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What's the story with Treasure Island? Seems like it could be a cool spot, but after doing my limited research its a combination hazmat us government site turned into affordable housing that's run by a company that doesn't really give a poo poo about tenants... Does that sound about right?
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Jul 23, 2013 13:50
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Geared Hub posted:What's the story with Treasure Island? It also will be deathtrap during a earthquake due to the liquefaction effect and how it's basically built on a pile of trash. It also has unique hazards such as really high radiation readings since many ships contaminated by cold war nuke testing made harbor at the island: https://www.baycitizen.org/news/env..._eid=f3447a622b etalian fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Jul 23, 2013 |
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Jul 23, 2013 14:29
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CrazyLittle posted:
Yep, that's newer, I remember the old one on that site was really crappy before it closed and we never went back. The reviews aren't very fond of the new version either, for what it's worth http://www.yelp.com/biz/lucky-supermarket-oakland-4 Also, since we are now driving from JL Square, Whole Foods is over on the other side of the lake as well.
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Jul 23, 2013 15:09
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Geared Hub posted:What's the story with Treasure Island? It used to be a Navy Base and the City of SF just recently acquired the land rights I believe. There is some housing there, but you don't want to live there now as it's pretty unsafe. There are huge plans in the works to develop it into a shopping and major residential area with tall apartment buildings and the such. Of course that will be decades before it's finished. etalian posted:It also will be deathtrap during a earthquake due to the liquefaction effect and how it's basically built on a pile of trash. This is partially true. Treasure Island was built using hydraulic fill for a 1939 World's Fair which isn't quite the same thing as being built on literal trash. The island did undergo partial liquefaction under Loma Prieta and would be catastrophically damaged for a San Andreas 7.5+ scenario event. However, we are king of Geotechnical Engineering here in the Bay Area and the MS program at Cal even studies TI in great detail so the remediation of the island is in good hands. ENGEO is providing consultation and has a good plan to remediate the area and I can go into more details about that. But yeah I wouldn't live there right now. Xaris fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jul 23, 2013 |
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Jul 23, 2013 19:00
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Geared Hub posted:What's the story with Treasure Island? You know how the bay bridge is a pain in the rear end to drive across if you're heading in or out of the city? It's like that but going anywhere.
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Jul 23, 2013 19:57
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The real treasure is all the rare Cesium isotopes.
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Jul 23, 2013 22:07
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My one trip to Treasure Island made me treasure my remaining non-irradiated cells. The government doesn't really seem to care at all about it, and while it seemed like a great idea, it's a total mess right now.
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Jul 23, 2013 23:11
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InsomnicIneptitude posted:My one trip to Treasure Island made me treasure my remaining non-irradiated cells. The government doesn't really seem to care at all about it, and while it seemed like a great idea, it's a total mess right now. The issue that plagues Treasure Island, Hunters Point, and Alameda Point is that while the US Navy has (mostly) funded the rehabilitation, that leaves huge semi-industrial zones and no one to fill them. Even SF's attempts to sell middle-income housing at Treasure Island has been foiled by the fact that by nature its kinda hard to get there. Mare Island and Alameda Point have had some recent developments. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Jul 23, 2013 |
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Jul 23, 2013 23:41
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I also seem to recall an "in case of emergency" clause in the TI land lease where the US Mil can reclaim it for military use if there's some massive emergency need.
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Jul 24, 2013 04:26
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Leperflesh posted:Well, I mean, if they're buying up homes and renting them out, isn't that going to help the rental market?
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Jul 24, 2013 05:13
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But it's what the market will bear, so it's okay.
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Jul 24, 2013 05:41
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Miss-Bomarc posted:they can just sit on empty units forever instead of having to sell them at the market price, which guarantees that whatever *does* go on the market will go for prices that make 2005 look reasonable. 
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Jul 24, 2013 06:54
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VideoTapir posted:But it's what the market will bear, so it's okay. Your avatar and your post go together so well.
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Jul 24, 2013 06:59
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FRINGE posted:If you seize the food, the water, and the shelter, you get an entire country of voluntary slaves. I am sure no one thought of this and its all just an accident. I'm fairly certain no one did. It's just the end result of competition. Businesses gradually outcompete individuals, then turn on each other until a few huge landowners are left. It's mostly unintentional but it goes to reason that the most ruthless businesses will be the ones to prosper unless someone demonstrates honest, non-exploitative behavior that brings greater quarterly profits. California may be closer to end-stage capitalism than the South.
