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It seems very tough to draw any conclusions on this just yet. The media has clearly latched onto a storyline of a mass exodus from American cities, but the real

• opencl 6y ago
  The report is from Zillow, it's easy enough to see the current inventory number. I just searched and it's at 1,849 in the city limits.
• 37r7rudjduj 6y ago
  > The media has clearly latched onto a storyline of a mass exodus from American cities, but the reality is probably much more complex. < But isn't the point of the article that San Francisco specifically is seeing an exceptional exodus? The story even mentions San Jose as a regional counter example to the observations being made of SF.
  • roenxi 6y ago
    Something strange might be happening to do with a very local effect - maybe a couple of large employers permanently went remote first resulting in a temporary blip. It is obvious from the charts that something unusual happened in SF. But that is different from it being sustained, not about to reverse or even important. The dust hasn't even finished rising from COVID-19 yet, let alone settled. And it isn't even clear this is COVID-19 related.
• fountainofage 6y ago
  > But cities have enduring appeal - proximity to people and culture and things to do I think this is key right here. For the foreseeable future, those things won't be any more available in an expensive city compared to an inexpensive rural area. So why buy a 1 bedroom for $2 million or rent one for $3500 a month if I can do the exact same amount of networking and see the exact same amount of museums while paying significantly less?
  • tjr225 6y ago
    Culture and things to do include a lot more than just networking and museums. One example for instance is the vast amount of unique natural beauty surrounding the Bay Area. Even rural places that have that are also expensive- though admittedly not nearly as much so. This is generally reflected in salary though.
    • fountainofage 6y ago
      Those activities are also restricted and limited during COVID - either explicitly via state and local ordinances or via social pressures to not spread the virus. Basically, the optimal solution right now is to not go anywhere or see anyone unless you absolutely have to. Which if all someone should be doing is sitting at home or getting groceries, they could do that for a lot less than SF prices.
      • tjr225 6y ago
        Hiking/cycling/camping can be crazy socially distant and probably one of the best things you can do for your own mental and physical health right now. A ride up Tam isn’t going to be any more or less dangerous than it was before. Outside of a few extremely popular spots it is not restricted in Washington, at least to my knowledge. If it is in the Bay/CA then it is news to me. In any case, that stuff will still be there when the pandemic is over. It won’t be anywhere east of the Rockies.
        • vecinu 6y ago
• ghaff 6y ago
  At this point, it's hard to say if you're looking at blips or systemic trends. There are certainly reasons one could imagine that there's a more general exodus from San Francisco and the Silicon Valley sprawl more broadly. While I generally like SF as a visitor, the negative side of the ledger gets longer with each passing year and most of SV broadly doesn't have much going for it, especially for the CoL, except for its access to places that are actually nice. So if people don't want/need to live there for high-paid tech jobs I can certainly imagine many leaving, at least to the point where CoL somewhat adjusts to sustainable levels.
• vmception 6y ago
  > SF already had such low inventory numbers that any change would look huge on a chart like this Bingo Its a delta of a delta I like the ones that show rent and pricing drops more This chart is an additional footnote but not one to make an article about in isolation
• jhowell 6y ago
  > It also seems plausible that SF has a unique combination of factors that put it in a bad spot right now. It’s insanely expensive, quality of life has been on the decline for some time, and the types of companies that made real estate there so expensive in the first place are also likely to be the ones that adopt remote work quickly and wholeheartedly. I imagine people at the fringes in the city (and region really), born and raised, with local family ties making it harder to leave, might feel that this "bad spot" appeared some time ago.
• neltnerb 6y ago
  I was surprised that in SF of all places the impact of COVID on AirBNB rentals wasn't even mentioned. I'd expect some people doing that have decided to just rent it like normal housing and actually increase the housing stock. But way too early to tell, I'm still never expecting to move back there.
  • rsynnott 6y ago
    I was wondering about that too. In Dublin, which has vaguely similar dynamics (inadequate housing supply, very large presence of tech and other industries which have gone all in on remote-for-now if not remote-forever) rental inventory is up by 60%. Which sounds like a lot, until you look at how tiny it is normally, and how much of what’s showing up to rent is very clearly hastily decommissioned Airbnb stock.
    • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      And house prices still haven't started coming down...
      • rsynnott 6y ago
        They may not for a while. Except for new-builds outside Dublin (or marginally in county Dublin but far from the city) they didn't drop much throughout 2008; sales just slowed down. 2009-2011 was where there was really a big drop.
  • xoxoy 6y ago
    Airbnb has been heavily regulated in SF for years (ironically), so there hasn’t been a lot of Airbnbs that were full units vs just a spare bedroom in someone’s actual residence.
