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They now act bewildered that, like Portland, their downtown is dead and shows no sign of improvement in the near term. As the tax base continues to collapse and more pressure is put on existing homeowners/residents, it’ll be interesting to see how the resulting cost of living crisis impacts these coalitions. I suspect things get far, far worse before they get any better.
Public defecation, car break-ins, littering, homelessness, people shooting drugs, needles everywhere, junkies talking gibberish and yelling to hallucinations, etc.
What's the point of paying a fortune to live like that?
Curious.
I suspect (but can't prove) that commercial real estate is a leading indicator of what to expect in the housing market. We'll see.
This just isn't going to happen. If anything, the declining commercial real estate is going to push up home values further because people want better WFH setups.
That's just one factor that wasn't in play in 2000 and 2008.
You can also look at it from the supply side. Imagine local property costs were not high, and you were at said high paying job. It'd be perfectly logical to start accumulating said properties either as a long-term investment, or to just rent out as a passive[ish] income. And up go costs.
And this comment: "most interesting city in the world" is just weird to me. It only has 750K people. How much culture can it possibly create? Not much. And it isn't very old, so it doesn't have any ancient history (sorry, hat tip to natives who lived there hundreds of years ago, but almost none of that culture remains). Mostly, it is a beautiful European-_looking_ city with a bunch of rich people in the Northwest Quadrant who can buy nice things. Most of the other three quarters are downright dull. It's not very important without Big Tech just outside its doorstep in the Valley. For example, New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Rio, Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Milan, Mumbai, Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing produce vastly more culture. Wouldn't they be more interesting?
I've lived in the middle east, so I've lived in places with a lot of history. That is interesting in its own way of course.
But SF is interesting because it's where the future exists.
I visited it as a tourist and I while the homeless problem makes it interesting and it was fun to see it in real life after being exposed to it so much in movies and video games, I didn’t see that many interesting things. At least compared to much older cities in other parts of the world.
The city government also made many missteps - overzealous planning oversight, squandering the tech windfall, growing too much without the ability to lay off.
Still, people are coming back. It's definitely better than it was this time last year. And South Park is still South Park.