5 ms·

Having grown up in Portland, it's remarkable how quickly the housing prices have skyrocketed in less than 5 years.

mcguire 11y ago
When did San Francisco become the hot property? I know that the last time I was out there, about 2005, tech was still in the valley and SF proper was relatively low rent, bad neighborhoods, and no tech presence. Does this industry (to the extent that you can call AirBNB, Uber, and Twitter the same industry) really act like a flock of grackles or starlings, descending on a place, eating everything, and moving on?
- api 11y ago
  It seems to be full of people who want to be near art and "cool" people. Unfortunately tech doesn't find a way to pay those creators of culture anything. If anything, the focus is on finding ways to make everything free. So tech moves in, enjoys the presence of creative culture they refuse to fund, but ultimately inflates real estate so much they drive that creative culture away. Rinse and repeat. If art and culture are so valuable to us why are those who create these things so poor? Why do people cringe at buying an album for $9 but then spend $11 on a coffee and a biscuit?
  - cloudjacker 11y ago
    Because its not just any form of expression that people want. The artists shouldn't have balked at taking a class in economics.
  - Apocryphon 11y ago
    I'm not sure if a lot of the hip tech transplants want art. They just want the aesthetics.
    - api 11y ago
      I think what they want is culture, which is produced by people who love their communities and who don't work 90 hours a week so they have time to actually do it.
  - gd2 11y ago
    True, but isn't part of it that one thinks that on the $9 album, the marketing and media company folks gets $8.50 of $9.00 But there is also artistry in creating a coffee or dining experience, and hopefully that money spent on the meal and coffee goes more to the chef artist who prepared the meal, the architect artist who designed the space, and the line cook, waitress and dishwasher.
  - seivan 11y ago
    Tech isn't creative and artistic? Why is an "album" worth more than a graphics engine, drawing app or game? If anything music is overvalued. I'm surprised we haven't automated Skrillex and all that house crap yet. ;-)
    - rfrank 11y ago
      > Why is an "album" worth more than a graphics engine... Why is a Picasso worth more than paint?
      - seivan 11y ago
        Because the introduction of GPU's didn't come until 30~ years ago ;-) also it's a single physical item. It's more of a collective piece than actual art, at least today.
  - prmph 11y ago
    One interesting explanation is that people seem to think (maybe rightly) that art and culture are cheapened by too much money. To be authentic, art and culture needs to be nearer to the struggling edges of society.
- rco8786 11y ago
  It's part of a nationwide(global?) urban renewal. Millenials and their successors are more likely to want to live in urban areas and stay single longer than their older counterparts. This is causing rents to increase noticeably in nearly every major urban area. Couple that with relatively high pay for tech sector jobs that like to hire these younger folks and you get it even worse in SF, Seattle, etc.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Be careful of overgeneralizing from the subset of the population you interact with in tech. For example, according to this FiveThirtyEight piece from last year, the actual trend is that college-educated millennials are slightly more likely to move to a subset of dense cities. [1] In general, it's unclear how much of an overall urbanization trend there is. [1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less-urban-than-you-think/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...
- guyzero 11y ago
  Seriously that was 11 years ago. Yes, a lot of things changed in 11 years.
  - mcguire 11y ago
