S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010 | Hacker News Reader

S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010

sfchronicle.com

326 pointsmemish423 comments

One thing to note is that the 2021 population is an estimate, and if you are a Census buff as I am, and compare the Census' 2019 estimates to the 2020 actual populations (as calculated from the census), there are often very large differences.

The article also says that CA's estimate of the population decline is much smaller, and arguably CA itself would have more accurate data for this particular metric (residency and voter rolls).

So while I'm sure the gist of the argument is true, there is probably a larger margin of error on the calculation than you'd think at first glance. I'm not quite going to say the article is sensationalist, but if you look at the totality of the data (house prices, rental prices, CA's population estimates, etc), I'm not sure the "SF is in freefall" narrative holds up.

I appreciate the point you are making, so I ask this genuinely: how confident are we in the census count? How confident are we usually, and how did that change given the hurdles the pandemic introduced?

Both the decennial census and the census ACS are estimates. All population counts are estimates.

All statistical inferences are estimates, and carry standard errors with them. What is your point?

All measurements are estimates, but sometimes the errors look like "we have a machine that spits out 4 all the time" and other times they look like "I saw two people, but I can't rule out the possibility that I spontaneously hallucinated them."

These are not standard errors.

See https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/pes-2020...

Census data is wildly inaccurate. The percentage of people who fill out the census form is less than 20% in some neighborhoods. Whereas the city knows every time someone flushes a toilet or flips a light switch.

You do know that if you don't fill out the census form they come knocking on your door, and if you refuse to respond they ask your neighbors and go based on that.

Is that a statement or a question?

Yes?

In Canada, it's also technically illegal to not fill out the census.

In the US it is illegal to fill out the census. Making an error is purjery.

> Census data is wildly inaccurate

What's your source for this claim?

As far as I could find for people who aren’t counted by either census workers or themselves like you mentioned, the Census Bureau tries to get their information through other methods.

This can be proxies, like other people who live in the neighborhood, other government data sets like social security records and postal service data, or through "imputation" which leverages statistical modeling based on the data they do know.

All of the sources I can find suggest that the census is extremely accurate at the large city level, and only obfuscated at lower levels because of the data privacy protections they've put into place.

As a census surveyer during the pandemic, I can say that questionnaires are pursued pretty relentlessly, at least in Canada. There will always be some people that refuse or can't be surveyed for some reason, but it's about as accurate as a human to human data collection process can be. The public only has access to somewhat lower resolution data, which probably nullifies the necessity of accounting for every single person anyway.

In some cases, especially with volatile/vulnerable populations living in apartments and what not, we'd revisit the same residence at least 3 times if we don't get it done the first time.

The less than 20% number in some neighborhoods seems like it'd be possible, especially if it's very dangerous, but unlikely, though I don't know the U.S system.

Canada != US

If you compare rent trends of SF vs NYC or LA

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/san-francisco-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/new-york-ny

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/los-angeles-ca

You'll notice a huge difference between in SF and the other cities. Rent prices still hasn't gone back to pre pandemic level.

Yes, SF has problems that are not related to the macro environment.

nitpick: Rent prices in many neighborhoods are back up. It's specific areas in and near downtown that draw down the average.

Well, thank you for confirming my suspicions. I wish I saw this before posting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31533926

*But SF Bay surrounding communities have seen rent back up to pre-pandemic levels. So this trend seems SF city proper specific.

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/palo-alto-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/los-altos-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/sunnyvale-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/san-jose-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/santa-clara-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/walnut-creek-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/fremont-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/dublin-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/south-san-francisco-ca

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/san-carlos-ca

Other cities seem like they have more diversified local economies than SF. Probably there are more people with the flexibility to work from home working in the bay area than in these other places.

The prices in NYC are just insane!

Much like many cities - NYC included - are seeing people leave because they are no longer tied to wherever they had been with remote work, we're also seeing many people moving here specifically because they can work remotely from NYC.

Available rental inventory is almost nonexistent right now, vacancy rates are at the floor. Much of our new development is exactly the kind of new amenity building that folks in the high-earning tech remote worker crowd often seek, but its still not managing to keep pace with demand. There's a shortage of inventory for virtually everyone except the billionaire class (not that they occupy much of the market in absolute terms).

I've been in NYC about a decade an even in pre-pandemic years that most folks agree were much more stereotypically booming and I can't ever remember a housing market that was so frothy.

Apparently 3 beds are cheaper than 1 in new york. 3,695 vs 3,600.

That's probably a factor tied to area - dense Manhattan is more luxurious and expensive than Bensonhurst, where a three bedroom is more common and a fraction of the cost. A more meaningful metric would be, by borough, market rate housing. Then Manhattan three bedrooms will be 6,000 and not 3,600. They can easily reach 9 in a doorman building downtown.

I think remote work is often understated in reasons people move away. When you go into the office every day, it's pretty obvious that you have to live in whatever city you live in. But with remote work, the question becomes "if I don't have to live here, do I want to keep living here". For many (including myself), the answer was a definitive NO.

Sure many headlines and news segments make it seem that it's the crime, the high rent, and all these super visible indicators and while I'm sure that factored into the decisions of some, for many it was that they just wanted a change and got the golden opportunity to do so.

EDIT: It's not even that one may even "want a change", it's when you're presented with the opportunity to make a change, the gears in your head start turning as to what options you have at your disposal. I would imagine many people that moved had previously no intention to but just got the opportunity and decided to take it while it lasted.

I agree but I think this also understates the importance of just how messed up SF has become. I don't want to come into contact with human feces as part of my daily commute. I'm going to leave no matter what once that is the case. Especially when the equity in my two bedroom apartement is enough to buy the nicest house ever built in some other smaller city.

If people keep leaving, will that equity materialise as you hope?

Right, which is why you get out while things are still liquid

Just pointing this out. This post was quickly up +4 and then instantly went down to -1. Someone seems to be brigading here.

He doesn't live in San Francisco but is claiming that if he commuted to work he would always see human feces on the ground. He provides no evidence, not even a personal experience

What do you want? Pictures? This is commonly known to be an issue there. If I was there right now, I'd say give me 5 minutes and I'll post a picture. Was in SF last week. If you do a lot of walking there, you WILL see not only a shit, but someone actively shitting.

Edit: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...

That's not an indication of frequency which is what matters.

Granted I've only spent about 6 months of my life living in SF, but I did a decent amount of walking around and never saw human feces.

Same. We lived in SF for 10 years and saw something like that maybe twice? On the whole the city is pretty clean, and most of the dirtiness is because it rarely rains. That's what's keeping many of the other popular cities looking cleaner.

For reference we've been in DC for a year now and we saw someone literally pull their pants down and poop in the middle of the sidewalk the other day. I don't think that's any indication of the city though.

I think it's the kind of thing where many folks visiting would end up in the rougher part of downtown, see something unfortunate, and not really experience the rest of the city. And then the whole city is painted with that brush.

The bay area has many problems (housing policy is probably the worst in the country), but it's also a beautiful and vibrant place to live.

I'm genuinely curious, where do you live and do you 'do a lot of walking' there too?

Midwest. 0 walking here.

Consider the possibility that you're being downvoted for breaking the Hacker News guidelines:

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't mention this in my comment as it was more about the broad trends in every city rather than SF/NYC specifically.

Typically for a group that got tired of a city and moved out, there would be a new group that is ready to fill their place. Thing is no one wants to move to SF given the situation (crime, COL, homeless, etc). Now for all the folks that will say "it's not that bad" I say that it doesn't really matter. If you're moving to a city, your opinion and view of the city is largely dictated by what you see/hear from friends, relatives, on the news, etc. Even if SF wasn't "that bad", it still doesn't matter, because the perception is more important for gaining residents than the actual situation IMO.

Exactly. And the problem is even if I want to stay, once my entire social group has left during the pandemic since none of us were old enough to have mortgages or kids, well, this all kind of sucks right now. All the people I work with have kids and mortgages and have enjoyed flitting up to Tahoe for the past two years, but I'm not from the state but was required to work within it for the past year anyway. Well, my life here is pretty shitty right now, and as soon as I could really start doing things, it was time to start a hybrid model designed with people with kids and mortgages in mind. Traditionally, these folks have a lot of leverage over their younger counterparts, which we're finding is not holding.

The issue is that Gen X is small, so they don't have a lot of leverage if the only other two generations in the market just leave town. Unless it's their opinion that Californians are just better, but of course, now we're back to the shrinking schools problem. It's difficult for me to imagine how California rebounds without losing a lot more ground first. Probably the best thing that could happen for people from the part of the country I grew up in, if we're actually concerned with equity though.

Also, when you pick a place to move to in this huge country, "it's not that bad" isn't going to be chosen, even if true.

I think you're right about perception to people considering going there. But I really think it just comes down to cost. Cities have gotten exorbitantly expensive.

It doesn't make financial sense to stay in SF if you're salary stays the same in Texas and your company is remote. Unless there is some specific reason to live there - you like the vibe, or it's where you were born, or some other reason (weather).

I think it's good that we have this shakeup. Change is a good thing, and I think a lot of cities need some change.

I think your argument ignores that fact that in other cities, you drive by the social problems, whereas in SF you walk through them.

Nobody complains about the homeless people who live under the Las Vegas Strip because they are unseen, but per capita, some studies imply Las Vegas has a much worse problem than SF.

I see this argument constantly, that the streets run brown with human feces. I worked in SOMA for a decade, I would commute every day on BART and would walk from Montgomery Street Station or Embarcadero or Civic Center or 16th Street to wherever my office was at the time (different companies, different offices).

SOMA was always pretty clean, Civic Center a bit more hit or miss, 16th Street was generally a bit dirtier and rougher.

The number of times I encountered human feces though was very low, like not even a monthly occurrence. Now I'm sure there's parts of San Francisco that are worse than others, and the walk from 16th Street BART to Potrero Hill would take me past plenty of homeless people camped out on the sidewalks, but I rarely if ever encountered human feces.

But every. single. time. San Francisco comes up, it's the same tired line, "Oh I couldn't deal with the absolute deluge of human feces" which like cool, neither could I and it was fine because what the heck is everyone talking about. I'm not going to claim that every sidewalk and roadway is completely free of poo, but as someone that managed a team of people and would frequently go for walking meetings all around San Francisco, it was never my experience.

This comment is absurd to someone living in a small metro area. There should not ever be human shit encountered on a sidewalk. Not once every couple months; never. You've been living in absurdity for so long that you've lost sight of it.

I don't know why it isn't being mentioned.

I am not in the Bay Area myself, but about half of my friends there have relocated in the last couple years. A bunch to Washington or Oregon, some to Texas, one to Nashville, and a few others to places mostly in the northeast. All of them cited cost of living as the primary reason ... but all also mentioned full time remote work is what finally made it possible to move.

When you aren't chained to a physical location by your job, lots of things become possible.

Even if you like San Francisco on balance, it's hard not to ask yourself if you like it so much that you're OK with paying for some of the most expensive housing in the country when you don't have a reason you have to be there.

This is not a strategy for everyone, but I definitely pay less in SF than I would in most cities because I know people willing to live with me long-term (and split rent) here. Generally it's easier in SF to find a roommate who is high-earning and willing to split an apartment or house compared to other cities, where similar people would just pay a little more to get their own place.

in our city, my partner and I bought a house entirely for 5.5 years of what we were paying in rent. Now just 2 of our rent payments cover annual tax and insurance.

any locally optimized strategy within the overall context of renting is still a failing proposition imo.

Splitting rent among roommates is not specific to San Francisco, it's common to cities with expensive housing. LA, Miami, NYC, San Diego, etc. all have high proportions of adults living with roommates (https://porch.com/advice/cities-whose-residents-likely-live-...).

Having roommates certainly helps save money, but it remains true that you and your roommates are paying for some of the most expensive housing in the country.

You (and those like you) have informally recreated boarding houses. It’s a shame that Single Room Occupancy is basically illegal to build in any major US city: most cities require building “single family units” that must have their own bathroom(s), kitchen and bedroom(s).

It would be nice if people who are OK sharing common spaces were able to have housing built specifically with them in mind.

I can probably get why it was banned (if abused, it can be horrible) but it is extremely common way of living, especially for young people without families in expensive places - so one would think the government would stop pretending it's not happening at some point...

For cities in general there's much more to do compared to low density areas. Restaurants, entertainment, other people. All of this within a decent traveling distance.

Sure. Cities lend themselves to different sorts of activities and have different pros and cons than do rural areas. Personally I get all the city stuff I want in short visits. I can see a play in a large city that is an hour drive away without living there.

