"companies are looking to relocate to higher quality space in more desirable parts of the city, because prices have come down and employers need to be near restaurants and shops to get staffers to come back"
This is a correction that makes sense: occupancy is shifting to benefit the small businesses that provide amenities like restaurants and shops.
SF's attempt to make office park-like experiences in transit deserts made a lot of money for real estate developers but these properties need to be massively written down.
What are the "more desirable parts of the city" with "restaurants and shops?" Union Square? No. SOMA? Not any more. Mission Bay? Boring, plus ballpark traffic. Dogpatch? The cheap warehouses are taken. Financial district? Old skyscrapers.
Mid-market, near Twitter and City Hall? You've got to be kidding.
Sounds like you just don't like SF. That's ok but it doesn't actually explain anything.
Same as NYC, there's a concentration of multi-millionaires that choose to live there. I highlight them specifically because they can live lavishly anywhere they want. That's not a... mistake?
I love being in an office. I think it makes me more productive (in my role, 10% coding 90% management), I enjoy the face to face communication, and I think it is difficult to do some of what I do from my home office.
That said, I would likely need 30-40k from a company to give up the personal convenience of a <60 second commute, the ability to get fresh air when I want it, etc. And when I am in coding mode, the absolute quiet is a must.
I’m a coder that prefers an office with a door and a common area. I actually really miss in person system design meetings - the kind that spill out to the common area and people are passionate and interrupting each other, vs the “wait your turn to talk” online meeting. (I also have not found anything close to a whiteboard wall for design.)
On the other hand I live a mile away from my office and bike in, and I don’t ever want to go back to an hour long commute.
I’ve had the benefit of working with some great managers that made it a point to engage people, but I understand that what I’m describing could feel exclusionary - I actually will take that to heart as well, so thanks. But the fully remote meetings… are completely the opposite of empowering or energizing for me.
If that's how you want to interpret everyday conversation, sure. Making sure everyone gets their word is in another management skill, however. So I'd place that blame on them if the quiet and polite never speak.
Yes, I do live quite close, although that's because I moved closer on purpose. I enjoyed the office even before I live as close (it used to be a 30m commute, now more like 15), but the longer commute definitely made it a slightly less obvious tradeoff. I'm not required to be in the office; with the shorter commute I'm there everyday, whereas with the longer one I was there maybe 4 days a week.
Either AI doesn't work, and there's little demand for office space for people working at AI firms, or it does work, and there's little demand for office space for people working at AI firms.
The AI angle feels like clickbait in this article. Not sure what the fact that Anthropic and OpenAI leased some offices has to do with a sector-wide commercial real estate dropoff (which is not just happening in SF, for the record).
There was some sort of thingy that happened that caused people to work from home. Some of those that could, ended up liking WFH and decided never to work from an office again.
Neither? The article's argument is that the market is down overall, with most firms cutting down on real estate, and AI firms are the rare exception that's still expanding. But this isn't happening because AI "works" or "doesn't work", it's happening because AI firms are flush with VC cash.
This is already being done at least for some properties around the country. One Wilshire in LA was built for law firms in the 1960s, now hosts a data center with a huge amount of internet traffic going through it.
Infeasible for AI workloads because of their enormous power consumption. It’s far cheaper to run additional electrical capacity in rural areas, so that’s where new data centers will have to be.
The city (and it's defendants) refuse to acknowledge or address the problems that prevent people coming to the city:
1. Unreliable and expensive public transportation
2. Expensive tolls and parking
3. High number of car break ins
4. Just a general ugliness to the city: trash, feces, homeless encampments, open drug use, graffiti and boarded up storefronts, crime, and mental illness on full display
Make it easier for people to come in and make them want to come in. With a budget of billions of dollars for such a small city, you'd think these issues would be addressed quickly.
Vancouver also has an enormous amount of visible street homelessness, numbering in the thousands, driven by a housing crisis and lack of mental health supports. The city is also severely experiencing the consequences of toxic drugs flooding the illegal street drug market, as 6+ people are killed by toxic drug overdoses Province wide every day.
The vacancy rate downtown? A mere 14% and only 10% in the Metro Region. Low during an era when other cities such as Calgary and SF are experiencing double that rate.
So I don't think it's homelessness etc that is causing any of these problems. After all, both SF and Vancouver had a severe homelessness and drug problems well before the pandemic.
It is likely that SF's especially tech oriented economy may be a factor, as tech is particularly WFH friendly and may be keeping WFH going on longer than other places.
Vancouver's excellent public transit system may have helped in return to office efforts. When I hear people talk about how great WFH his, they often talk about how miserable their old commutes were. Fix the commute and maybe RTO is more appealing.
But fixing the commute problems is not really something SF can do alone. I do not believe at all that a city alone can move the needle on public transportation, unless we're talking about affordable projects like bike lanes. Vancouver's rapid transit system is only possible due to significant funding from both the Province and the Federal government. The Feds just bailed out Vancouver to prevent service cuts.
Vancouver’s office sector has a higher fraction of occupants who cannot work from home, such as digital animation and effects companies and video game developers, who have special on-site tech and extreme confidentiality requirements that preclude WFH. San Francisco’s typical firm is more likely to be WFH-friendly.
I’d say another factor in Vancouver’s favor here is the concentration of people who live downtown amongst the office towers. San Francisco’s downtown is relatively empty by comparison. So when the office workers left, it hollowed out entirely.
These are just some anecdotes. But I would tend to agree with your comment that it’s unlikely just the drugs and crime keeping offices empty in SF.
Yep I agree. The other advantage Vancouver always had is that there's a pretty significant amount of residential Downtown and near Downtown, and so Downtown didn't fully empty out as badly as many American cities, and there are a massive amount of workers that can walk and bike to work.
I don't have familiarity with the needs of digital effects workers, but I'm unsure that there were any technical barriers for the games folks. There were games studios that shipped games during WFH with all PCs and dev kits on site due to IP issues. The solution was Parsec, a pretty much magical piece of software that is essentially ultra low latency remote desktop.
I remain shocked that so few companies outside of the games industry use this, and the software seems not well known, but maybe everyone else just ships people laptops.
Close colleagues of mine run a video game development company (I worked for a time in that industry). They were doing contract development for one of the huge publishers and were prohibited from doing WFH. During the pandemic, they toughed it out at the office.
Just a heads up: Muni is quite cheap and fairly reliable, with most of the city being within a few minutes walk to a stop. While cheap, I believe it should be 100% free, especially since fares are ~70% tax-funded anyway.
BART is quite expensive, I agree, however it stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit and is not actually managed by the city of San Francisco, but rather the multiple SFBAY counties it serves. That's the one that's used the most by workers coming into and out of the city and there's little SF can do about BART's pricing.
BART itself is facing a funding crisis, and there's a lot of chaos on the trains regularly, unfortunately, which deters a lot of people from taking it.
The solution isn't to subsidize driving + parking even more than it already is, but to fund public transport properly so that more people can take it easily.
Cost aside, I am suprised more don't find Muni pretty dangerous? I can't recall a time I've ridden and had a quiet ride without some crazy stuff happening.
I agree. I was more referring to BART, Caltrain, AC Transit etc that brings people in. Considering the fact that majority of the office workers live outside the city, that public transportation needs to be affordable. And safe.
Bart and Caltrain are reasonably priced when you compare them to LIRR or Metro-North. All 4 are long distance commuter rails, not local public transit.
