Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks(sfchronicle.com) |
Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks(sfchronicle.com) |
Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back.
You can’t harangue workers into reversing that, and you can’t browbeat business owners into paying for space that goes unused.
If you assume a lack of business renters being able to occupy the space or live off the people coming do business there, there’s only one customer base left: residential.
“But it’s hard to retrofit”, “we’ll have to redo the laws”, etc. Well, ok. You can wait to see if things will change, but they won’t. Eventually the property owners, and a city in need of tax revenue, are going to have to come to terms with the new reality.
When they do, even if it’s three decades from now, there will be more housing in that area. It will keep the streets filled, it will keep crime down, and it will bring in tax revenue… eventually. It’s anybody’s guess how long that will take, however.
The Financial District and especiallyunion square area could be amazing if it was zoned for residential with commercial on the first floor. Parts of it could easily rival some of the nicer neighborhoods in Europe. For the larger buildings, make every 6th floor a shared space, put a restaurant/bar/clubhouse on the roof for residents to use and rent.
I have a friend who lives here
the top floor has a restaurant with nightly entertainment, party rooms to rent, tennis court, pool, gym, outdoor patio
It seems premature to say this with confidence, though. Last time I saw the stats, remote work overall is down to 10% and still dropping pretty fast. Yes, prevalence is higher in the tech world, but still, we should wait until it stabilizes (especially with an incoming recession) before proclaiming that two years of remote work has changed the world.
It’s never coming back. Companies that know have been shutting their SF offices. Once it starts it’ll become a positive feedback loop. And it’s well underway.
An added wrinkle is that the city is addicted to spending. When income drops they’re in for a rude awakening. Already dysfunctional government offices will cease to function entirely. SF is headed for some dark times.
(Bias: I moved out in 2020, even though I was rent controlled at 2012 prices. The city was great at 2012 prices, but we knew leaving meant never coming back. Even so, QOL has improved a lot since leaving.)
Isn't that by definition false? If living here was worth less, rents and home prices would drop. Sure, rents dipped quite a bit during the pandemic, but they've recovered somewhat, possibly completely. Home prices didn't change much. And yes, I know that these costs are propped up by things like zoning, the city planning process, NIMBYism, etc., but that doesn't really matter: there's still -- somehow -- enough demand to keep prices as high as they are.
(Bias: I bought a condo in the Dogpatch in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. I've been really happy with our QOL since moving, even during the pandemic. The neighborhood has mostly recovered, with only a few businesses closing permanently.)
You’re right, and it’s been true for a long time. Remember, it took the city approximately 30 years to remove the Embarcadero Freeway, even though its removal was first proposed in 1963. And the only reason they fully executed on this plan was because the damage from the Loma Prieta earthquake forced their hand in 1989.
Remote work reduces demand for downtown office space, but where is evidence that it reduces it below supply?
Demand was very high - downtown office space was very expensive. Many businesses that would love to open up or move downtown previously couldn't. Now they can.
Cheap inputs like office space, in a great city with great transit, etc., with proximity to other businesses and services, is a perfect place for entrepreneurs and startups. This economic change could unexpectedly, at the height of SV costs, create a low-cost community of startups right in SF.
It's speculative, but so is the doom and gloom. The first who see the opportunity when everyone else is wailing and gnashing their teeth will be the ones to cash in. Maybe me!
Plenty of office space is being used nationwide. I’m fine going into my New York or Mountain View offices. I would not want to commute into or around San Francisco.
Valencia-Dolores was just fine before the gentrification. A better analogy would be the comparatively quick tear down and demolishment of the Embarcadero Freeway, which had formerly been a blight on the city for decades and blocked the beautiful waterfront. Once it was torn down and that area redeveloped, hardly anyone can imagine a good rationale for ever building it in the first place. That’s one of the greatest success stories of modern San Francisco, and it’s likely the downtown area can benefit from the same approach. People didn’t want to hear that about the Embarcadero Freeway and fought against bringing it down for years, but in retrospect, everyone now knows they were dead wrong.
The reality is that a building owner doesn't want to lower the asking rent because it will devalue the building. They make more money owning a building with high rents than they lose having it sit empty. Nobody actually checks if these "high value" real estate properties on paper are actually occupied.
Sf would be smart to make deep cuts now to free up budget. Going as far as putting a ballot initiative to end maybe prior proposition earmarks.