That's fine but the parent implied it was objectively worse than living elsewhere

I think the parent was me :-) I actually like SF but some of the most expensive housing in the country is a high bar if you don't either have enough money that it's a non-issue or have to live there for employment or other reasons. There are many cities with solid city activities that aren't SF.

I'm aware there are options. It's subjective

Sure, but most who leave SF will choose a smaller metro area, not a rural area. What I have found in my time in the Bay Area is a general ignorance of how many smaller metro areas have developed more vibrant urban centers over the past 10 years. The people from these cities who went home for the first time in a decade are finding surprisingly livable metros waiting for them, closer to aging family.

A lot of smaller cities have developed gentrified cores. Mind you, these cores can be pretty small. You may have a relative handful of restaurants and bars you like and they may lack some of the cultural amenities of a larger city. But I know a couple who just sold their presumably very appreciated house in a major metro and moved somewhere smaller.

I've definitely thought about finally leaving the Bay Area, previously I'd written off a lot of places because I want to be close to the coast and I love the relatively mild weather. More recently I ended up talking with a park ranger about life out here (he's from Truckee). He was real attracted to the Oregon coast but aghast at the white supremacy issues that are still ripe up there. There's always a catch.

Now? Politics and infrastructure put me off of huge chunks of the country (especially Texas and Florida). I don't really care if Austin is a vibrant metro area when the state government is trying to ensure women have subhuman status at most even if they've got to gut our judicial system to do it. Small town Texas? Absolutely fucking not, doubly so if I actually wanted to raise a family. Then again the Bay Area is my home.

Yes, you’re certainly wrestling with a different circumstance than many others, if not most, if you’re from the area.

For someone from a place most people from the Bay Area would never deign to visit, I’m more than happy to go back and do the hard work to make it better. Work politicians and voters in California are incapable and unwilling to do.

What does being "woke" have to do with this situation?

I think you replied to the wrong person because neither I nor the parent said anything about "woke."

You said "Work politicians and..." I thought you meant woke because otherwise the sentence doesn't make sense

I understand your confusion. You can mentally insert "which" or "that" between "Work" and "politicians" to make sense of it. Making that its own sentence was probably a mistake on my part for this audience. My statement is politically neutral. Not sure which angle you're coming from, but I'm not interested in that discussion. It's not helping anyone in the community I grew up in.

I think one thing that keeps me in the Bay Area is economic opportunity, although it remains to be seen how larger macro-economic forces will effect this.

For the last decade though, if you write code in the Bay Area, there is just this massive backstop of companies looking to hire. I've lived here since 2011 and worked for all of 3 startups that entire time, so this isn't so much about job hopping. Instead, because of all the competition for talent in the area you get to enjoy a degree of job security, high pay, and benefits that are pretty nice. It is also a major relief to know that if your company does have to let you go for whatever reason or you just get sick of the work you are doing and want to quit, there are a ton of other places hiring.

With remote work I imagine being physically close to the Bay Area is less of a requirement, but it seems like there is some amount of drive to get people back into offices, so we will see how long that remains viable.

This is really the main reason I stay in the Bay Area, I moved out to the Greater East Bay a few years back and was able to find a nice house in a nice enough area for a reasonable price.

Having easy access to so many employers provides a peace of mind and an implicit pile of leverage that's pretty great.

It sounds like you are saying that if you move from SF to another city cost of living expenses will drop dramatically.

Well they can. If I move to another popular place like Manhattan they probably won't go down much. But it's reasonable to ask, if you don't have a work-related reason to live in a place, whether it's good value based on your priorities. The answer may be "Yes!" for SF for some people. But it may also be "No."

Yes, this is famously true, with SF's cost of living (especially but not only housing) being some of the very highest in the nation. Getting out of California helps even more.

Like it or not, SF has the most vibrant tech community than anywhere else.

I live an hour away, and I make the painful, tedious drive up in rush-hour traffic at least once a week to meet up with some group or another in person. The alternative is the dreary, sleep-inducing vendor teleconferences that double as "meetups" on the Peninsula.

I'm strongly considering ditching the Peninsula and moving to SF for better networking and more diverse hangouts and career opportunities.

This is both the good and bad of living in area like the Bay. I'd find the idea of going in an evening a week with a tedious drive to do work-related stuff tedious at best.

The alternative is moving to the city, which is what I am strongly considering.

Not a lot of places in the USA where you can take transit, walk around and be close to the beach and the mountains while having a garden and some space :)

I second this

My friends seem to be moving to Washington, Florida, and other parts of California (away from main cities)

I see far more California vehicle tags in Central Florida than I would've expected.

That is probably more a function of population. I regularly see Florida plates in Washington.

I live in Missouri and people who have lived on my street for decades have Florida plates. They must have property there and claim it as residency for tax purposes

A ton of license plates with oranges on them here in the Bay Area, too.

When you look in the cars, are they older people? Where I live (western Florida), it's generally older people and not the demographic that you'd expect to find on this site.

I just moved NYC to Florida and I've been shocked how many other people have done the same. Florida is doing a relatively good job of attracting high end tech talent as far as I can tell. Texas is the other place I hear mentioned a lot.

Assuming you’re moving long-term, aren’t you worried climate change is going to make Florida (especially coastal southern Florida) a lot less attractive?

Yes climate change. It's going to be bad. Please don't move to Florida

You joke, and I'm sure for some people (who don't really plan to stay anywhere for very long, especially if single & childless) it doesn't matter. But I'm 39 and have little kids. I'd like to stay where I settled for the rest of my life at this point (which may still be another 50+ years).

Would you bet on climate change not making Miami a lot less ideal place to live in by the time you're old?

In Florida at the moment, we don’t plan on staying.

https://youtu.be/wWLn6uwPETY

The hypotheses I'm seeing are interesting.

On one hand, lots of tech workers with kids move there for big yards and good weather.

On the other hand, the universities are not up to scratch. And for college graduates and the young, moving to Florida isn't going to provide you with much if any career safety.

I'm very interested in the future of Florida in a few years. It can go either way.

I actually know several people who used this as an opportunity to move into the Bay Area. The sudden drop in rents made it more attractive and they jumped.

They both work in industries where face to face communication is a competitive advantage. It’s easy to forget that not every job is naturally compatible with remote work like it is for those of us who type on computers all day.

I'm in this boat. We moved apartments in SF during the pandemic and we now live in an amazing neighborhood, amazing building, for 40% less then we were paying for a below average apartment before.

It's not one or the other (moving in or out), it's about getting what you (the individual) wants, and being smart about timing and using world events to your advantage, not disadvantage.

Some people wanted to move away from SF, some wanted to move in. It was an opportunity for either.

Where have you been seeing the rent drop in SF? I'm in the south bay and have been interested in moving to SF now that I'm going remote, since I want a bit more active nightlife. Now that I'm remote, I don't have to stay in south bay.

I haven’t seen these supposed rent drops in SF or the Bay Area either. My lease in the peninsula is up next month and the rent is increasing about 8%, and that’s aligned with the prices I’m seeing elsewhere for comparable apartments.

Things are rising a bit now but if you jumped into a new place in like 2021, the discounts were pretty absurd.

We've known multiple people whom their building was expecting they'd continue their lease at the higher rent while offering the lower rents to the general public for new tenants. I'd encourage you to find out what they're advertising rents at for new tenants and then hold them to that advertised rent.

The available units listed on the website are even slightly higher prices.

There’s another nearby building that’s extremely similar (same developer, I believe, and very similar floor plans, appliances, and amenities). Last summer comparable units in that building were priced the same as in my building, but are now a ludicrous 20-25% higher than my building.

Rents are definitely down - or at least they were 1.5 years ago when I last moved. Before the pandemic, 1 bedrooms were usually at least $3500 and often $4000+. When I looked last January, there were decent places between $2500 and $3000. I emailed some landlords saying "is there any chance you could go lower" and they offered me free rent for 1-3 months. I ended up with a pretty good deal on a large one bedroom in the Mission.

Rents have gone up since then from my understanding, but they're still below what they were several years ago. https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/san-francisco-ca

Many buildings around us have not since raised their rents. Still bargains to be had.

$3000 a month for a modern building, good one bedroom? Not a studio.

In SOMA/Mission? That's genuinely somewhat affordable for tech workers.

You'd get a terrible studio in Manhattan for that, plus all sorts of fees.

San Francisco's reputation is letting itself down. The house price bubble must only be for 3BR family homes with a yard in San Jose/Palo Alto.

I have seen more 'For rent' signs in the last 3 or 4 months than I have in the last 15 years I've been living here. No idea how that translates to rent prices though.

Largely SOMA and parts of the Mission and the Van Ness corridor. It's mainly areas which generally feel less like a neighborhood and more like a bustling city - mainly areas where renters are more OK with living in than homeowners would be willing to purchase in. A great example is the new Chorus building which opened in 2021 on Van Ness and Mission. It remained mostly empty throughout 2021 despite offering 10 weeks "free rent" with a 1 year lease. Stunningly gorgeous building, incredible amenities, but a subpar location - a condo here would be sold at a heavy discount because of the location, thus this is a luxury rental apartment instead. Across the street is the new Fifteen Fifty building, also with heavy "free 2 months rent" discount for a 1 year lease.

But even in the most desirable neighborhoods, rents are still down about 10-15% compared to pre-COVID

I would revise this statement: "mainly areas where renters are more OK with living in than homeowners would be willing to purchase in"

To say: Areas that appear less like traditional neighborhoods with single family homes and more large modern condo buildings.

Our building, and many around ours are largely condos, not rentals. They don't look like traditional houses, but even in this more modern area with multi story buildings and retail all over the 1st floor it's not that it's a place that people don't want to buy homes, it's that there are no "homes" to buy, just condos.

Is the word home not used to describe condos as well? I would have figured it’s a place with no houses to buy.

yes, buying/owning a home does include condos.

I use the word "home" to also include condos. Home does not mean "house".

Hayes Valley has tons of condos - homeowners want to buy here. Homeowners don't really want to buy at 6th and Mission and a Condo there would be heavily discounted per sqft.

Mission Bay also feels like a neighborhood - calm, some park space, all condos

Check out SOMA, dogpatch, Potrero, south beach, etc.

Rents are still significantly less around here than before the pandemic.

> sudden drop in rents

Curious, Why aren't properly prices droping to reflect the loss in population.

It’s possible most of the 6.3% did not own property and we’re not in the market to buy property, so there was no change in that market.

And I'd assume house selling is fairly elastic in the short term. If property prices go down, people would decide to wait.

Even renters increase housing costs. Housing is finite and some people sit on the fence about buying or renting. An inability to find a rental unit sometimes tips them into the buying territory

Speculators betting it will come roaring back afterwards, money still getting cheaper, folks with families that can’t move, inability to ‘just move’ if you own, all probably contributing.

Housing prices have been out of whack with fundamentals (cash flow) since at least ‘12-‘13.

Here's another more bleak option. Just like in 2008 when corporations bought up huge swaths of the housing market for cash while no one could get a loan. (which is part of the current issue with not enough homes to buy)

They aren't betting the market will come roaring back, they are betting that they can corner the market and housing will be a subscription just like everything else they sell.

Rent seekers aren't going anywhere, and the cost is really immaterial to them for the most part. They don't need cashflow, they need a monopoly.

That assumes they'll get takers on the areas though.

With remote work becoming more of the norm, what if the labor market doesn't move back?

They'll have a monopoly that few ever pay rent on, and they'll go broke (while the houses rot).

Sure, It's not a sure thing forever and not all areas are going to be winners, but if you have a big enough budget, you can just buy houses everywhere for a long time and probably make decent rent for a while. Heh, if not, or when it ends, they can just dump it and or the company and walk away. It's not like they are doing it with their own money.

Urban areas are desirable even outside of the availability of high paying jobs. There are neighborhoods in America's desirable cities filled with the adult children of wealthy people who pay their kids' insane rents while they pursue arts, fun and wait tables or bartend on the side for petty cash or to keep busy. That section of urban residents are not dependent on high paying jobs and will continue to seek out cities for the lifestyle aspect.

This is a spooky narrative, but the rent seekers can't be the majority. My understanding is that many Californian real estate markets are kept artificially tight due to various forms of NIMBYism.

If renters become the majority, it's suddenly no longer viable to limit new housing through regulation. Markets are nowhere near the fundamental limits of homes per square meter of the state that's good to live in.

I don't think they are a majority and I think the main problem is lack of housing being built. But I do think that what housing is out there on the market faces stiff competition from companies not people. I'd assume there are a few people buying houses with cash but my guess is a lot of those stories you hear about people bidding 100k over ask and losing to a cash offer are mostly not people.

Theres a good number of companies that are open about increasing their housing portfolios. Even construction companies that built thousands of starter homes per year converting to rentals only.

