The San Francisco Rent Explosion
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
"The population is also growing. From 2000 to 2010, 28,500 new San Franciscans arrived in the city. From 2010 to 2012, the city welcomed another 20,600 inhabitants in just three years."
Oh, is that all? I live in Austin, TX, the #1 destination in the U.S. for people aged 25-34. [1] You got 28,500 people in 10 years? We get that many new people every year. In fact, perhaps even as often as every 6 months; 158 people move to Austin every day by another estimate. [2]
You have to increase the supply of rental and housing units in order to accommodate population growth. Austin is struggling with it, too, but condos are springing up downtown.
San Francisco has no choice; Austin is barely managing to handle the growth, and we're a growth-happy boom town teeming with young folks. (Yes, it's pretty awesome to run a startup here too--I'm having a blast!) You must build more housing. If you are an SF resident, vote people in who will support new housing. Vote out the politicians who curb growth with ridiculous laws. Otherwise, all the cool people will end up in Austin (and other cities that can better manage the growth. ;)
[1]: http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/for-people-on-the-m... [2]: http://www.realtyaustin.com/blog/how-to-keep-up-with-158-peo...
Austin: 272 sq mi, growing SF: 46.87 sq mi, fixed on 3 sides by water and a 4th by other metropolises
Not saying that SF's development managers don't need to rethink their restrictive development policies, but comparing any city that doesn't have fixed boundaries to SF is pretty apples and oranges.
But as noted in comments below, I would never -- not ever -- consider living in a state run by people like Rick Perry.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/rick-perry-2014-reelec...
When should we expect you? Just kidding, you'll be out of the country shortly because he'll be President </sarcasm>
I'm not bothered by a governor with an accent, as long as he keeps the books balanced, the crime down, and the red tape light.
BTW, which are are you referring to when you mention budget deficits and crime?
Personally I support increased density and housing in SF, but it's an uphill battle with the other residents who want to fight the "Manhattanization" of SF.
I hate to say it, but maybe we should just leave SF to be sort of a "jewel." Let the tech companies and employees who can afford to live there remain.
Then, why not pick a place like Oakland or Alameda or perhaps somewhere more south of San Francisco, and build the mega dense business center of our dreams?
Maybe it makes more sense to recognize that SF is beautiful, rare, and limited in space, and leave it be. After all, it's basically the size of some "elite" neighborhoods in other big cities. Do the poor have a right to be accommodated in SF? There is a ton of space around it that can be developed more affordably and let's not forget about the rest of the country.
No, I don't live in SF. I just don't see why it should be turned into a New York clone.
I've lived in New York for 7 years and I'll be leaving (at least for a while) soon and there is exactly one major negative of New York: the cost of real estate.
Of course, there are cultural problems-- douchebags, shitty cutthroat people, unimaginative technology scene-- but all of that garbage flows directly from the extreme cost of living.
Given that San Francisco has now been fully infected by the one major negative of Manhattan, and is already experiencing the attendant cultural complications, it really has nothing to lose by fully Manhattanizing.
the author has said that there's a far more modest development plan somewhat mirroring his proposal: http://www.grandboulevard.net
Which really is the jewel in the bay area. SHhhh....
Put this floating place just off shore and let singles and couples rent the places.
Bike --> Bart --> Cal-Train --> Bike (and reverse, $20 total)
This is one thing that interestingly has been both ignored and solved by tech companies. FB, Goog, Gene - they all have very effective troop transport. But by-in-large, silicon valley has done nothing to provide a solution to the problems with transportation and data access.
(WRT data access: DSL wasn't available in the heart of SV for several years after it was widely avaialble. Cellular coverage from AT&T has had the SAME EXACT dead spots on 280 and 101 corridors for TEN FREAKING YEARS! -- No widely available wifi, data coverage on CalTrain and Bart is horrendous!)
Although, in a way, the Bay Area is already Shanghaied without a solid method of medium distance transportation.
Manhattan is a different world of density. The daytime population (which is what you think of when you think Manhattan-like density) is over 3 million people in 22 square miles. Midtown Manhattan is probably at 200k+ people per square mile in the day time.