It's pretty unlikely that office space/buildings will be retro-fitted for residences.
Is this contradictory to the reason that startups are funded in S.F proper? I remember many articles and social media posts were saying along the line that people chose to work in S.F because they loved bustling city life. Yet the city is doomed because people wanted to work remotely en masse?
San Fransisco is fun but a big pain in the ass to get to and live in, even compared to the rest of the area.
It might take a few years until we get there, but we will.
What we’re actually going to see is a division better highly skilled people going to companies that understand what humans need and lesser skilled or otherwise problematic employees settling for the less desirable jobs with backwards looking management and worse total compensation packages/work life balances. These regressive companies will slowly implode due to cancerous cultural issues that will blossom wonderfully when toxicity is given the fertile ground of desperate and problematic staff coerced into interacting in bullshit jobs.
COVID didn't do what I expected. Instead of online learning moving into the mainstream, we got emergency crappy online learning, and the world burned out on online learning. Everyone now believes it can't be done.
All the businesses I worked with switched to WFH, equally poorly. In my current job, working from home, I feel isolated and asocial. I hate it. That's true of many coworkers as well. It's not the fault of remote work, but it's the fault of the very poor implementation of remote work at my employer.
I don't think my employer is unique here.
I now share your prediction.
Keith Rabois said one of the the major reasons he moved was because of crime.
Surely, something can be done, normally with big effort compared to the final outcome, but not more than that.
In the very past was easier: rate of change was FAR slower, cities was built with rocks and some wood, the very same rocks can be "moved" to build something different and woods can be sourced nearby. The city was able to rebuild itself. Normally after some catastrophe. Modern cities tend to be steel and concrete, not easy to be "reused" especially locally. As a result modern cites need to be rebuilt from the ground today and IF we accept such enormous challenge when they'll be rebuilt will probably be not good anymore because tech and so business/needs are already changed.
In the recent past the idea of a thriving city was simply: we have living places and commerce concentrated, if tomorrow a certain family of shops became obsolete and disappear others will occupy the same places with minor changes, like we do not have anymore the need for stearic candles but at their place light bulb shops arrive, we do not have much classic restaurants and at their place small kitchen for ready-made food delivery take their place etc. That's effectively worked for a certain amount of time. Factories are outside, they have room to change, agriculture have room to change and people live in cities.
Now such model is in crisis, climate change force new kind of homes, it's not just a matter of changing windows and some appliance. New small homes are easier to rebuild, you crush the old one, build another at the same place. Tall buildings are another story and most cities are made of tall buildings especially downtown.
That's the real crisis, it's not a matter "due to remote work some offices are empty and activities around them can't survive": no one take this places because it's not anymore a simple "economical shift" in the same model.
Since we dream a future of flying cars density for economy of scale will be FAR LESS dense than now and that's give the ability to change, cities can only be small/medium and on-purpose, like classic manufacturing districts.
The really unpopular part is the fact that in such model too many will be new poor and of course they do not like such idea, we do not like that being not so sure for ourselves since even wealthy today a big shift might be hard to sustain.
Why would any business set up shop in these conditions. Remote or not, plenty of safer & cleaner spots in America to do business.
The issue is that once a particular practice in relations between capital and labor becomes ingrained, conditions of competition make it very difficult to shift the balance. You would effectively have to have a non-competition agreement between big tech companies over this clause, because highly paid workers can and will leave for perks like remote work.
Remote work takes that those seating costs right to zero, and it's already been proven out with ample data demonstrating that productivity suffers little, if at all. There are a plethora of multi-billion companies that are 100% remote to really drive this point home.
In-office work isn't coming back any more than personal offices with doors for individual contributor engineers are coming back.
Sure, the tax revenue looked great, but it happened in a way that caused great human suffering by making occupancy in the city zero sum, and awarding it to only those who had the most money to pay. That's not how it had to be, and choosing a zero-sum economic system rather than positive sum was foolish, and only meant to appease those with conservative views on construction. And by basing tax revenues on the business cycle, SF is now at such great risk, with huge social spending needed to repair the damage it inflicted with this unnecessary zero-sum system.
Sadly, those who will be hurt the most by a potential downturn are not those who benefited by setting up a bad system. A downturn will help nearly no one, and cause great suffering. I feel a little sick in my stomach when I hear some hoping for a downturn, either as a chance for them to finally buy real estate, or as a chance for S.F. to be made great again by returning to some imagined past. Both of these are very unlikely, especially the second.