These are long term changes, and not a quick cash grab at the bottom of the market.

Homeowners are a reliable political cohort, they tend to organize quickly as soon as any issues are on the agenda that might affect the value of their land and they will reliably push for whatever increases land values. They show up at city hall to make sure they are at least the loudest group on the issue. Homeowners are also diligent voters. You’ll need more than 50% of people to be renters to counter this, unless you can convince renters to organize as reliably and passionately as home owners.

> Homeowners are a reliable political cohort, they tend to organize quickly as soon as any issues are on the agenda that might affect the value of their land and they will reliably push for whatever increases land values.

I feel like this is a myth, do you have research to back this?

As a 20+ year home owner, I've never been asked to support anything to increase land/housing value (not that I'd want to, since that means higher taxes for me, which I'd rather not).

I don't think this homeowner cabal to increase values actually exists. If it does, nobody invited me and nobody invited any of my homeowner friends (which is all my friends) either, so it can't be a very large group.

But in the spirit of the question and for curiosity’s sake, if you were faced with a decision that’s beneficial to renters but decreases your property value, which way do you go?

> But in the spirit of the question and for curiosity’s sake, if you were faced with a decision that’s beneficial to renters but decreases your property value, which way do you go?

Details of the proposal matter of course, but in general I'd rather not support home values going up because that just means higher taxes for me in exchange of nothing since I continue to live in the same house which is unchanged.

Have you been asked to vote for/against zoning changes, or for special approvals for variances for developments?

Because I got those all the time. If I didn't show up (which I often did, as a homeowner in the area just to see what they were proposing), all the old folks in the area (90% who owned) definitely did to shoot it down or ask for crazy demands that jack up the price. Sometimes they just filibuster in the vein of 'onion on my belt'.

You'll see big boards up talking about 'Planning Commission Meeting' or 'Meeting on a Proposed Development' at the site of any proposed work, public notices in the paper, and developers in an area are usually required to send notice mailers to every address in the area too in advance.

Those are typically what you see. People generally don't propose a zoning change titled 'Plan to screw over all the poor renters and make the homeowners rich', since that's a bit too obvious and would get thrown out in court. It would be something like 'Plan to develop lot XYZ into high density residential' (which may get shot down).

Many folks (including planning commissions) are happy to ask for on the surface reasonable stuff that makes projects economically unviable, or complain about how the extra traffic from all those people will place an undue burden on them and ruins their quality of life and 'the neighborhood character'. Those complaints are also real - having more people in a small place DOES increase traffic (even with public transit), DOES change quality of life and neighborhood character (better or worse depending on who you are), etc. Adding more parking WOULD be nice for many people, even if there isn't space for it on the lot (why not do a underground parking garage then! $$$)

Which if the planning commission doesn't weigh heavily will result in a rather short tenure for them, in my experience.

All of which raises property values, and decreases the overall number of people who can have accommodation in an area by reducing density.

My municipality's NIMBY calling cards for proposed new development are "if dense housing is built, traffic will be even worse!", "more housing development could mean overcrowded schools!" and "what about our precious open space that some residents treat as garbage dumps and allow overgrowth of invasive species in?"

> Have you been asked to vote for/against zoning changes, or for special approvals for variances for developments?

No, never. That's not the granularity of questions that bubble up to the ballot. Those planning and permit commissions do whatever they do mostly behind closed doors, they certainly never ask the electorate.

> Have you been asked to vote for/against zoning changes, or for special approvals for variances for developments?

Also, if there are cities where this level of question does go on the ballot, it's the same ballot for everyone. So both homeowners and renters in that city get to vote on that, so it's not like there is any special influence power in being in one group or the other.

It never really gets on the ballot around here. But it is certainly brought up in counsel debates and people usually vote for that by proxy through the counsel positions.

There are also always hearings around higher density zoning and people turn out tooth and nail to oppose those at counsel meetings. On thing that is interesting, is people generally like the idea of more housing but when you say, 'We're going to add these 4 blocks near your house to the high density core', either people like it less or the people who like it less come out in droves and throw a fit.

As usual, the “speculators” and “out of towners” and others are convenient scapegoats, lest we have to face the underlying supply and demand and barriers to development.

You want to have a monopoly on housing in a major city? I’d be hard pressed to point out an industry where that would be harder. You have literally millions of competitors.

San Francisco is already the second most densely populated city in the USA (the first being NYC). SF is actually already slightly more densely populated than Tokyo, which many like to tout as a mecha for de-regulated zoning.

But the difference is, NYC is constantly building new housing inventory, with constant construction and developments going up left and right.

Meanwhile most of San Francisco is just streets of old single-family homes.

Do you mean streets of Victorian row houses? I didn’t notice many SFHs in SF unless you count row houses that are more commonly seen as town homes.

See https://westlinevillage.com/townhouse-vs-single-family-whats...

I'd guess no. The neighborhoods west of Twin Peaks and south of the Mission are dominated by single family homes.

I guess you mean the housing that you see coming on Caltrain after pass through south San Francisco? 30% of SF’s housing is classified as single family, so there must be some in the city. Just not as common as it is say, here in Seattle.

Not quite. The Brisbane project was an old Southern Pacific (Union Pacific?) yard that's right by the Caltrain station. AFAIK there's still nothing there.

South of the Mission take a look at Oceanview/Merced Heights/Ingleside (OMI). That's largely SFH. BVHP (Bayview + Hunters Point) as well and parts of it are visible from Caltrain. Heading west you'll find basically all of the Presidio, Forest Hill, Sunset, and Richmond neighborhoods are SFH or maybe low-rise apartment buildings.

A lot of the single family houses in SF have walls right up next to each other but do not actually share a wall. While Forest Hill properties historically had racially themed covenants, most of those neighborhoods predate HOAs and the worst of the covenants have been discarded.

With around 6,300 people per km2, "it is similar in terms of population density to San Francisco. In Tokyo’s 23 wards, however, the density is 15,381 people per km2, making it 50% higher than New York City as a whole."

https://japanpropertycentral.com/2021/12/housing-in-tokyo-is...

The 23 wards of Tokyo are 5 times the land area of SF city proper.

Let’s get in the full context:

>Nakano ward’s density of 21,956/km2, does rank a little closer to Manhattan (around 28,000/km2).

NYC is quite large. Huge areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island have low-risers or single family homes.

Which if course brings the average down.

My comment was more about the parent comment's poor comparison between SF and Tokyo by using Tokyo Metropolis (Tokyo-to) population density – which includes large areas of rural land and mountains – instead of the 23 Wards which is still not perfect but a better approximation of the "city" part of Tokyo Metropolis.

I agree that the link's comparison of Tokyo 23 Wards with all of NYC is not an appropriate comparison. But not necessarily because of single-family housing as you describe. Even for Nakano Ward (with population density nearing Manhattan's), 20.8% of residential buildings are detatched single-family homes and 48.9% of residential buildings are less than 3 stories tall [0], surely a higher proportion than several NYC boroughs. Its high density is more due to having fewer areas with offices, narrower streets (compared to NYC), and barely any green space.

[0] https://www.city.tokyo-nakano.lg.jp/dept/505700/d026142_d/fi...

>San Francisco is already the second most densely populated city in the USA

This isn't true, even if you limit it to cities with population over 100k. New York City, Jersey City, and Paterson, NJ are all more dense than SF.[0] San Francisco is effectively tied with notoriously anti-development Cambridge, MA. Quite a few smaller cities around the country are more dense as well.[1]

The housing situation in San Francisco is nothing to be proud of, unless you think that having the highest median home prices or median rents is a laudable achievement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Absolutely this.

The out of towners, who are mostly Blackrock, is just a fella with a spreadsheet tracking new dwelling approvals vs demand.

All the Bay Area has to do is approve new dwellings. The issue is the politicians are landlords with investment properties.

We are still in the early stages of the bubble deflating.

Many of my friends who are tech workers who've worked at unicorns and tech giants for 5-10 years bought their first homes in SF during the pandemic. I would guess part of the drop in rents is a shift in demand from former renters to new homeowners. Also, there was a general increase in prices across all asset classes during the pandemic that continued to drive prices up. Finally, property prices have actually gone up less in SF than they have in the US as a whole, likely because of the general effect of people moving away - compare the change from January 2020 to today in this chart https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS vs this chart https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/

If everyone who left was living in a 2 bedroom with a roommate and now that space is a one bedroom with a home office, then why would rents fall?

Presumably the willingness to pay a given amount from just one person’s income is lower than that of two people’s income. Add in additional temporary uncertainty in big parts of the tech market and I can see a lot of currently occupied units having a tenant not willing to renew as-was.

Is the former roommate paying twice as much? If not, their rent has fallen, for statistical purposes.

The loss of population is directly caused by property prices, so if they were reduced, the loss would reduce or reverse and we simply would't be talking about population loss anymore (seriously).

Yes, but probably not all. WFH has enabled those not interested in SF property to go for their property elsewhere.

It's also difficult to imagine demand increasing again and prices falling or even staying level. The issue with SF, NYC, London, etc. is sqr miles are effectively fixed and zoning limits how many residential units you can add to the market.

One of the items that seems to be missed in these kind of discussions is the increased demand for what otherwise would be called sprawl. You hear about people want to stay in a big city, or want to move to $tier3 city, but there is also a large cohort that wants to move to within 1.5 hours of bigcity, so I can maintain my network/family/work in the office once a month/etc ... This "sprawl" space is't a limited as the cities proper ... but with commutes was effectively limited. That limit is gone for large groups of remote/semi-remote workers.

Maybe? Just as many people are probably staying in or moving to SF because they remote work to a job in the valley (eg San Jose) and not commute that much. They aren’t so price sensitive and value being in the big city. Until SF is undesirable, demand will keep, rents will remain high, and people are going to be priced out.

I don't know the answer but I do know that all the attempted answers currently posted get the basics of economics spectacularly wrong.

My money is on either this census data or property value data simply being wrong. Housing is a famously inelastic market and a 6.4 % drop in demand should lead to a double-digit decrease in rents and values.

Condos did drop, single family homes did not.

Limited housing stock and people upgrading from rental to a home goosed demand and prices.

I’d also assume people who bought a place are less likely to sell and leave than someone renting.

I live in the south Bay Area. The local public school district has been steadily losing enrollment due to the high cost of living. The district administrator I talked with said that based on student records transfer requests, some families have moved further east and south into the sprawling exurbs, and many others moved to Texas.

I entered 2020 thinking I'd settle in the Bay Area, but stats like these accelerating over the past couple year make me feel fortunate I sat it out.

This is so sad to me. The fracturing of the community because of capitalism. All these people that are moving away from their friends they are shortsighted. When they really need people no one’s going to be around them. Sad.

People are moving because of gross mismanagement by democrats.

Keep in mind that the politicians in charge of this... are extremely local.

They are Democrats, but not the kind you'd think. It's a very small world in local politics.

Could be, what's your point? You think the Democrats are anti-capitalists?

Funny thing is, I recently went back to a few cities which have started to recover and the vibe was so fun I thought how much fun it would be live in one again. So much energy, good shops restaurants and amenities ! People didn’t throw cities away, they threw away cities in lockdown. I think a lot of people will rediscover city life and ultimately end up back there for some reason or another.

Cities grew organically for different reasons, we kept them because they serve a purpose. Before the pandemic it wast like we all hated living in cities.

I agree with you and GP; I'm just pointing out that the article does mention it as a primary reason:

> Experts have said the Bay Area’s high housing costs and remote work policies, particularly for the tech industry, fueled out-migration during the pandemic, as residents sought cheaper homes and more space. Almost all California coastal cities lost population, while the more affordable Central Valley and Inland Empire saw gains.

My observation from the discussion here is that there are a lot of people here still raving about city life (especially as pandemic tapers down) and how people are moving back in, etc. I think it's suffice to say everyone has a different living preference, and remote work enabled people who otherwise didn't want to live here, to move away, which in turn also opened up some spaces for people who wanted to live here but found it too expensive, to move in. The real question is probably how the numbers work out. Are there a lot more people who wanted to move away and are doing so now? If so, home prices and rents would drop. If the opposite is true or the numbers are about even, then prices wouldn't drop or would drop less.

There's also a natural tendency for many people, as they get older, to tend to gravitate away from downtowns as they care less about the bar scene, say, and more about space for hobbies, family, etc. So you're always going to have some natural outflow for older demographics and it's probable it's not being counterbalanced by new grads moving in.

But I agree with your basic point. If you no longer have to live in an area for work, you definitely start thinking about where you want to live.