Edit: White Plains to Grand Central costs $13 on peak while Mountain View to 4th and King is $8. Both are about the same driving distance
While it may be true for Caltrain, Bart cannot be compared to Metro North. A commuter pass that I have used in the past from Long Beach to Grand Central (~30mi) was about $200/month ($250 now). A similar driving distance commute from concord to Powell St (~30mi) would cost you about $290 for 20 visits to the city since Bart doesn’t do commuter passes. Bart also charges you per trip and the min distance rides are very expensive, making it overall a more expensive option to Metro North. And unfortunately it’s the only commute option from the East Bay apart from the AC transit busses commuter busses that charge $7 regardless of the distance.
4th & King is not comparable to Grand Central, which is a prime location. One needs to add the additional cost and time needed to take muni to where most of the offices are actually located.
They're working on extending Caltrain into SF's transit center, but that's currently a ways off.
Is it like this everywhere? What are other cities doing right that SF isn't doing?
Of the big cities I've visited (in CA, OR, WA, IL, DC, NY, CO, NV) and in other developed countries, I think SF is by far the worst, with Seattle a close second and Portland not far behind.
There's a bazillion variables to consider when discussing the livability of a city, but it seems like there is something in particular going on with the major West Coast cities, especially the ones with a lot of income inequality like San Fran and Seattle, where all the nice places are owned by rich tech people and there's not much left for anyone else. On paper they all claim to be solidly leftist, but their realities on the ground are much harsher, with people shitting and shooting up and dying left and right and no real feeling of community or solidarity. They to have very car-dependent cultures too and inferior public transit, which seems to decrease the likelihood of seeing "regular" people walking on the streets.
It was a very different feeling from, say, Chicago, where, yes, there's also crime and mental illness, but most parts of the city felt incredibly safe and warm and neighborly. I felt much more uncomfortable and unsafe in SF than I ever did in Chicago or DC or Denver.
I grew up spending much of my childhood in the SF Bay Area, but it's gotten so much worse in recent years, seemingly in line with the tech booms and then especially the COVID exodus (towards rural communities and WFH). I don't know whether this is a failure of policy or planning or politics or something else, but it's so sad that a city with so much money can fail so badly at being livable. I don't know how the richest state with all these amazingly smart and wealthy people can just turn a blind eye to all the suffering there, unable to provide even basic shelter to so many thousands. Every time I visit Europe or Asia, I become ashamed of the US (and myself).
Are there no objectively testable and verifiable "best practices" for city management? How do other states and countries manage these same issues? We can't be the only ones facing drug use, homelessness, etc. But we are definitely one of the richest societies, so it's not just a problem of budget. What sorts of successful implementations have been done elsewhere?
Also the fact that they've permitted like 16 new homes across the entire city this year so far which certainly doesn't help the housing price situation. Plenty of people want to live in SF but are priced out, and clearly the people who are priced in aren't numerous enough to sustain the city from seeing population and job loss.
Crime for one, can be addressed fairly easily at the current levels it exists in a city like San Francisco. The ease with which people are able to smash car windows in SF is ridiculous. The problem exists because of the lack of enforcement at all levels. I can guarantee that 95% of the smash and grabs can be attributed to maybe 200 individuals at best. If you start rounding them up and make sure they don’t get away with a slap on the wrist, you’ll immediately see the difference. And no, heavy fines and jail sentences for repeat petty crime is not morally questionable.
The same problems exist in lots of cities. Enforcement and recidivism prevention is not easy. You need competent staff and big budgets at all levels. For instance - what if 20 of those 200 are minors. Family court might just release them back to their parents. But if they’re unsupervised then they just do it again. And for adults what level of sentencing do you recommend for a misdemeanor? You can’t put them in prison. So they go to jail then get released and perpetrate again. Seriously, if crime were easy to solve we would be close to solving it, but we’re not.
I am not arguing for “solving crime”. If you read my comment, I specifically addressed the current levels of crime in SF. The current level of law and order in the city is below what is acceptable and achievable by a normally functioning city. Your car will be broken into within minutes of you leaving it, if you have anything at all visible in it. That is NOT the norm cities across the country, except a few. We don’t need to solve crime, we just need to not normalize it.
The rub of this is people conflate to race what they should conflate to economic circumstance. A poor white person is no more or less likely to commit a crime of opportunity as a poor black person, but most people don't understand nuance much less statistics or demography or history. It also doesn't help that a lot of police back then as well as today are racist.
a lot of minority folks are traumatized by not being able to walk down the street without being roughed up by police. innocent until proven guilty should be the bar we aspire to for everyone. if they tried the same tactic in a white neighborhood, it never would have stood.
So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way. Or people jumping subway turnstiles often have other warrants out agains them.
The fact is, the Giulani / Bratton reforms worked. But I guess you prefer more crime. Even if you're the one being mugged?
> So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way.
"The number of stops increased dramatically in 2008 to over half a million, 88% of which did not result in any fine or conviction, peaking in 2011 to 685,724 stops, again with 88% (603,437) resulting in no conviction. Leading to the remaining 82,287 resulting in convictions. On average, from 2002 to 2013, the percentage of individuals stopped without any convictions was 87.6%." [1]
Not terribly distinctive. They got it right less than 1/8th of the time. If that is your argument, that they were only stopping people they think had guns and were going to commit a violent crime, it's a terribly poor one. The vast majority of people were detained by the police with no cause other than looking a particular way.
So those stats (from a biased source!) are from 2008.
I guess that means you're happy with going back to the early days of Bratton's policing, then? By 2008 the battle was mostly won.
Assuming I believe your numbers (a stretch, but stay with me): do you have some other way of catching those 82,287 convictions? Or you just don't care?
The reason they were in minority neighborhoods is that that's where the crime is. And also where the crime victims are.
I care about catching guilty people, but I think we must protect the innocent from harassment as much as possible. I value liberty more than punishment.
Would you support this countrywide? Would you also support something like increased internet surveillance? A digital stop and frisk of every person, so we can catch all the digital bad guys? If so, why not? Because you might get caught up in it? I'm wondering where your line for these sorts of impositions is. It's easy to be for something if you don't expect to get caught in it.
I know that if I was mugged I might be more prone to accepting this sort of liberty loss, but that wouldn't be because I changed my ethical stance, it'd be because I was hurt and scared.
So you have to resort to hypotheticals to make your point. That sorta proves you've lost.
> I value liberty more than punishment
Putting your thumb on the scales and misstating the question. It's not about "punishment" -- it's safety. Yes, fear of punishment does dissuade some criminals from preying on victims.
And you've just admitted why NYC'ers broadly support stop-and-frisk: because they're "scared", too. As if that's something to be ashamed of.
As for "if you don't expect to get caught in it" -- you're right, I don't look like a mugger. You probably don't, either.
You can't have "universal collective transportation" simply because it's hyper-inefficient. A bus is more efficient than a car if at least half-loaded, but to cover any possible people needs you need to travel nearly empty or empty most of the time. Collective transport was born to bring workers back and forth to/from the factory, and that's efficient because you have a 99% full scenario. For political reasons it got extended to general population move in an era where owning a car was a thing only for very few. It was a nice idea for a time where we were at the dawn of a big abundance of resources. Then it became a business and that's the reason it's a fail. As a business it grab subsidy and tickets but still can't offer more than sub-par experience.