> "My biggest fear is the city either has to slash spending on, say, police, or it aggressively puts up taxes on businesses to cover the shortfall and drives them out of the city," he said.
It's always "we'll have to slash spending on basic city functions!" or "we'll have to raise your taxes!" but never "we'll have to cut all these unsustainable social policies!"
I don't want this to turn into an ideological battle, but my understanding was that in SF, that is not an unpopular stance. Is this not the case?
While I don't think that is a surefire way of fixing dtsf but it is a start. The superdense neighborhood of chinatown and somewhat dense neighborhood of little italy are pretty lively still, probably because everyone lives above the commercial and retail spaces that exist there.
(There's not much commercial offices in those neighborhoods but there's a few, especially between california and bush)
> “We had our best year in 2021,” said Santino DeRose, managing broker at Maven real estate. “The neighborhoods by far, where people lived and worked, came back the fastest.”
This actually might be a good thing. If the city gets optimized for people who want to live there verses people who are forced by their job to work in the city, in the long term it will be better for everyone and relieve some of the upward pressure on housing.
- Add housing
- Add staffed public toilets
- Pilot office conversions that assume only half the workers show up on a given day.
No wonder it's struggling with remote work, there's no incentive to go there. If somebody would be living there, then there would always be someone around to shop, drink or go to work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-fr...
The headline makes it sound like an exercise in question-begging, but it really isn't, as the author makes clear.
AKA offloading the costs onto individuals by forcing them to show up to work the old way. The city needs to pivot to focusing on its full time residents and less of the business sector.
It turned out what they actually got was a DA that literally did not do his job, and just had literally everyone arrested put back on the street. Apparently also trying to get his father out of criminal charges as well?
That goes a long way to explain the overwhelming recall in last? weeks election.
If SF wanted to clean things up, they'd have cops walking a beat in the Tenderloin--something I never say in the 12 years I lived there. I think the lack of any political competition has led to politicians who don't give a shit about what's best for residents and can just coast off the vote blue no matter who mentality.
They've been at it for a while now, and the main result has been intentionally crippling the road system at great expense (without fixing public transit). So, I'm not convinced allowing a regional authority more power to sabotage transportation networks is a good idea.
There are also mandates to add affordable housing, but those are either ignored or lead to boondoggles. (Construction is ridiculously overpriced in California. They may as well be mandating affordable dollar bills.)
One way to fix it would be to streamline permitting, etc for new housing (they did this for ADUs, but that's explicitly limited to housing that's inappropriate for families).
Typical permitting delays in south bay are something like 3 years for new construction (enjoy those double mortgage payments!), and nonsensical requirements add at least 50% to construction costs on top of that.
This could be solved in a few months by Sacramento outlawing such practices, then closing and replacing any non-compliant planning departments.
People aren't in San Francisco because they don't want to be in San Francisco.
Even the people that "loved San Francisco" didn't even like things in the actual city limits, talk to nearly anybody about what they like there and they'll pick an endless list of things from the Pacific Ocean to the border of Nevada. Other cities aren't like that. Red Flag 1 through 10.
There are people that like things in the city limits, 30 years ago. You'll know because they'll tell you about how a nice neighborhood used to be the most hellish thing you could ever imagine and would never visit, but at least artists used to lived there. Which is what they fawn over. As if someone else was going to pay for this $100 haircut, but if I see any gentrifiers I'll bark at them for you! scouts honor.
And finally you begin to notice that almost all the other people that think they like(d) that city don't have an objective view of other metropolises to compare it with. Oh, I get it, this is "The City" for that region that people aspire for, because its 600 miles of frontier from there to Portland, Oregon. A couple aspirational people from Central Valley, "escaping" (their words), a bunch of economic migrants from across the US, visa holders that have no choice in the matter. Okay. Interesting. There were very few people from other cities that really just liked all the nature, and again, fewer of those are talking about the nature within the city limits. All that masked by actual geographic scarcity exacerbated by artificial scarcity to make the high prices seem like there was something to covet? Yeah, everyone that could leave has left.
> The transit system’s looming deficit has given rise to whispers of a new regional tax to fill the gap.
death spiral.
Obviously this is just my experience, I bet many will have seen something similar. I don't think the city government policies are as big of a factor as people think. People saw an option to leave due to the nature of their work, and did.