If SF was attractive, then people would want to remotely work from SF. But it isn't. So, they're leaving. On the other hand San Diego seems to be blowing up.

I don't think this is necessarily true. Consider that the reason many people were in SF in the first place was because their job required them to be there and they didn't have a choice; now that they have a choice, perhaps many of them find SF attractive and stay, while a minority don't and leave.

Around 2010 and before SF was very attractive. The southbay were where most jobs were located but everyone wanted to live in the city. That's what caused a huge amount of companies and startups to move to SF.

The influx of techies, however, changed the city. And SF soon became what it is today.

The ahistorical techies destroyed sf by 2000.

Sf became techietown in 2000.

Instead of primarily being an alt culture capital.

It became "a place to work".

No. It started in 2000 and proceeded into 2010 where around 2010 and before it became noticeable. By the mid 2010s it reached it's peak.

Prior to 2010 and a little after it was more than a place to work. It was a place where all techies wanted to live; but not because of work. Because they loved the city. That's why those shuttles from SF to mountain view google exist. Too many googlers wanted to live in SF and work in MTV.

> Consider that the reason many people were in SF in the first place was because their job required them to be there and they didn't have a choice

I’m not sure how big of a factor that is/was though. I know plenty of people in their 20s who worked in the peninsula or east bay but deliberately took on the high costs (and long commutes!) of living in SF for the usual reasons related to SF being a cultural center.

I think it would be fairer to apply your claim to the reason many people live in the entire Bay Area, but not specifically in SF.

I mean, to be fair, we're talking about 6 out of 100 people moving this year. I can defiantly see 6 out of 100 people being there just because that's where they get paid or their job moved them.

It's even more likely that part of that 6 percent had family obligations, and some just realized they wouldn't buy a house even if they loved the city, and some just hated it.

If fallacies worked then everyone would use them, but they don't, so nobody uses them!

SF is attractive it's just stupidly expensive

If SF was unattractive, it wouldn't cost $2,500-$3,000 to live in mediocre housing with 6 housemates.

Even people that don't have high paying tech jobs are lining up to pay these kinds of insane prices. They don't want to pay the prices, but it's worth it to live in an area like SF.

One of the only places on the planet in human history that people put this much energy and money into just living somewhere.

"Nobody drives in LA. There's too much traffic!"

Obviously there is some level of demand to live in SF, and that's part of the explanation for the high cost of living.

But the factor really driving up rent and real estate prices is the massive resistance in SF and the Bay Area in general to building new housing.

It's being driven up everywhere. SF just started higher.

In part yes, but also, SF was especially resistant to building new houses. So much so it even has a Wikipedia article on its obstinance. [1]

> For example, from 2012 to 2016, the San Francisco metropolitan area added 373,000 new jobs, but permitted only 58,000 new housing units.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage

Don't confuse the city and county of San Francisco with the whole bay area. There are NIMBYs just like everywhere else out here, but San Francisco is already one of the most densely populated cities in the country. You don't have to look very far (e.g. Brisbane) to see places with little-to-no housing fighting new developments tooth and nail.

While I agree, being among the most densely populated areas in a country that's mostly empty ain't much to write home about. It's basically just apologism. I know it needs to happen everywhere, I just have a particular disdain for SF city politics.

I guess living in SF is like buying a boat. You're happy when moving there but much happier when moving out

SF is expensive. If SF was cheaper, it would be more attractive, more people would arrive, and rents would be pushed up again by the increased competition. This is just supply and demand at work.

I have a family member in San Diego and it’s truly mind boggling how expensive things have become over the last couple years.

It's funny, I moved to SF and landed a tech job, in that order. I moved to the Bay Area for certain things above a job. I know there are others like me, perhaps not a majority of the HN crowd, but I quite like it here and it would take a lot for me to change my mind about the place.

Lots of reasons why people hate SF. The homeless problems, the petty crime. The smell, the dirtiness, the shitty weather, the actual danger of stepping on human feces, the drug use.

To each their own, but I think it's important for people to get out of their headspace and see things from a more general perspective as well. There are very good reasons why people don't like SF and unless people who love the city acknowledge those things, change is likely impossible.

Except the weather lol I lived in Bernal for years and never experienced any of that...

This is what I mean by people not getting out their headspace. I literally find it impossible not to experience every single thing I mentioned above on a daily basis just by walking through the city.

There are good reasons why people don't like SF but why should people who do like SF care or try to convince them otherwise? I don't like Dallas but I don't think people who do like Dallas need to get out of their headspace and change things for my benefit.

Obviously SF has problems and no one loves SF who doesn't want to improve the homeless issue. It doesn't make them wrong to love the city.

Do you know the excitement that surrounds stories like this on foxnews? They want liberal Democrat cities to fail so they can blame leadership as an example

That's because leadership is failing.

The correct response of leaders is to ignore wealthy citizens attempting to prop up their multi-million dollar 3bed4bath properties and let them know, "We're going to zone more areas for residential development, sorry. 2500 square foot homes shouldn't be $3 million in any area in America."

And all these rich liberals - and they are liberals - use the same bullshit line over and over, "I'm all FOR affordable housing... I'm just afraid it'll change the character of our neighborhood."

Bull. Shit. You. Lying. Fuck.

You thought you'd be able to set up your grandchildren for life because you chose what was a relatively sleepy, and honestly kinda shitty, city back in the 1970s. Fuck you and fuck off.

What they're really afraid of is that some politician who really does give a shit about the city will come along and upend their apple cart and their 50 year old brownstone will only be worth $1 million instead of $7 million when they die.

Anger aside (directed more at liberals or NIMBYs?), California and San Francisco is limiting its potential.

Wealth of the area is being strangled by a magnitude.

As an individual owner, however, it’s irrational to not fight.

So how would you incentivize growth? It can be done, but I do think the lawmakers will have to be creative about it.

> Wealth of the area is being strangled by a magnitude

How so?

For one, real estate value isn’t fixed.

A lot of two small houses can made into a condo that serves eight families or more (a very tiny condo).

The values of those eight condos isn’t equal to the two houses; the total value will be eventually be quite higher yet individually be more affordable.

That’s just the start. Let’s suppose 1000 single family homes were converted into a 4000 units.

The construction alone means economic activity, though that’s temporary.

3000 more families means more to that much more demand for services in the long term. Which ripples into more demand for service jobs, generating a demand for labor.

More incoming labor means more people, which means more construction activity due to demand.

Rinse and repeat.

San Francisco is missing out however, because the window of opportunity is passing; that is, if it hasn’t already passed.

> let them know, "We're going to zone more areas for residential development,

Why? This may seem deliberately naïve but in the context of the current discussion, why should more areas be zoned for residential if people are leaving the Bay Area? If there are residents who hate the Bay Area, can't afford it, and are no longer stuck there now that they can WFH then it sounds like they are cheerfully leaving. The wealthy citizens keep their houses and neighborhoods and perhaps the rest of us get a break from the ceaseless complaining.

It's an easier solution than massive rezoning proposals.

Because human beings have a right to live in an affordable home.

There's no reason that, given increased construction, Bay Area prices cannot DECREASE.

Imagine that. Having your monthly home payments go down by 10% a year, due to increased supply.

Treating land as a source of wealth, even for the 4 bedroom 3 bathroom middle class, is highly immoral.

The amount of residential zoning is NOT the problem. It is the restrictions on existing zoning.

People want to maintain a suburban way of life for a population that is changing into a city.

What right does a person have to prevent me from turning my home into a 4 unit apartment complex? No right, yet this is the rule that prevents suburbia from transforming into a city.

It is like a growing reptile refusing to shed.. Instead it stays put growing bigger and bigger until it's suffocates and explodes. The bay area has has already suffocated... the exodus is it's guts spilling out of a rupture in the skin.

> What they're really afraid of is that some politician who really does give a shit about the city will come along and upend their apple cart

The opposition party in Australia in 2019 wanted to take some policies which makes investing in houses more profitable which might have lowered house prices but majority of people in Australia are homeowners so they didnt vote for opposition party.

Are you calling me a "lying fuck" because I offered my opinion about the situation?

No he called you a lying fuck because he thinks you're not being honest.

I don't think you're lying. But most definitely what he says about liberal democrats is true.

https://youtu.be/hNDgcjVGHIw

Attacking conservatives was just poor taste and off topic. The reaction you got was well deserved because you tried to give something neutral a political bent.

1. First rule of comments on Hackernews is "be kind". My statement didn't attack any single user on this site. If the user disagreed with me he can simply state that with a counter argument.

2. Conservative pundits have made remarks implying politics/a political party are to blame. I don't think it's politically neutral and that's what I was commenting on. Examples below where the population decline is discussed.

Foxnews - segment on the crime issues and the population decline. Saying that "a rare breed, a Republican" ... "community activist is trying to save his city". Then when talking about the DA and a recall "..who is the notoriously soft on crime DA in San Francisco". [1]

Washington Times - "In recent years, more people have left California for other states than have moved there, a trend Republicans say is a result of the state’s high taxes and progressive politics" [2]

Newsmax - [Headline]"DeSantis Concerned About California Exodus; Calls San Francisco 'Dumpster Fire'"

(Desantis quote's are the main portion of the article) It's like the leftism, they will not draw the connection between their leftist ideology and the destruction that's all around them,""

[1]https://video.foxnews.com/v/6305307974112#sp=show-clips

[2]https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/7/california-p...

[3]https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/desantis-california-exodus...

It is an attack. It's blaming a situation based off of someones politics. People are conservatives too and when they are talked about like that, they feel blamed or almost like they're being observed like creatures in a zoo.

The person who responded to you interpreted that way and to me it also reads that way. Simply bringing up politics is often an attack and depending on the context it may be relevant, but in this case I don't see any relevancy. Lots of people hate SF who lived there and this is independent of the media.

Even Fox news doesn't always report lies. Sure they have strong bias and tend to twist reality and exaggerate situations but their objective is political, not to simply just "lie." If a story aligns with their politics then when they report it, it's basically reporting the truth.

In this case the whole communism thing is an exaggeration, but it is an aspect of the truth that lots of people hate SF.

There's just no need bring up Fox or the conservative media here. Better to offer your opinion on the matter because a good number of people who hate SF are actually liberal and moderate as well.

In my opinion some conservative pundants hate sf not because of the conditions but because of who runs the government and who lives there

And I think bringing up Foxnews is worth it because they push a narrative about issues in California less on numbers and more on emotion. They repeat the same accussations or statements without data so often people take it as fact now. For example "California is a failed state "

> To each their own, but I think it's important for people to get out of their headspace and see things from a more general perspective as well.

What makes you think those of us who enjoy living in the area haven't made the conscious choice? There are good reasons I chose to live in the urban parts of the SFBA, just like I presume there are good reasons several of my friends are happily running a household in Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Brooklyn, Columbus, or pretty much any other part of the US.

Many haven't... I've literally met people who claim they haven't seen any human feces in San Francisco or drug users and homeless people everywhere.

Then there's people like you who prefer the fair and balanced look. Like San Francisco is a city that has some problems just like any other city.

Are there really, truly any factually bad places to live in the world? Or is everything just a matter of opinion? Nothing is bad or good it's what each individual makes of it.

When is it that enough people believe in something that it's no longer an opinion but a fact? Some people may enjoy being punched in the face but enough people hate being punched in the face that this situation is considered to be factually just a shitty situation to be in, completely independent of opinion.

I'm saying enough people are talking shit about SF that SF is pretty much in the zone of being factually categorized as a shitty place to live. If it's not there yet, it's close enough where people need to acknowledge some big problems here that no other 1st world city has.

I think the point is that many people feel forced to live in SF because of their job. At the same time, there are so many people that love SF that are forced out due to economics.

It would be better if people were able to choose where they want to live rather than being pushed into certain living situations that aren't what they'd choose. There are plenty of techies that feel pushed to living in SF for their job. There are plenty of LGBT people that feel pushed out (or kept out) of SF due to economics even though they want to be there. It's not that any group is right or wrong. I just think that people get resentful when they're kept away from the things they want in life. Place is one of the biggest parts of our lives. "I want to live in X, but I can't really because..." is just a recipe for unhappiness.

> "if I don't have to live here, do I want to keep living here"

I answered the exact same no to that question, moving out of NYC when my job went permanently remote since the pandemic. I moved to semi-rural Virginia where my family is, and bought a house with far more space and a pool than I could have dreamed of within commuting distance of NYC.

For some house size is less important than have more to do outside the home if city entertainment is to your liking

Your reasoning contradicts its self.

I agree that remote work allows more workers to live where they want.

You claim that workers left SF not because of any attribute of the city, but because they wanted a change.

You imply that SF is desirable place to live, however it's population declined only because of a desire for change.

