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Leviathan Song posted:This is also very city dependent. Seattle and Philadelphia, for example, both have very narrow block layouts so almost none of those thick rectangle buildings get built. Washington DC on the other end of the spectrum has a lot of mega buildings that I don't know how you would convert. One of the prime examples there was Philadelphia and I've definitely seen others that have been converted or converted to mixed use. From what I’ve been reading most places tax commercial and residential very differently, and that’s before you get into the value of assorted business taxes and the knock on economic activity- eg commuters from the burbs buying lunch in the city. Tldr seems to be that it’s going to be painful for a lot of city finances.
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Jun 12, 2023 19:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:From what I’ve been reading most places tax commercial and residential very differently, and that’s before you get into the value of assorted business taxes and the knock on economic activity- eg commuters from the burbs buying lunch in the city. Sure but if no one is occupying these places, the tax/commuter income isn't coming in anyway. But the problem with switching over is no one is going to kick out paying tenants to convert to residential, so your conditionals are: 1. No tenants 2. Cost effective to convert 3. In an area of residential demand 4. In an area where proper zoning can be done (related to 2, I guess) The overlap there is generally small, so conversion may not be super common. What you may see more likely is new buildings or renovations may lean more toward residential if the market future for CRE looks soft.
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Jun 12, 2023 20:36
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Another one Edit: for context, this is the "big famous mall in the core of downtown, at the junction of the financial district and tourist district", not a suburban mall on the edge of the city https://web.archive.org/web/20230612210650/https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/westfield-giving-san-francisco-mall-18148102.php quote:
Hadlock fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Jun 13, 2023 |
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Jun 12, 2023 23:51
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SF is really the perfect storm. All the tech workers were raptured out of downtown during COVID and all the issues from failing to address the crime and quality of life issues have made it increasingly unwelcoming for everyone else.
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Jun 13, 2023 06:53
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https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/13/cpi-inflation-report-may-2023-.htmlquote:
 GlobalMegaCorp posted:SF is really the perfect storm. All the tech workers were raptured out of downtown during COVID and all the issues from failing to address the crime and quality of life issues have made it increasingly unwelcoming for everyone else. Lack of tech dollars will also make addressing QoL issues exponentially more challenging Hadlock fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Jun 13, 2023 |
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Jun 13, 2023 20:47
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GlobalMegaCorp posted:SF is really the perfect storm. All the tech workers were raptured out of downtown during COVID and all the issues from failing to address the crime and quality of life issues have made it increasingly unwelcoming for everyone else. SF’s crime has more or less come out as overinflated as the rest of the hyped up crime wave. The cost is about it.
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Jun 13, 2023 21:40
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SF has extremely visible poverty problems, but those get translated to "crime" and "quality of life" by the media
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Jun 13, 2023 22:25
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like how do you resolve poverty? oh, that's hard, you have to do a lot of stuff, complicated how do you resolve crime? more cops obviously, get tough, crack down and how do you fix quality of life? make the homeless go away, probably one neat trick
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Jun 13, 2023 22:27
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pmchem posted:what i've read about the debt ceiling deal so far indicates a very minimal departure from actual planned spending and revenue collection by biden/dems. some culture war fodder in there affecting very small dollar amounts but... basically no nominal discretionary budget cuts, minimal actual cuts to future IRS spending, entitlements/defense continue their upward path, etc. it seems like something dems would've agreed to even without all the drama, since FY22 discretionary spending as % of GDP is far above pre-pandemic levels. makes me wonder if the GOP is gonna take another swing at spending when appropriations bills come around. bolded part above, oh man loving called it via boomberg https://archive.ph/JcNUl "Faced with a rebellion on his right flank, McCarthy agreed this week to push through the House spending cuts $120 billion deeper than caps set barely two weeks ago. " "House Appropriations Chairwoman Kay Granger on Monday defended McCarthy’s agreement with conservatives, saying the debt deal set “a ceiling, not a floor” for spending. McCarthy told reporters he always planned to pass spending bills below the caps in the debt deal."
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Jun 13, 2023 23:48
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Leperflesh posted:SF has extremely visible poverty problems, but those get translated to "crime" and "quality of life" by the media yeah well put
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Jun 14, 2023 00:10
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That was fast https://archive.is/2023.06.14-023942/https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-supes-cut-red-tape-fill-downtown-s-empty-18150947.php quote:San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved legislation Tuesday that relaxes zoning restrictions and simplifies the process and requirements for converting existing commercial buildings. Some stuff about adjusting how buildings on union square can be used as well but not super relevant
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Jun 14, 2023 03:52
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GlobalMegaCorp posted:SF is really the perfect storm. All the tech workers were raptured out of downtown during COVID and all the issues from failing to address the crime and quality of life issues have made it increasingly unwelcoming for everyone else. Additionally the combination of SF building barely any new housing plus the enormous influx of tech workers making absolutely absurd multi-six figure salaries spiked rents and real estate prices so high that that the regular sort of low and middle income workers that would keep a city going were chased out long ago. Now it's a mostly empty play set for the super rich.