My neighborhood in Chicago was ~50k per square mile, and it could seem pretty empty on the weekend (skyscrapers aside). If San Francisco were developed to that density uniformly, it could fit 2m+ people.
Of course any such reform is a long shot. It's hard to change the character of a city. The best hope for San Francisco is for the tech industry to find it worth staying in the city despite the costs (like finance has done with New York). Otherwise, you might just see a lot of that growth shift to friendlier places like Seattle.
Austin is a great town, but you can't just sit there and say "Hey SF, why can't you be more like Austin?"
Except surfing. No one ever talks about surfing in the Austin area.
(Hill Country Barbecue in Menlo Park is pretty solid, wouldn't be laughed out of Austin.)
Houston gets flak for its miles of suburbs, but if you want to live in a nice wooded neighborhood right in the middle there are a number to choose from: Bellaire, West University Place, Memorial, Hunter's Creek Village, and of course River Oaks.
Just be prepared to shell out 3-4x as much as you'd need to out in a suburb. Make that 4-10x for River Oaks. Suburbia exists in places like Houston for two reasons: (1) there's space for it; (2) the vast majority of people don't believe in paying upwards of a million dollars (or more) for a house even if they can afford it. They'd prefer to commute than blow that kind of money just to not commute.
The interesting problem that places like San Francisco and NYC face is that there simply aren't cheap suburbs. You've got a lot of people making a whole heck of a lot of money, but they have to be geographically located right in that particular place to continue making that money. There are so many of them that the prices skyrocket even outside the city proper. In the end, almost ironically, that money ends up losing a lot of its value because through competition with one another they all end up pushing housing prices to their limits.
As another user posted, the density of SF is much greater, and it isn't getting any bigger.
Funny, downtown Austin hasn't gotten any more affordable with all that fabulous building...
I guess we should further experiment in 78704. If we bulldoze it, it will be cheaper.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face...
"San Francisco—one of the most expensive cities in the United States—added just 418 new housing units in 2011, the fewest since 1993. What’s more, 149 existing units were removed, leading to a nearly nonexistent increase in housing supply."
There is clearly something massively dysfunctional in San Francisco. High prices should create the incentive for drastically increased supply. San Francisco should look like Toronto does, with dozens of high rises under construction trying to cash in on the high rents. See: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blogs-and-comment/what-toron....
superficial explanation for the outrageously high housing
prices in the Bay Area is that that there’s not much
developable land, especially on the peninsula between San
Francisco and San Jose. In fact, the major reason is
the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”)
Not surprisingly, the existing people with 3 or more story houses have seen their property values shoot up since those large houses can no longer be built there.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/print-edition/2013/0...
> There is clearly something massively dysfunctional in San Francisco. High prices should create the incentive for drastically increased supply.
They have and do.
Meanwhile in New York, you pay a broker $10,000 for the privilege of paying $2500 a month to sublet a room a family of cockroaches only uses at night.
The first, as others have pointed out, is NIMBYism. SF has the most stringent zoning laws I've ever seen. Furthermore, lots of the deep-pocketed residents and real estate developers have been successful in fighting off verticalization.
The second major factor is instability. SF is famously overdue for "The Big One" and is known to be seismically unstable. But what a lot of people don't realize is precisely why it's so unstable: because a large portion of it was basically built on wet sand and landfill. If you look at topographic or seismic maps of SF, you'll see that much (most?) is built on areas of liquefaction. It can be unsafe to build highrises on shaky ground.
The first problem can be solved, albeit not easily. The second problem is a time bomb waiting to go off. Perhaps in our lifetimes, or perhaps in the next generation's.
Most people that visit think it's 'cold', they're expecting the hot weather of SoCal
Personally I like seasons, but there is a huge contingent of people for whom some form of California weather is their idea of perfection whether that be LA, San Jose, or San Francisco.
The city is ugly as hell. The food here costs a fortune. The bars are full of pretentious douches.
The real problem is European density needs European public services. San Francisco is enormously less livable than London, unfortunately...
"demanding they make it just like the overbuilt sprawl
that they came from."