However, there are more remote workers outside of SF than in it. If SF was in-fact desirable, and remote workers simply want 'change', then SF's population would increase. Because a greater number of remote workers would move to desirable SF for their change, than would leave it.

Reality is this: Remote work allows workers choose desirable places to live regardless of office location.

Without the advantage of office location, SF stops being desirable. It stops being desirable because the benefits it supplies (culture, etc) are less than the costs it demands (crime, rent, etc).

One might argue that MANY cities are going to experience similar declines and that SF isn't unique. So this can't be seen as people voting with their feet against SF.

That's fine. Then people are voting with their feet against MANY cities and cities are simply not desirable.

The price of rent shows its desirability. Lots and lots of people want to live there, but that doesn't mean they can, or that it's the best fit for their other requirements.

No it really doesn't. It's a supply/demand thing. A ton of jobs bring people into San Francisco, a lot of people coming into SF (with housing supply roughly steady) let to ever increasing prices. Simple as that. That's the majority of why people come to SF.

It's not the 1960s anymore as people fled to SF because of flower power, hippies or the gay movement. Sadly it's become a very different town.

As soon as jobs didn't require people to live in SF (thanks to Covid induced remote work) people moved out. Not everyone! Of course. But more people moved out than moved in, showing that the desirability of SF isn't as strong as you think it is.

There's another data point that supports this view of remote work: retirement

Many people, when given the chance to not work at all, leave their residence or make a decision to split their time between their old home and a new home in a location with a better lifestyle, friends, family, whatever.

The even more obvious thing is the lockdowns. Regardless of whether you think the lockdowns were appropriate or not, it’s pretty clear that many of the advantages of living in a dense cultural center like SF go away when you’re mostly confined to your home and can’t participate in night life, the art/music scene, restaurants, etc. Heck you barely even benefit from the weather any more.

Many SF tech companies would love to not allow remote work again, but I think they can't really pull that off anymore. The argument "the company can't function that way" has been demolished during COVID days, so it'd be very hard for companies to go back. And the more companies allow it, the less leverage the ones that don't have.

That said, a lot of people that worked in SF didn't live in SF even back then. They may live in Oakland, Redwood City, Mountain View, all the way from Walnut Creek to Los Gatos or Milpitas. Now they can just avoid the multi-hour commute - and I think that's a win.

>...all these super visible indicators

I laughed a little at how hard the wording here is trying not to say "The homeless and druggies". Anyway, this explanation might have some grounding in reality but I don't know that it's actually saying anything useful since people and businesses choose remote work for a reason and they choose to displace themselves to embrace it for a reason. There are essentially two components in this scenario. There are the people who leave because want to work remotely and the companies that want to leave to hire remote workers (or move their current workers). The people want to work remotely because of the crime, toxic local culture, and costs. Companies want to leave because of the crime, incompetent governance, and costs. In either case, the fraction of people/businesses leaving because remote work is just so awesome and it's fun to get out and see new places is miniscule.

Tl;dr: People and businesses choose to work remotely for reasons and there's little evidence to show that a primary or even significant motivator of this is simply a desire for a change of scenery. Even if it was, the question still becomes what is the scenery being escaped from.

This is exactly why I left to a smaller town. Once I was fully remote, there was nothing keeping me from seeking out better prices for housing, better schooling for my children, and better streets to walk down.

As someone who still enjoys SF and wants to keep living here, I read this as great news since I expected rents to decrease by a similar amount.

But I just checked my apartment's website and it seems like if anything the rents have slightly increased compared to the price I renewed at last year!? Obviously this is a sample size of 1 and doesn't reflect the overall market.

Curious if anyone else has real data on rent price trends. Is it just my apartment or is this a case of the market staying irrational for longer than I'd have hoped?

EDIT: data was provided in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31533492

I'm in Oakland and I'm not in SF all the time, but it does feel like Market St. / the Financial District is the most affected post-pandemic, but the rest of the city feels like it's as popular as ever. Lots of SF residents I know in tech are working from home but are still living and enjoying the city.

Anyone know stats on NYC? I'm having trouble understanding the current true state wrt to apartment rental pricing: many people left during Covid but I'm not quite sure if many of those in fact returned.

Furthermore, it would seem as though rental inventory is quite low or at least demand is through the roof (typically one needs to be ready to sign on the spot) with little to no room to shop-around. Prices are also quite high, I understand we have been in a recent high inflation regime but I just can't help but think the apartment rental market isn't as transparent as it was say, 3+ years ago.

price is above pre pandemic

There are many incentives in NYC that prevent rents from dropping. What we saw during the pandemic was static rent prices with increased benefits that lowered the actual price, for example last month is free so in effect rent has been lowered by 1/12 while still being listed as 12/12. Landlords do this for a variety of completely [redacted] reasons, including price controls, taxes, vacancy regulations, credit for "improvements", advertising histories. Rents do not fall in NYC, they merely stop rising for a time.

The main reason they do it, IIRC, is because the banks handing out the landlords loans require some minimum rent prices on the leases in the loan contracts. The way they get around this is by offering a month or three of free rent. That way the leases signed by the tenants still me the contractual obligations of the bank.

In the end the tenant still gets screwed when the lease comes up to be renewed, unless they are willing to move out over negotiating another free month in the next cycle.

There was a big price spike in late 2021 to the present for rents. There was an amazing opportunity in early 2021 for a super negotiation position.

Unfortunately the people came back all at the same time, seemingly.

The state is booming with low vacancy, that's the present state

I think a lot of people got covid deals, and at over 12 month leases. For example, getting a 12 month lease plus some number of free months. Some of these people are still in their apartments. Meanwhile, a lot of people are trying to move to the city and there's just less space overall because of those deals.

My guess is that as those leases come to an end and some of those people move, the rent situation may get less crazy. But who knows.

In the first year of COVID. I can't comment about how SF is faring these days, but LA also cleared out that first year.

But this year, people came roaring back. The average rent increase in my neighborhood was over 20%. The competition for rental units in some buildings is intense enough that potential tenants either sign a rental agreement on the spot or lose the unit to someone else willing to sign, and at least one of the apartment buildings on my block has a waitlist.

(Also interesting to note that the city of LA was not one of the top cities in terms of population loss per the Census, but several suburban cities in LA County, like Torrance, were on the list.)

I haven't seen any data to support "roaring back". 6-ish months ago they were still saying SF rents were down 20% from March 2020. Any idea how many rentals aren't rentals anymore because of the moratorium impact? I know up here in Portland there was a huge net reduction of rentals and prices spiked pretty hard.

For example: https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/sa... https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/05/02/san-francisc...

Like I said, I can't comment on how SF is doing because I don't live there. But I do live in LA, and the apartments in my neighborhood have never been this full before.

For point of comparison: at two of the apartment buildings on my block, a 1 BR 540 sq ft studio will rent for about $2800. This is up 16% from pre-COVID rates of approximately $2400 for those same units ($2200 during COVID, which is where the >20% increase comes from).

EDIT: At one of those buildings, a 1BR is listed for $3600, which is what a 2BR used to rent for at that same building pre-COVID. I can't say what the 2BR rates are right now because there aren't any listed.

Rents are up across the country and you are right it's 20% in LA according to rent.com. However equating rental prices going up 12% in the past 12 months with "people coming roaring back" isn't really correct. I mean inflation is up >7% in the last 12 months. I wouldn't say NYC has had a huge roaring back of people...but rent is up 39% in the last year...triple what SF saw.

You can have rental prices increase and that doesn't necessarily mean an increase in demand...there are many external factors (supply shrinking, adjustments to account for lost rent in the pandemic, inflation, etc).

You're just ignoring contrary data to fit your viewpoint.

As I've pointed out many times, the apartment buildings in my neighborhood have waitlists for potential renters, and that's despite 20% YoY rent increases (or 16% rent increases, comparing pre- and post-COVID). Average vacancy is less than 1%, and that is true of all of the desirable neighborhoods in LA (of which there are too many to mention). Your own citation supports the rent increase.

These rent increases are not due to supply shrinking (there are thousands more rental units on the market now than before COVID), adjustments for lost rent in the pandemic (that's not how rental pricing works, landlords always charge market rate), and inflation (rent in these neighborhoods increased more than twice as much as inflation).

At this point, having been confronted by data showing that your understanding is wrong, you need to point to actual concrete evidence that your understanding is reasonable and not just vague insinuations.

My viewpoint is that there is not enough evidence to support what you are saying. Also "your neighborhood" isn't the same thing as an entire city so you can't extrapolate a single small data point into a city wide theory.

I didn't see any of your data to show 16% increases of pre/post COVID...and the article is talking about SF which is 12% YoY.

Landlords absolutely charge market rate...which includes baseline costs for running rentals and they had much higher than normal non-payment over the last 2 years which means their costs are up, therefore rents are up.

I see no data to support your "thousands more rental units now"...in Portland they saw supply shrink over the past few years, and that was pre-COVID. With the recent increase in home values and 24+ months of potential non-payment a lot of small time landlords opted to sell (and we have a shit ton of people from California moving up here). https://assets.noviams.com/novi-file-uploads/mfnw/Files/arti...

Here's rent data for SF:

https://www.rent.com/california/san-francisco-apartments/ren...

  Avg.    Rent    Annual Change
  Studio  $2,911  +17%
  1 Bed   $3,520  +12%
  2 Beds  $4,593  +6%
  3 Beds  $5,701  +8%

So if the average is say 12% increase (which is what rent.com says right now)...that still means SF is lower than before COVID started. Not to mention that the most cities are seeing off the charts numbers compared to SF right now.

https://www.rent.com/research/average-rent-price-report/

36% increase in Portland, 112% increase in Austin, 36% in Miami.

But please, feel free to down vote me for using data.

> people came roaring back. The average rent increase in my neighborhood was over 20%

Just throwing a thought out there, but your anecdote might say a bit more about inflation than about a returning population.

No, these buildings are completely full. The average vacancy for the apartment buildings in my neighborhood is less than 1%. Also, you're ignoring the bit about the waitlists...

See also LAT article on this phenomenon, but across the metro area as a whole. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-05-17/california...

> The average rent increase in my neighborhood was over 20%.

Is that compared to the pre-pandemic value, or to an artificially low value during a pandemic year?

Also consider inflation: if everything is up 8% in a year, the real increase is only 12% in real terms.

So many houses in my SF neighborhood are currently empty. They're single family homes so I'm not sure of the impact on the overall population, but it's been weird around here.

- For sale and empty.

- Full renovations. Guessing more than half are flipping them, given the speed which construction started after sale.

- Investors buying homes and keeping them empty.

What is happening is a weird confluence of events that no-one actually cares to analyze because SF is the world's most politically charged city to speak about, so people just state their biases vs. actually thinking.

The trends as I see them are:

1) An increasing number of increasingly wealthy people with connections to SF that choose to domicile elsewhere while keeping a home in the city that is used a few months a year (to your point of empty homes being kept empty).

2) The temporary shut-off of a massive pipeline of recent college grads who fill the offices of not only start-ups, but also accounting firms, consulting firms, banks, etc.

3) A reduction in appetite for '3 guys in a 2 bedroom where someone sleeps in the dining room' and an increase in appetite for '1 guy in a 2 bedroom/home office set up,' which supports price growth but not population growth.

4) The fact that for the past century, SF has been a city that grows beyond its means and then crashes, only to pick back up again on the next cycle (SF only surpassed its peak 1950 population in 1990)

There are certainly more that I miss, but from a street-level perspective, SF isn't in noticeably worse shape than it was in 2000. Question is "Is post-pandemic lifestyle change similar to the car (which caused that 40 year lull) or is it more temporary?"

Some people renovate before moving in. Might as well customize it before the big move if you can afford it.

On the 400 block of Arlington street, there are several large Victorian homes that have been empty for several years. There needs to be a tax on empty homes and a tax on people owning second homes that are empty.

Property tax?

Property Tax 2: The Vacancy

With even hybrid work models your living a better life living up in Sac and driving down once a week.

This is a good thing. People should vote with their feet.

Problem is when hybrid becomes 2, and then 3 days. That commutes starts becoming a nightmare.

The capitol corridor train is pleasant enough, even if not the most convenient of bay area transit options.

Isn't that like 2 hours each way..? That's like a quarter of your day, no thanks.

Yes, 2 hours from Sac. Quite rough to do every day, but I'd think pleasant to do twice a week; there's WiFi and a café on board, for what it's worth. That said, if you just want cheaper housing, Fairfield is only an hour away in the same direction, so there are plenty of intermediate options.

