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Jaxyon posted:Maybe I'm just restating your stuff in a different way, looking back I don't know if I'm making a meaningfully different point from you, sorry. Ah, gotcha. I was interpreting your post as saying "Sure, we spend more on rent and medicine but we spend less on groceries and televisions (so it's okay)." Sorry about that.
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Jan 23, 2020 01:25
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Leperflesh posted:as a warlord, I will find the intentional community very convenient as a local concentrator of the resources I will routinely collect from them; dispersed individual households are more costly to tax If people stay in dispersed households you could appoint a network of underlings - I'll call them "vassals" - to oversee a group of them, called a "commune". You would allow these "vassals" to keep some of the resources for themselves as payment for overseeing them. I will call this system "communism".
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Jan 23, 2020 01:36
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:If people stay in dispersed households you could appoint a network of underlings - I'll call them "vassals" - to oversee a group of them, called a "commune". You would allow these "vassals" to keep some of the resources for themselves as payment for overseeing them. I will call this system "communism". Those people are bound to feud. Alism.
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Jan 23, 2020 01:44
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A better plan than that is learning a useful skill that everyone loves, like distilling or meth synthesis, so that you can be a valuable resource in the climate wars. Don't be in a fight, be fought over.
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Jan 23, 2020 01:45
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FCKGW posted:Y'all are ignoring the teachings of Jesus who commanded all of us to procreate i always thought the last line was "is all that i crave." it scans so much better.
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Jan 23, 2020 01:51
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Is this a good place to ask about registering to vote? I'm in Santa Clara county, and there was news a few weeks ago about discrepancies in their voter records, or something. I checked my voter registration today, and while the state knows I'm registered, the county has no record of me. However, I'm a permanent voter-by-mail. Could that be the reason why I'm only registered at the state level? The county does have records of my prior vote-by-mail ballots, so I would think they'd also have my registration. Any thoughts?
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Jan 23, 2020 03:23
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ProperGanderPusher posted:I keep hearing reports that millennials actually by and large get sick of city living after they turn 30ish and decide to start a family. Hard to raise a baby in a one bedroom apartment without making your neighbors want to murder you. I’m getting to that point myself on top of wanting less noise and more room for my poo poo. I don't intend to ever have a family, but I am getting a bit tired of the city. Crowded, noisy, expensive, and soot gets on everything if you keep the windows open. I don't go to as many cultural events here as I have in other cities, since here's much more spread out and I don't live in the city proper. Moving into a remote position and getting a house somewhere up in the woods of Norcal seems quite tempting.
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Jan 23, 2020 03:51
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Solumin posted:Is this a good place to ask about registering to vote? Call either (866) 430-8683 or (408) 299-8683 and tell them you want to verify your voter registration details. If they need to be updated they can do it for you right there over the phone.
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Jan 23, 2020 03:56
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CMYK BLYAT! posted:I don't intend to ever have a family, but I am getting a bit tired of the city. Crowded, noisy, expensive, and soot gets on everything if you keep the windows open. I don't go to as many cultural events here as I have in other cities, since here's much more spread out and I don't live in the city proper. Moving into a remote position and getting a house somewhere up in the woods of Norcal seems quite tempting. I generally like living in the city even though I never go out because I hate driving, like truly despise it. But it seems like I'll never be able to get a supermarket within walking distance.
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Jan 23, 2020 05:03
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:If people stay in dispersed households you could appoint a network of underlings - I'll call them "vassals" - to oversee a group of them, called a "commune". You would allow these "vassals" to keep some of the resources for themselves as payment for overseeing them. I will call this system "communism". You could create the "Vasslapp" and be a disruptive post-modern warlord.