There are entire parts of SoMa that have a parking lot or a 1-2 story auto body shop when a 6-8 floor apartment building could easily occupy that space.
The other problem cities have with new buildings is all the complexities that now exist with mixed use commercial/residential buildings. Back in the day, having a ground floor of stores and apartments above was rarely a problem, but the rise of HOAs/ROAs and the equivalent COA for commercial tenants, buildings often end up in litigation because most developments won't even begin until a certain amount of the commercial occupancy has been sold. This leads to a distorted balance between the COAs and the ROA/HOA that is established later after distorted agreements between the two have been put in place. This imbalance then puts buildings under litigation, hurting real estate values.
This canard keeps getting repeated on HackerNews.
It's not 2011 anymore, when housing construction was at its lowest because of the overhang due to the massive real estate bubble.
It's 2013 and a construction boom is under way that is so large that in the next 2 years more housing will be built than in the past 15 years combined.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/print-edition/2013/0...
That said, it's great news that so many rental units will be made available in the next few years.
How many units were built in 2006, 2007, and 2008?
figure 3 on page 11 illustrates the point I was making:
http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/files/publications_reports/20...
Look at the price of housing from 2007 to 2011, and if you understand the role of price in marketplaces, you'll understand why construction was so low.
Considering those rent prices (location location location!), if you don't have a good-paying job you're not going to stay there long. No unemployment entitlement is going to cover three years of renting a one-bedroom apartment renting at twice the mortgage on a four-bedroom one-acre-lot house conveniently outside Atlanta. Of course the unemployment rate plummeted: surely sky-high rent drove out anyone not able to keep or get a high-salary job.
Author focuses on availability of new units, and marvels at the low vacancy rate, without addressing the turnover of old units. It's a limited supply of high-desirability housing; either pay a high price or get out, there's a line of people waiting for openings and willing to pay premium prices to get in. Of course unemployment is low and prices high there.
First off, rent control doesn't apply to apartment building built after 1979, so, as noted below, its less relevant - especially with the new construction in SOMA.
Second, the anecdotal stories about landlords holding units off the market is just that - anecdotal stories. The owners of those buildings are Prop. 13'ed with a 30yr old assessment and are doing just fine. Opening a new unit means they can collect more rent at todays market rates. Its a silly story promoted by landlords that would like to make more money during the booms. Of course, its also those very rent control laws that protect landlords during the busts (2002, 2009, etc).
Sorry to say this, but rent will come down when companies in SF start running out of their free, investor money and have to turn a profit or sell themselves. More people will lose their jobs, won't be able to afford living in the city proper and people will move away. Thats the way it has been here for at least the last 20 years and probably longer.
By the way, also anecdotally since I can't find the reference, rents in the area have decreased by 5% on YoY basis.
Plus, as someone who bicycles most places, I am happy that I'm capable of biking all the way up without stopping, but it gets sooooo old and contrary to what you may think, it never gets any easier. There is nothing worse than going to the gym, getting in a good workout and then having to deal with that bullshit hill just to get to your bed.
Edit: "More than 4,220 units of housing began construction in San Francisco in 2012 — following a year in which just 269 net units were added." -- http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/san-francis...
[1] http://qz.com/94939/san-francisco-not-silicon-valley-is-the-...
I started company with my own savings. In SF it would not last 2 months, here I have 1+year runway.
"Austin ranks as the No. 1 place to launch your business, according to a new ranking by GoodApril, a San Francisco-based tax-planning startup. The ranking compares the seven hottest startup scenes in the U.S. across measures that matter most to new entrepreneurs: median tech-employee earnings, maximum personal income tax, property tax, the cost of housing and the cost of office space. Perhaps surprisingly, San Francisco, the longtime Silicon Valley startup mecca, ranks as the worst place to launch, due to high costs and taxes."
It is instructive to understand the difference, i.e. why entrepreneurs start businesses that thrive and succeed in San Francisco when the pundit's supposed "climate for business" is better in other places.
Low-value-add businesses are affected strongly by those factors. If value add is high, those factors matter much less.