Source for that Tableau dash: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
We bought a home in the Bay Area a few years ago. We considered the pros/cons of moving out of state and one pro of staying here was Prop 13 in California. We plan to retire in this home and figured Prop 13 will help make our post-retirement living expenses negligible.
I only recently had the realization that Prop 13 could cause some serious problems like cities being incentivized to encourage resident "turnover" because new residents would be subject to current level property taxes.
Another issue is cities having to rely more on sales taxes which discourages building residential housing and encourages building of commercial properties. Also when a recession hits then the cities are hit even harder because they aren't able to collect those sales taxes.
We found that Bay Area schools are begging for money constantly and theorized that very low property tax income is a big part of that too.
I mean... I like paying less but something about it feels wrong. Property taxes are a big source of income are they not?
Some of these are gonna spark controversy but term limits, the recall and ease of passing propositions are some of the other ones.
The legislature is no longer professional enough to govern, so the people do it at the ballot box, at the behest of whom ever has the most money to spend. The fact that California is a single party state because of realignment and radicalization on the right makes all of this worse.
More like "enlightened views on wealth preservation." You can follow the incentives on this one. It's not that complicated.
However, SF and California is largely run by a small handful of families who are "kingmakers." The Buells, Fishers, Guggenhimes, Gettys, Marcuses, Pritzkers, Swigs, and Trainas.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-san-...
Companies didn't want to move back into some of the office buildings so they were converted into residential housing.
I remember dating someone who lived down there and looking up at the ceiling and mentioning "Why do you have such weird drop ceilings here?" This is where I found out her apartment used to be an office building.
Probably because the supes are elected by neighborhood, they are very NIMBY.
Source: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101889483/what-would-it-take-...
Converted apartments are not going to be "affordable" (by say the likes of students, and people just out of college not in finance or tech.
Once the white collar workers leave, there is less demand for service workers to live there. Sure maybe some salaried workers like in emergency services and policing might choose to live there. If I were a service worker, living in SF proper would not be the thing I'm looking to do.
Years ago, the center of the action in "Silicon Valley" was actually in the geographical valley, in the south bay. The south bay is way different from SF - safe and sterile. Some people would move up to SF and commute all the way down to the south bay just because they wanted to live somewhere interesting. Those sort of people also tended to be the sort to start startups, and the center of the action gradually moved to SF.
I think SF can try following the same path a second time, focus on catering to the gritty hipster demographic and hope something valuable grows out of it. Added housing to push rents lower seems like a good start.
Once the balance between supply and demand is similar, urban living should be cheaper than suburban living, because urban areas need less infrastructure for each resident.
It effectively has no zoning which means you get oil processing plants built next door to elementary schools.
The Austrian Economists will jump in here and say that's why certain private property developments buy the equivalent of "sky rights" (or "land rights" I guess) with adjoining properties to effectively create their own zoning.
Maybe I am next to your house. I want to have a hog farm or a 24/7 very loud factory.
This isn't consistent with my experience at all. When I lived in SF, having moved to work for Salesforce, I spent a ton of time at street fairs, nightclubs, museums, concerts, parks, etc, and that's before I get to the food. Most of my friends seemed to be doing the same.
I mean, I have nothing against Lake Tahoe -- it's great -- but you could get that by living in Albuquerque, and the snow to jerry ratio is a lot better.
This is a reference to the rental prices. I can see how I didn't make that clear. SF fell the hardest out of metropolitan areas and has grown the slowest.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-21/san-franc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gairaigo_and_wasei-eig...
I haven't watched much Korean TV, but iirc it's not exactly uncommon in Korean music either.
I assume it's "cool" given the prevalence of English media, probably varies quite a bit by region.
But sure, people with negotiating power will likely keep WFH and people without will have to come in.
NYC is in a similar boat although seemingly less severe. The mayor is just saying "go back to the office" so it's certainly an uphill battle.
I've also never seen a tent on the sidewalk in Detroit. South of Grand Circus Park is a big startup area. To be fair I have found trying to cross the park in the evening to reach restaurants on the other side I've quite often had to deal with very aggressive panhandling homeless people. I've never encountered this problem elsewhere in the city.
Here's another video by the same guy where he meets an ex-convict who is building a real estate empire one house at a time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356169
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31532901
I live in Oakland which is fucked up in its own ways.
