just too much demand. It’ll never again be “cheap” just like Manhattan will never be cheap.
Axes are legal. The hardware store down the street at Mission sells axes.
Axes are not convenient weapons. Generally speaking, I can't think of any reason to feel unsafe simply due to the presence of an axe.
They could make that area more residential, but there isn’t a ton to do right now
The problem is with zoning, people don’t want apartment buildings made in their back yard, so zoning laws prevent much of the needed supply to resolve the problem.
I agree with point 1, policy changes need to be made big time
Sf needs to fix its transportation, high taxes and homelessness (it is not a crime to be homeless). Can’t attract workers to the city if parking costs $30 and driving over the bridges cost $7 and your public transportation is neither cheap nor reliable.
This won't work, because this is a meme. SF had an uptick in crime during the pandemic like most urban areas did, and it's slowly receding durnig the recovery as it is elsewhere. But a lot of people have decided, based largely on reporting in partisan news, that somehow this is a unique problem due to an out of control woke city government. And it's not. Here are some statistics showing the rates rise and fall:
https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...
Since you mention safety, maybe you want to look at violent crime stats only? This site of "most violent cities" looks credible, and points out correctly that SF doesn't even make the list. Oakland across the bay does, so maybe that counts.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/most-viol...
But then Oakland sits well down the list, behind such wreched hives of scum and villainy as Indianapolis, Little Rock, and the Mos Eisley of North America: St Louis, Missouri.
Just stop, basically. It's just a meme. It's false, and it's leading people to some very weird conclusions (e.g. the "many policy changes" you're demanding to fix a problem that doesn't actually exist).
The problem with just thinking this is normal, a meme, and not caused by bad policies at the city and state level, means it will just get worse, and more people will leave, and the outcome of this is not good. Better to acknowledge that policies specifically about crime and police have had devastating effects on SF and continue unabated now.
I for one would like SF to be the great place it was before these policy changes, and therefore not have to leave.
Then you'll need to find some way to quantify what it is that you're talking about, because using words like "crime", "safe", etc... don't correlate and aren't what you mean.
I'll just say it: is it homelessness? It's probably visible homelessness, right? We used to push these people out of public spaces and now we don't.
Downtown areas are screwed. There is no point living downtown if you don’t also work there. All those people who lived downtown are now gonna contribute to suburban sprawl. That of if they are junior, will just be working from their parents house.
Vast majority of them would prefer to sign a lease for 7y for a building instead of overpaying for a small space with nicer interior. The reality is that companies really want assembly lines for office workers.
Seriously, why would anybody live in a tiny downtown flat if they either work from home or have to find a half-assed “office that isn’t an office but isn’t at my cramped alartmen?
It makes no sense.. WFH requires a big house with a comfortable private office. The amount of people willing to live in a sense urban environment and somehow manage to work outside a formal office is incredibly small.
WFH is a suburban developers wet dream.
If I was permanently living here I'd opt for a simple 2k or higher like I used to have which was easily affordable as a couple on mediocre salaries and definitely affordable on a dev salary. Probably could get a nicer place than I used to have and recreate my US based setup.
My friends location has dozens of restaurants of basically every type, even more bars, multiple grocery stores, and various other services I won't need for a visit but would use in daily life like dentists and gyms.
That's also ignoring the ten minute walk to multiple train lines to the whole of Tokyo that gives me access to nearly anything you'd ever want to do in a city. A smaller space is definitely a worthwhile trade-off millions of people elected to live and work in. I'd say it's a very easy choice when the city is built around people with things to do within walking distance and good public transportation, instead of planning for cars and Lyft transportation.
Ignoring NIMBYs and allowing large amounts of housing to be built also keeps rents from becoming the silliness that they became in SF. If you go the opposite way in Tokyo and elect for a smaller place (perhaps because you work at a restaurant and don't WFH and are fine using the various amenities Tokyo offers outside your home) it's possible to live in basically the various hearts of Tokyo on a solidly middle of the road salary.
The smaller space only becomes an issue when people have kids and start a family, when some percentage moves to the suburbs. However, not everyone because rents in a bigger place are expensive, but once again not insane.
But you were complaining about WFH not being luxurious enough outside of a detached home.
American cities could reinvent themselves after the mass exodus of people leaving down town offices. I don't think most will, but it's definitely possible with the right planning
Cause I ain’t working on the kitchen table or in my kids room. I have almost three years of experience to tell you how much that doesn’t work.
Most people in the wfh demographic in SF are either DINKs or Yuppies
So you are saying I now have to pay for a mediocre co-working space out of my own pocket to be successful working in a tiny apartment downtown?
I also WFH in a fully remote company.
If it cost somewhere between a third and a fourth as much as it did when I left and that cost remained relatively static, I would’ve probably stayed, but there’s no chance that would happen in reality and so I moved.
