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Wow! ~2/3 of housing units in SF are rentals... "In 2014 (the most recent year with available data) there were about 387,000 housing units in SF. About 3

Wow! ~2/3 of housing units in SF are rentals... "In 2014 (the most recent year with available data) there were about 387,000 housing units in SF. About 38% were owner-occupied, and the remaining 62% or 240,000 were rental units."

deleted 11y ago
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cheepin 11y ago
I wonder why this is... My first guess is that hardly anyone that works in SF can afford to own housing, my second is that real estate speculators are buying up and renting a lot of San Francisco property.
- mrkurt 11y ago
  Prop 13. Very low property taxes create tremendous incentives to hold on to real estate you own. People paying 2000 level property taxes on real estate with 2015 level values are making a killing on rent.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Prop 13. Very low property taxes create tremendous incentives to hold on to real estate you own. Very low property taxes should be relatively neutral between holding and trading compared to higher property taxes. Prop. 13 encourages holding over trading because, while it does control property tax rate, it also constrains tax basis value increases to small annual increases while you hold property, but reassesses at full market value when you buy a new property. Which means, it increases the incentives to hold on to property once you've purchased it and decreases the incentives to purchase property, because the property is (net) higher value to the current owner than a new purchaser with otherwise similar profile, since the new purchaser would have to pay higher annual property taxes.
lisa_henderson 11y ago
That would be normal in any big city. For over a century the general rule was "Move to the suburbs if you want to buy a house. If you stay in a city then you rent." Things have only changed slowly, since the 60s, with the rise of condos, that has made ownership slightly more common in the cities.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

cheepin 11y ago

I wonder why this is... My first guess is that hardly anyone that works in SF can afford to own housing, my second is that real estate speculators are buying up and renting a lot of San Francisco property.

mrkurt 11y ago
Prop 13. Very low property taxes create tremendous incentives to hold on to real estate you own. People paying 2000 level property taxes on real estate with 2015 level values are making a killing on rent.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Prop 13. Very low property taxes create tremendous incentives to hold on to real estate you own. Very low property taxes should be relatively neutral between holding and trading compared to higher property taxes. Prop. 13 encourages holding over trading because, while it does control property tax rate, it also constrains tax basis value increases to small annual increases while you hold property, but reassesses at full market value when you buy a new property. Which means, it increases the incentives to hold on to property once you've purchased it and decreases the incentives to purchase property, because the property is (net) higher value to the current owner than a new purchaser with otherwise similar profile, since the new purchaser would have to pay higher annual property taxes.

lisa_henderson 11y ago

That would be normal in any big city. For over a century the general rule was "Move to the suburbs if you want to buy a house. If you stay in a city then you rent." Things have only changed slowly, since the 60s, with the rise of condos, that has made ownership slightly more common in the cities.