The point the defendants of the city model fails to accept is that the city have had many reasons to exists, nowadays the sole left is financial capitalism, than need "the sharing economy" where 99% own nothing and have to share scarce resources piloted by the social score imposed by the 1% who rule. This model is untenable environmentally, humanly and practically, see from Neom to Arkadag, Innopolis, ... failures as a proof. The new deal is technically only possible in a spread society of small semi-autonomous buildings where there is room to evolve, room to relocate to livable areas (landslides, wildfires, floods etc) for the present and future time when for instance we can pump water so we do not need to live in the deepest part of a valley to get clean water every days knowing we will be flooded occasionally like before.
Cities have finished all others economical reasons to exists and nowadays having buildings occupied less than 12h/24 commuting between them so see ads (shop windows) and casually click on them (consume what they sell) it's a waste of resources we can't afford for all.
I do not understand the question, trying to speculate I can say that the "downtown" model was needed in the past, where anything was on paper so it's useful to have a specific place where all paper works are done, while others for specific activities like commerce, factories producing various goods and so on. A "zoning" mandated by the need of physical proximity. As an example you file your revenues declaration than you go to the bank nearby and pay what's due, since you are there you also go to your carrier to ask for another contract etc etc etc, similarly before supermarkets you go to a specific place where anyone commercializing food go so in the same area you can buy meet, fruits, bread, ...
You can see this model as the "universal city factory".
This model need density, not too much but enough and it's not only not needed anymore, but it's now incompatible with current tech and climate change. Since the '80s logistic became cheap and quick enough that delocalizing became a better option then being nearby your customers, with modern TLCs/IT we do not need the office anymore because we do not need to work with paper physically walking around. We need websites/APIs as "the office where you need to go to file tax, make a payment etc", a desktop as a tool to act instead of walking around. Modern logistic also demand space: delivery anything in a dense city is a nightmare delivery in a sparse area, not too low dense but still sparse, it's a pleasure, there is room to park everywhere, no issues reaching the nth floor with potentially heavy and big package and so on. Oh, yes you need to travel a bit more, but hey, there is plenty of space for p.v. and your delivery van fleet might have quick replace batteries like Renault QuickDrop at yours warehouses. Similarly those who not WFH still have parking places where they work in a fixed location to plug their EV and recharge from local p.v. being not anymore artificially spread for the sake of car makers like USA suburbs but being intermixed like EU Rivieras you still do not made too much distance to have recharging issues. Having a bit of space around and small buildings allow for cheap constructions and evolution. This is the new "right density" for the economy of scale.
Only there are some looser: in this model we all own, so no market for Uber, we eat in fixed locations with plenty of space, not while commuting so, no market for Just Eat, room at home for anything so no various services like public washing machines and so on. The financial capitalism loose dramatically while a new spread, quickly evolving, in a constant change without the need for much revolutions, of SMEs etc flourish. Not everything can be done at this scale, like steel production but hey, even Apple have planted a small foundry hidden nearby some homes. We definitively can work in most cases at small scale. Unfortunately the big losers are also much powerful and disagree.
> You can see this model as the "universal city factory".
> This model need density, not too much but enough and it's not only not needed anymore, but it's now incompatible with current tech and climate change.
Interesting, that's backwards for me. It's true that technology means we no longer have to shuffle pieces of paper around, but that doesn't change the fact that some people like being around other people. As far as climate change, imo a few dense core cities are better than endless suburban sprawl because by taking up less per person, there's more left over for nature. If it's dense enough you don't need a car which is better for the environment because you're walking everywhere.
Apple gets away with a tiny foundry in Cupertino because they have Foxconn to run great big factories in China. That's not a globally workable model.
Liking does not means is cheap or sustainable though.
> few dense core cities are better than endless suburban sprawl because by taking up less per person, there's more left over for nature.
Actually it's the opposite, first because you do not need less per person, you do need more in natural resources:
- big buildings demand much more infra around and themselves consume much more raw materials to be built, beware that OLD buildings are another beast respect current one with seismic and fire safety, energetic performances, ventilation and so on. In the past a small 4-5-storey building (let's say 20 apartments) was on-par or even a bit cheaper than 20 correspondent homes because homes tend to be bigger and have 20 roofs. But such ancient buildings does not care about how much energy they need to heat, they have no cooling, no seismic designs, ... they are just "CA boxes" stacked around with small additions (clean and dark water, electricity, windows etc). Things have changed, elevators, stairs, also have their slice;
- supporting infra is much more impacting as density, few dense are is like sit on few staple, it hurt, MUCH, you create heavy masses (subsidence), divert much water altering water cycle for a very larger area, produce much concentrated pollution, absorb much heat (a big slice of thermal mass exposed to the Sun) and so on, again modern cities are not old ones still made of small buildings where peoples tend to work at ground floor living "just upstairs", there are still no factories in cities anymore, because nowadays change is quick enough and scale vary enough we need room to change and a dense city is too dense for that, so you still need to go back and forth the city and moving all goods etc;
- finally the most important: cities can't evolve. Today "A-class" homes are tomorrow G-class, today needed infra are tomorrow relic and missing new needed infra, just see how hard is in dense EU cities parcel delivery. We have had parcels before, they were just rare and letters just common, now it's the opposite so they can't got delivery on feet by the postman nor they enter the small set of post box in the hall and it's a new logistic nightmare, such a small change such a big issue. To change a city you need to rebuilt it and that's dramatically expensive.
Also, nowadays in spread area (beware, spread A BIT, not large ranches around the Steppe) you do need to travel MUCH LESS than before, first all works doable from home should and can be WFH, witch just erase commuting for a big slice of population, having longer trips to buy food means you stock more at home and you have room to stock, so for instance instead of buy small packaged stuff where the package is single use and prominent respect of what's packaged you buy large stuff with much less disposable package. Being able to do much more via web means again much less trips. In the end you travel of course, but much less than before, and you can travel electric on scale, because most people can recharge at home or at work (where the work is in a fixed place, from local p.v.). You probably thing about USA style suburbs where there are ONLY homes for a very big area and somewhere else ONLY shops etc, such design it's not the spread design, it's the Ford design to sell more cars. The kind of density I advocate is the EU Riviera model, where homes and shops are intermixed, so you still have few shops in 1 km, a school nearby and so on. Where you can live in a 30km radius instead of 15' walk ignoring the immense infra and supply chain needed to serve you in the 15' setup.
The only who benefit from modern dense cities are those of the financial capitalism that need such "big scale" to rule, at a less dense scale they fail. Maybe local foundries are untenable but that's not true for much more, in the end we can have few cities to serve some productions composed only of workers for a certain period of time, of course workers have family, children but it's still a temporary location, they'll go out when retiring or changing job and in that case such cities became much smaller. The New Urban Agenda essentially agree we can't build large dense cities, Neom, Arkadag, are good examples of such failure as original Fordlandia, but they still hope to build small cities of essentially slaves, who depend by third party services, owning nothing, to live, and even if that's might be possible it's not good for nature nor for us. Now take a look at "urban" air mobility push https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... did you think it could be "urban"? I think it PERFECTLY much a spread living, matching actually the old model of the gentleman who run by car seeing slaves working by feet around, the advertise like https://appliedevtolconcepts.com/ who perfectly mach '30s car advertisement.
They’re burning billions mostly in datacenter runs. AI researchers could be doing 1M+ total comp per year but there aren’t that many to fill vacant office space.
You are betting against the house though and the house always wins, logic be damned. commercial real estate is an over 22 trillion dollar market in the U.S., there is a lot of well lobbied vested interest in not letting that money poof into smoke.
Yes, just short real estate investment trusts for commercial property, write puts (options) against these shares (warning make sure they're covered and not naked), or throw money at many of the ivnerse ETFs out there.