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Jun 14, 2023 03:53
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SF can fix both their economy and poverty problems by just going to their zoning bylaws and ripping them up and letting people build gently caress tons of new apartments but they won't.
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Jun 14, 2023 03:55
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Yeah but property values
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Jun 14, 2023 04:00
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Femtosecond posted:SF can fix both their economy and poverty problems by just going to their zoning bylaws and ripping them up and letting people build gently caress tons of new apartments but they won't. i hope they build this high rise across form the zoo that was proposed a few months ago 
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Jun 14, 2023 04:01
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drk posted:i hope they build this high rise across form the zoo that was proposed a few months ago Being able to see zoo animals from your apartment balcony sounds like an amazing selling point.
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Jun 14, 2023 04:02
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lmao yea. That sort of thing should be allowed over that entire visible area of that photo.
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Jun 14, 2023 04:03
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San Francisco is probably the only major city like this where ocean front (not just ocean front, but ocean front with a really good beach) isn't zoned for wall to wall condo skyscrapers Pretty recently they closed off part of the great highway and turned it into a beachfront pedestrian walkway
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Jun 14, 2023 04:09
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You can build like that in Manhattan cause the ground is solid bedrock. In San Francisco everything's been pulverized by earthquakes and skyscrapers don't work so well.
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Jun 14, 2023 04:12
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They build 10+ story towers (so ok maybe not as tall as that SF conceptual tower...) in Richmond, BC and the entire thing is a sandbar in the Fraser river. The way they do it is that they compact the soil like crazy for months and months and I think they also maybe just put down piles to really be sure. So they can def build something a lot more than the SFHs that are currently there.
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Jun 14, 2023 04:21
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I took geology classes at SF state and I lived for years in the outer sunset (that's the neighborhood you see there). I can tell you that everything you see in foreground and middle ground of that picture is composed of "holocene sand dunes" everything yellow in this pic    e.g. it's compacted beach sand from the last ten thousand of years that in a million years might become sandstone but right now, isn't. To build a skyscraper they'll have to slam piers deep down to find bedrock. Additionally, that area was built out mostly in the 1930s and 40s, it's serviced by a lot of 1940s infrastructure and in particular the water and sewer systems would need significant upgrades. It is not a trivial thing to do. That said, probably the area could support a lot of six to eight story apartments, which would probably be a lot more feasible to build and less likely to require the city to tear up the entire neighborhood in order to massively upgrade the infrastructure.
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Jun 14, 2023 05:05
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Salesforce tower drove piles to bedrock 264' down; freedom tower in lower manhattan has 150' pile. Chase center in famously boggy mission bay sits on 150' piles If you're not building massive, global flagship structures you can probably get away with 60' piles or whatever for 10-15 story towers or whatever. Maybe don't build them salesforce tower (1070') high
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Jun 14, 2023 05:15
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Have no doubt that an enormous amount of infrastructure improvements are required. Sad thing is that the municipal government just stands around and uses that as an excuse to not do anything when improving the infrastructure is their job. Same thing in my jurisdiction where we've had a metro stop surrounded by SFHs since the 1980s and people have been increasingly yelling at the city to loving maybe upzone the area and when the city finally had a look at it they shrugged and said sorry the sewers are so bad that It's Just Not Possible. What really should be happening here is the Feds/State weighing in here and being like, "hey so you have to loving upzone all this poo poo, but listen we'll pay for the upgrades so that the taxpayers don't get soaked and you don't get voted out."
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Jun 14, 2023 05:32
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https://archive.is/hHWKm Fed pauses rate hikes, possibly temporarily  quote:Federal Reserve officials paused on Wednesday following 15 months of interest-rate hikes but signaled they would likely resume tightening to cool inflation, projecting more increases than economists and investors expected.
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Jun 14, 2023 20:31
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I'm curious, an old roommate of mine was an EE from turkey working at a semiconductor company and send most of his paycheck home for his dad to buy properties in Istanbul. Before he moved out he said he had something like 10 properties. World bank inflation calculator says that since he and I had that conversation about a decade ago, inflation has gone up 595% If turkey has effectively 100% inflation since January 2020, does that mean his $1000 usd/mo mortgage is now $500 usd/month, or do countries with a history of high inflation have clauses in their mortgage contracts that modify the payment amount of some sort? $1000/mo with 600% inflation is something like $166/mo? I looked into buying property internationally and noted that in many countries it's customary to pay a minimum of 33% down, I'm guessing due to this kind of instability
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Jun 14, 2023 20:41
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Hadlock posted:I'm curious, an old roommate of mine was an EE from turkey working at a semiconductor company and send most of his paycheck home for his dad to buy properties in Istanbul. Before he moved out he said he had something like 10 properties. World bank inflation calculator says that since he and I had that conversation about a decade ago, inflation has gone up 595% Wasn't it earlier in this thread were a lot of people were discussing how fixed-rate mortgages were pretty rare outside the US? I'd assume that the bank resolves this by adjusting the interest rate to match/beat inflation when the interest rate on the mortgage adjusts.