You can't be taken seriously when you consider SF to be the nicest cities in the world. Try visiting Singapore or Tokyo or Melbourne.
Is this true? Are there some numbers available for comparison?
For expensive housing you need both demand and lack of ability to create new housing.
If the work itself is leaving, why would they want to live in a city, just to live in a city? To what end? I guess retirees with deep pockets, ok?
Ok, thats still a benefit. Allowing more people to live in the city is still a good thing.
> To what end?
To allow more people who want to live here, to do so.
Downtown SF and SJC were quite ugly during downturns before tech came to the rescue. Market street until recently was still suffering from blight brought on 40 years ago.
If I got that correct, then I would first say that there are massive numbers of people who want to live in SF who have been kept out by the $4000 prices, and lowering it to $3500 or $3000 would bring in far more people.
Further, thinking only in terms of service workers and tech workers misses a lot of what goes on in the city, there's a ton of people in between.
But even if I'm wrong, then having a huge number of vacant apartments is really good news for all renters in the city. It puts pressure on all other landlords to power prices. It changes the market segmentation, and drives improvements in prices or apartment quality for all market segments adjacent to whatever price the conversions initially target. There is no downside to a bunch of vacant office space converting to vacant apartments.
One problem with mass conversions, and in general the way that SF has done planning—zero change allowed for decades then dumping a bunch of new stuff in a small area—is that it takes a long time for the new neighborhood to gain all the character of a neighborhood, for example the little shops, the community groups, etc.
It’s flat and ugly there, but surprisingly socially vibrant, open, and interesting in large part because barriers to entry are so low and life is so affordable.
Houston may not have zoning but it has plenty of code that mandate car dependency and huge amounts of driving and therefore suburban blandness.
Regulation versus deregulation is a barren framing, the real problem is absolutely terrible urban planning rules in the US that have created our bad situations. As a field, it would probably be better if it never existed.
Do you have any examples? This doesn't seem likely to me.
One of SF's big problems is the prevalence of culture war, vibes, and being hipper than thou overriding the economic interests of residents with less wealth.
Definitely would help a ton though, and I probably shouldn't be hopeful of a single solution here.
That's not what I've seen. Top talent still commands SF salaries, no matter where they happen to be located.
So far everyone I've seen try to implement Geo-adjustment magically had to carve out "special" deals for most engineers. They won't talk about it openly of course.
Anyone who grew up in the burbs in the 70s-90s and goes back today can observe this.
Anecdata - I have a sibling who lives in fairly rural MAGA country outer exurbs and yet has both bubble tea & pho shops in driving distance.
Similarly "well everything is so far in the burbs".. ok well, I've lived nearly 20 years in NYC and my average commute has been about 40 minutes. All my friends live all over the 5 boroughs, most of which are a good 30-40 minutes by uber or subway. We mostly see each other weeknights after work in midtown/downtown since thats closer.
Remote or even 2-day in-office hybrid work makes the trade offs of being 30~60 miles outside the city much more attractive.
The city has many conveniences and also a ton of inconveniences, it doesn't take a lot to put the balance out of whack and make you question why you pay so much for it.
And the illegality of non-competes. And the fact that your off-hours IP is yours.
One thing that tech people are forgetting is that California law may not apply to them in remote situations and there are a bunch of protections that you get when you are subject to California law.
If you don't think the corporate lawyers are already working this angle, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you ...
While I think what you're talking about is a big deal and the biggest mistake every state that wants a tech industry fails at (yet New York, Massachusetts, and DC/Virginia seem to do ok), a bigger one is the fundamental culture of Californian tech. Most other parts of this country, people are too scared to take the risk to leave the "good" job for a startup. It's a negative feedback loop that dampens any chance of growth. California is the one place where people feel safe enough to ditch a good job for a cool one, and it pays in spades for the state.
> All that masked by actual geographic scarcity exacerbated by artificial scarcity to make the high prices seem like there was something to covet?
I feel like this stance does a tremendous amount of disservice in identifying issues and making SF better. It is always scapegoated and never confronted head on. Scapegoats come in the form of: We're kind out here in SF, we are pro-homeless, homelessness is caused by inbound people from other states, etc. None of which are remotely true, but peddled repeatedly ad-nauseum.
Except, the correlation is real and well known.