Prices haven't really fallen yet to my knowledge. There is a lot of resistance to letting prices fall (marking to market), and many commercial real estate deals are multi-year. RTO mandates indicate that larger employers aren't yet willing to give up office work.
IMO I expect to see something give over then next 3 years, with some markets taking longer to correct.
Shorting a stock is like taking out a loan, but when you pay it back, you don't pay it back at the value you started with, but at the new value. So, if you shorted starting at $100, and it's now worth $10, you could keep those $90, and pay back just the $10.
The opposite of shorting is just buying the stock: exchange the market price $X for a share of stock today, sell later for $Y, profit or loss is $Y - $X. You've made money if the stock has gone UP. Since there's no upper bound on the price of a share but the lower bound is $0, you can lose at most your initial outlay $X, but potential gains are uncapped.
Shorting a stock is borrowing the stock: that is, you get a share of stock today (and sell it today for market price $X) but are liable for returning the share of stock at some time in the future (you obtain it from the market at $Y to do so). The profit or loss is thus $X - $Y. Since there's no upper bound on the price of a share but the lower bound is $0, you can gain at most your initial outlay $X if the price goes to zero, but potential losses are uncapped.
Long: you buy a stock, hold it, later on sell for profit or loss.
Short: you borrow a stock, sell it, hold the money and later on buy the stock back at a lower or higher price you originally sold it for. Then return the stock to the person who lent it to you.
As you fucking should. I tried renting commercial real estate and it was an absolute joke. Like $3k/mo total NNN for 1ksqft of crumbling cement cube in the shitty part of town.
A typical NNN lease (what businesses use) is priced in terms of dollars per square foot per year. A reasonable number would, in fact, be $10/sqft/yr plus the NNNs (insurance, utilities, taxes, another ~$5 maybe) but the land owning class insists it's closer to $25 all in for a crappy shack and whole number multiples for anything "nice".
The $10 number is the base rent, the triple nets are the $5. As such the base rent just represents the cost of money when the structure was built, which most of the time was decades ago. It's been paid off many times over and so the "right" price is what the market will bear.
This is, for lack of a better explitive, fucking awful for the economy. If you have a restaurant district and everyone's paying "maximum sustainable rent", the customer is getting the "minimum sustainable product". If you spend $10 on a salad, more of that money that could be going to fresh local lettuce is being spent on rent so you get a worse product for that $10. The existence of the landlord isn't making the economy bigger better faster wherever, they're...literally just rent seeking.
SF bigger? Not if the current city government has any say, which is a large part of the issue. Why invest in SF with their 16 new units of housing a year when you can just invest in san jose which is increasingly the center of gravity of the bay area, especially the longer the government of SF acts like toddlers?
Its both larger than SF and growing faster than SF. The economy of the bay area is bigger than just software engineering. If this statistic is to be believed, information technology jobs in the bay area only account for 6% of the job market anyhow (1), although they make up the vast majority of the job related headlines for the bay area I am sure.
Alternative theory: As WFH improves, WFH will increasingly mean "Work from Ukraine," "Work from India," and "Work from Ghana." It will be hard to justify SFO salaries.
Vietnam is the cheapest country to live in Asia. Da Nang is the most affordable "world-class" beach in the world. WFH should be about beaches or mountains or museums depending on your taste.
- Central America is a convenient plane hop away, and in the same timezone.
- Parts of Africa and India are anglophone, which makes life easy. Africa is at least somewhat timezone compatible (calls might cut into evening plans, but you don't lose sleep)
The cost-of-living relative to Vietnam is low enough to not matter. There are also middle-income countries where cost-of-living is a bit higher, but with much better infrastructure. Plenty of Southern and Eastern Europe is at about a third of the per-capita GDP of the US.
You're not wrong, but also currently the rust belt, including Detroit, is bouncing back somewhat because it's the last bastion of cheap housing for people who aren't making HN ivory tower money.
> Alternative theory: As WFH improves, WFH will increasingly mean "Work from Ukraine," "Work from India," and "Work from Ghana." It will be hard to justify SFO salaries.
This theory is bullshit. Outsourcing has been a thing for decade. Moving all work to the cheapest possible place has been tried many times, to varying degrees of failure.
I'm wondering what non-traditional uses people will find for this space as rents drop? In Manhattan, there are a few developers who seem to be doing well at converting some office buildings into housing [1], but it seems like quite a challenge. Perhaps there are better uses?
I know several companies relocated precisely because of the corruption and mismanagement. Stripe is a good example and their building remains unoccupied to my knowledge.
More companies have moved out citing SF to be unsafe to operate in.
I don’t know much about how the CCP operates, but China is not a democracy. They don’t have elections in China. San Francisco has elections with numerous candidates.
the standing committee would like to know your location, affirm the territorial unity and sovereignty of the city and county of san francisco immediately
"companies are looking to relocate to higher quality space in more desirable parts of the city, because prices have come down and employers need to be near restaurants and shops to get staffers to come back"
This is a correction that makes sense: occupancy is shifting to benefit the small businesses that provide amenities like restaurants and shops.
SF's attempt to make office park-like experiences in transit deserts made a lot of money for real estate developers but these properties need to be massively written down.
"Transit deserts" is not what's going on here. Bart, Muni, the Salesforce Transit Center? There's lots of transit.
Maybe people don't like the transit, though?
What are the "more desirable parts of the city" with "restaurants and shops?" Union Square? No. SOMA? Not any more. Mission Bay? Boring, plus ballpark traffic. Dogpatch? The cheap warehouses are taken. Financial district? Old skyscrapers. Mid-market, near Twitter and City Hall? You've got to be kidding.
Sounds like you just don't like SF. That's ok but it doesn't actually explain anything.
Same as NYC, there's a concentration of multi-millionaires that choose to live there. I highlight them specifically because they can live lavishly anywhere they want. That's not a... mistake?
There are nice residential areas, such as Pacific Heights and parts of the Sunset.. But where are the nice, homeless-free office areas?
I love being in an office. I think it makes me more productive (in my role, 10% coding 90% management), I enjoy the face to face communication, and I think it is difficult to do some of what I do from my home office.
That said, I would likely need 30-40k from a company to give up the personal convenience of a <60 second commute, the ability to get fresh air when I want it, etc. And when I am in coding mode, the absolute quiet is a must.
Managers like being in an office.
Coders like being at home.
I’m a coder that prefers an office with a door and a common area. I actually really miss in person system design meetings - the kind that spill out to the common area and people are passionate and interrupting each other, vs the “wait your turn to talk” online meeting. (I also have not found anything close to a whiteboard wall for design.)
On the other hand I live a mile away from my office and bike in, and I don’t ever want to go back to an hour long commute.
> passionate and interrupting each other
So whoever's loudest, rudest, and wrong wins over someone quiet, polite, and right?
I’ve had the benefit of working with some great managers that made it a point to engage people, but I understand that what I’m describing could feel exclusionary - I actually will take that to heart as well, so thanks. But the fully remote meetings… are completely the opposite of empowering or energizing for me.
If that's how you want to interpret everyday conversation, sure. Making sure everyone gets their word is in another management skill, however. So I'd place that blame on them if the quiet and polite never speak.
For whatever it's worth: coder, like being in the office :)
The organized environment, easy coffee, and not needing to dedicate a bunch of home office space make it a big win for me personally.
Do you live close to the office?