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Jan 23, 2020 07:18
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Buckwheat Sings posted:What's to misunderstand when he's right? I think that if you were to look at the housing price spikes in many booming metropolitan areas in the US, and come away from them concluding that they are just more examples of failures of unregulated free markets, you are not understanding the problem. You are either greatly ignorant, or you are ideologically committed to blaming capitalism for all problems in society, kind of like how Puritan women (or Bobby Boucher's mother in the movie, The WaterBoy) blamed the Devil on everything. Housing markets are highly regulated and controlled by local governments. Don't get me wrong, in many cases, this is a good thing! The problem is not that they aren't regulating housing enough (e.g. although I would not be opposed to a vacancy tax in SF, I don't think that it will really do anything meaningful to solve the problem), the problem is that in many cases they are putting regulations on housing that are bad for society. In a lot of cases these bad regulations are wildly popular among the local constituents. It's complicated. 'Capitalism bad' might work to explain other problems in society, but I don't think that works very well to explain housing cost rises in booming metro areas in the US. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Jan 23, 2020 |
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Jan 23, 2020 14:01
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in a lot of cases, those motivations are driven by the economic realities of life under capitalism.
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Jan 23, 2020 15:03
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silence_kit posted:I think that if you were to look at the housing price spikes in many booming metropolitan areas in the US, and come away from them concluding that they are just more examples of failures of unregulated free markets, you are not understanding the problem. You are either greatly ignorant, or you are ideologically committed to blaming capitalism for all problems in society, kind of like how Puritan women (or Bobby Boucher's mother in the movie, The WaterBoy) blamed the Devil on everything. The problem is capitalism. Regulating the markets is all well and good but the government should be building those houses. The reason it can't is that it's seen as capitalism's job, no matter how poorly it's able to deliver on that. Public housing would go much further towards solving a problem that capitalism will never be able to catch up to on its own.
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Jan 23, 2020 15:07
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I will say that the folks getting horny over vacancy taxes for commercial property too don't necessarily understand how different business leases look. Most commercial leases are triple net leases, which means the business owner renting the space agrees to pay all the taxes and property expenses in addition to their rent.
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Jan 23, 2020 16:13
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Yeah but commercial property is a huge scam anyway. It's the textbook example of a market not working properly. The reason that strip malls sit 50% vacant and the rent never decreases is because of how the landlord's loans are structured. It's insanely stupid.Cup Runneth Over posted:The problem is capitalism. Regulating the markets is all well and good but the government should be building those houses. The reason it can't is that it's seen as capitalism's job, no matter how poorly it's able to deliver on that. Public housing would go much further towards solving a problem that capitalism will never be able to catch up to on its own. Yes, the problem is that capitalism commodifies everything, including things that shouldn't be commodified, like shelter and healthcare. Having said that, Strongtowns turned me on to the fact that there are EXTREMELY perverse public-private incentives at work here. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Jan 23, 2020 |
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Jan 23, 2020 17:40
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lol https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1220362474890788869
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Jan 23, 2020 18:38
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Yeah but commercial property is a huge scam anyway. It's the textbook example of a market not working properly. The reason that strip malls sit 50% vacant and the rent never decreases is because of how the landlord's loans are structured. It's insanely stupid. In addition to the triple net thing above, what is this?
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Jan 23, 2020 19:19
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Jaxyon posted:In addition to the triple net thing above, what is this? Lowering the rent decreases the value of the asset in the eyes of the bank. Most commercial landlords are just rolling over their loan every 10 years or so (there's a term for it but I've forgotten). However the space sitting vacant does not lower the value of the asset in the eyes of the bank. So when it's time to roll over that loan it's better to have 50% vacancy then to have 20% vacancy and have reduced rent by 15% overall. So it just absolutely fucks the elasticity of the market.