    That's my point. 11 years may seem like a long time to you, but it's really not. I've seen quite a few people here wanting high-rise residential buildings in San Francisco to alleviate the high rents there. A skyscraper is at least 40 floors, according to wikipedia and one rule of thumb I've seen puts the construction time for them at 1 month per floor, from ground breaking to completion. That's about 4 years in construction, plus design and planning time, plus site acquisition. That's five, six years (more?), total, even in the most positive political atmosphere. Someone who wanted to alleviate SF's high rents today, assuming you could do that by building high-rise apartment buildings, would had to have started at the height of the construction bust. That would be, I think, before San Francisco proper's tech boom, i.e. before there was a problem evident. And if you started building one today,... Once upon a time, Intel planned to build a 10 story office building in downtown Austin. They stopped, with nothing but the structure of the building up, in 2001. The incomplete building was demolished in 2007.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Yep. The government and people of San Francisco and Silicon Valley could wake up tomorrow, all with the simultaneous revelation that OMG we need to build a massive amount of new housing and all the associated transportation and other infrastructure needed to support it. And you might start seeing the initial fruits in a decade. Meanwhile, in the real world, if attitudes and policies were to start shifting, 15 to 20 years is probably a more realistic planning horizon.
    - guyzero 11y ago
      In 2008 I moved out of Toronto and when I went back a few years later there were dozens of new high- and mid-rise buildings that had been built downtown. Telus Tower was built from 2007 to 2009, 32 stories. 120 Bremner is 30 stories, same time period. Cityplace has about two dozen high-rise residential towers that were all built in 2-3 years and are 30+ stories tall. It does not take 4 years to construct a highrise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Early adopters started moving in 2006 (remember the YScraper?). It really accelerated around 2010, when the economy started recovering. Prices started rising in earnest in the second half of 2011. I know a number of people here who are praying for a tech crash so they can afford housing again.
  - davidw 11y ago
    Prices were already going up a lot in the dot com days.
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      Yeah, and then they went down in the dot-com crash, and then they went up again from 2005-2007, and then they went down again in 2009. I moved to Mountain View in 2009. In late 2008 (as the crisis was hitting the stock market, but before landlords had realized it would affect them), a realtor was showing me around, and I asked about a swanky corporate apartment complex we drove by. "Oh, that's out of your price range - they charge $2000+/month." I ended up living there for $1400/month in 2009-2010, then they started jacking up the rent. When I left in 2013, they turned around and rented it for $2700/month.
Chlorus 11y ago
And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the urban growth boundary or increasingly restrictive land-use regulations.
pklausler 11y ago
Metro (being the Portland area's multi-county regional government) voted last year to not expand the urban growth boundary. So the supply of single-family homes with yards is basically fixed, while demand is growing. Expect home prices to continue to grow (Portland's rate is top in the U.S.) as new housing construction continues to be constrained to dense multi-family structures for the next five years until Metro votes on UGB expansion again.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  What rises with house prices - property taxes. Revenue for Metro. I am going to assume there's a non-negligible correlation.
  - pklausler 11y ago
    Property tax revenue would rise with new construction as well.
    - FireBeyond 11y ago
      Wow. Good point. No idea why I didn't consider this. :)
  - Tiktaalik 11y ago
    Not necessarily. The city decides what amount of revenue it wants to generate, then divides that amongst all properties based on accessed value. If in a year everyone's accessed value increases by the exact same amount, and the city doesn't increase the amount of total income they want to generate, no ones property taxes change.