I know many smart people in SF and LA, who created great open-source projects as a hobby. After a few years this project matures, and it would be great time to turn hobby into business. But they have to keep working for large company, to support family.
Some stuff (such as DBs) is just bellow VCs radar. I guess it is good for me. My startup is all about collecting abandoned ideas and adding nice wrapping.
What I think keeps it going is the fact that a lot of rich people live there now and are willing to invest in companies. That investment allows the company to pay its bills while it is building its product. However even with investment, the money still goes quicker than if you were somewhere else. In essence, it looks like an angel investment bubble to me. The question is, will the bubble burst and when?
What SF offers you is a combination of money, risk-taking, technical expertise, legal expertise, openness to new ideas, and experience taking ideas and turning them mass-market. Bay Area startups are built to scale, and scale fast. A lot of the interesting fundamental research happens elsewhere, but when it comes to taking a basically good idea and convincing millions of people to adopt it, there's nothing quite like the infrastructure in Silicon Valley.
I think the primary issue is constrained supply. As klochner said, barely any new housing is added and SF has a fixed land mass. But this problem is made much much worse by rent control.
If you have an apartment in SF with Rent Control and prices are rising, you don't move. This means fewer apartments are on the market, which further increases the price, leading to a price inflation cycle.
Of course, ironically now that I live in the city I would never want rent control taken away. Pretty much everyone else I've talked to, even those who agree with my assessment on its negative aspects, also find it very convenient once it's in their favor. So it's removal will likely never pass in a public vote situation.
Rent control is becoming increasingly irrelevant as anything constructed after 1978 is exempt, which is most of SOMA.
I keep hearing about how insane SFO is, but can't help but think that Cambridge is experiencing a similar 'explosion' in it's own right.
I've gathered that the exit's out west are accelerating the price increases, but with the abundance of schools here as well as the interest in establishing a presence in 'tech square', rent has skyrocketed and I don't really see it slowing down.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why doesn't the acceleration in Cambridge get such attention?
While it's nice to live right where things are happening, you could easily get a place out in Davis Sq or Porter Sq and take the T in, or in Somerville or Union Sq and have a 10 minute bike ride.
From what I gather, as a fellow Cambridge resident, the problem in the Bay Area is that areas with Somerville-level rent result in an HOUR+ commute, rather than a 10-minute commute.
There's a lot that's great about the bay area, but I think we certainly have the upper hand here when it comes to [reasonably priced] city live-ability and transportation.
The only issue? Amarillo is pretty far away from the other larger cities. In the plains, we talk of distances between cities based on the number of hours it would take to drive that distance. Six to Dallas/Fort Worth, six to Denver, four to Oklahoma City, ten to Houston. Combined with the lower population, not much of an urban culture makes it out here. I don't mind, though, and because of the low cost of living and the Internet bringing the world to me, the low cost of living makes up for it. I'm not working with a startup nor on any products of my own at the moment, but should I start, I don't think I'd relocate unless a very compelling offer came my way.
We talk about miles because otherwise, we'd have to say,"I live seven minutes from downtown SF between 10pm and 7am, an hour and a half between 7am and 10am, twenty minutes between 10am and noon, an hour between noon and 2pm, forty minutes between 2pm and 4pm, an hour between 4pm and 7pm, and half an hour between 7pm and 10pm."
EDIT: Though, the point I wanted to make was that it was an abstraction over the longer distances between the cities. To rephrase my examples, it's 360mi to Dallas, 430mi to Denver, 260mi to OKC, and 600mi to Houston. (Now that I'm looking up distances, I can add 500mi and 7.5 hours to Austin in that list - that length isn't in my cache, so to speak.)
Chicago and Portland would both be not much more.
All of these are relatively large cities (~1.5M+ in the metro area) with a lot of cultural institutions, and many have pretty decent economies (especially considering that high housing costs aren't driving away lower-income folks, artificially raising the average). Minneapolis, for example, has a median income for a family of very nearly $60k, versus $42k in Amarillo.
There's a large middle ground in this country between small, remote Texas cities, and hugely expensive coastal megalopolises.