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Jan 23, 2020 19:30
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Jaxyon posted:In addition to the triple net thing above, what is this? The value of a commercial property (read: mall, strip mall, etc) is based on the calculated/accepted income from it over the period of the loan. If your commercial property loan has a ten year term and expects each of the ten subunits to bring in $3000 per month, the value is (give or take a ton of complexity not worth writing here) $3000 x 10 x 12 x 10 = $3.6M. That's the approximate value of the property from the perspective of the lender, for purposes of collateral, etc etc. They loan you $3M for it. So, let's say there's an economic downturn in your area or your industry just starts struggling against online competitors. To fill the booths, you're going to have to charge $1,500 per month instead. This constitutes a revaluation of your property and your building is now only worth $1.8M against a $3M loan. Commercial loans typically don't allow you to be underwater like that. At the end of (contracted interval), the loan gets re-evaluated and you have to make the lender whole on whatever depreciation has occurred. You'd have to immediately come up with $1.2M cash to bring yourself in line with the loan amount and balance it out. THat's if the loan doesn't already have a liquidation-in-full clause of some sort, where the entire loan is due and void. (Most don't have that, or at least that's my understanding.) So, what you run into instead is the property owner having to pick between trying to ride out a wave of vacancies at high rent (avoiding a re-valuation event by changing his income basis) and actually filling the spots but risking his lender bankrupting him if the loan balancing payment is too large.
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Jan 23, 2020 19:32
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i bet we could fix that problem and make the rents go down if we built more commercial property. thats supply and demand, economics 101.
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Jan 23, 2020 19:33
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Oh, cool Thank you both That actually explains a lot about commercial property that I wasn't quite connecting
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Jan 23, 2020 19:35
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I'm still mad about the small grocery + deli we had in town that had to shut down because their landlord jacked the rent up to "market rate," whereupon the location sat empty for two years.
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Jan 23, 2020 19:48
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Sundae posted:At the end of (contracted interval), the loan gets re-evaluated and you have to make the lender whole on whatever depreciation has occurred. You'd have to immediately come up with $1.2M cash to bring yourself in line with the loan amount and balance it out. THat's if the loan doesn't already have a liquidation-in-full clause of some sort, where the entire loan is due and void. (Most don't have that, or at least that's my understanding.) a lender losing money? unthinkable
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Jan 23, 2020 19:56
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And note that this is also a disincentive to sell, because while a bank may accept a valuation of a property based on the nominal rent being paid by the remaining tenants despite high vacancy, a buyer sure as hell won't. Prop 13 makes this much worse, because now the property owner has a strong incentive to try to ride out the times of high vacancy; selling the property (and reinvesting in some other property) involves a big jump up in property tax. Commercial and industrial property is already more often leased out for long-term lease arrangements than residential (think 99-year leases), so you have all these factors combining to make liquidity in the commercial/industrial property markets extremely slow. Now say you're a growing business, or you're moving a business to the area, and you need a property. You have decided you want to own rather than lease, for a variety of reasons that we don't need to delve into too much. The market of good quality commercial property for sale is thin despite high vacancy, due to prop 13. So you're incentivized to build new. You add more commercial real estate to the region and occupy it, and value the property based on its nominal per-square-foot value which is itself based on inflated commercial values around you due to the aforementioned artificially high asking price. This is nice for the local authority collecting property taxes, so they're happy to approve your new construction, and by the way, you borrow money from a bank based on this valuation in order to finance your construction. You're bringing jobs to the area! You're adding to the bank's repackaged mortgage-backed securities portfolio! Yay! You just added to the housing crisis, did not help struggling commercial property owners reduce their vacancy rates to a point where they can handle their loans, helped to support artificially high commercial property valuations, and consumed some more open space that should have been either housing or green. Meanwhile that office building a mile away that could have housed you is increasingly derelict as its owner, struggling just to pay his loan, can't afford to maintain it properly; his vacancies climb due to lovely maintenance until his business fails and he's forced to dump his crappy building on the market, and now even potential buyers like those growing businesses I just mentioned don't want the property. They'd rather build new. There are all these systemic problems that prop 13 actively makes worse in sneaky ways. And municipalities and states often aren't helping; they'd rather extend tax breaks to new business, convert slums into new commercial/residential space for the wealthy, and crow about adding jobs, than regulate commercial property loans, force banks to reassess properties taking vacancy into account, insist that those new jobs being created get housed in existing commercial buildings with vacancies, or whatever else is needed to stop this idiotic cycle. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jan 23, 2020 |