Yes, I do live quite close, although that's because I moved closer on purpose. I enjoyed the office even before I live as close (it used to be a 30m commute, now more like 15), but the longer commute definitely made it a slightly less obvious tradeoff. I'm not required to be in the office; with the shorter commute I'm there everyday, whereas with the longer one I was there maybe 4 days a week.
Yeah, about 15 is the furthest I'd be wiling to go for an in office job. Otherwise you're losing an hour a day just to travel.
are you being sarcastic?
Either AI doesn't work, and there's little demand for office space for people working at AI firms, or it does work, and there's little demand for office space for people working at AI firms.
The AI angle feels like clickbait in this article. Not sure what the fact that Anthropic and OpenAI leased some offices has to do with a sector-wide commercial real estate dropoff (which is not just happening in SF, for the record).
There was some sort of thingy that happened that caused people to work from home. Some of those that could, ended up liking WFH and decided never to work from an office again.
This is totally orthogonal to AI working.
Neither? The article's argument is that the market is down overall, with most firms cutting down on real estate, and AI firms are the rare exception that's still expanding. But this isn't happening because AI "works" or "doesn't work", it's happening because AI firms are flush with VC cash.
There's only one answer: We teach AI how to work and pay rent and we all become landlords instead.
This is already being done at least for some properties around the country. One Wilshire in LA was built for law firms in the 1960s, now hosts a data center with a huge amount of internet traffic going through it.
Infeasible for AI workloads because of their enormous power consumption. It’s far cheaper to run additional electrical capacity in rural areas, so that’s where new data centers will have to be.
The city (and it's defendants) refuse to acknowledge or address the problems that prevent people coming to the city:
1. Unreliable and expensive public transportation 2. Expensive tolls and parking 3. High number of car break ins 4. Just a general ugliness to the city: trash, feces, homeless encampments, open drug use, graffiti and boarded up storefronts, crime, and mental illness on full display
Make it easier for people to come in and make them want to come in. With a budget of billions of dollars for such a small city, you'd think these issues would be addressed quickly.
Vancouver also has an enormous amount of visible street homelessness, numbering in the thousands, driven by a housing crisis and lack of mental health supports. The city is also severely experiencing the consequences of toxic drugs flooding the illegal street drug market, as 6+ people are killed by toxic drug overdoses Province wide every day.
The vacancy rate downtown? A mere 14% and only 10% in the Metro Region. Low during an era when other cities such as Calgary and SF are experiencing double that rate.
https://www.biv.com/news/real-estate/metro-vancouver-office-...
So I don't think it's homelessness etc that is causing any of these problems. After all, both SF and Vancouver had a severe homelessness and drug problems well before the pandemic.
It is likely that SF's especially tech oriented economy may be a factor, as tech is particularly WFH friendly and may be keeping WFH going on longer than other places.
Vancouver's excellent public transit system may have helped in return to office efforts. When I hear people talk about how great WFH his, they often talk about how miserable their old commutes were. Fix the commute and maybe RTO is more appealing.
But fixing the commute problems is not really something SF can do alone. I do not believe at all that a city alone can move the needle on public transportation, unless we're talking about affordable projects like bike lanes. Vancouver's rapid transit system is only possible due to significant funding from both the Province and the Federal government. The Feds just bailed out Vancouver to prevent service cuts.
TransLink set to receive $825M from federal gov’t funding over five years https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2024/07/03/translink-canada-go...
Vancouver’s office sector has a higher fraction of occupants who cannot work from home, such as digital animation and effects companies and video game developers, who have special on-site tech and extreme confidentiality requirements that preclude WFH. San Francisco’s typical firm is more likely to be WFH-friendly.
I’d say another factor in Vancouver’s favor here is the concentration of people who live downtown amongst the office towers. San Francisco’s downtown is relatively empty by comparison. So when the office workers left, it hollowed out entirely.
These are just some anecdotes. But I would tend to agree with your comment that it’s unlikely just the drugs and crime keeping offices empty in SF.
Yep I agree. The other advantage Vancouver always had is that there's a pretty significant amount of residential Downtown and near Downtown, and so Downtown didn't fully empty out as badly as many American cities, and there are a massive amount of workers that can walk and bike to work.
I don't have familiarity with the needs of digital effects workers, but I'm unsure that there were any technical barriers for the games folks. There were games studios that shipped games during WFH with all PCs and dev kits on site due to IP issues. The solution was Parsec, a pretty much magical piece of software that is essentially ultra low latency remote desktop.
https://parsec.app/
I remain shocked that so few companies outside of the games industry use this, and the software seems not well known, but maybe everyone else just ships people laptops.
Close colleagues of mine run a video game development company (I worked for a time in that industry). They were doing contract development for one of the huge publishers and were prohibited from doing WFH. During the pandemic, they toughed it out at the office.
Just a heads up: Muni is quite cheap and fairly reliable, with most of the city being within a few minutes walk to a stop. While cheap, I believe it should be 100% free, especially since fares are ~70% tax-funded anyway.
BART is quite expensive, I agree, however it stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit and is not actually managed by the city of San Francisco, but rather the multiple SFBAY counties it serves. That's the one that's used the most by workers coming into and out of the city and there's little SF can do about BART's pricing.
BART itself is facing a funding crisis, and there's a lot of chaos on the trains regularly, unfortunately, which deters a lot of people from taking it.
The solution isn't to subsidize driving + parking even more than it already is, but to fund public transport properly so that more people can take it easily.
Cost aside, I am suprised more don't find Muni pretty dangerous? I can't recall a time I've ridden and had a quiet ride without some crazy stuff happening.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-muni...
Muni makes me miss Chicago's CTA, which I used to think was the wild-west for crime till I moved here.
I agree. I was more referring to BART, Caltrain, AC Transit etc that brings people in. Considering the fact that majority of the office workers live outside the city, that public transportation needs to be affordable. And safe.
Bart and Caltrain are reasonably priced when you compare them to LIRR or Metro-North. All 4 are long distance commuter rails, not local public transit.
Edit: White Plains to Grand Central costs $13 on peak while Mountain View to 4th and King is $8. Both are about the same driving distance
While it may be true for Caltrain, Bart cannot be compared to Metro North. A commuter pass that I have used in the past from Long Beach to Grand Central (~30mi) was about $200/month ($250 now). A similar driving distance commute from concord to Powell St (~30mi) would cost you about $290 for 20 visits to the city since Bart doesn’t do commuter passes. Bart also charges you per trip and the min distance rides are very expensive, making it overall a more expensive option to Metro North. And unfortunately it’s the only commute option from the East Bay apart from the AC transit busses commuter busses that charge $7 regardless of the distance.
4th & King is not comparable to Grand Central, which is a prime location. One needs to add the additional cost and time needed to take muni to where most of the offices are actually located.
They're working on extending Caltrain into SF's transit center, but that's currently a ways off.
And it's becoming unnecessary. The center of SF business activity is moving towards 4th and King, and away from the old financial district.
Citation needed, and even so it wouldn't compare to directly commuting to Grand Central which is incredibly well connected to the rest of Manhattan.
Look up decline of San Francisco financial district in Google. There are many articles.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/map-downtown-san-fran...
turn half the buildings residential and the problem is solved.
Muni metro is dog slow for the entire street running section, I could literally run faster
Is it like this everywhere? What are other cities doing right that SF isn't doing?
Of the big cities I've visited (in CA, OR, WA, IL, DC, NY, CO, NV) and in other developed countries, I think SF is by far the worst, with Seattle a close second and Portland not far behind.
