12 ms·
San Francisco Office Rents Pass Manhattan as Most Expensive in Country
- vesinisa 11y agoThe article links to this report[1] by which SF 1-bedroom housing rents are also highest in the U.S. It's an interesting report, citing a median rent of $3,490 for 1-bedroom apartment in SF, but can someone please tell me if this is price per week, per 2 weeks, per month, or per year? In the UK for example rents are often cited per week or per 2 weeks, and where I live per month. [1] https://www.zumper.com/blog/2016/01/zumper-national-rent-report-january-2016/ https://www.zumper.com/blog/2016/01/zumper-national-rent-rep...
- JoshTriplett 11y agoIn the US, home/apartment rental prices always refer to monthly cost unless explicitly stated otherwise.
- cangencer 11y agoI think UK is only place where rents are advertised as per week, found it very weird when living there.
- yen223 11y agoRents are listed as per week here in Australia too.
- tajen 11y agoAs a French citizen, I've always assumed that Oz and US could be culturally close. Both are young countries with a lot of space, "unlimited" resources and a need to manage imigration. After living 3 years in Oz, I've noticed it has a lot of similarities with UK, for example the use of the metric system (or their schizophrenia about it), the per week/per month rents, the orthograph and vocabulary ("aluminium";) and down to the awesome simplicity of their tax forms and tax code. Actually the UK tax code is canonically simple and should be adopted by the whole world ;)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Gustomaximus 11y agoIn Australia I head some anecdote that resonated that went something like; Aussies and Brits believe they are culturally different until there's an American in the room.
- esolyt 11y ago> I've noticed it has a lot of similarities with UK, for example the use of the metric system I'm not sure why you think this is worth pointing out, considering that Liberia, Myanmar, and the US are the only countries not using it.
- rhino369 11y agoA bunch of old British empire countries really half ass it.
- widdershins 11y agoHe was referring to our 'schizophrenic' use of it. It's used differently among generations. Older people use purely imperial, whereas young people use a confusing mixture. For example, I measure long distances in miles, but short distances in meters and centimeters! I think of weights and volumes in a metric way, except when talking about the weight of a person, when I use stone (not pounds, mind you). I might be an extreme example, but most people use an imperial-metric melange of some kind.
- pja 11y agoOnly in London - in the rest of the UK rents are usually monthly.
- petercooper 11y agoI think it only happens in areas of the UK where rents are very high, such that a monthly amount would look ridiculously high to almost anyone even if it's the going rate.
- diezge 11y agoThis trips many people up - £200 per week is not the same as £800 per month as most months are usually longer than 28 days. It is a way of (to many people, very sneakily) charging people more than they expect.
- jacques_chester 11y agoIt's not sneaky if it's the prevailing norm. Coming from Australia, I am accustomed to multiplying by 52 instead of 12.
- diezge 11y agoIt's different when you're used to it - a large amount of people here in London are from other countries/areas where this isn't prevalent and haven't worked out (or not really considered) the difference between the two.
- candeira 11y agoAustralia too.
- rayiner 11y ago> The chart-topping office rents in San Francisco are also a testament to the city’s geographic constraints, crammed as it is into 47 square miles at the top of a peninsula It's more of a testament to the city's anti-development attitude. Manhattan has twice the people with half the land area, on an island.
- melling 11y agoHow do people get away with making bad comparisons in major news sources? Manhattan is 34 square miles surrounded by water. It's an island! This would seem to indicate that there must be more to the problem. Better mass transit into Oakland, for example, would help. That's another 78 square miles of usable land.
- rhino369 11y agoWhile it doesn't effect the city itself, the geography appears to constrain suburbs. The lack of nearby suburbs probably drives prices up. New York has sprawling suburbs that go into nearby states. The SF equivalent of a lot of those areas are mountain ranges and oceans. To be sure, SF has suburbs (or suburb equivalents): SV, Oakland, etc. But a lot of prime area for suburbs can't support one. Draw a 30 miles radius circle from manhattan and SF, and I bet NYC has more livable land. That said, that is all the more reason for strong development in SF. Or else you are going to end up with SF just being a rich neighborhood for millionaires in a Bay Area megacity.
- melling 11y agoHow many people live in SF and Silicon Valley? 4 million people? There are 20 million people who live in the NY area? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area If you want to work in Manhattan, you need to live near mass transit (bus, train) because 30 miles in/out of the island is too painful. That greatly limits where you can live.