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Jan 23, 2020 19:57
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CPColin posted:I'm still mad about the small grocery + deli we had in town that had to shut down because their landlord jacked the rent up to "market rate," whereupon the location sat empty for two years. Cities should tax every landlord with an empty storefront equivalent to the loss in sales tax every month.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:00
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AngryBooch posted:Cities should tax every landlord with an empty storefront equivalent to the loss in sales tax every month. Sales taxes vary hugely per square foot depending on the type of business. Some service-based businesses generate zero sales tax.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:00
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Also just so y'all know, some malls have a cap on the amount of money a business can earn before they start taking a slice. A friend of mine is a small business owner at a mall, and if he has a good month he has to pay a percentage of it to the mall. Keep in mind though that this is on gross, and he already pays the mall for the rent, the taxes, etc on that first chunk of income. So basically the mall takes a percentage of every dollar he makes. That's exactly how they structure it and exactly how they like it.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:05
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CPColin posted:I'm still mad about the small grocery + deli we had in town that had to shut down because their landlord jacked the rent up to "market rate," whereupon the location sat empty for two years. I live near an upscale mall-esque street in the bay area (Burlingame Avenue). About 15-20% of the storefronts are empty now because of how high the rent is (even the lesser units go for $8-12 per sqft/month), and the city council / rear end in a top hat residents are still enforcing zoning requirements that only allow restaurants and consumer-focused retail (e.g., clothing or cell phones) to open business there in the name of "the character of the street experience." They've voted against allowing any other type of business to move in, while staying silent on the fact that no restaurant or smaller clothing store is going to move in with mandatory ten year leases at like a minimum of $6,000+ per month before build-in. (And yet for some reason, The Gap owns five separate stores on the street. I have no explanation for that one.) Most of the new businesses that do move in are salons, simply because salons charge their employees to work there. As long as the owner gets enough suckers to rent chair time, they can make enough to cover lease before any business is accounted for and offload losses to the stylists. Our former bookstore has been empty for six months now, and there are two prominent units that have been empty for more than three years. Leperflesh posted:And note that this is also a disincentive to sell, because while a bank... <snip> Absolutely this too. It's insane.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:05
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every restaurant that's not a high-end place is being forced out of downtown san jose according to my boss his chamber of commerce buddies that are restaurateurs are all worried about labor shortages
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Jan 23, 2020 20:08
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Like my tiny little dip of a toe in the waters of CA real estate laws made me run away as fast as I could. I don't think people get how dysfunctional our society is and how much of it is rumbling forward on inertia from 50 years ago. When that runs out, it stops dead.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:11
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our society is already one where unproductive rent extraction is more rewarded than productive work. if thats not a dead society than its one that is afflicted with a growing gangrene
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Jan 23, 2020 20:17
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:a lender losing money? unthinkable Banks are compelled by law to have a minimum reserve-to-loans ratio. So yeah it's kind of unthinkable.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:19
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:every restaurant that's not a high-end place is being forced out of downtown san jose Downtown SJ is incredibly depressing. Tons of empty store fronts on major streets. My roommate told me the other day he was in the area and noticed the Safeway on 2nd and San Fernando had shut down, which is wild to me considering I remember it being the only source of walkable groceries as an SJSU student besides the poo poo mini-mart on campus. Can't keep a major chain grocery store afloat smack in the middle of the downtown of the nation's 10th largest city, two blocks off a university campus with 33,000+ students. The actual downtown is such a shithole and there's basically no reason to spend any time there besides that's where your job is.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:24