There's a bazillion variables to consider when discussing the livability of a city, but it seems like there is something in particular going on with the major West Coast cities, especially the ones with a lot of income inequality like San Fran and Seattle, where all the nice places are owned by rich tech people and there's not much left for anyone else. On paper they all claim to be solidly leftist, but their realities on the ground are much harsher, with people shitting and shooting up and dying left and right and no real feeling of community or solidarity. They to have very car-dependent cultures too and inferior public transit, which seems to decrease the likelihood of seeing "regular" people walking on the streets.
It was a very different feeling from, say, Chicago, where, yes, there's also crime and mental illness, but most parts of the city felt incredibly safe and warm and neighborly. I felt much more uncomfortable and unsafe in SF than I ever did in Chicago or DC or Denver.
I grew up spending much of my childhood in the SF Bay Area, but it's gotten so much worse in recent years, seemingly in line with the tech booms and then especially the COVID exodus (towards rural communities and WFH). I don't know whether this is a failure of policy or planning or politics or something else, but it's so sad that a city with so much money can fail so badly at being livable. I don't know how the richest state with all these amazingly smart and wealthy people can just turn a blind eye to all the suffering there, unable to provide even basic shelter to so many thousands. Every time I visit Europe or Asia, I become ashamed of the US (and myself).
Are there no objectively testable and verifiable "best practices" for city management? How do other states and countries manage these same issues? We can't be the only ones facing drug use, homelessness, etc. But we are definitely one of the richest societies, so it's not just a problem of budget. What sorts of successful implementations have been done elsewhere?
Also the fact that they've permitted like 16 new homes across the entire city this year so far which certainly doesn't help the housing price situation. Plenty of people want to live in SF but are priced out, and clearly the people who are priced in aren't numerous enough to sustain the city from seeing population and job loss.
Crime and homelessness aren’t areas that can be addressed quickly - unless the method is morally questionable
Crime for one, can be addressed fairly easily at the current levels it exists in a city like San Francisco. The ease with which people are able to smash car windows in SF is ridiculous. The problem exists because of the lack of enforcement at all levels. I can guarantee that 95% of the smash and grabs can be attributed to maybe 200 individuals at best. If you start rounding them up and make sure they don’t get away with a slap on the wrist, you’ll immediately see the difference. And no, heavy fines and jail sentences for repeat petty crime is not morally questionable.
The same problems exist in lots of cities. Enforcement and recidivism prevention is not easy. You need competent staff and big budgets at all levels. For instance - what if 20 of those 200 are minors. Family court might just release them back to their parents. But if they’re unsupervised then they just do it again. And for adults what level of sentencing do you recommend for a misdemeanor? You can’t put them in prison. So they go to jail then get released and perpetrate again. Seriously, if crime were easy to solve we would be close to solving it, but we’re not.
I am not arguing for “solving crime”. If you read my comment, I specifically addressed the current levels of crime in SF. The current level of law and order in the city is below what is acceptable and achievable by a normally functioning city. Your car will be broken into within minutes of you leaving it, if you have anything at all visible in it. That is NOT the norm cities across the country, except a few. We don’t need to solve crime, we just need to not normalize it.
Russia solved this problem long ago. Parents are criminally liable for behavior of minors. Either they control them or they answer for their actions.
And societies like Japan solved it by making it unacceptable as a society and a culture.
NYC reduced crime enormously in the 1990's and beyond. Were those methods all "morally questionable" for you?
broken windows policing and stop and frisk were indeed morally questionable strategies as they were primarily used on minority communities
The rub of this is people conflate to race what they should conflate to economic circumstance. A poor white person is no more or less likely to commit a crime of opportunity as a poor black person, but most people don't understand nuance much less statistics or demography or history. It also doesn't help that a lot of police back then as well as today are racist.
And yet, many minority members are alive today because they were not murdered by those criminals caught by stop-and-frisk, or broken windows policing.
a lot of minority folks are traumatized by not being able to walk down the street without being roughed up by police. innocent until proven guilty should be the bar we aspire to for everyone. if they tried the same tactic in a white neighborhood, it never would have stood.
We are OK with giving up civil liberties when it's the liberties of minorities?
We are OK with these minorities becoming crime victims, because we don't want to inconvenience potential criminals?
Assuming all they are is "potential criminals", they are, in fact, innocent people.
So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way. Or people jumping subway turnstiles often have other warrants out agains them.
The fact is, the Giulani / Bratton reforms worked. But I guess you prefer more crime. Even if you're the one being mugged?
> So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way.
"The number of stops increased dramatically in 2008 to over half a million, 88% of which did not result in any fine or conviction, peaking in 2011 to 685,724 stops, again with 88% (603,437) resulting in no conviction. Leading to the remaining 82,287 resulting in convictions. On average, from 2002 to 2013, the percentage of individuals stopped without any convictions was 87.6%." [1]
Not terribly distinctive. They got it right less than 1/8th of the time. If that is your argument, that they were only stopping people they think had guns and were going to commit a violent crime, it's a terribly poor one. The vast majority of people were detained by the police with no cause other than looking a particular way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
So those stats (from a biased source!) are from 2008.
I guess that means you're happy with going back to the early days of Bratton's policing, then? By 2008 the battle was mostly won.
Assuming I believe your numbers (a stretch, but stay with me): do you have some other way of catching those 82,287 convictions? Or you just don't care?
The reason they were in minority neighborhoods is that that's where the crime is. And also where the crime victims are.
I care about catching guilty people, but I think we must protect the innocent from harassment as much as possible. I value liberty more than punishment.
Would you support this countrywide? Would you also support something like increased internet surveillance? A digital stop and frisk of every person, so we can catch all the digital bad guys? If so, why not? Because you might get caught up in it? I'm wondering where your line for these sorts of impositions is. It's easy to be for something if you don't expect to get caught in it.
I know that if I was mugged I might be more prone to accepting this sort of liberty loss, but that wouldn't be because I changed my ethical stance, it'd be because I was hurt and scared.
So you have to resort to hypotheticals to make your point. That sorta proves you've lost.
> I value liberty more than punishment
Putting your thumb on the scales and misstating the question. It's not about "punishment" -- it's safety. Yes, fear of punishment does dissuade some criminals from preying on victims.
And you've just admitted why NYC'ers broadly support stop-and-frisk: because they're "scared", too. As if that's something to be ashamed of.
As for "if you don't expect to get caught in it" -- you're right, I don't look like a mugger. You probably don't, either.
You can't have "universal collective transportation" simply because it's hyper-inefficient. A bus is more efficient than a car if at least half-loaded, but to cover any possible people needs you need to travel nearly empty or empty most of the time. Collective transport was born to bring workers back and forth to/from the factory, and that's efficient because you have a 99% full scenario. For political reasons it got extended to general population move in an era where owning a car was a thing only for very few. It was a nice idea for a time where we were at the dawn of a big abundance of resources. Then it became a business and that's the reason it's a fail. As a business it grab subsidy and tickets but still can't offer more than sub-par experience.
The point the defendants of the city model fails to accept is that the city have had many reasons to exists, nowadays the sole left is financial capitalism, than need "the sharing economy" where 99% own nothing and have to share scarce resources piloted by the social score imposed by the 1% who rule. This model is untenable environmentally, humanly and practically, see from Neom to Arkadag, Innopolis, ... failures as a proof. The new deal is technically only possible in a spread society of small semi-autonomous buildings where there is room to evolve, room to relocate to livable areas (landslides, wildfires, floods etc) for the present and future time when for instance we can pump water so we do not need to live in the deepest part of a valley to get clean water every days knowing we will be flooded occasionally like before.
