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Comment by gibsonf1 | Hacker News Reader

A potential solution:

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.

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I don’t agree with rent control.

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

The two are necessary but not sufficient. SF is plagued with problems which shouldn’t exist in a city this size with the revenue it has generated over the last two decades.

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.

> 1. SF fixes the crime problem so its safe to be downtown. This requires many policy changes.

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).

I live here and observe, it's reality, and its true other cities share this reality, and other's don't. Those that do share this problem have very different policies than cities that don't.

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.

> I for one would like SF to be the great place it was before these policy changes

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.

Besides the policy, the easy climate to be homeless definitely causes this problem to accumulate in SF moreso than say, Duluth. In Austin there is ample money to deal with homelessness but little action. Politicians tend to avoid thorny problems. Unfortunately this is a problem of survivorship. If the homeless were out of sight, no one would ever complain about them.

I think a lot of HNers are a bit too soft to live in cities to begin with. Apparently seeing needles on the ground or - gasp - drug use across the street triggers their fight-or-flight response.

1 and 2 can't work together unless the private market is somehow cancelled and the government retains ownership of the buildings

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

Not sure I understand your point. 2 will happen because of the market anyway. My point is mainly that without 1, people won't return, so then both the current owners and new owners of the buildings will go bankrupt and SF will become another Detroit.

America has experienced flight to the suburbs and urban price crashes in the past (iirc previously due to crime too) .

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.

> iirc previously due to crime too

"White flight" was definitely about more than just crime

IDK, I googled about it and found this. Sounds to me far too reductionistic given "white flight" coincides with rising crime. And the opposite ("gentrification") coincides with lowering 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...

rents never get lower when things get better. rents get lower when things get bad. thats my point

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)

When you have to pay a mortgage on a very expensive building every month, and its empty, that's a very BAD thing. To avoid bankruptcy, the only option is to lower rent to get any kind of income. If even then the income isn't enough, bankruptcy. New owner buys for much less, then rents out the space at lower rates, etc.

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.

> New owner buys for much less, then rents out the space at lower rates, etc

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.

> If downtown becomes some safe green utopia, rents triple

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.

>Slowly increase

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

That’s a fair point.

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.

Not always true, afaik in Ontario, if the building was built after 2018 none of that "maximum rent increase" stuff applies. Landlords can raise the rent to whatever they want.

A lot of cities have some rent control like this covering older buildings in the us but its shockingly politically unpalatable. People think it is better for others to be gouged on housing I guess.

now you can have a whole office just to park bikes in

Wow. Do you imply SF should embrace crime because that's the only way to keep things affordable?

It does seem like making the city undesirable for the wealthy would be only way to get prices to drop (stopped being affordable a while ago)

Who are the wealthy in this case? Because if they are wealthy they probably just Uber from their gated/secure location to wherever they are going and avoid the problem if it gets bad enough walking on the streets.

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.

Maybe I was too naive to know. But the one time I was in SFO last year I was walking back and forth to the pier to the financial district. I didn’t feel unsafe at all.

It’s hit or miss block by block, but if you do it daily you’re going to feel unsafe at some point. I remember walking past someone sharpening their axe on the corner of 4th and King (Caltrain) at 9am during peak commute.

Dudes just got an axe to grind. It would be another thing if they threatened you with it.

> sharpening their axe

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.

You’re not naive. Most of the office space (fidi and the eastern areas of soma) are completely fine. Pretty much the same as any city. Things only get worse when you go south and west. The offices are empty because of remote work, not crime/homelessness.

They could make that area more residential, but there isn’t a ton to do right now

What if they just gave the empty offices to the homeless people. All Problems Solved.

Are you using crime as a euphemism for homelessness?

Are you disputing the existence of widespread crimes in SF?

You can say any city has widespread crime. There will be crime happening throughout the city on some level.

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