Disclaimer. Just moved to Oakland. Loving the lower cost of living and proximity to my old haunts in SF.
Best move I've ever made. Surrounded by beautiful country, better weather and a very friendly, hip community with great restaurants, bars and the like.
It may not be for the 20 year olds, but when you're ready or can work a couple days from home, there are definitely affordable alternatives other than SF and the Valley. My previous rent check now covers a house mortgage, yard, insurance and taxes. Plenty of places in northern or western Marin that are the same. It's more affordable than you think.
Almost more importantly, my neighbors and friends out here aren't all in startups. There's some actual diversity to the residents, being a mix of farmers, blue collar workers and desk job commuters.
* More high-rises means that SF loses it's charm
* The technorati are cash rich so they'll keep on coming anyway
* Soaring rents are forcing out those who make SF the desirable, culturally rich place that it is
* Eventually this corrects itself and Oakland becomes the desirable, culturally rich place (already happening)
* Rinse and repeat
If by culturally rich you mean burner babies, human freak shows, and unemployed artists who've depleted their trust-fund, then yes.
- People who lost their houses recently have trouble qualifying for a mortgage and must rent instead.
- Investors (Wall Street and otherwise) are buying up houses to rent because it's hard to get a good return on your money in other ways.
- There still exists some amount of "shadow inventory" that banks are keeping off of the market, either on purpose or because foreclosing on a house has become more expensive and time consuming.
Source: http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com/real-estate/articles/renta...
Imagine a real estate market with only 100 1BR apartments to rent. If 85 are occupied, 15 available, and 5 people are trying to rent those 15, the price of rent should remain about the same as 10 will remain vacant.
However, if 40 people are trying to rent those 15, the price of the 15 will be bid up due to a limit in supply. Then the remaining 25 people will continue to bid up rents for any new vacancies. A scenarios like this can cause rents to skyrocket, especially if supply remains nearly constant.
SF is really going to need to figure out its artificial supply scarcity problems soon.
Mountain View rents for a 1BR are running around $1700/month in a not-so-great neighborhood, or about $2k/month if you're close to the Googleplex or downtown (except for a few smaller family-owned apartments...owner-rented places tend to have smaller rent increases than manager-rented places, since usually a family just wants to find a good tenant and have them stick around rather than take the risk of getting a bad tenant).
2. Since building codes and zoning laws are often manipulated to adjust supply, there is predictably a lag between need and updated codes. We are in the middle of a housing creation wave. There is currently a large volume of to-be-constructed units that have been approved by the planning commission and will be entering the market in the next year [1].
3. One of the most overlooked sources of demand pressure is the recent and rapid rise of west coast properties as good investment vehicle for Asian investors [2].
4. Re: rent control - it is intentional that the community believes it is more valuable to keep rental housing stock fluid and accessible, at the expense of investment appreciation. Or, at least the community used to believe - given the changing demographics of San Francisco, I would expect these rules to change in the next decade or two. A reasonable comp is changes in how rental stock and rent control is treated in Berkeley over the past two decades.
[1] http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=1691 [2] http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22313326/bay-area-rea...
I've been able to watch some dramatic housing supply buildouts in a few areas, and my observation has been that the owners almost always price new housing somewhat above market rates for existing housing -- after all, it's new, and it's often marketed as luxury housing (plus the building costs were in $LAST_YEAR dollars and are mostly unamortized rather than in $DECADES_PAST dollars and mostly amortized).
I'd think this might be more true for land-constrained places like San Francisco, where the only way to increase supply is up, so it's more capital intensive and only makes financial sense at a certain price.
There's a few places I've observed a decrease in price, but it hasn't been because of supply increase. It's places like Detroit where demand drops, usually because the economic activity of the region stagnates or collapses, thought it's sometimes because of health/property hazards instead.
If I'm right, building more might stabilize prices in SF, but they're not going down, short of the current tech boom there turning out to be an unsustainable bubble. Or maybe a major natural disaster.