Cities have finished all others economical reasons to exists and nowadays having buildings occupied less than 12h/24 commuting between them so see ads (shop windows) and casually click on them (consume what they sell) it's a waste of resources we can't afford for all.
How do streetcars in downtown areas prior the arrival of cars factor into your narrative?
I do not understand the question, trying to speculate I can say that the "downtown" model was needed in the past, where anything was on paper so it's useful to have a specific place where all paper works are done, while others for specific activities like commerce, factories producing various goods and so on. A "zoning" mandated by the need of physical proximity. As an example you file your revenues declaration than you go to the bank nearby and pay what's due, since you are there you also go to your carrier to ask for another contract etc etc etc, similarly before supermarkets you go to a specific place where anyone commercializing food go so in the same area you can buy meet, fruits, bread, ...
You can see this model as the "universal city factory".
This model need density, not too much but enough and it's not only not needed anymore, but it's now incompatible with current tech and climate change. Since the '80s logistic became cheap and quick enough that delocalizing became a better option then being nearby your customers, with modern TLCs/IT we do not need the office anymore because we do not need to work with paper physically walking around. We need websites/APIs as "the office where you need to go to file tax, make a payment etc", a desktop as a tool to act instead of walking around. Modern logistic also demand space: delivery anything in a dense city is a nightmare delivery in a sparse area, not too low dense but still sparse, it's a pleasure, there is room to park everywhere, no issues reaching the nth floor with potentially heavy and big package and so on. Oh, yes you need to travel a bit more, but hey, there is plenty of space for p.v. and your delivery van fleet might have quick replace batteries like Renault QuickDrop at yours warehouses. Similarly those who not WFH still have parking places where they work in a fixed location to plug their EV and recharge from local p.v. being not anymore artificially spread for the sake of car makers like USA suburbs but being intermixed like EU Rivieras you still do not made too much distance to have recharging issues. Having a bit of space around and small buildings allow for cheap constructions and evolution. This is the new "right density" for the economy of scale.
Only there are some looser: in this model we all own, so no market for Uber, we eat in fixed locations with plenty of space, not while commuting so, no market for Just Eat, room at home for anything so no various services like public washing machines and so on. The financial capitalism loose dramatically while a new spread, quickly evolving, in a constant change without the need for much revolutions, of SMEs etc flourish. Not everything can be done at this scale, like steel production but hey, even Apple have planted a small foundry hidden nearby some homes. We definitively can work in most cases at small scale. Unfortunately the big losers are also much powerful and disagree.
> You can see this model as the "universal city factory".
> This model need density, not too much but enough and it's not only not needed anymore, but it's now incompatible with current tech and climate change.
Interesting, that's backwards for me. It's true that technology means we no longer have to shuffle pieces of paper around, but that doesn't change the fact that some people like being around other people. As far as climate change, imo a few dense core cities are better than endless suburban sprawl because by taking up less per person, there's more left over for nature. If it's dense enough you don't need a car which is better for the environment because you're walking everywhere.
Apple gets away with a tiny foundry in Cupertino because they have Foxconn to run great big factories in China. That's not a globally workable model.
> some people like being around other
Liking does not means is cheap or sustainable though.
> few dense core cities are better than endless suburban sprawl because by taking up less per person, there's more left over for nature.
Actually it's the opposite, first because you do not need less per person, you do need more in natural resources:
- big buildings demand much more infra around and themselves consume much more raw materials to be built, beware that OLD buildings are another beast respect current one with seismic and fire safety, energetic performances, ventilation and so on. In the past a small 4-5-storey building (let's say 20 apartments) was on-par or even a bit cheaper than 20 correspondent homes because homes tend to be bigger and have 20 roofs. But such ancient buildings does not care about how much energy they need to heat, they have no cooling, no seismic designs, ... they are just "CA boxes" stacked around with small additions (clean and dark water, electricity, windows etc). Things have changed, elevators, stairs, also have their slice;
- supporting infra is much more impacting as density, few dense are is like sit on few staple, it hurt, MUCH, you create heavy masses (subsidence), divert much water altering water cycle for a very larger area, produce much concentrated pollution, absorb much heat (a big slice of thermal mass exposed to the Sun) and so on, again modern cities are not old ones still made of small buildings where peoples tend to work at ground floor living "just upstairs", there are still no factories in cities anymore, because nowadays change is quick enough and scale vary enough we need room to change and a dense city is too dense for that, so you still need to go back and forth the city and moving all goods etc;
- finally the most important: cities can't evolve. Today "A-class" homes are tomorrow G-class, today needed infra are tomorrow relic and missing new needed infra, just see how hard is in dense EU cities parcel delivery. We have had parcels before, they were just rare and letters just common, now it's the opposite so they can't got delivery on feet by the postman nor they enter the small set of post box in the hall and it's a new logistic nightmare, such a small change such a big issue. To change a city you need to rebuilt it and that's dramatically expensive.
Also, nowadays in spread area (beware, spread A BIT, not large ranches around the Steppe) you do need to travel MUCH LESS than before, first all works doable from home should and can be WFH, witch just erase commuting for a big slice of population, having longer trips to buy food means you stock more at home and you have room to stock, so for instance instead of buy small packaged stuff where the package is single use and prominent respect of what's packaged you buy large stuff with much less disposable package. Being able to do much more via web means again much less trips. In the end you travel of course, but much less than before, and you can travel electric on scale, because most people can recharge at home or at work (where the work is in a fixed place, from local p.v.). You probably thing about USA style suburbs where there are ONLY homes for a very big area and somewhere else ONLY shops etc, such design it's not the spread design, it's the Ford design to sell more cars. The kind of density I advocate is the EU Riviera model, where homes and shops are intermixed, so you still have few shops in 1 km, a school nearby and so on. Where you can live in a 30km radius instead of 15' walk ignoring the immense infra and supply chain needed to serve you in the 15' setup.
The only who benefit from modern dense cities are those of the financial capitalism that need such "big scale" to rule, at a less dense scale they fail. Maybe local foundries are untenable but that's not true for much more, in the end we can have few cities to serve some productions composed only of workers for a certain period of time, of course workers have family, children but it's still a temporary location, they'll go out when retiring or changing job and in that case such cities became much smaller. The New Urban Agenda essentially agree we can't build large dense cities, Neom, Arkadag, are good examples of such failure as original Fordlandia, but they still hope to build small cities of essentially slaves, who depend by third party services, owning nothing, to live, and even if that's might be possible it's not good for nature nor for us. Now take a look at "urban" air mobility push https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... did you think it could be "urban"? I think it PERFECTLY much a spread living, matching actually the old model of the gentleman who run by car seeing slaves working by feet around, the advertise like https://appliedevtolconcepts.com/ who perfectly mach '30s car advertisement.
AI firms don’t hire that many people.
They’re burning billions mostly in datacenter runs. AI researchers could be doing 1M+ total comp per year but there aren’t that many to fill vacant office space.
My WFH-driven long bet against commercial real estate that I've held since pre-covid times continues to bear fruit
Is there an effective means of shorting commercial real estate available to retail or "small" accredited investors? Seems like an easy bet to take.
You are betting against the house though and the house always wins, logic be damned. commercial real estate is an over 22 trillion dollar market in the U.S., there is a lot of well lobbied vested interest in not letting that money poof into smoke.
Yes, just short real estate investment trusts for commercial property, write puts (options) against these shares (warning make sure they're covered and not naked), or throw money at many of the ivnerse ETFs out there.