> At least 550,476 people commute to jobs in San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
When I lived in the city, I would often work downtown. When I would stay late, you would see up close and personal how the downtown area became a ghost town as the majority of people left the city for home. That’s both a brain, talent, and tax drain on the city, and represents a lost constituency that has no connection to local issues.
This crazy idea that "woke" politics are somehow responsible for the rise in crime and the deterioration of living conditions is a talking point invented by Fox News. There is literally zero evidence for it. Boudin failed because the police admitted they refused to work with him. End of story.
CBS News. KPIX Special Report: San Francisco's Tenderloin – A State of Emergency https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuWeMl2lCMM
ABC News. Here's why one of San Francisco's top officers says crime is here to stay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4112HGOCTQ
KRON 4. 70% of San Francisco residents say quality of life has declined: poll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0UcFBeWrgU
Christopher Rufo. Chaos by the Bay: The Truth About Homelessness in San Francisco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI
NBC News. Saving San Francisco: Ep. 5 'Why Should I Live in Fear?' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGNGJ-bIL4
There are probably hundreds of these clips. I am sure you can also dig up reasons why the DA was recalled.
850k people are unhappy. 40% of the residents want to leave: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/40-percent-san-franc...
When close to half of the population of a city wants to leave, probably a good idea to accept what's wrong with the city and try to look inward.
I'm happy we'll have a new DA and hopefully the city will also make folks get mental health help when needed and get serious about building housing (i.e. get out of the way).
Online learning is fine for adults who have developed sufficient mental discipline and focus, especially college style where you're in classes only a few hours a day.
Expecting 7 year old kids and teenagers to sit in front of a computer screen and suffer through what effectively amounts to 7 hours of meetings is asinine- they can barely do that in person, where the number of distractions is far fewer.
OTOH, I will never go back to an office, full stop. The commute isn't worth it, and being in person more than a handful of times a year (tops) isn't worth it. I'm a fairly introverted person by nature, though, and my dogs and wife are home during the day, so I don't really get any sense of isolation.
And even then. Do you remember in the early 2010s with the rise of edX, Coursera and co when one of the founders was predicting that in 20 years almost all learning will be online, universities will ho bankrupt and close with less than 50, including the online ones, remaining?
The reality is that the vast majority of adults can't be bothered to maintain their motivation and finish an online course. The stats on course completion rates are abysmal. I've been there, of course, I have enrolled into probably more than 10 different courses, all of which sounded very interesting, but none of which i was motivated to see through the end.
The original founders built platforms which worked pretty well. In the end, MOOCs were videos and multiple choice questions. No one can stomach that.
The original Stanford AI course, from Norvig/Thrun, did pretty okay. Coursera steamrolled Udacity by building a massive number of crappy courses.
The first edX course, 6.002x, mis-attributed to Agarwal but mostly built by Sussman/Mitros/Terman, did even better. Within a few years, edX was run by corporate types who did massive numbers of crappy courses.
The actual founders had bold plans for how to make the platforms and courses even better, but those never panned out, due to politics, incentives, etc.
Good online can be really good.
Also FYI BART is not a city agency and it has its own police force.
https://www.kron4.com/news/thousands-cited-for-evading-bart-...
To say that it’s the least important problem ignores a pretty wide swath of ostensibly less significant problems (cigarette misuse near buildings, litter, speeding, unlicensed drivers, unlicensed panhandlers, take your pick). I’m going to need a citation on that claim.
Voting against my self interest when all it does is affect my bank balance? No problem. But if it forces my kid to change neighborhoods (and therefore schools) while giving up a home I plan to retire in... that's harder.
And if property values are rising so quickly that I even notice an increase in the property tax, then every single renter is completely screwed by comparison.
The only way that property value increases could cause somebody to lose their house is if they are completely financially incompetent, as far as I can see.
Crafting the message, targeting the various groups, etc. Yes, there are folks like you who may do it, but convincing the majority is an uphill battle.
When housing drops 10% in a year, my property tax bill, like most people who bought a few years go, goes up 2%.
Yes, my property tax bill also goes up 2% when property value jump 10%. But, the cost of govt services didn't jump 10% that year, so why should property tax go up that much?
Not really; yes, it reduces total volatitlity in property tax revenues asymmetrically, since tax assessments fall without restriction in downturns irrespective of turnover, but rise with a sharp limit in upturns outside of a limited set of qualifying events.
