Anecdote: I live in Park Merced: > Parkmerced is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, designed by architects Leonard Schultze and Thomas Dolliver Chur

Anecdote: I live in Park Merced: > Parkmerced is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, designed by architects Leonard Schultze and Thomas Dolliver Church in the early 1940s. Parkmerced is the second-largest single-owner neighborhood of apartment blocks west of the Mississippi River after Park La Brea in Los Angeles. It was a planned neighborhood of high-rise apartment towers and low-rise garden apartments in southwestern San Francisco for middle-income tenants. It contains 3,221 residences (after sale of five blocks to San Francisco State University (SFSU)) and over 9,000 residents, and is one of four remaining privately owned large-scale garden apartment complexes in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Merced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Merced On my block, just on my street, there are over a dozen empty garden apartments, 2- and 3-bedrooms, that have been empty since (more-or-less) the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns. Folks started leaving and no one has moved back in. Next to my house there are three empty apt.'s to the left, one to the right, and four across the street. The owners haven't lowered rents though. The theory is that they would rather keep the rents high and the apartments empty than lower the rents because if they do that it affects their ability to raise rents later on (rent control is the only way I afford to still live here. For better or worse my family pays less than half the market rate. However, as I am describing, the market rate is not "clearing the demand" or whatever the economic jargon would be. No one is renting at "market" rate right now.) The other problem is that rents going down affect the valuation of the property, something like that. IANAEconomist. Anyway... There are literally hundreds of perfectly fine apartments ready to rent here in Park Merced, with the M line light rail going directly to downtown SF in about 20-30 minutes and a BART station in walking distance. - - - - Get this. Some folks moved in to the place across the street on Monday, but then Wednesday the staff was here kicking them out: they were squatters. I spoke to one of the staff who told me that this was a group of people who were breaking in and squatting in units all over the property, that they had changed the locks on the house they tried to squat in, and that he had called the police, who asked if anyone was being violent (no) and then still hadn't shown up an hour later! They never did show up. The squatters moved all their stuff and their two dogs back into their vehicles and left.