> warning make sure they're covered and not naked
Covered puts wouldn’t be net short. They're net neutral or positive as the puts expire worthless if the price doesn’t drop.
You can hedge your puts by buying some calls to limit the max exposure if the price rises.
Buying puts would be a net short position.
>Seems like an easy bet to take.
Well, yeah, you're two years too late.
Prices haven't really fallen yet to my knowledge. There is a lot of resistance to letting prices fall (marking to market), and many commercial real estate deals are multi-year. RTO mandates indicate that larger employers aren't yet willing to give up office work.
IMO I expect to see something give over then next 3 years, with some markets taking longer to correct.
How did you profit from this bet?
shorting or longing?
pun intended
sorry :)
can anyone explain the difference between shorting a stock and the opposite of it, if any? and what both of them mean? ELI5, please.
I've read about it from long back, but have been too lazy or never thought to check out what it meant, since I don't do much share trading.
double sorry.
Shorting a stock is like taking out a loan, but when you pay it back, you don't pay it back at the value you started with, but at the new value. So, if you shorted starting at $100, and it's now worth $10, you could keep those $90, and pay back just the $10.
But unlike stock buying, shorting can cause huge damage more the the starting value.
If you short a stock at 100, and it reaches 10, you pay back at 10 and get to keep the remaining 90.
If, however, that stock reaches 300, you have to pay the extra 200 from your pocket.
So shorting is much bigger risk than investing directly in stocks.
That's if you actually borrow the stock & sell it, the old-fashioned way.
There are less risky ways, like buying a put option.
The opposite of shorting is just buying the stock: exchange the market price $X for a share of stock today, sell later for $Y, profit or loss is $Y - $X. You've made money if the stock has gone UP. Since there's no upper bound on the price of a share but the lower bound is $0, you can lose at most your initial outlay $X, but potential gains are uncapped.
Shorting a stock is borrowing the stock: that is, you get a share of stock today (and sell it today for market price $X) but are liable for returning the share of stock at some time in the future (you obtain it from the market at $Y to do so). The profit or loss is thus $X - $Y. Since there's no upper bound on the price of a share but the lower bound is $0, you can gain at most your initial outlay $X if the price goes to zero, but potential losses are uncapped.
Long: you buy a stock, hold it, later on sell for profit or loss.
Short: you borrow a stock, sell it, hold the money and later on buy the stock back at a lower or higher price you originally sold it for. Then return the stock to the person who lent it to you.
thanks for all the replies, guys.
the sale so shorte, the profitt so longe to earne ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer
wikipedia can though investopedia might be a more fun rabbithole for you.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortsale.asp
> the average asking rent dropped to $68.27
It's still way too high. Try $10 per sq ft.
I was sad I had no shoes, but then I met a man who had square feet.
Good one.
In case it's not obvious, that's an annual number.
(Doubles down on $10 per square foot.)
As you fucking should. I tried renting commercial real estate and it was an absolute joke. Like $3k/mo total NNN for 1ksqft of crumbling cement cube in the shitty part of town.
A typical NNN lease (what businesses use) is priced in terms of dollars per square foot per year. A reasonable number would, in fact, be $10/sqft/yr plus the NNNs (insurance, utilities, taxes, another ~$5 maybe) but the land owning class insists it's closer to $25 all in for a crappy shack and whole number multiples for anything "nice".
What are the inputs that go in to $10 being the "right" price? SF's minimum wage? Tax rates by bracket? A desire for things to be cheaper?
The $10 number is the base rent, the triple nets are the $5. As such the base rent just represents the cost of money when the structure was built, which most of the time was decades ago. It's been paid off many times over and so the "right" price is what the market will bear.
This is, for lack of a better explitive, fucking awful for the economy. If you have a restaurant district and everyone's paying "maximum sustainable rent", the customer is getting the "minimum sustainable product". If you spend $10 on a salad, more of that money that could be going to fresh local lettuce is being spent on rent so you get a worse product for that $10. The existence of the landlord isn't making the economy bigger better faster wherever, they're...literally just rent seeking.
$0.01 per sq ft. Final offer.
it was a bubble, bubbles pop eventually
And SF will likely bounce back, bigger than ever. It's a cycle.
SF bigger? Not if the current city government has any say, which is a large part of the issue. Why invest in SF with their 16 new units of housing a year when you can just invest in san jose which is increasingly the center of gravity of the bay area, especially the longer the government of SF acts like toddlers?
> san jose which is increasingly the center of gravity of the bay area
[citation needed]
IIRC Google halted their SJ mega-campus plans, are there any other major moves happening?
Its both larger than SF and growing faster than SF. The economy of the bay area is bigger than just software engineering. If this statistic is to be believed, information technology jobs in the bay area only account for 6% of the job market anyhow (1), although they make up the vast majority of the job related headlines for the bay area I am sure.
1. https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/jobs-by-industry
... perhaps. I'm less optimistic.
Detroit wasn't very springy.
30+% vacancy means it's still vastly overpriced,
Alternative theory: As WFH improves, WFH will increasingly mean "Work from Ukraine," "Work from India," and "Work from Ghana." It will be hard to justify SFO salaries.
Vietnam is the cheapest country to live in Asia. Da Nang is the most affordable "world-class" beach in the world. WFH should be about beaches or mountains or museums depending on your taste.
There are few advantages to living in SF.
For me, "cheapest" is the wrong metric. Examples:
- Central America is a convenient plane hop away, and in the same timezone.
- Parts of Africa and India are anglophone, which makes life easy. Africa is at least somewhat timezone compatible (calls might cut into evening plans, but you don't lose sleep)
The cost-of-living relative to Vietnam is low enough to not matter. There are also middle-income countries where cost-of-living is a bit higher, but with much better infrastructure. Plenty of Southern and Eastern Europe is at about a third of the per-capita GDP of the US.
TL;DR: Travel around and shop for what fits you.
You're not wrong, but also currently the rust belt, including Detroit, is bouncing back somewhat because it's the last bastion of cheap housing for people who aren't making HN ivory tower money.
> Alternative theory: As WFH improves, WFH will increasingly mean "Work from Ukraine," "Work from India," and "Work from Ghana." It will be hard to justify SFO salaries.
This theory is bullshit. Outsourcing has been a thing for decade. Moving all work to the cheapest possible place has been tried many times, to varying degrees of failure.
A lot of this depends on:
- Whether people move with the work
- Telework infrastructure
I'm wondering what non-traditional uses people will find for this space as rents drop? In Manhattan, there are a few developers who seem to be doing well at converting some office buildings into housing [1], but it seems like quite a challenge. Perhaps there are better uses?
[1] https://tildes.net/~design/1g5r/nathan_berman_has_helped_res...
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Offices revalued due to increase in WfH? Those dastardly Democrats must be at it again!
I know several companies relocated precisely because of the corruption and mismanagement. Stripe is a good example and their building remains unoccupied to my knowledge.
More companies have moved out citing SF to be unsafe to operate in.
https://abc7news.com/1-billion-dollar-artificial-intelligenc...
Why does the party matter when SF gov has many disparate factions with different agendas? They don’t operate like a single party.
> They don’t operate like a single party
They basically operate like mafia at the table.
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I don’t know much about how the CCP operates, but China is not a democracy. They don’t have elections in China. San Francisco has elections with numerous candidates.
It increasingly does: https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2022-11/Chapter_1--...
the standing committee would like to know your location, affirm the territorial unity and sovereignty of the city and county of san francisco immediately