Hacker News Reader

Comment by gibsonf1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com