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Jun 14, 2023 20:56
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It’s pretty hard to get a handle on how other countries’ property markets and mortgages work. It is highly variable. If you got a decent relationship ask the dude. I know mortgages in some high inflation countries had a mark to market process (which was also true of things like savings accounts etc) that occurred on a monthly basis.
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Jun 14, 2023 21:07
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Interest rates in Turkey are also much much higher than the US. If I read their central bank page right, overnight lending rates are currently 10% and have been as high as 60+% in the past 20 years. Even if they did get a fixed rate mortgage, it would be rough
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Jun 14, 2023 21:07
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as somebody who's got a little experience purchasing property outside the U.S. (in my case, a flat in the Tokyo area), and who knows a few people elsewhere around the world, it really is a country-to-country thing. Japan is unique in that longer mortgages are also available, and that fixed or variable rate for mortgages both were possible, but also unique in that the home loan interest rates were down below 2% for us when we bought in 2021. This is not abnormal for Japan. Can check the details and add more if there's interest ( ) in how that all happened.the other factor besides inflation and interest rates is currency exchange rates, because somebody working and getting paid in USD then sending it to Turkish lira is probably providing tons of money to their family. Even if there's nominal transfer fees or bad exchange rates (from my experience from Japan, I would pay $20 on each end to send JPY to USD as a flat fee, though that was on the nice end of things), the USD has been so strong for so long that you're still making a ton.
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Jun 15, 2023 01:04
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Leperflesh posted:SF has extremely visible poverty problems, but those get translated to "crime" and "quality of life" by the media No one knows how high the crime rate is because there are no stats. Things like: - Chasing someone down the street and threatening them with violence - Sexually harassing a woman and threatening her with sexual assault - Stealing a bike - Breaking into a car - Stealing a catalytic converter are all crimes, but are rarely reported to police because there's no point. And a shitload of these things happen in SF every day.
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Jun 16, 2023 20:47
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Yeah, and you didn't even mention all of the white collar crime that goes unreported in SF. Crime city.
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Jun 16, 2023 21:11
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Yeah someone broke into my truck yesterday and tried to steal it, if I report it it will only be to get insurance.
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Jun 16, 2023 21:46
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big shtick energy posted:No one knows how high the crime rate is because there are no stats. Things like: Those things happen in every city in the world every day (OK maybe not singapore) and if there are no statistics it's impossible to know if the problem in SF is particularly worse than whatever position the hysterical media commentator is starting from or not. I would also guess that car breakins and catalytic converter thefts are typically reported, because that's what you need to do to make an insurance claim, but I won't dispute the first three. The important point here is that "crime is bad" is the universal eternal justification for "getting tough on crime" via increased police budget, power, and harshness and it's always backed up with the most visible elements that can be put on camera. It's also the case that the police obviously are not doing anything about the types of crime you mention if you are correct that they're not reported, more or less by definition. How could police reduce crime that they don't see or aren't told about? And yet, anecdata about unreported crime still seems to lead to police as the answer. Whereas crime rates and recessions, unemployment, and poverty clearly have positive statistical correlations, but "crime seems to be down because there's a bit less poverty now" is not a story that can be handwrung about on the news so it tends not to happen and perceptions are more important than facts. Property crime in SF, based on reported statistics, is higher than the average US city (violent crime is lower), and that is attributable to a lot of factors including the enormous wealth disparity, the fact that it's a major tourist destination, less off-street parking, the city size/density (large sprawling cities have more "safe" suburbs within their city borders), and the fact that city census data on residents doesn't include the comparatively huge number of commuters who enter and leave the city daily (e.g. a "crime rate per 100,000" that ignores the city's daytime population and only uses residential data may calculate a misleadingly large ratio). There is also, as always, racism baked into the statistics. A lot of statistics finding that, for example, black people commit disproportionately more crime, is based on black people being subject to higher arrest rates, because of course many reported crimes do not result in an arrest and therefore no racial info is available for them. And yet, hmm, what other reasons besides "they do more crimes, even when accounting for poverty" might factor into increased arrest rates? SF has become a sort of whipping boy for the US political right in an attempt to causally connect two parallel myths: that SF is "the most liberal city" and that it is "drowning in a crime epidemic", the former causing the latter. Those are both claims that are simplified and twisted to a point of uselessness.