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Does anyone have any information on the homeless sweeps being done in the middle of the homeless count in LA county. Are they intentionally trying to drive down the homeless count numbers to make it look like homelessness is getting better or something? Doesn't that screw with state and federal funding though as I was told that is one of the reasons for the count in the first place. I saw them sweeping homeless on Tuesday in my neighborhood, and our count was last night. LA Street Watch is reporting similar sweeps all over. I weirdly got the exact same route i did last year for homeless count and despite seeing day to day homelessness getting worse in my neighborhood, we saw less tents and homeless last night than last year. We did see 3 different examples of places it looked like a homeless person had been living there recently, but we don't count that.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:29
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JesusIsTehCool posted:Does anyone have any information on the homeless sweeps being done in the middle of the homeless count. Are they intentionally trying to drive down the homeless count numbers to make it look like homelessness is getting better or something? Doesn't that screw with state and federal funding though as I was told that is one of the reasons for the count in the first place. I saw them sweeping homeless on Tuesday in my neighborhood, and our count was last night. LA Street Watch is reporting similar sweeps all over. I weirdly got the exact same route i did last year for homeless count and despite seeing day to day homelessness getting worse in my neighborhood, we saw less tents and homeless last night than last year. We did see 3 different examples of places it looked like a homeless person had been living there recently, but we don't count that. Having a smaller official homeless number has a variety of political advantages.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:30
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Sydin posted:Downtown SJ is incredibly depressing. Tons of empty store fronts on major streets. My roommate told me the other day he was in the area and noticed the Safeway on 2nd and San Fernando had shut down, which is wild to me considering I remember it being the only source of walkable groceries as an SJSU student besides the poo poo mini-mart on campus. Can't keep a major chain grocery store afloat smack in the middle of the downtown of the nation's 10th largest city, two blocks off a university campus with 33,000+ students. The actual downtown is such a shithole and there's basically no reason to spend any time there besides that's where your job is. they claimed that the safeway there had to close because the people who own the parking structure there wanted to increase what they were charging them for it quote:The main problem: Free parking vanished for Safeway patrons, despite strenuous efforts by the city to gain ownership of the underground parking garage adjacent to the store. i also heard the real reason was because they were out of control for shoplifting and other security problems. i don't know about all that, but i did used to pay for parking there and about once a week you'd come across people sleeping in the elevators in the morning
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Jan 23, 2020 20:44
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Jaxyon posted:Having a smaller official homeless number has a variety of political advantages. For funding? It would seem strange to me to intentionally get less money to address homelessness. No one in LA with eyes is going to be convinced that its getting better. regardless of what the official count says. What advantages are you seeing to deflate the homeless count numbers? I will admit I don't really know the details of how count numbers translate to funding so maybe there is something I am missing.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:56
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JesusIsTehCool posted:Does anyone have any information on the homeless sweeps being done in the middle of the homeless count in LA county. I actually saw a tent that had tapped into a ped bridge's lighting to provide power for some stuff, so I'm sure something like that would have tripped off a bunch of complaints.
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Jan 23, 2020 21:01
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JesusIsTehCool posted:For funding? It would seem strange to me to intentionally get less money to address homelessness. No one in LA with eyes is going to be convinced that its getting better. regardless of what the official count says. What advantages are you seeing to deflate the homeless count numbers? I will admit I don't really know the details of how count numbers translate to funding so maybe there is something I am missing. They dont care about the funding because they dont actually care about helping the homeless. It's much more politically advantageous in the short term to just lower the count so politicians can come out and claim that under their watch the homeless population decreased according to an official count. H.P. Hovercraft posted:they claimed that the safeway there had to close because the people who own the parking structure there wanted to increase what they were charging them for it I definitely buy the security angle: my roommate got his phone stolen there years ago, and when I was a student I'd see 1-2 people a month at least get chased out for shoplifting. The parking component is so loving infuriating though: so many people lost a walkable grocery store because some private equity firm decided they could squeeze a few extra bucks out of commuters.
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Jan 23, 2020 21:03
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:every restaurant that's not a high-end place is being forced out of downtown san jose There was an AWESOME Caribbean/Mexican place in a La Costa, CA strip-mall that got pushed out due to high rents ... the place stayed vacant for 5 years.
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Jan 23, 2020 21:06
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