Usually what happens is that a large increase in supply doesn't immediately push prices down, but results in a large overhang of vacant housing stock. The developer eats the cost on that for a while, but then the next recession hits, people lose their jobs, banks foreclose on the properties, and that starts the tumble in prices. That's how it worked in 2009 - rents dropped significantly in the Bay Area as employment numbers tumbled and people moved in with roommates. It does depend on their being a recession before demand catches up with supply...if there isn't, prices just don't increase as fast in the meantime.
See how that works?
California’s budget woes combined with poor economic results have long made it a poster child for poor fiscal management. The state’s credit rating has been downgraded to an A- by S&P, the lowest rating for any U.S. state, and its budget and pension shortfalls are infamous. How long has it been since CA had any GOP hegemony again? I'm no Republican, but shifting the blame won't work in a fact-rich environment.
Average # of Days Above 90 degrees: 111
Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
It's still hot, but not the hellish kind of heat you'd expect from the numbers, because the humidity is lower.
The average house price is currently $213,600 [1]. It's considerably cheaper if you're willing to live in Pfluegerville or Round Rock and commute. Houses out East (where I live) are still fairly cheap and have a reasonable commute to downtown. People seem to miss that commuting East-West generally hits less traffic in Austin than commuting North-South…
If you have to live downtown or in one of the hot neighborhoods, you're obviously going to pay more for the privilege. If you're willing to be a little further out or live in a less desirable neighborhood, the housing prices in Austin are still pretty reasonable.
[1]: http://www.zillow.com/local-info/TX-Austin-home-value/r_1022...
Police coverage in these areas is strictly just who is on duty for those neighborhoods; you are not going to find lots of families of police living in these pricey neighborhoods, so the demand from residents to hire a lot more beat officers for the higher densities (and the increasing crime that the influx of population is bringing) will be pretty intense in the near future. Fire departments have not been really upgraded to suitably manage high-rise fires. Austin did significantly improve its central area sewage "backbone" capacity with a massive upgrade to a very large downtown pipe, but no new treatment plants are coming online soon. New fresh water plants and sources are especially scarce looking out over the 20-30 year time horizon.
All of this is to say if you think the about-2.75% property tax (and no Proposition 13) at these kinds of prices gives you sticker shock even after accounting for no state income tax, be sure to plan for even more property taxes in the 20-30 year time horizon. There is plenty of infrastructure spending to come that was deferred and will be demanded by residents in the higher-density future. You do not have to report your sales/purchase price in Texas (but naturally you still report sales price to the IRS), so property tax assessment and challenge becomes a blood sport here for some people; as property prices for SFRs start commonly hitting $1M+ in a few years, expect that to intensify. A lot of the NIMBY'ism pointed out in this thread that afflicts SF is even stronger in these Austin neighborhoods, who have very active neighborhood associations regularly lobbying city council members. In short, there are a lot of very good reasons Austin residential real estate in the central neighborhoods will explode in prices in the current boom.
If you are childless and in a $90K and up bracket, and especially if you are a professional couple with each earning that, then these numbers can possibly be finessed in your personal finance (if you ignore saving for various goals). It's a very comfortable lifestyle, but kind of "fake it 'til you make it"; it gets pretty challenging with children in the picture.
But, we decided against it. There was no compelling reason to move to Austin. For us, it was only worth uprooting our lives, if we are moving to areas such as SF/Bay Area.
But at least in NYC developers are constantly adding bucketloads of rental inventory, especially in Brooklyn and Queens. The restrictive development policies of not just San Francisco but other Bay Area municipalities sounds like a disturbing crisis is on the horizon. Pretty glad I'm not planing on moving back there anytime soon...
I used to have an apartment a few blocks away, but my roommate moved out and the rent went up. From a month before my move-out to a week after, I scoured through craigslist trying to find an acceptable home at a reasonable price. But now, having lived in my office for 3 weeks, I have lost all will to look.
Perhaps I don't get paid enough as a developer in SOMA. I'm certainly not making six figures.
Business Times:
Nearly 8,000 new apartments, mostly in mid-rise and high-rise buildings,
will come on line between now and 2015 — 3,498 in 2015 alone. It’s more
new rental housing than was built in the last 15 years combined, according
to real estate research firm Polaris Pacific.