When did San Francisco become the hot property? I know that the last time I was out there, about 2005, tech was still in the valley and SF proper was relatively low rent, bad neighborhoods, and no tech presence. Does this industry (to the extent that you can call AirBNB, Uber, and Twitter the same industry) really act like a flock of grackles or starlings, descending on a place, eating everything, and moving on?

api 11y ago
It seems to be full of people who want to be near art and "cool" people. Unfortunately tech doesn't find a way to pay those creators of culture anything. If anything, the focus is on finding ways to make everything free. So tech moves in, enjoys the presence of creative culture they refuse to fund, but ultimately inflates real estate so much they drive that creative culture away. Rinse and repeat. If art and culture are so valuable to us why are those who create these things so poor? Why do people cringe at buying an album for $9 but then spend $11 on a coffee and a biscuit?
- cloudjacker 11y ago
  Because its not just any form of expression that people want. The artists shouldn't have balked at taking a class in economics.
- Apocryphon 11y ago
  I'm not sure if a lot of the hip tech transplants want art. They just want the aesthetics.
  - api 11y ago
    I think what they want is culture, which is produced by people who love their communities and who don't work 90 hours a week so they have time to actually do it.
- gd2 11y ago
  True, but isn't part of it that one thinks that on the $9 album, the marketing and media company folks gets $8.50 of $9.00 But there is also artistry in creating a coffee or dining experience, and hopefully that money spent on the meal and coffee goes more to the chef artist who prepared the meal, the architect artist who designed the space, and the line cook, waitress and dishwasher.
- seivan 11y ago
  Tech isn't creative and artistic? Why is an "album" worth more than a graphics engine, drawing app or game? If anything music is overvalued. I'm surprised we haven't automated Skrillex and all that house crap yet. ;-)
  - rfrank 11y ago
    > Why is an "album" worth more than a graphics engine... Why is a Picasso worth more than paint?
    - seivan 11y ago
      Because the introduction of GPU's didn't come until 30~ years ago ;-) also it's a single physical item. It's more of a collective piece than actual art, at least today.
- prmph 11y ago
  One interesting explanation is that people seem to think (maybe rightly) that art and culture are cheapened by too much money. To be authentic, art and culture needs to be nearer to the struggling edges of society.
rco8786 11y ago
It's part of a nationwide(global?) urban renewal. Millenials and their successors are more likely to want to live in urban areas and stay single longer than their older counterparts. This is causing rents to increase noticeably in nearly every major urban area. Couple that with relatively high pay for tech sector jobs that like to hire these younger folks and you get it even worse in SF, Seattle, etc.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Be careful of overgeneralizing from the subset of the population you interact with in tech. For example, according to this FiveThirtyEight piece from last year, the actual trend is that college-educated millennials are slightly more likely to move to a subset of dense cities. [1] In general, it's unclear how much of an overall urbanization trend there is. [1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less-urban-than-you-think/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...
guyzero 11y ago
Seriously that was 11 years ago. Yes, a lot of things changed in 11 years.
- mcguire 11y ago
  That's my point. 11 years may seem like a long time to you, but it's really not. I've seen quite a few people here wanting high-rise residential buildings in San Francisco to alleviate the high rents there. A skyscraper is at least 40 floors, according to wikipedia and one rule of thumb I've seen puts the construction time for them at 1 month per floor, from ground breaking to completion. That's about 4 years in construction, plus design and planning time, plus site acquisition. That's five, six years (more?), total, even in the most positive political atmosphere. Someone who wanted to alleviate SF's high rents today, assuming you could do that by building high-rise apartment buildings, would had to have started at the height of the construction bust. That would be, I think, before San Francisco proper's tech boom, i.e. before there was a problem evident. And if you started building one today,... Once upon a time, Intel planned to build a 10 story office building in downtown Austin. They stopped, with nothing but the structure of the building up, in 2001. The incomplete building was demolished in 2007.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Yep. The government and people of San Francisco and Silicon Valley could wake up tomorrow, all with the simultaneous revelation that OMG we need to build a massive amount of new housing and all the associated transportation and other infrastructure needed to support it. And you might start seeing the initial fruits in a decade. Meanwhile, in the real world, if attitudes and policies were to start shifting, 15 to 20 years is probably a more realistic planning horizon.
  - guyzero 11y ago
    In 2008 I moved out of Toronto and when I went back a few years later there were dozens of new high- and mid-rise buildings that had been built downtown. Telus Tower was built from 2007 to 2009, 32 stories. 120 Bremner is 30 stories, same time period. Cityplace has about two dozen high-rise residential towers that were all built in 2-3 years and are 30+ stories tall. It does not take 4 years to construct a highrise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto
nostrademons 11y ago
Early adopters started moving in 2006 (remember the YScraper?). It really accelerated around 2010, when the economy started recovering. Prices started rising in earnest in the second half of 2011. I know a number of people here who are praying for a tech crash so they can afford housing again.
- davidw 11y ago
  Prices were already going up a lot in the dot com days.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Yeah, and then they went down in the dot-com crash, and then they went up again from 2005-2007, and then they went down again in 2009. I moved to Mountain View in 2009. In late 2008 (as the crisis was hitting the stock market, but before landlords had realized it would affect them), a realtor was showing me around, and I asked about a swanky corporate apartment complex we drove by. "Oh, that's out of your price range - they charge $2000+/month." I ended up living there for $1400/month in 2009-2010, then they started jacking up the rent. When I left in 2013, they turned around and rented it for $2700/month.

Chlorus 11y ago

And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the urban growth boundary or increasingly restrictive land-use regulations.

pklausler 11y ago

Metro (being the Portland area's multi-county regional government) voted last year to not expand the urban growth boundary. So the supply of single-family homes with yards is basically fixed, while demand is growing. Expect home prices to continue to grow (Portland's rate is top in the U.S.) as new housing construction continues to be constrained to dense multi-family structures for the next five years until Metro votes on UGB expansion again.

FireBeyond 11y ago
What rises with house prices - property taxes. Revenue for Metro. I am going to assume there's a non-negligible correlation.
- pklausler 11y ago
  Property tax revenue would rise with new construction as well.
  - FireBeyond 11y ago
    Wow. Good point. No idea why I didn't consider this. :)
- Tiktaalik 11y ago
  Not necessarily. The city decides what amount of revenue it wants to generate, then divides that amongst all properties based on accessed value. If in a year everyone's accessed value increases by the exact same amount, and the city doesn't increase the amount of total income they want to generate, no ones property taxes change.