- tamana 11y ago
- zuck9 11y agoFor a 1-bedroom in SF, won't it be cheaper to live in a hotel, apartment hotel or an Airbnb?
- ghaff 11y agoAs someone who goes to SF for a lot of conferences, hotels are pretty outrageous as well. Depends on the relative areas, but they're probably worse than Manhattan as well. Depends on demand during a given week, but hotels are pretty easily $300/night with taxes.
- rhino369 11y agoReally? I was just in SF for a conference at paid 115 dollars a day for a pretty nice place. That's like half of Manhattan pricing.
- ghaff 11y agoI haven't paid less than $200/night for years in SF. At the last VMworld, $400/night with taxes was a bargain. It certainly depends on the week and the location, but anecdotally (and I travel to both locations quite frequently), SF in the general Moscone area is every bit as expensive as midtown Manhattan.
- rhino369 11y agoI paid 200 a night for the 30th and 31st (so new years eve premium) at Hotel Zelos and then 115/night for Parc 55 for the 1st-6th for a conference. Did I get lucky? My wife's hotel stipend was 280 a night, which suggests, I probably did.
- ghaff 11y agoThe Zelos used to be the Palomar, which at least used to be a pretty good deal for that area though I don't think I've personally stayed there. $115 is a very good price for a business hotel in the Union Square area. I imagine immediately after New Years may be relatively light on business travelers.
- sly_foxx 11y agoWhy isn't office disrupted by transferring to remote work? You have these companies that make tools like 'slack', 'asana', 'dropbox' etc. which help you work remotely and all of them require their employees to be at the office in the most expensive location in the US. Programming/customer_support/sales/design/marketing jobs can all be done from anywhere. What is stopping these startups from going remote?
- gaius 11y agoBecause it isn't true. Remote work is fine one or two days a week but nothing beats the bandwidth of a dozen engineers in a room with a whiteboard when it comes to tackling hard problems. If you're just making cookie-cutter intranets or shopping carts or something sure, go 100% remote, but that is not what Silicon Valley is for.
- ghaff 11y agoNo, much of Silicon Valley these days is for making cookie-cutter mobile social apps and the like.
- ironchef 11y agoGaius, Studies are mixed on the pros/cons of office vs remote. For example a Stanford study showed productivity increased 9 to 13% for remote office workers. Some have shown that collaboration can increase as well as communication was more intentional (I don't remember the study offhand). Anyways, point is it's not all or nothing and the data is still out on effectiveness and efficiency (I'd think it also depends on the nature of the work etc)
- geggam 11y agoTotally depends on the person IMO... We have one day a week we work from home... I find myself producing more that day than the rest combined. Others on the team function differently
- 11y ago
- raldi 11y agoSF has a law (1986's Prop M) that restricts the supply of new office space: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-law-blocks-tech-boom-expansion-5652707.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-law-blocks-tech-bo... One saving grace of the law is that in years when nobody wants to build, the city "banks" the excess for years when construction is over the limit. But we've just about exhausted those savings, and are now hitting the cap. The developers and the owners of existing office space know that the carryover is about to run dry, and that the cap is going to be in full effect every year for many years to come, and are pricing their long-term leases accordingly. And companies, knowing the same thing, are signing them. Did you hear that the Sierra Club is going to have to leave the San Francisco headquarters they've occupied since the 1800s, because the rent is now too high for them to afford? (http://www.sfexaminer.com/sierra-club-moving-headquarters-from-sf-to-oakland-due-to-rising-rents/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/sierra-club-moving-headquarters-fr...) The irony is that those rising rents are due in no small part to their acting against their stated mission when it comes to allowing tall buildings in this city. They'd rather sprawl people out into the suburbs and beyond, where they'll bulldoze swaths of nature to build their buildings, and the people living and working there will have much larger carbon footprints.
- alsetmusic 11y ago> The irony is that those rising rents are due in no small part due to their acting against their stated mission when it comes to allowing tall buildings in this city. They'd rather sprawl people out into the suburbs and beyond, where they'll bulldoze swaths of nature to build their buildings, and the people living and working there will have much larger carbon footprints. Berkeley is especially guilty of this. Last I heard, a few years ago, the building cap was something ridiculously low. I was told six stories was the max by a friend as we carpooled to work from East Bay to South Bay due to the scarcity of attractive rental spaces in SB. Thus, there is major congestion toward and away from SF every day as the population cannot be condensed. Berkeley is the most NIMBY city I've seen. It took me two years to find a high quality space to rent in an attractive part of Oakland and this was about eight years ago. Today, there's no chance I'd give it up as I'm doubtful I could ever get as lucky in the present market. I've concluded that if I opt to spend a year traveling, I'll have to pay rent on my present space while I'm not using it because I don't want to live in a delapidated unit at an even higher rate when I come home.