I had a 90 minute+ door to door commute (which I could do mostly by train) for about 18 months. I only had to do it about half the time and it was manageable but probably not sustainable long-term, especially for stretches when I was regularly going in more frequently. Once a week would be pretty doable; I go in for the day periodically but nothing like once a week.

That’s when you buck up and let your boss know you mean business. Sorry to be crass, but fuck this hybrid bullshit. Commutes are a massive waste of time and doing it even once a week is unacceptable.

I’ll quit before hybrid. It’s a great market to change jobs.

You can live cheaper in a lot of cities closer to San Francisco than Sac which still offer reasonable commutes. Most of the east bay, south bay, peninsula, etc.

I think the point was the cost. Sacramento is much cheaper than the peninsula.

You couldn’t pay me enough to live and work in Sacramento let alone live there and commute to the city.

According to the article, Manhattan lost 6.6% (that is, even more) in the same timeframe.

Manhattan is a much closer comparable to SF than all of NYC, the lines just happen to be drawn differently.

SF is probably hit the hardest by WFH. If you lived and worked in the city you probably had a pretty good commute, so you're not getting the biggest benefit. And while I know it's a less common preference on HN, a lot of people enjoy going in to a lively office and occasionally grabbing drinks with your coworkers after work. It's a great way to make new friends. But with WFH there's a prisoners dilemma where no-one goes in because no-one goes in. Hard to justify living in one of the most expensive cities in the world at that point.

As a side note, I've been reading a lot of comments like the one below describing SF as a "nightmarish hellscape" and I just want to caution people to not read into things too much. I've spent a lot of time in both SF and Seattle, and while there's specific streets you want to avoid, and you can (rarely) run into weird or disturbed people in other areas (like most major cities) overall they're lovely places if you can afford them.

On the other hand, SF has a significant tech population that has been living in the city but taking shuttle buses for an hour to their offices down south. I imagine flexible WFH for 2-3 days/wk will enable a larger number of people in the future to live in SF

I'm in this boat and this is true. A hybrid wfh and partial in the office option really opens up options living in this area, it makes it much more doable.

I think flexible WFH will also be a boost to Apple, which traditionally was unable to hire some people who loved city life and refused to commute.

It's the people paying $3000 for a bunk bed who bailed on the city.

Probably not. Rents dropped (supply meets demands - even in San Francisco). Most people I know who were unhappy with their apartment moved across town and got better deals (myself included). If you left you probably left because you had no strong connection with the city and you wanted to leave. Anyone in tech who wanted to stay could fill the vacancies.

Did rents really shift that much outside of the widest margins? I feel like 3k for a nice one bedroom has held more or less constant for the last few years (even pre-pandemic), a little up, a little down, but largely been around there. You could definitely pay more, and you could find cheaper, but for a ~1000 sqft single, the needle really hasn't trended far.

C'mon. Rent was/is expensive but never $3000 for a bunk bed. If you were really splitting a room I'm pretty sure you could have had one for <$800 pre pandemic (assuming you're splitting 1 bedroom in a 3 bedroom setup).

I think it's also the case that people whose main experience with SF is going to conferences at the Moscone get exposed to more than their fair share of the city's underbelly. When I was last in SF last December, I was actually led to expect things would be a lot worse than they were. To be honest, it seemed "normal" which is sort of a low bar in certain areas but, as you say, that's true of Seattle too.

> like most major cities

I have lived in or visited Boston, Chicago, North Carolina's RTP, and the Bay. Only in SF are there homeless camps with blatant drug abuse and public defecation being tolerated by authorities. Only in SF can you run into, with 100% probability, a mentally deranged person on your daily commute. When "specific streets" cover half the city (Financial district, Tenderloin, SoMA, Mission...) they aren't so specific anymore.

The other cities listed are very cold at times and/or very humid/hot at times. It is much easier and pleasant to camp outside in western cities.

…which makes people less sympathetic to the homeless, and feel less compelled to take real action to get them off the street.

Obviously NC is a completely different environment, so it doesn’t even make sense to compare.

But I think the fair weather of the west coast absolutely hurts the homeless more. In Boston, they have a “right to shelter” law that will house people, even in hotel rooms. SF weather is so nice that people don’t feel bad about letting people stay on the street.

Boston actually has more homeless people (with a similar total population) than SF - but almost all of them are “sheltered” and off the street. Boston has a 97% shelter rate, SF has 40%. NYC has a much bigger population (and more absolute homelessness), and a sheltered rate of 95% - due to similar “right to shelter” laws. Even Chicago has a meager 72% shelter rate.

https://sfgov.org/scorecards/benchmarking/homelessness

Why is this so prevalent in wealthy U.S. cities but so much less in cities like Paris and London. These are more expensive (relative to income), dense cities with housing shortages and smaller GDP's.

Maybe there's something to be said for management of tax revenue and prioritization. Also petty theft is prosecuted in these cities.

Americans, especially those who've led a relatively charmed life, have a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality. The idea of the rugged, cowboy individualist succeeding all on their own through sheer force of will is a deeply ingrained part of our culture. Many would scoff if you tried telling them that they're already deeply interdependent with others to live the lifestyles they lead, for things like the clothes on their back, the food on their table, etc.

A person with this kind of mentality who sees homelessness and drug addiction on the street is unlikely to be sympathetic about what brought someone to that state of affairs, or take action to help fix the issue.

I've lived in the same spot in the mission for 10+ years (and been around longer), and other folks in the building for 20+: the mission hasn't regressed to the gang wars era (we have stories there...), but between the break-ins, homeless tents, poop & drugs, crazy people shouting at 4am, and occasional shootings, the neighborhood has slid back 10-15 years. Luckily I've only witnessed 1 murder, so the crime is merely 'costly and disruptive' vs 'life threatening', but that doesn't mean it's acceptable.

I lived in Seattle as well & visit frequently -- around when capital+pill hill gentrified again around MS downtown employees (games studios?): the current Amazon-era of the city is closer to SF 5-10 years ago vs today's slide back. It's not all good, to be clear: I'm guessing buying a place just got steadily harder as well, and families pushed further out.

I think it's worth noting that while it was definitely statistically less safe in the gang wars era, it was also less obvious. You didn't have to step over someone shooting up on the sidewalk (or the turd they left behind). You wouldn't see a broad daylight theft. If it wasn't your car stereo that was stolen the problems felt a lot farther away.

Curious why you continue to live there if you feel it's gotten so much more dangerous? Perhaps rent control? There are so many nice and safer parts of SF.

I spent a decade in St. Louis, MO, famously rated "Most Dangerous City in America" multiple years running and witnessed 0 murders. How many murders would you need to witness before you start to worry about your own safety?

Yep :)

Unfortunately, guns is a US problem, not a SF one. Within that, most violence is between people who know each other, so that's a funny one to work through. We moved our Oakland office to SF not long after watching a drive-by shooting of a downtown subway bus stop during a product strategy meeting: avoiding being the collateral damage is the tricky calculation here.

I am indeed moving out, but due to the city failing at its homeless programs + the historic property crime levels. (Parking a car shouldn't be a game of chance where you factor in the chance of theft & broken windows into the meter cost!) Simply going outside is annoying at this point, while there are amazing areas all around the bay area where that's still a joy.

> Luckily I've only witnessed 1 murder

Stockholm syndrome is real here.

Surprisingly though, mission south of 24th has gotten better in the past decade.

I have visited almost every major US cities including a lot of experience living in and near some of the “worst crime” cities. Cities where there really are streets you do not dare go. In San Francisco I never felt unsafe anywhere, even in the “worst” parts of town. That said, the concentration of homeless people when I last visited was unlike anything I had ever seen in a US city.

I'm a city native living in SF, but grew up all over the SFBAY including much, much rougher neighborhoods than anything I've experienced in SF.

Several of my family members and myself have been assaulted/robbed in broad daylight, had cars stolen, and some have been shot by stray bullets due to a local gang fight. When I was in grade school someone brought a gun to class and showed it off by pointing it at me (!!) — all outside of SF.

SF feels incredibly safe compared to my lived experience in the rest of the Bay. I'm not saying there aren't any issues here, but SF is nowhere near as bad as some of the roughest parts of the Bay. Not by a longshot.

> SF is nowhere near as bad as some of the roughest parts of the Bay. Not by a longshot.

You’re absolutely right, but compared to other global cities SF often looks comically bad, and certainly has the appearance of decline. No fundamental reason it can’t rise again though.

And especially given its income and tax levels... there's no excuse for SF to be so chaotic and disheveled. It's like having the income and taxes of Switzerland but living conditions of a third world country.

1: Cities don’t have the authority to levy income taxes.

2: SF has a lower sales tax rate than surrounding counties.

3: Crime data shows SF is no more chaotic than its much larger and more populated neighbor across the bay (Alameda County)

Generally, I feel like the Mercury News homicide map is a good representation of the roughness of the area, and it doesn't look like SF is as different from those areas as you propose. From the looks of it, it's one step up from dead last, Oakland.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/01/04/bay-area-homicides-20...

This map is proving my point. Even if SF is one step up from dead last, if we look at a complete year (2021) there's a HUGE difference between SF and Oakland. By comparison SF looks relatively safe, and having lived in both cities I can attest to that.

The rough parts of SF are a cakewalk compared to Oakland's. Not only that, but at least in SF the roughest parts tend to be pretty concentrated to a small area.

I didn't want to point out Oakland by name because I still think it's a pretty awesome city and visit it often. Seeing SF being singled out by the (social)media as a hellscape makes it pretty clear they're really unfamiliar with much of the SFBAY.

The truth is that most culturally significant cities have both good and bad parts to them.

Ya it pales in comparison to Oakland (low bar). But it's still #37 of 100 in violent crime, and is #4 highest property crime.[0]

And with Oakland, it's all happening in the West and East Oakland hoods, separate from the places most people here and visitors would frequent. But with SF, it's all over the main areas of the city (obviously still somewhat concentrated in a radius around Tenderloin) where people are going about their day to work and tourists are passing by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Population: 16/100

Murder: 66/100

Rape: 67/100

Assault: 66/100

Robbery: 55/100

Theft: 2/100 (!!)

Car theft: 34/100

Outside of theft [1], SF ranks in the lower half per capita in most categories in this chart, including burglary. Of course it would be better if it was even lower, but what I see and experience, is a relatively safe city considering its population.

[1]Yes I care about theft, but my personal safety and those I care about rank much much higher than my property, and what I'd consider being "safe" in a city.

Wait what.

So the street you want to avoid in SF is... Market Street?

That just reads like "don't go to Oakland."

It’s pretty easy for the highly paid and wealthy to insulate themselves from the problems of any city and live in a bubble of comfort. SF is becoming more challenging to do so in, but far from impossible.

It’s the lower and middle classes that suffer most from SF’s problems, they can’t afford the rose colored glasses. Until the wealthy are truly inconvenienced they’ll continue with the feel-good ineffective measures.

That’s not specific to SF of course, it’s just becoming more prevalent. I definitely enjoy spending time there, but I’m lucky enough to afford to.

In places like NYC the feel-good measures (like not prosecuting low level crimes, like shoplifting and petty theft) cost the city tax revenue due to businesses leaving and tourists becoming more reluctant to come. Headlines have effects.

Ironically, that tax revenue can be used to reduce these very issues, a secondary effect not brought up often.

Where are the good areas? I work from SF occasionally (SoMa), but many of my post-work exploration (of restaurants and bars) lead me to walk through or near places that are aptly described by the “hellscape” comparisons. I get skeeved out to the max.

Are there better places to hang out for rich people/people in the know? Random walks are rarely fruitful for me here in SF compared to other large cities I’ve been to.

Also, for what it’s worth, I’m not sure people who live in the city have noticed the decline from its prepandemic “peak”. As someone who visits a few times a year, the changes are far more dramatic.

I know a few folks who moved to States like Colorado, Delaware, etc from Bay Area once their employers officially went fully remote. They all said Bay Area was unaffordable for them. These are mid-to-senior level tech guys, though not in FAANG companies.

For SF specific data on housing and zoning I highly highly recommend http://socketsite.com. Such a thorough and great resource! I only wish more cities had something like it!

This is mostly an artifact. SF proper is a very small area in a metro area having around 8.5 million people. If you look carefully at a similar size urban core in other metro areas then you will see similar results.

Especially with the advent of Starlink, you can literally work anywhere and still have reliable enough Internet to make a six figure income.

I think in the two scenarios you can focus on either the positives or the negatives.

When population goes up: positive - the area is vibrant economically; negative - rent is spiraling upwards out of control

When population goes down: positive - rent is finally affordable; negative - the area is falling apart existentially

I think the media in general has found the negative spin sells better.

As a non-US citizen, sometimes I ask myself how did California end up like the country where I am from, which is located in the so called third world.

