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
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.
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.