But stabilizing property tax revenues, even to the extent it is true, is made less relevant by the way Prop 13 cuts property taxes so low that it shifts the burden to other, more volatile, revenue streams. (While the assessment increase is what most people focus on with Prop 13, it also capped nominal property tax rates in California at a low rate.)
The only tax assessments that fall during downturns are the folks who are underwater, that is, the recent purchases. The folks who aren't underwater get a 2% increase.
That's why, as I wrote, when there's a 20% downturn, most people still have a 2% increase, which keeps tax revenues from falling significantly. In other words, stable.
I write "most" because one of the key arguments of the "prop-13 is bad" folks are that most properties are paying too little tax because of when they were bought.
You can't have it both ways. If you make that argument, the arithmetic shows that prop 13 stabilizes property tax revenues during a downturn.
I agree with your last sentence, but this works because that last group is a minority (even if barely), so the larger society votes against them. it only takes a small amount of poorer people who don't want growth for nostalgic / quality of city life reasons, and you have a pretty sizable majority coalition against change.
In the end, its simply a recipe for never fixing any of the actual problems, with the added benefit of giving your base and activists plenty of ideological wars that can never be won.
>it's all about scolding people and identity politics to distract from meaningful policies like universal healthcare, elder/child-care, etc.
You've described national politics in the united states; it's not unique to SF liberals at all.
That's pretty damning evidence crime is bad and the people are right to dismiss strawman arguments as deranged nonsense.
Do you know what “recall” means
> If a majority of the votes on a recall proposal are “Yes,” the officer is removed and, if there is a candidate, the candidate who receives the highest number of votes is the successor to the unexpired term of the recalled officer.
(Cal. Const., Art. II, Sec. 15; Elections Code §§ 11381(c), 11384, 11385)
https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/recalls/recall-procedures-g...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Large cities with crime rate higher than SF, according to your source: Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix.
Your source says St Louis has a crime rate 2.9x higher.
Maybe consider that you just hate SF, for your own personal reasons?
(And your source is based on voluntary reporting, so there's huge biases there. SF sounds like the kind of place that could manage to push for more transparency..)
Which sounds like a recipe for... grandpa dies, grandma can't pay property taxes so defers it for 10 years. Grandma dies and whoever inherits the home needs to be pay a massive deferment (unaffordable?) or give up the home.
Not sure where this bizarre idea came about that people whose houses dramatically increase in value should:1) be able to avoid paying taxes on that value and 2) pass the house down, in whole, to their heirs without paying increased taxes.
It sounds reasonable to me that a retiree with a conservative investment portfolio that is barely over/under inflation should be able to live out their remaining life in that home.
I think someone who spent enough money could repeal it, and it'd help.
There isn’t a red state that doesn’t wish they had Prop 13.
Money can't fix everything but spending 33% below the median probably is a sign of underinvestment.
Obviously, a person living in the area is usually making less so it’s all relative.
Are Prop 13 benefits for businesses still in place ?
That would be a good start - if the company is sold all its underlying California holdings get re- appraised
REITs are traded on the value of the underlying asset - unlike a homeowner that does not extract value from their property
Properties packaged in tradable shares should be re-appraised annually at least
Wanna know what its a "single party state"? Because one of the major parties, up until Pete Wilson, acted like a real party, then became a caricature (the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys like Nixon, Reagan, Deukmajian, Schwartzenegger etc all got elected) but now comprise less than 25% of the state registered voters (although many are now independents with a center-right lean) and the GOP leadership in the state are utterly oblivious clowns who live in rural bubbles like the Northern areas that want to start a neo-fascist Confederate Idiocracy with Eastern Oregon and Southern Idaho, or urban derp-bubbles like West Orange County and Torrey Pines, who just want brown people to tend to their golf courses and think Ayn Rand is one hot bitch. The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because the Koch-knobs and Trumpkins that "lead" the opposition are as inane and insane as they are.
Yes and: Disempowering legislators empowers administrators and lobbyists. Power is zero sum.
I supported term limits until I saw first hand how agency heads run circles around legislators.
Now, I advocate making legislators more powerful, more independent, and therefore less dependent on lobbyists, contributors, and agencies.
Make legislating a real, full time job. More resources for staff, to help mitigate infoglut and provide real constituent services. Etc, etc.
> campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering.