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Jul 24, 2013 07:26
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Miss-Bomarc posted:It's going to help the rental market for the five or six corporate entities that will, after a few years, own 65% of the residential property in California (and that will go up to 85% if you restrict it to the property that's anywhere near anything worthwhile.) They'll be able to dictate terms to potential renters through sheer size, rather than being subject to rent-control and eviction-notice and similar laws that forced smaller property owners to treat tenants as equals rather than income. They'll be able to control price by controlling supply (people aren't willing to pay your exorbitant rents? Just take half your units off the market! They'll *beg* to pay $2500 a month for a studio in Redwood City if that's the only thing they can *get*.) And since they're large-asset corporate entities rather than actual residents, they can just sit on empty units forever instead of having to sell them at the market price, which guarantees that whatever *does* go on the market will go for prices that make 2005 look reasonable. Yeah plus history show big monopolies make it easier to do things such as price controls and other tricks to stifle genuine competition in something such as rental market. Sort of why things such as a lack of internet providers always leaders to lovely service, not enough upgrades and also higher monthly rates.
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Jul 24, 2013 16:10
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Miss-Bomarc posted:It's going to help the rental market for the five or six corporate entities that will, after a few years, own 65% of the residential property in California (and that will go up to 85% if you restrict it to the property that's anywhere near anything worthwhile.) [citation needed] Not to be glib, but this is the first I've heard of five or six corporate entities owning a large percentage of the total rental market, nevermind "the residential property" which is ridiculous on its face (the large majority of single-family homes in the US are occupied by their owner: see Homeownership in the United States). According to this, in 2010 home ownership in California was among the lowest in the nation... at 56.1%. Given that even with the mortgage crisis only a small fraction of all residential real estate has gone up for sale in the last five years, I find it incredibly implausible that this rate will dip below 50%, much less that "five or six entities" will own all or nearly all of it. So, if you could, please provide any sort of source for this assertion?
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Jul 24, 2013 21:36
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There were a bunch of local stories popping up back in Feb I recall one locally for Sacramento as well.....as well as national stories. Not gonna quote percentages or impact but it's happening. http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/realestate/blackstone-other-investors-snap-up-thousands-of-tampa-bay-rental-homes/2110744 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-09/blackstone-steps-up-home-buying-as-prices-jump-mortgages.html quote:"Blackstone Group LP (BX), the largest U.S. private real estate owner, accelerated purchases of single- family homes as prices jumped faster than it expected. Blackstone has spent more than $2.5 billion on 16,000 homes to manage as rentals, deploying capital from the $13.3 billion fund it raised last year, said Jonathan Gray, global head of real estate for the world’s largest private equity firm. That’s up from $1 billion of homes owned in October, when Blackstone Chairman Stephen Schwarzman said the company was spending $100 million a week on houses. Keyser_Soze fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jul 24, 2013 |
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Jul 24, 2013 21:51
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From that bloomburg article:quote:The market, which has been “dominated by ‘Mom and Pop’ owners” could total 12 million homes and be double the size of the institutional multifamily market, JPMorgan analysts led by Anthony Paolone, wrote in a note yesterday. “A corporate structure with institutional capital around the business makes sense.” 12 million homes as the entire theoretical size of the institutional rental home market? According to a quick google result: quote:It may be that the terminology is different than single family homes. However, barring that, here are some census.gov numbers for you. Taking just the single detached homes, there's over 91 million in the US. 12M would be 13% of the market of 80M single detatched & mobile homes that are occupied year-round (so, ignoring vacation rentals and such). Not even remotely approaching 65%. Even if you also include the implied 6M institutional multifamily market, you're then talking about the total market of 130M homes: so that's 130/18 or 13.8% of the total market. That's a lot, I suppose, but it's split among multiple companies who presumably would be in competition with each other, and it still leaves a huge gap between the majority (which are owner-occupied), and the remainder (presumably non-institutionally non-owner-occupied homes). Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Jul 24, 2013 |
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Jul 24, 2013 22:18
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Leperflesh posted:it still leaves a huge gap between the majority (which are owner-occupied) quote:Blackstone has spent more than $2.5 billion on 16,000 homes to manage as rentals, deploying capital from the $13.3 billion fund it raised last year, said Jonathan Gray, global head of real estate for the world’s largest private equity firm. That’s up from $1 billion of homes owned in October, when Blackstone Chairman Stephen Schwarzman said the company was spending $100 million a week on houses.
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Jul 25, 2013 07:12
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I'm not arguing against the premise that it's worrying to see companies buying up huge numbers of properties. I'm arguing against the hyperbole and (especially) wildly inaccurate factual assertions being used to support statements like:FRINGE posted:If you seize the food, the water, and the shelter, you get an entire country of voluntary slaves. I am sure no one thought of this and its all just an accident. I think it's possible to express concern about a trend without obliquely implying it's a sinister national conspiracy to enslave the country.