  • asdff 6y ago
    I see that on LA craigslist. You can find plenty of apartments that come 'fully furnished' with that spartan airbnb black particleboard furniture, cheap tv, and futon. Some of them are only month to month, in anticipation of going back to airbnbing whenever that becomes profitable again, like a lightswitch.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dang 6y ago
  Re inventory numbers: this comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24176859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24176859, which points to an article that (misleadingly, as this and other comments are pointing out) referenced only a 96% increase in inventory numbers. We merged that thread into this one, which was posted earlier and points to a more substantive article. (I know it's WSJ, but there are paywall workarounds in the thread.)
• Nursie 6y ago
  > But cities have enduring appeal - proximity to people and culture and things to do is just as much a factor as proximity to work. Proximity to people may be something that loses appeal in the medium term. This is a suspicion rather than anything that can be evidenced yet, we'll see how it plays out, but I think it might start counting as a negative, or less as a positive, for a while.
  • throwaway2048 6y ago
    Few people are going to restructure their entire life over medium terms concerns, if they can avoid it.
    • Nursie 6y ago
      Firstly, I disagree, I think a lot of people structure their lives around the medium term - "I'm going to retire to X one day, but for the next few years I'm doing Y", "for now the city life is great, but I'm putting aside some cash for a house in the burbs in a few years" etc etc But secondly, that's not really what I meant, I meant that for the next several years people's motivations and choices are likely to be impacted by the virus. This may result in a larger percentage of people moving away from cities or choosing not to move to them. i.e. I'm not talking about an individual holding the thought in their head that "I don't want to be in a city, in the medium term, but may move back later", but a population which is less favourable to city life in the medium term, and holds a greater proportion of people who think "I don't want to live in the big smoke at all" I may be wrong, of course, but I think we're already seeing it to a small extent.
• kbenson 6y ago
  The article actually notes this: > It should be noted that San Francisco had an unusually low inventory relative to other large cities prior to the pandemic. Historically, the ratio of homes for sale relative to total housing has been a quarter of New York's. But then they go on to assert that this is important regardless, but don't actually provide any information to back it up. > Regardless, the 96% year on year change in inventory marks a significant moment. I would assume if it was so self evident, it would be easy for them to include even a sentence that alludes as to why. They say other nearby markets don't see the same shift but other nearby markets were never like SF anyway, so I'm not sure why they would indicate something in a market already known to be dissimilar. Edit: I and the parent comment were referring to the SFGate article from another submission that got merged I to this one, as we were before the merge.
  • smallnamespace 6y ago
    If you're a renter and you when lease renewal time comes up and you see twice as many open units in your apartment, wouldn't you also bargain more aggressively with your landlord? Conversely, if you're a building manager and you an X% occupancy rate target, you're going to need to cut prices in order to maintain that rate if a bunch of tenants don't renew. This is pretty much textbook microeconomics 101. Going a bit further, occupancy rate is a signal that both sides of the market can (noisily) observe, so if the prior non-occupancy rate was very low, you'd expect a shock that doubles the rate (say, 5% -> 10%) to lead to perhaps a larger price change than in a less tight market (such as 10% -> 15%)
    • mjevans 6y ago
      In practice I've never known how many other units were occupied, and the land lords are incredibly incentivized to sit on empty units over reducing the value of the property by lowering rent ever. The numbers thus _only_ go one direction.
      • zucker42 6y ago
        Rents dropped significantly at the start of the pandemic in my area (from $3400 around this time last year to $2500). It's partly because I'm right next to a big college.
• paul7986 6y ago
  You and others here questioning the full veracity of this article says to me the media is crap! All headlines and clickbait that too many people read only such headlines and believe it's the end of the world almost. Maybe one day the media will be forced to change for the better of society!!! As of now too many people are sheep to it (all sides)... I find local media in my small town city to be much more digestible and better for society.
• withinboredom 6y ago
  Anecdotally, I've received a huge number of DM's, emails, and even, texts, somehow, about people wanting to know the details about how I moved out of the US. I've met some very interesting people, all but one moving from the bay area.
  • apineda 6y ago
    Out of curiosity where did you move to?
    • withinboredom 6y ago
      I live in the Netherlands. My son was 3 when we moved here; he's about to turn 6 and speaks Dutch fluently. I'm still working on it :)
• 01100011 6y ago
  What does the current distribution of population by age in the US look like? I would bet that younger people tend to flock to the cities more, and as they age they leave for the suburbs and the country. If that's the case, there may be demographic shifts which will combine with other factors to affect a prolonged shift away from the cities.