Absolutely. I advocate pretty much all the good government reforms. Public financing of campaigns, approval voting for executive positions, proportional representation for assemblies, restoring fairness doctrine, open government as default (eg something like data.gov for most everything). Etc, etc.
PS-
Lawrence Krubner's blog Demodexio is really good. Dives into nonobvious, nonsexy, common sense fundamental structural reforms for democracy, elections, and policy work.
So far, Krubner's advocacy matches my own experiences and observations. Here's just one great example:
Should the votes from voters combine on a per-issue basis, rather than a per-party or a per-candidate basis? [2022/05/13] Why did Kenneth Arrow think that Approval Voting would do a better job of bringing to the surface the real concerns of voters?
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-the-votes-from-voter...
The last is really not true; Schwarzenegger was elected well after the California Republican Party had durably stopped trying to appeal to California voters in a way that could win statewide elections or legislative majorities and instead committed itself to appealing to the most extreme of the national Republican donor class. That's why they (and particularly Darryl Issa, who hoped to used it as a vehicle for his own election) funded the recall drive, aiming for an opportunity where they wouldn't actually need to get more votes than retention to win.
But once the recall was set, Schwarzenegger, who had basically no connection to the institutional Republican Party, swept in and blew away the establishment Republicans (leading to Darryl Issa’s literally tearful exit from the race that he has spent $1.7 million out of his own pocket to make happen).
> The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because
Largely of the lack of internal ideological coherence and stability, making them able to run at least one candidate that fits the moment and district in any given election.
No, but his tenure helped to foment their internal confusion about where to go. Arnold himself refused to play a party line game, and that in turn led to ever larger fissures between the national RNC and the State leadership.
To the rest of your comment - I think big tent parties are good, but not ones that require ideological fealty the way current parties do, you can't build a durable majority with left social issues, a weird mashup or left wing and right wing economics and "progressive" requirement that everyone hew to proper "optics".
That's a recipe for never fixing any of the actual problems, with the added benefit of giving your base and activists plenty of ideological wars that can never be won.
After is generally better, at least than in an equal time period before, though I don't attribute it to term limits, which were a bad idea.
> the last real structural reforms to state government were before term limits
The last major structural reform to state government was when it was finally made modestly governable by the repeal of the supermajority budget requirement in 2010, 14 years after term limits applied to the Assembly (a little over two full turnovers forced by term limits), 12 years after they applied to the Senate (one full turnover and halfway through the next.)
The last major structural reforms of government administration (which may be more what you are thinking of, though of less practical effect) were a series under Schwarzenegger in 2005 (or so, not sure they all happened that year), still well after term limits.
He was not the most effective governor, but he also was not a destructive or fundamentally divisive one (yes he had soe hot points but I can't think of a single governor of this state who hasn't) and he certainly performed better than I thought he would.
The other issue I see is that the deferment program is limited to very low income seniors (< $35k year or something like that). That's pretty low for a lot of places in the Bay Area which means not being able to go on road trips and do whatever it is seniors do in their twilight years.
"1986 Proposition 58
Proposition 58 allowed homeowners to transfer their principal residence to children without a property tax re-assessment, as well as the first $1 million (not indexed to inflation) in assessed value of other real property."
Of course if the homeowner has more than one child it could get messy
a different way of phrasing the question: is it fair that your new neighbor pays twice as much as you to support city services, just because they bought their place more recently?
My neighbor paying 2x what I paid has no effect on the cost of city services
I could see the point of your argument if I sell and make a profit - but before I do that my QOL within my house is not affected
Wealth = assets minus liabilities
Of course not, stock shares or real estate are not money. But they are wealth.
Honestly I have trouble summoning up much pity for people whose face a property tax burden because their homes have doubled or tripled in value.
Illiquid property value isn't the same thing as having money, so...yes?
I mean, if you want every neighborhood in every urban area to be tech and finance bros, maybe this is a good idea, but most people would disagree with the premise you're pushing.
It is generally considered to not be a good idea in tax theory to tax things that don't involve either money or things that are very easily converted to money, unless perhaps the tax is relatively small. For purposes of this discussion "money" means whatever the government will accept as a tax payment.
That's partly because you ideally want taxes that are meant just to raise revenue (as opposed to for example so-called "sin" taxes) to not cause much change in the activity or thing being taxed.
When the market is tech and finance bros, all neighborhoods and all stock will become tech and finance bro'd. That's a bad thing for that community and--uh--society at large.