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Jul 25, 2013 18:50
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San Diego makes The News again! Why is it that it seems like politicians have a hard time with- NO TOUCHING! neurobasalmedium fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Jul 25, 2013 |
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Jul 25, 2013 20:47
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You should learn to use the [timg] tag for gigantic images.
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Jul 25, 2013 20:49
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neurobasalmedium posted:
Because politics is like being a rock star, but for old, ugly people.
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Jul 25, 2013 20:57
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Leperflesh posted:I think it's possible to express concern about a trend without obliquely implying it's a sinister national conspiracy to enslave the country. It is a sinister national conspiracy to enslave the country.
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Jul 26, 2013 05:17
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VideoTapir posted:It is a sinister national conspiracy to enslave the country. Conspiracy is a heavily loaded word. "Enslave" is even worse. But here you have a collection of capital firms swooping in and buying up properties on the cheap and putting their thumb on both the the rental and the starter home markets. With wages stagnating and job security a joke, it's not a huge step to make for those in the working class looking up.
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Jul 26, 2013 17:10
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rope kid posted:I think most people were waiting for the bottom to become reasonable; it never did. edit: beaten by a couple of pages, but ill leave it up anyway. It never did because over seas investors snatched up houses in bulk and they were instantly turned into rental properties only to be sold when the value is high again. Many houses never saw the market, and those that did people bought sight unseen. Its loving unreal it is happening again and nobody gives a gently caress. My wife bought our house before we were married at the peak of the market. 400,000 dollars for 2,000 sq feet in god drat RIVERSIDE. We could no longer afford the 4,000 dollars a month (15 year), luckily we re-fi'd at the end of last year and got an awesome 2.8 rate and a 500 dollar payment while taking money out at the same time. Aeka 2.0 fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Jul 26, 2013 |
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Jul 26, 2013 17:43
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Have you seen my apex seals? I seem to have lost them.
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Aeka 2.0 posted:My wife bought our house before we were married at the peak of the market. 400,000 dollars for 2,000 sq feet in god drat RIVERSIDE. We could no longer afford the 4,000 dollars a month (15 year), luckily we re-fi'd at the end of last year and got an awesome 2.8 rate and a 500 dollar payment while taking money out at the same time. I'm bad at math, but explain to me how you're paying $500/month on a 15-year mortgage for a $400k house. Because $500/month is what I get quoted for taking out a $125k loan for 30 years, and that includes property taxes and assumes a 3.5 interest rate. Are you paying interest-only for a period of time? Or did you mean to say that you're paying $500/month less than you did before the refi?
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Jul 26, 2013 19:39
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Willa Rogers posted:I'm bad at math, but explain to me how you're paying $500/month on a 15-year mortgage for a $400k house. Because $500/month is what I get quoted for taking out a $125k loan for 30 years, and that includes property taxes and assumes a 3.5 interest rate. Presumably the house lost significant value since they bought it at the peak.
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Jul 26, 2013 21:25
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Trabisnikof posted:Presumably the house lost significant value since they bought it at the peak. Yah, but lenders aren't doing mark-to-market because the government's still buying loan paper from lenders at face value.
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Jul 26, 2013 21:26
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Aeka 2.0 posted:My wife bought our house before we were married at the peak of the market. 400,000 dollars for 2,000 sq feet in god drat RIVERSIDE. We could no longer afford the 4,000 dollars a month (15 year), luckily we re-fi'd at the end of last year and got an awesome 2.8 rate and a 500 dollar payment while taking money out at the same time. I can't tell if we're lucky or not getting a really nice 1,200 sqft home in Marina Del Ray/Culver City for 360,000 2 years ago. So far, yes? Though I really don't like the current news of HOME PRICES AMAZING IT CAN ONLY GO UP!!! coming back again.
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Jul 26, 2013 22:04
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Buckwheat Sings posted:I can't tell if we're lucky or not getting a really nice 1,200 sqft home in Marina Del Ray/Culver City for 360,000 2 years ago. So far, yes? Though I really don't like the current news of HOME PRICES AMAZING IT CAN ONLY GO UP!!! coming back again. Yeah it's pretty deja vu, I guess people are too dumb to realize another model with reasonable rent/house costs would be better than the home is a investment mindset.