The short version is that it isn't. You just hear about the worst parts. There are still plenty of fully functional cities and towns and the crime rate is still quite low by historical standards.

Definitely has its problems, but the availability heuristic makes things seem worse than they are.

Yeah, this is definitely a real problem.

I live in semi-rural America, and I have literally never in my life even seen a gun fire before. I used to live in DC, for six years, and I was never robbed, accosted, or even made to feel unsafe, and I had on multiple occasions walked miles home from a bar after closing. It was a downright pleasant way to get home if I didn’t need to be up the next morning.

America the country is basically nothing like America shown on TV. It’s just too big and complex to explain in a soundbyte.

This is an exaggeration. I grew up in the southbay and you basically never see the shit you see in SF in the southbay. SJ has a bigger population then SF.

I love SF and I'm happy the population is going down. These articles are posted once a week and trumpeted as some sort of victory and I can't imagine who they think is shedding tears over this.

Sometime people wave their hands towards sad homeowners who are ( maybe ) seeing their home prices go down but I own a pricy home in a pricy neighborhood and as far as I'm concerned it's funny money. Whatever profit I'd make from selling my home only matters if I move to a place where home prices haven't gone up at the same rate. There's no lower COL city that I'm interested in living in so it's all the same to me.

People who own properties in SF are in a v different situation to those who are renting, couch surfing, flying in and out to HQ etc etc.

I love SF too. We moved north over the bridge 8 years ago (working from home) but are in the city all the time. It was spectacularly deteriorating pre pandemic (when we left the Castro area the local library had just employed an armed guard to keep the transients out for example) and is now arguably in crisis due to the collapse of foot traffic retail, rampant crime and due to the city being a welcoming destination for transients who often have serious mental illness (SMI) and substance abuse issues. The city - and California generally - does not have the resources to triage their needs but it does have a huge 'non profit' homeless industry and more worryingly some areas are crowded with cartel drug sellers.

Driving European visitor friends around a few weeks ago was the first time I'd really been to all the neighborhoods in a leisurely way since the pandemic abated. The wealthier areas (Noe Valley etc) are relatively unchanged apart from a lot of empty storefronts, but a lot of the city looks very beaten up despite the gorgeous vistas, light and climate (perfect weather during out tour).

We are at a typical west coast boom/bust cross roads for California cities...

SF has its problems to be sure. California has its problems too though whether or not those problems are better or worse than problems in any other place is unclear - the media treats SF and California as though they are one and the same.

( I'm old enough to remember when the media treated LA and California as one and the same and the SFers would snottily gripe that they're not 'that' California )

Still I don't know of any SF problems that will be made worse by the population going down. Seems to me that the couch surfers, renters, etc. benefit from the lower population.

> When population goes up: positive - the area is vibrant economically; negative - rent is spiraling upwards out of control

What's endlessly infuriating is population going up in a city should be an almost unmitigated positive. It's just our unwillingness to allow building new housing turning it into a zero sum game that makes it a mixed bag.

But does the transportation capacity also scale linearly with size?

The argument I usually see is that there would be less need for transportation as the removal of explicit zoning would be part of the effort for increasing density and that would put people closer to the goods and services that they want/need.

(I don't have an opinion on this; the closest I ever got to city planning was playing Sim City)

I think we have plenty of working proof that mass transportation systems work at scale (NYC, Seoul, Tokyo, Berlin...)

But why? Are we aiming to have mega-cities of 15M people like Asia? I've been there, no thanks. It would be better if people move to other cities if SF doesn't make sense.

A nuanced view of any sort of economic change will include analysis would objectively consider all the pro's-and-con's, and the media knows that con's sell better because of heightened emotional response.

Those that have "made it" are moving out of SF and the young and hungry are moving in. SF has seen a wave of Gen Z inbound recently. I'll take that trade anytime.

"the number of rental applications by people who fall into Gen Z (defined as those born between 1997 and 2012) have increased by 21% in the past year. Meanwhile, as we just discussed, rental applications from every single other generation have been lessening. Millennials, for instance, saw an 8% decrease in rental activity...

Between 2020 and 2021, people who fall into Generation Z were filling out 21% more leases nationwide, as compared with the year before. When that search is narrowed to San Francisco, Rentcafé says those 20-somethings had a 101% increase in rental applications. They now make up more than a fifth of all people looking to lease in SF."

https://sfist.com/2022/03/22/san-francisco-is-getting-younge...

Majestic take.

More than likely, the ones that "made it" are staying where they are, having bought whatever property they've been able to and are now renting it out to the Gen Z'ers to pay it off. The older generation, wisely, realizes there's no future there and have ended their rental terms to go elsewhere where they can actually afford to buy something, not having gained any real estate ownership of their own.

Calling Gen Z'es "hungry" in this instance is, God bless their hearts, insulting to common sense and rationality of things at play here.

I think there's a middle ground. I'm sure gen Z is hungry. Good chunks of every generation are, on the other hand, counting rental applications is a little odd.

There's a good chunk of millennials that are settled. They aren't moving in or out. an 8% drop for a generation that is about to turn 40 during a 2.5% interest rates seems a lot like a few people collected the cash to buy the homes and aren't renting any longer. But we'll never know because this is a single stat in a whole sea of stats regarding housing by generation.

*edit, I mean, we could know, we could go out there and find meaningful data to get a full picture of what's going on but I don't really care that much. Just saying that looking at one stat and crafting a wonderful narrative is pointless.

> The older generation, wisely, realizes there's no future there and have ended their rental terms to go elsewhere where they can actually afford to buy something, not having gained any real estate ownership of their own.

Wise > No Future > Makes biggest investment there anyway.

Does not compute.

> the number of rental applications by people who fall into Gen Z (defined as those born between 1997 and 2012) have increased by 21% in the past year.

Is this surprising or useful? Most folks get their first apartment around age 21. Right now, that means there's roughly four years of Gen Z renting apartments. If the oldest members of Gen Z are 25, an increase of 21% is... pretty much exactly how many people you'd expect to be getting old enough to lease their first apartment in one year.

> Between 2020 and 2021, people who fall into Generation Z were filling out 21% more leases nationwide, as compared with the year before.

And this is less than you'd expect. If the oldest Gen Z is 25, two years ago they'd be 23. One new year of college grads should yield a 30-50% bump. But the pandemic happened.

> When that search is narrowed to San Francisco, Rentcafé says those 20-somethings had a 101% increase in rental applications.

Again, not super useful. Most 20-somethings leasing apartments during those years are definitionally millennials (and probably still are!). The pandemic changed who was looking for housing and who they lived with, and the change as it affects SF in 2020 is probably not a usual trend.

> They now make up more than a fifth of all people looking to lease in SF

If we assume teenagers aren't leasing apartments, this is again no surprise. If every decade of people (20-somethings, 30-somethings...) made up an equal share, this is very reasonable up to the average life expectancy. People lease less as they get older, which skews the numbers towards younger generations. I'm sure you could look up the numbers and find out the exact distribution, but 20%+ of renters being in their 20s seems...ordinary. Maybe even a bit low.

It will be interesting to see how much of this is Bay Area spread.

We've had a huge number of people move to Santa Cruz, for example, so I've wondered how much of this might be the Bay Area getting broader instead of smaller.

The increase in rental prices in Santa Cruz reflect that. It's good for my family since we've been there 90 years but I'm currently in San Jose because I can get a nicer place for the same amount. It's not bad because I throw my electric bike on the bus that runs over the hill every hour when I want to go visit.

Price people out of living somewhere and the market will eventually react.

Interestingly the inflation in SF, and Bay in general is less than national average, and much less than hot areas like Miami.

I guess soon it will balance off

The most regrettable thing is that it's those who bear the most responsibility for the city being less desirable (in a multitude of unrelated but compounding ways) are the ones with the most ability to just move elsewhere. I wish these people had to sleep in the bed they made.

The idea that people who simply decide to live somewhere are guilty of some moral failing is preposterous. Hold your elected leaders accountable for not doing their job.

Your comment could be read as a slam on rich techies, or the homeless, or even a specific race or ethnicity. Amazingly ambiguous! :-)

People vote if SF has a good or bad government, by voting with their feet. Cities across the nation can have people leave due to remote work. This isn't remote work.

This is a vote on if SF's government is great or bad.

Rents are up 15% YoY, which is probably a leading sign that demand is back. I know some folks might blame higher rents on greedy landlords… But it’s quite clear that at work this year’s class of new grad hires is moving to the Bay Area.

What I think we saw is people left SF because there’s no point in doing remote work from a cramped, expensive apartment. So yes, it was a vote on governance. But for all SF’s problems it’s more nuanced than “people are fleeing a sh*t-hole city.”

(And even funnier, I live in Oakland. There was a noticeable surge in people parking bikes with Caltrain tags in the bike room. I’m back to being the only bike with a Caltrain tag now.)

Yes. I moved to the east bay but despite the sunshine I think I’ll be going back to SF later this year.

Could this be a potential source of a housing bubble collapse?

Given that work from office is the primary reason SF became so expensive in the first place, yes.

How can SF home prices be justified vs SD or LA in a remote work world?

>How can SF home prices be justified vs SD or LA in a remote work world?

I don't live in SF or even in a city but, in the abstract, I'd pick SF from that triplet. LA is complete sprawl and a little bit of SoCal beaches goes a long way for me. And San Diego is nice enough but sort of soulless. I like the SF climate even when summer is the coldest winter you ever spent--and there are great recreational options and scenery.

It's not really about preferring SF, but preferring it at twice the home price (or whatever the actual gap is). It's hard to justify that if not forced to live there for work

Negative - this is a geography that will remain unaffected by housing downturns. Too much money on the sidelines for it to collapse.

https://archive.ph/BWJzQ

I mean yes? Why would anybody want to live in SF?

Is there a lot of empty housing then?

Makes sense.

First summer I rented in the area (around that time), I had to use AirBnB to find something halfway affordable, and I was basically using it more as a trust broker.

The unit I paid 1500 a month for, literally a bedroom in a dog dander riddled home with a tiny shared kitchen.

I looked, and within 3 years the same place would have been more like 4500/month.

(This was walkable to Castro street, but so is a lot in that weather.)

Meanwhile, I heard all these tech bros WHINING, literally WHINING. Oh, San Francisco is so cold in temperature, and all this other BULLSHIT.

I had grown up somewhere if you wore a rainbow shirt someone would have killed you, full stop.

We didn't have beer gardens like tied house. You couldn't even walk anywhere, there were no sidewalks, and the township police would have rolled up on you if you tried. (Meanwhile, one of the richest townships in the country to this day has no bus system as a leftover anarchornism from the era of bussing during MLK's time.)

But people talked like El Camino Real and similar stretches of road out in urban Appalachia were interchangable.

The last summer I was out there, Elliot Rodger went on a rampage after the university counseling center sent me off to Mozilla with two refills on a bottle of aloprazolam and zero leads on therapy for the summer.

(You had to go through the counseling center for it to be covered by the student health plan, and if you met someone who seemed to actually be skilled or empathetic, they'd break it to you they can't "poach clients" even if you wanted to do otherwise, or had misunderstood your benefits, or any other edge case)

I ended going back to my college town and venting to my therapist something to the effect that if folks continue down this path of making the world a giant Ikea without the social programs, folks may perceive it's an easier path to a 1BR and a Playstation if they murder an island of children than if they learn to code or whatever.

And then I went down to the gun range, and rented a glock 40 and about fifty rounds.

(The guy who came with me got a bolt action 223 and quietly sent all his downrange about 200 hundred yards)

(Less kick than a 1911, but still a hell of a recoil. You gotta be within about ten feet if you want to actually make use of one without practice)

I hope folks understand how utterly degrading it is to have it rammed down your throat since childhood to "respect women", then have a string of them who have more assets that your entire family make a show of letting you buy them lunch off OkCupid when the only reason you signed up is because you felt so strongly that folks should focus on work at work, having known what it's like to abandon an entire field of study because someone got too handsy. (It's not "nice", you South Park loving sociopoaths)

Anyways, the time the summer of snowden rolled around, I was DONE WITH IT.

I went back to flyover country and told my therapist that I'd read Elliot Rodgers manifesto, and I thought he was a whiny little freak. I told her that despite that I was sincerely worried that folks might melt down like he did, decide to not JUST commit suicide. I tried to show her an essay I got anonymously published about my special education experiences -- she refused to even read it. They had this weird kind of "If you don't like grad school, you can drop out and work at Subway" mentality.

(I wrote this a while back, but left the tab open because I got distracted -- Happy Memorial Day weekend, peace out girl scouts.)