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Jun 16, 2023 22:02
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big shtick energy posted:No one knows how high the crime rate is because there are no stats. big shtick energy posted:And a shitload of these things happen in SF every day. So nobody knows, except you somehow know?
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Jun 16, 2023 22:38
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Leperflesh posted:Those things happen in every city in the world every day (OK maybe not singapore) and if there are no statistics it's impossible to know if the problem in SF is particularly worse than I don't want to turn this into the "San Francisco is the poster child for everything that's wrong with America" thread but my personal experience living in six different parts of the city, vs living in other major cities is that property crime is way way higher than other cities I've lived in. Is a lot of it pretty crime like stolen bikes? Yes but it's constant and there's a cultural attitude of acceptance about the situation that I've not seen in other cities
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Jun 16, 2023 22:40
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As much as the right is trying to paint San Francisco as a crime-ridden hellhole, there also seems to be a movement among some to imagine that there is literally no crime problem at all and anyone actually in San Francisco who says anything different is lying and/or falling into fake media hype. Those in the later category tend to also have a lot of very strident ideas about how literally all crime is because of wealth inequality (except for white collar crime, which is just because rich people and/or corporations are bad) and police have never actually stopped any crimes from occurring. I think part of the issue is that we need to step away from the larger category of "crime" and talk about what people really mean most of the time when they are talking about this: social disorder. When a drunk guy shits all over my stairs it's obviously a less serious crime than some corporation doing wage theft. And obviously I want the justice system to punish the corporation doing the wage theft. But I also don't want to have to step over poo poo walking out of my apartment, and if I end up stepping in the poo poo then my day is immediately worse off. When people are tolerant of folks making GBS threads in public places, or being violently drunk in public, or doing low-level property crime, there is an immediate lowering of the quality of life for everybody. Having police around does generally lower that level of social disorder. For example, there's a 7-11 near my apartment that is perfectly positioned as the last 24-hour store on the way back from downtown out to where a bunch of people live. Often after last call it can get rowdy in there as people are coming back home from a night out drinking. Fights have broken out, windows have been broken, etc. It got to the point where the store decided on some nights to pay a cop to be security, basically just stand around in uniform. When there's a cop in the store, the drunks tend to be a lot more restrained and it's generally a calmer, more pleasant experience if you have to stop in and get something. I've never seen any of the cops that have been security there ever arrests anyone, because they don't have to. They are lowering the level of social disorder by their mere presence. Now, there is a flip side to that. That store also tends to have a few homeless people who generally hang around the parking lot, mostly during the day and early evening. Sometimes they are panhandling, sometimes they're just chilling out and eating whatever snack they got in the store. They aren't really the source of much social disorder, but they also tend to get hassled when police stop by. Ideally, you'd want a situation where the people who are just hanging around and not bothering anyone don't have to worry about the fact that there's a cop there; while also having a way to let the coked-up club assholes who would otherwise be loudly harassing people know they have to cut it out or else they're gonna face some consequences. The former isn't going to be solved by being "tough on crime", and the later isn't going to be solved by pretending that police don't actually ever accomplish anything. Hadlock posted:I don't want to turn this into the "San Francisco is the poster child for everything that's wrong with America" thread but my personal experience living in six different parts of the city, vs living in other major cities is that property crime is way way higher than other cities I've lived in. Is a lot of it pretty crime like stolen bikes? Yes but it's constant and there's a cultural attitude of acceptance about the situation that I've not seen in other cities Everyone glosses over that, for every libertarian chud computer-toucher who moved to San Francisco and priced somebody out, there's at least two card-carrying-DSA computer-touchers who moved to San Francisco (and also priced someone else out). Often those in the later group are cargo-culting the city's famously liberal/accepting culture to the point of arguing that only fascists would be upset that someone is shooting up on the bus.
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Jun 16, 2023 23:46
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This thread pivoted from interesting economic stuff to jerking off about how hard it is to be rich around all the poors who steal in SF pretty quick, it'd be cool to swap back to the interesting economic stuff imo.
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Jun 16, 2023 23:48
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All right, back on economics. From the inflation report last week, it seems like groceries are starting to get cheaper. (Egg prices, in particular, seem to be falling most steeply.) 
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Jun 16, 2023 23:53
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LanceHunter posted:Everyone glosses over that, for every libertarian chud computer-toucher who moved to San Francisco and priced somebody out, there's at least two card-carrying-DSA computer-touchers who moved to San Francisco (and also priced someone else out). Often those in the later group are cargo-culting the city's famously liberal/accepting culture to the point of arguing that only fascists would be upset that someone is shooting up on the bus. are you a cop
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Jun 16, 2023 23:59
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Core inflation doesn't seem to be following the overall CPI inflation story though Source: https://archive.is/2023.06.14-16072...aft-is-imminent
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Jun 17, 2023 00:05
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