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Jul 26, 2013 22:21
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Willa Rogers posted:I'm bad at math, but explain to me how you're paying $500/month on a 15-year mortgage for a $400k house. Because $500/month is what I get quoted for taking out a $125k loan for 30 years, and that includes property taxes and assumes a 3.5 interest rate. I think what he means is that, during the month in which he did the re-fi, he had a single $500 payment, while taking a home equity loan (!) at the same time. But yeah his wording makes that really unclear. There's no way he's making $500 payments on even some kind of retarded balloon mortgage for a $400k loan.
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Jul 27, 2013 00:06
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Ah, OK: that totally makes sense within that context.
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Jul 27, 2013 00:08
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Ron Jeremy posted:Conspiracy is a heavily loaded word. "Enslave" is even worse. But here you have a collection of capital firms swooping in and buying up properties on the cheap and putting their thumb on both the the rental and the starter home markets. With wages stagnating and job security a joke, it's not a huge step to make for those in the working class looking up. How about this....it is a collection of (in many cases objectively provable, in a few cases proven in court) conspiracies to extract more and more money from the working classes. Collectively this has the effect of removing our disposable income and our options. With the degree to which corporate directorates interlock, I think we can call it a single conspiracy, though there may not be any single conspirator who is involved in every aspect of it.
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Jul 27, 2013 01:19
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VideoTapir posted:How about this....it is a collection of (in many cases objectively provable, in a few cases proven in court) conspiracies to extract more and more money from the working classes. Collectively this has the effect of removing our disposable income and our options. With the degree to which corporate directorates interlock, I think we can call it a single conspiracy, though there may not be any single conspirator who is involved in every aspect of it. I don't think the word "conspiracy" is accurate or helpful. It seems to me that we are discussing something that is categorically similar to corporate monopoly in any other typical context. For example: a proliferation of mom & pop grocery stores is gradually replaced by huge centralized warehouse-style corporate monolith stores (Wal*Mart, Target, Kmart, etc.). This initially benefits consumers because economies of scale provide lower prices. However, prices are low only while meaningful competition exists between the entities. When a corporation begins to gain monopoly power, it can manipulate the market, raising prices with little or no recourse for the consumer: the barrier to entry is now too high for small independents to gain a foothold, and consumers no longer have the choice of competing outlets. The government already has well-established regulatory antitrust powers. All that is needed is for it to exercise them. Sometimes those powers seem to be reasonably effective, and sometimes they seem to be amazingly ineffective: the FCC seems to be completely complicit with the conglomeration of the broadcast radio marketplace into one utterly dominated by Clearchannel, for example, while it has repeatedly exercised antitrust power to prevent telecommunications monopolies. If home-rental corporations gain monopolies (locally or widely), we have to demand that our regulators exercise their antitrust powers. However, based on the actual numbers which I have quoted in this thread, it does not appear that anything like a monopoly has arisen. There might be very localized exceptions, such as in Tampa Bay as suggested by that Tampa Bay Times article which Keyser S0ze linked, but even there, the article prefers to quote scary-big numbers without actually providing comparative statistics (what actual percentage of the total Tampa Bay rental market is now in the hands of Blackstone?) or substantiate the implication that Blackstone or any other individual corporation has sufficiently dominated the market that they can unilaterally raise prices without facing effective competition from other companies and the private rental market. I will reiterate, then: it is a trend that we should be concerned about, sure. If we think that increasing private home ownership is "good" (and I think that's a very complex question, actually), then this runs against that trend. If we think it's bad that all-cash investors have an advantage over borrowers when purchasing residential real estate, that's a problem worthy of discussion. But there's no loving conspiracy, it's just people with a lot of money recognizing a potentially lucrative investment opportunity. Housing prices took a huge nosedive and, due to both extremely negative consumer sentiment (which tends to trail the market) and very tight credit (which was a good correction but possibly an overcorrection to previously over-loose credit), houses nationwide in general and especially in certain markets were underpriced. The rental market became very tight (everyone who lost a home needed to rent one; the population rose while new home starts stagnated; both factors put heavy pressure on the rental market) which drove up rents while thousands of foreclosed homes sat empty. You can blame this situation on a lot of different factors but you can't really blame people with money for recognizing that they could buy a lot of houses and rent them for profit. This relieves the rental market while also helping house prices to recover! If momentum has taken the reverse trend too far the other way (and I don't think it really has: I think rents are still too high and homes in many markets are still underpriced) then it will gradually correct, as more homes available for rent loosens the rental market and the profit margin potential of purchasing a house and then renting it out drops accordingly. So yeah. Every corporation that sells products is in a conspiracy to extract money from the working classes! That's what companies are for, making profits for their owners. Which is why we need regulations, to protect the working classes (and everyone else for that matter), because unregulated capitalism is savagely cruel. But let's not act like a bunch of oligarchs have gotten together in a room somewhere and plotted to buy up 80% of the residential real estate in America into a single company so they can force everyone to rent and pay whatever they feel like charging with no recourse. That scenario is cartoonish and unrealistic. It's more just investors (and investment companies, including banks) realizing that the stock market is overbought, the bond market is overdue for a correction (especially when the Fed finally stops quantitative easing), gold is overpriced and overly volatile, so they need somewhere new to put their money... and real estate is (historically-speaking) cheap. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jul 27, 2013 |
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Jul 27, 2013 02:06
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VideoTapir posted:How about this....it is a collection of (in many cases objectively provable, in a few cases proven in court) conspiracies to extract more and more money from the working classes. Collectively this has the effect of removing our disposable income and our options. With the degree to which corporate directorates interlock, I think we can call it a single conspiracy, though there may not be any single conspirator who is involved in every aspect of it. I'm not disagreeing with your point, but with your using heavily loaded terms. The net effect is the same, but it's the result of thousands of individual actions, each earnest and mostly innocently self-interested, not a sinister cabal. It's capital in general that is the conspiracy, members of interlocking boards.