Ridiculous rent for houses/apartments in a very bad shape, rising crime and eroding faith in the justice system (you could argue that the data doesn’t support this, but the reality is that the data doesn’t support this because a lot of crimes these days go unreported), school district going to shit, bad city governance (which trickles into bad transportation, more homelessness, filth in the streets, businesses closing or not enough new ones opening, ever increasing taxes etc.) and overall high taxes which you question when you don’t get proportional services.

Pretty much all the reasons I left in 2018 after 10 years. Expensive, filthy, and dangerous. I live in Boston now and my quality of life has soared. Make just as much too.

I went to SF over last weekend and thought of stopping by Walgreens (Pharmacy) to pick up eye drops. I had to call the associate to unlock the cabinet doors to pick them up. Took 5-10 mins to just get hold of someone with a key ring the size of a coconut. Every cabinet was locked from toothpaste to tampons. This is at the Walgreens near Union Square which is still better than other areas.

People are leaving because of the decline. I wish San Franciscans would stop defending themselves and admit that things are actually worse and whatever politics they're advocating hasn't worked. This extends more generally to California (and other west coast states).

I voted for Shellenberger for Governor of CA. Felt right.

> I voted for Shellenberger for Governor of CA. Felt right.

Same, but note that this was only the primary... it's entirely possible we'll end up with Newsom and some other random Democrat on the actual ballot.

Unfortunately, yes. People have stopped voting based on rationale and policy, but instead based on team colors.

For those who don't know Shellenberger, he is your classic liberal running as an independent. Pro nuclear alone gets a vote from me. But there are so many things he talks about that are just common sense in majority of large cities around the world.

If you're fed up with CA, please look him up.

But surely if we just vote in the same people for another 30 years or so, they'll get around to solving these problems!

The only voting choices you have in America are Republican and not Republican. The non Republican party is a disorganized mess. Its the world we live in.

Not so in Cali - there it is (almost always) a choice between democrat and democrat due to the way primaries are structured.

I'm pretty sure the non-republicans are just paid off by their "donors" to let republicans win. Democrats are just there to feign opposition.

> I wish San Franciscans would stop defending themselves and admit that things are actually worse and whatever politics they're advocating hasn't worked. This extends more generally to California (and other west coast states).

> I voted for Shellenberger for Governor of CA. Felt right.

FWIW, people like Newsom openly admit the scale of the problems and the roadblocks which radicalized "progressivism" present to California. Newsom has even openly admitted that some of his own policies as mayor of San Francisco were somewhat foolhardy and naive in retrospect, including his housing and drug policies. (And he did so not as a sound bite to impress voters, but buried in speeches and interviews and backed up by substantive reasons for why they were so.) Mayor Breed has also expressed mea culpas of her own. And both have expressed extreme frustration with many of the (invariably) Democrats they must work with.

Breed's become so frustrated recently she event started swearing--"less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city”--and almost seemed to lose her composure in an interview when asked how she felt about Boudin's policies.[1][2]

My voting strategy is two-fold: 1) Any politician that can admit they were wrong about substantive policy issues deserves my vote, period, especially when such admissions come with potential cost, are unforced, and relate to relatively recent policies. 2) As politics is the art of the possible, I appreciate that I need to vote for someone who knows how to play the game. Newsom and Breed are both savvy players, and they're career players. That turns alot of people off. But that's politics. Being a savvy player is a sine quo non of a good politician. (And by savvy I don't mean being good at soundbites or playing to voter sentiment, but know how to wheel and deal and pull triggers in smoke-filled rooms--palace intrigue type stuff.)

When a candidate demonstrates political savvy while also credibly expressing some honesty and sensibility, then the choice quickly becomes easy. Both Newsom and Breed have done that, IMO. It's difficult for me to expect more out of them at this point. One of my benchmarks for a virtuous politician is Senator Russ Feingold. But Senator Feingold lost Wisconsin in 2010. He couldn't match his virtuousness with his savviness. Both Wisconsin and the U.S. as a whole probably would have better off with a little less virtue and a little more savvy from Feingold.

Ideas are cheap. We don't need people like Shellenberger in office. They'll be ineffective. We need people who are capable of hearing what people like Shellenberger are proposing, and then to the degree its possible (and often it won't be possible at all) translate that not just into effective policy or literal legislation, but a sufficient number of actual legislative votes.

Regarding Newsom's privately sensibilities on energy policy, he's personally far more conservative than you'd think. Circa 2005 Newsom mothballed a donated gas power plant in San Francisco, but that wasn't his first choice. He was coerced into it--coerced by a lawyer friend of mine advocating for the surrounding community and who defly threatend (in person, from across the table) Newsom with a scorched-earth public relations campaign which Newsom knew he couldn't win. Newsom, understanding that politics is the art of the possible, relented. It was battle he could never have won if forced out into the open. By relenting he built capital--environmental policy credibility--that could come in handy one day. Like, for example, today: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-04-29/califor...

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/mayor-breed-orders...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...

Many people do not know but Newsom's ex-wife used to be Kimberly Guilfoyle: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13885405/kimberly-guilfoyle-used-t...

Now, I don't vote based on character to a certain extent, but Newsom has both: Terrible policies and a terrible character.

I would find it difficult to have any respect for Newsom if all I knew about him was his social and business life. But the older I get the more I realize that character traits are distributed much more randomly than I ever believed. People want to believe, for example, that intelligence and compassion tend to come packaged together. But then you realize that there are quite alot of very malicious yet intelligent people out there. The universe doesn't have a sense of justice, at least not to the degree we expect, and definitely not the degree we desire.

Last week I heard on the radio[1] a poem that resonated very strongly me with:

  A man said to the universe:
  "Sir, I exist!"
  "However," replied the universe,
  "The fact has not created in me
  A sense of obligation."

It's a poem by Stephen Crane, recited by Paul Auster during an interview. Auster describes Crane as (IIRC) a proto-existentialist, which explains why the poem resonated so strongly with me.

[1] The (Mostly Forgotten) Writer Who Changed Literature Forever, Again and Again, On the Media, May 20, 2022, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/mostly-for...

Nice, I like the poem.

Serious question: what's another place in the US with mild year-round weather, walkable neighborhoods (haven't driven a car in 12 years), and easy access to an international airport? That's what SF offers me. The "SF is an unlivable hellhole" drumbeat is so loud that I almost feel compelled to move (my own experience be damned), but I'm not sure where to.

Too bad the USA has practically no livable cities.

Don't feel compelled to move. If you don't know why you want out of SF, don't leave.

Everybody who is saying how horrible it is aren't going to live your life for you. Don't try to live theirs.

Have you ever been to Santa Monica or San Diego?

As someone who lives there and is taking a very hard look at other towns, the answer is none. Some small parts of LA come close.

> what's another place in the US with mild year-round weather, walkable neighborhoods (haven't driven a car in 12 years), and easy access to an international airport?

If you consider SF (the city) weather mild, there are a ton of cities in the US that match what you're looking for. They just don't have the tech orientation and cachet that you associate with living in SF.

Agreed, California is pretty special. I think its easy to get hung up on "mild year-round weather", it actually gets boring and I prefer 4 proper seasons. I enjoy some snow and some hot summers which means most of the country is available.

Do you also want a city that borders the ocean and is also a 5 hour drive to one of the most beautiful national parks in the country? I think you might be out of luck.

There is no such place in the US. And SF is not it either. San Jose appears to be steadily improving, though this is not a recommendation at all. This is my perspective traveling and living around the northern hemisphere awhile, including substantive time in SF. Manchester NH is within an easy Uber ride of BOS and may be of interest. Winters aren't so great but you can easily fly as far south as Puerto Rico, which has massive crime problems and barely functioning government. There are obviously various options in between. My opinion is that the US is generally inhospitable, SF included, and is unlikely to change substantively in the next several decades. California could start banging out housing, improve transit and reform healthcare delivery and it would probably take at least 20 years to catch up... to what you'll easily find outside the country. America is at the stagnation point in transition through institutional and socio-economic cycles based on what I understand and the solutions aren't super clear at the moment--at least not as clear as the problems.

>"Manchester NH is within an easy Uber ride of BOS and may be of interest."

I had not heard of this before. Is it walkable? It looks like pretty country outside there. I would be curious how you found it.

SF is expensive and horrible. The only reason people in tech live there is because of employers in the area and it beats living elsewhere in the Bay Area which is expensive and dull.

There's really no other reason people would put up with an hour (or more) commute each way every day.

Yep, the Bay Area somehow got lucky with the nexus of high tech being here. Without these jobs, this area wouldn’t have a whole lot to offer

San Francisco has become a really hostile place to live even if you make $300,000+. My wife and I lived in Glen Park and it was still a shit hole. We had a meth head constantly breaking in and living in the parking garage of our building. Cops and landlord didn't care. I regularly saw people shooting heroin and smoking meth/crack on BART during rush hour. I was sick of seeing needles on the street and smelling urine. As soon as the pandemic happened we got the heck out of the Bay Area and relocated somewhere cheaper and nicer. I am sure there are many others doing the same thing. I cannot imagine trying to raise a kid in SF.

I with you here. Our neighbor had her apartment violently ransacked while she was at work. This is bad. What makes it evil, they waited for her to return - sitting in the apartment waiting for her to walk in. After the detective interview I had, i realized, I don't want to raise family here anymore. The detective agreed.

I didn't even go into the worst of it! I had a bullet come through one of my walls, clearly shot from the walking trail near my building. Cops came out and literally laughed about it and threw the bullet casing into a sandwich bag. Landlord threw some spackling paste over the hole. We literally started packing up the next week.

To this day, over 2 years later no one from SFPD has ever contacted me or followed up on the bullet. SFPD is a disgrace. The city is not safe for people. You're just once chance encounter away from something horrible happening to you and when it does, no one will take it seriously or do anything about it.

I'm really curious where you live in Glen Park for this to happen. I've never seen crime there. There's no needles anywhere, and kids everywhere.

Near Arlington and Richland. There's a walking trail there along Arlington that attracts a bunch of druggies and creeps. The Richland overpass also has homeless camps near it year round.

I think if you live further up the hill, there are fewer issues, but I was close enough to Bernal Heights, the J, 38, and BART, and the community garden--which all brought more riff-raff nearby.

Wow, I live maybe two blocks north, closer to the J and the 36, and literally I've never seen a homeless person in my block, there's no car break-ins, and the only "crime" I've seen is someone yelling at their contractor, which promptly got half of the block outside wondering what was going on.

Rampant and near-encouraged crime forced the hands of my SF friends to move. Some pass it off as a standard of living situation but they all moved to low crime Red states..

https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem

Takeaways:

+ The rate of murders in the US has gone up at an alarming rate. But, despite a media narrative to the contrary, this is a problem that afflicts Republican-run cities and states as much or more than the Democratic bastions.

+In 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.

+ 8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.

I always enjoy a good leftist source posted to discredit experiences felt by my friends in real-life. "Here are some facts from this website Joe so stop complaining." Meanwhile in reality outside of the internet my friends have been mugged, harassed and assaulted for walking SF streets that were once the safest.

The problem with these types of sources is they are collected by journalists who do not back check their own work. They are trying to make a political point.

Crime statistics are based on reporting which is higher in Red states. Murder areas like Chicago have thousands of incidences of crime that go unreported.

SF and NYC both saw precipitous drops in crime over the past 30 years that lead to a major influx of new residents. The pandemic has seen a moderate backslide and all the transplants are flipping out. It's amazing how expectations can change. I've lived in NYC for 25 years. The homicide rate is about a quarter of what it was when I moved here, yet everyone seems to be declaring this the apocalypse that will end the city.

San Francisco is the dirtiest city I have ever seen. It doesn’t seem like a great place to spend 1 million dollars on a house unless you work there.

I thought NYC was the dirtiest place I've ever seen, sounds like there's competition!

Neither are as dirty as New Orleans. There's trash, there's excrement, then there is rotting catfish and shellfish on top of the trash and excrement and it just sits stewing in stagnant, humid, swampy and hot air.

I was actually going to go there last year for a show, until nature decided to try and destroy it again (though I hear the hurricane wasn’t too bad)

The few weeks afterwards when the trash wasn’t getting picked up made me hightail it to Mobile for the duration.

I live in the Lower Ninth Ward and based on what I saw of SF last fall I’d still give that award to SF (unless comparing the few weeks after Ida)

1 million dollars might get you a two-bedroom condo. Median house price is 1.6 million

https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/

Have you ever traveled outside the US?

Keep going. Needs to drop another 50% or so.

I'm not surprised about this, given anecdata I've heard. I only hope they will vote for different policies than the ones which caused them to leave (they won't)

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