Largely in response to the city's growing technology sector, 22,000 residential
units are in various stages of approval and construction. … Since 2008, only
about 1,710 units were built each year, compared with an average of 2,220 each
year between 2004 and 2008, according to the department.
Looking at the planning department data [1], there are currently 28,010 housing units approved and 3,930 under construction. The total pipeline is 43,580 units. For the previous reports they provide, we've got:
* Q1, 2007: 9,305 filed, 4,736 approved, 4,978 under construction, 30,002 total
* Q3, 2007: 10,708 filed, 5,005 approved, 6,134 under construction, 31,761 total
* Q4, 2007: 20,890 filed, 4,570 approved, 6,790 under construction, 40,370 total
* Q1, 2008: 34,510 filed, 4,560 approved, 7,520 under construction, 53,980 total
* Q2, 2008: 32,370 filed, 4,780 approved, 7,480 under construction, 51,470 total
* Q2, 2009: 34,570 filed, 6,200 approved, 6,510 under construction, 54,610 total
* Q4, 2009: 30,370 filed, 8,220 approved, 1,320 under construction, 46,600 total
* Q2, 2010: 30,780 filed, 5,870 approved, 1,480 under construction, 43,780 total
* Q3, 2010: 20,710 filed, 16,690 approved, 1,180 under construction, 44,100 total
* Q1, 2011: 15,610 filed, 22,590 approved, 1,730 under construction, 45,820 total
* Q2, 2011: 7,620 filed, 29,760 approved, 1,820 under construction, 45,760 total
* Q3, 2011: 7,620 filed, 30,280 approved, 1,990 under construction, 46,620 total
* Q1, 2012: 6,180 filed, 27,670 approved, 3,990 under construction, 42,520 total
* Q2, 2012: 6,940 filed, 28,060 approved, 4,220 under construction, 43,280 total
Does anybody else have any data?
[0] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/print-edition/2013/0...
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-apartment-construc...
Net gain or loss of units:
* 2000: 1,797
* 2001: 1,779
* 2002: 2,408
* 2003: 2,496
* 2004: 1,487
* 2005: 1,855
* 2006: 1,914
* 2007: 2,567
* 2008: 3,263
* 2009: 3,454
* 2010: 1,230
* 2011: 269
I seem to recall an article about at least one owner who was tired of bad tenants. He had mentioned that he wasn't the only one and that there were many who just weren't leasing out otherwise empty space.
In my experience, if you grabbed ten tech people at random, you'd find at most one person who could tell you anything at all about neighborhoods outside of the Mission and SOMA. The Googlebus picks people up from their home in those neighborhoods in the morning, and drops them off again at night. There is nothing else.
Honestly, the inner/outer richmond has better restaurants than SoMa.
[1] Not just distance. Thanks to the lack of freeways/BART, travel times to downtown are on par with being as south as Millbrae.
(Apologies for even more off-topic, but xkcd #386.)
Paying the high rents isn't that bad. It sucks to have to have sell off your prime saving years to landlords, but the high tech wages and career benefits of spending one's 20s in high-prestige companies almost sorta quasi-compensate for that.
The problem is that it's culturally devastating when rent gets that high. When rent prices go up, losing a job is a financial catastrophe (as opposed to an annoying inconvenience) and employers know they can get away with more bullshit. Adventurism goes away and you get an almost creepy deference to authority in the workplace that's unbecoming of high-talent people. That's a big part of why the New York startup scene is, while well-funded, so unimaginative and mediocre.
If Silicon Valley wants to be relevant in 25 years, it will drop some Nordic Indignation on the NIMBY assholes. New York has tons of other stuff and will be fine (as a city, if not necessarily a tech scene) when what is now called "the Series A crunch" is fully fledged and recognized as what it it is-- a post-bubble correction, the start of a bust-- but the Valley will die if it doesn't reverse course. (By the way, one might think that prices would come down and reverse the problem; that doesn't happen. Real estate prices are so sticky against downward movement that, by the time they start to seriously drop, it's too late.)