If this were Tokyo we were speaking about rather than SF, the cost would be trivial to justify even in a remote work situation. The perks handily outweigh the downsides. I don’t mind paying but the quality of the experience needs to meet a certain bar for the price to make sense.
I suspect the deeper problem is with San Francisco and similar cities that became more of a desirable place to work than a desirable place to live. When business is good the city does well, but when the businesses leave or go under people have no other reason to stick around given all the other negatives.
To give an example, my NYC friends moved there to be in NYC and only look for jobs that let them stay in NYC. Whereas my Bay Area friends primarily moved there because that's where they got the highest offers after college, and most of them would move (or already have moved) elsewhere if a better offer comes around.
The interesting thing is how that area transformed over time. Right after 9/11, it was empty (lots of destroyed office space, barricades, etc), then the offices started to fill back up but with only 1 or 2 residential buildings, which meant very little else, especially on nights and weekends (no grocery stores, shops, etc). Over the years, as more residential space filled up, the shops and stores came, the coffee shops and restaurants extended their hours at nights and weekends, and the whole area came to life.
For why? Because they want rent money... If people WFH, the companies renting these offices will terminate leases.
Or is there some other reason that time and time again I see claims like this?
Coupled with economic activity from all the workers needing to be at a certain place for a certain time it was a dream.
Now all economic activity from this is uncontrolled. Workers spend their time and money on things they actually want instead of being forced to consume.
> And yet again, while it’s tempting to see, promote or editorialize an opportunity to convert all the vacant office space in San Francisco into housing, the conversion of existing office space to residential use still makes absolutely no economic sense for the vast majority of San Francisco buildings, due to the relative value of each use and the costs of conversion.
This is why rent doesn't always track purchase prices. People who bought a long time ago, or are picking up distressed assets have a lower capital base than those who bought recently or at peak prices. Because they have a lower capital base they only need to compete with, on a risk adjusted basis, with other recurring revenue investments (like bonds).
Now, because bond rates have sky rocketed recently, that means the value of the buildings has plummeted (remember risk adjusting).
If a building value has plummeted, and it's vacant, the owner has a good chance, potentially an incentive to just walk away from it.
I suspect that relative value may shift significantly once building owners accept that office workers _really really_ aren't coming back.
However I expect companies will try to push people to go back to the cubicle.
1/ No tolerance for drugs and crime
2/ Rehouse and rehabilitate the homeless
3/ Improve public schools
But I wonder if saying that would get me canceled in 2023. Or if not those three what are the top of mind issues for SF residents?
Not all homeless need rehabilitation, not all homeless want housing. When they do, not all trust the government enough to make their lives better through these efforts. (I say this through the experience of friends who are social workers specializing in dealing with homelessness)
If you really wanted to get rid of homelessness, you need:
1/ A massively expanded budget for running shelters, temporary and long term housing
2/ Compulsory institutionalization to get people who are addicted or mentally ill off of the wrong drugs and onto the right ones (along with the requisite therapy) as appropriate
3/ Eliminate all of the feel-good laws, policy changes and cash handouts that allow camping in public spaces which enable long-term homelessness. An actual goal of no vagrancy means pushing people into steps 1 and 2. Pitching a tent on a sidewalk or in a public park either gets you a fine or, if you can't pay, put into the system.
4/ A massive police presence in the short term to deal with the gangs and cartels - local and foreign - who have been making a killing running hard drugs into and through legal grey zones such as (though certainly not limited to) homeless encampments. Simple legalization of drugs won't be sufficient to stop this, though it may help. Unfortunately, that does also run counter to #1.
The drugs and crime thing is a done deal, at least for the next generation or two. There were too many civil rights issues that artificially suppressed crime in the United States over the past 30+ years. Just look at stop and frisk in NYC -- that isn't happening again.
Consider where we are now, all of the "bad" stuff you see in regards to crime, drug use, and homelessness has occurred during one of the longest economic expansions and lowest unemployment rates in US history. The blue collar labor market never was this tight. Maybe high unemployment and a terrible economy will reduce crime, drug use, and homelessness, but that would be a surprise to any prognosticators.
Are you suggesting that it's a shame stop and frisk was stopped? And that it was stopped for artificial reasons?
Homelessness is a problem across the country, and they'll just flock to the city once the word gets out that you're giving away housing in one of the greatest places to live in the continental US. States like FL and TX will even buy the one-way bus tickets.
1) You gonna lock up everyone who jaywalks?
2) When someone who's homeless decides that they don't want to be forced into your rehabilitation program, are you gonna throw them in prison or force them into rehab?
3) How?
But actually fixing these issues and participating in the political process is harder than talking about it on HN.
> that would get me canceled in 2023.
Is this what the snowflakes call not getting elected now?