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Jul 27, 2013 02:37
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Ron Jeremy posted:I'm not disagreeing with your point, but with your using heavily loaded terms. The net effect is the same, but it's the result of thousands of individual actions, each earnest and mostly innocently self-interested, not a sinister cabal. It's capital in general that is the conspiracy, members of interlocking boards. It's only loaded because "conspiracy" has been taken over for reptoid-CIAkilledJFK-chemtrails. People get together to do things (many of them illegal if unenforced) at the expense of others, what else are you going to call it? That you can't hear the word without picturing Bond villains or tinfoil hats doesn't change what it is. And no kidding capital is the conspiracy, what do you think I was talking about?
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Jul 27, 2013 02:45
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Leperflesh posted:[citation needed] And I didn't say there was an Evil Special Conspiracy Plan to Take Over Everything. I said it was what was gonna happen as a natural outcome of the present attitudes toward lending risk. You see, the bubble never popped. It just stopped inflating. Sure, "prices" went down; that was because foreclosed homes are required to be reported as sales at the market price. Property owners who weren't in trouble--who didn't lose their jobs, who didn't get caught in an ARM-reset trap, who didn't try stupid poo poo involving not paying loans or taking a bank to court--just hung on and waited until now, when buyers decided it was time to start buying again. But what that means is that prices went up and stayed up. But bankers remember what happened when they wrote all those no-down loans, and how scared they all got, and so the present market heavily favors people who can put in a big chunk of change--effectively bribing the bank to write the loan--and that means corporate entities, or private investors operating on such a scale that they might as well be corporations. And so we end up in a situation where most of the actual residential property is rentals, owned by a few giant entities with thousands of properties each. And this sucks, but not because of Evil Plutocrats. It sucks for the same reason it sucks that the US mobile-phone market is dominated by maybe four different companies and they're all awful. It's not a "monopoly" market; there are multiple providers of the same service, and consumers can switch from one to another. But none of them gives a poo poo about any individual customer. For every user who angrily declares that they're taking their business elsewhere, there are ten thousand other suckers who hate the service but still don't want to put up with the hassle of switching, and that means the providers don't have to care what any individual user wants.
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Jul 27, 2013 06:53
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Willa Rogers posted:Ah, OK: that totally makes sense within that context. I seem to have confused a lot of people with leaving out relevant info. The house was bought in 2004 and after we got married we were throwing money at it, much higher than the payment required, because we were dumb and riding the money train. Her business was doing good, my job was doing good, everything was awesome and we were trying to pay the house off early. Things took a downturn in 2009, but we were still fine. By the end of 2012 my wife informed me that we were living off of savings for months. Which she should have said something to me because I sold an extra car I no longer needed and bought a few luxuries instead of just selling it and saving. So I checked the bank and I found out we owed 40k, so we started a refinance and pulled an additional 40k for an "oh poo poo" fund. The new payments are $500 (rounding here) for a 15 year. Taxes and insurance extra. Aeka 2.0 fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Jul 27, 2013 |
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Jul 27, 2013 07:55
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Leperflesh posted:I don't think the word "conspiracy" is accurate or helpful. There will always be competition for the kinds of poo poo sold at WalMart, Target, etc. It's called the Internet. If Target raises their prices, people will simply start ordering stuff from Amazon. In fact, online stores like Amazon have such a huge advantage that the only way for brick and mortar monolith stores to compete is to keep their prices low, even if they are the only store in the area selling that stuff. In retail, geography is no longer a big concern when it comes to determining competition.
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Jul 27, 2013 08:55
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