- CrowFly 11y agoHaving lived in both, I can tell you that Manhattan is much nicer, cleaner, and safer, with more resources, better food, and better culture. Violent Crime rate is 2.5x times higher in San Francisco. (Ask Wolfram Alpha)
- hijinks 11y agoI use to work in the Empire State building. There were stories about from tenants that in the mid 90's the building was pretty much empty and the rents per sq/foot of office space was 75% less then an apartment. So there are stories about people renting office space to live in. They'd also have a gym membership to use the shower and they'd save a ton of money.
- hitekker 11y agoIs that still the case in parts of Manhattan? I would seriously considering doing this.
- CPLX 11y agoThis has been going on for eternity and still does. The catch is that it's illegal and if the fire inspectors get wind of it you can have a very sudden and unpleasant removal from your "apartment"
- hitekker 11y agoI suppose I'll just stick to the plan of living out of a van then...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tannhauser23 11y agoHave you ever noticed how there are fortune tellers occupying prime storefronts all over the city? The places with a little chair behind the window and a thick curtain? I never saw anybody ever go in or out of those places. I asked a prosecutor friend whether these places are fronts for prostitution or drugs. Turns out the fortune teller stores are actually being used as homes for entire families. They cordone off a tiny area for palm-reading and live in rest of the space. It's a really cheap (and super illegal) way for a family to live in Manhattan.
- mckoss 11y agoFor those that are not familiar with commercial rental quotes, they are stated in units of $/sq ft/year. A good rule of thumb is that you need about 200 sq ft per worker. So, at $72/ft, your 10-person startup needs to spend $144,000 annually just for office space in SF.
- stepanhruda 11y agoThat's price for a single developer, not that bad.
- asah 11y agoum, 10% overhead "not that bad" ?
- lmeyerov 11y agoFor a small startup, an extra dev or 1-2mo extra runway has way more leverage. We went with downtown Oakland: cut commute east bay folks, quickly BART accessible for SF ones, and joys of a good downtown like nice restaurant s & cafes. When growing, we unanimously decided to stay rather than go to SF.
- stepanhruda 11y agoRelatively, yes. Other comments suggest being based in a different location around the country instead – those will have both cheaper labor costs and cheaper office space. Will the ratio ever go below 5% though?
- hitekker 11y agoI have a friend whose parents own three houses in SF. When I asked about the rapidly increasing cost of rent and how it's driving people out, he told me, paraphrasing, "People don't have a right to live in San Francisco." Another way of saying that you should only live there if you can afford it. Needless to say, I'm inclined to believe that NIMBY's cannot be reasoned with.
- orangecat 11y ago"People don't have a right to live in San Francisco." Which is true, although the flip side is that people shouldn't have the right to prevent others from building new housing. At least not for reasons like "it might cause my property value to stop wildly increasing".
- geebee 11y agoI can't speak for everyone, and this is just my personal experience. I grew up in SF, and I haven't seen this sinister quality in people who oppose density. I disagree with them, I'd like to see SF add more density, but my impression is that most of the old timers in SF oppose new development because they are resistant to change and highly suspicious of developers, not because they want to create shortages and spike the value of their property. In short, at the extreme, the school teacher or SF state professor who was able to support a family and buy a 4 bedroom house in the sunset in 1975 wants the new professor in 2016 to be able to buy a a 4 bedroom house in SF and support a family, and is unhappy that this is no longer possible. They also tend to believe, rightly or wrongly, that "density" would just mean lots of high end expensive apartments that nobody in the "middle class" can afford. In short (and again, I'm guessing), they are very cynical, perhaps irrationally so, about what development will do. There are, of course, some pretty horrendous examples of redevelopment projects and so forth in SF. I know, you're already reaching for the keyboard to explain the difference, but you'd be preaching to the choir here. I'm just trying to explain why it's not really a desire to maximize the value of a real estate asset that drives so much of opposition to new housing and development. The whole thing has a very bad reputation in SF. There is such a thing as YIMBY in San Francisco, often people who have seen their friends and children priced out.
- melted 11y agoGood. Maybe we'll get "silicon valleys" everywhere else as well when situation becomes completely untenable.