"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
Readit News
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.
Maybe people don't like the transit, though?
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?
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.
Coders like being at home.
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.
The organized environment, easy coffee, and not needing to dedicate a bunch of home office space make it a big win for me personally.
Deleted Comment
This is totally orthogonal to AI working.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Well, yeah, you're two years too late.
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 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.
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.
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
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortsale.asp
It's still way too high. Try $10 per sq ft.
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.