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Yes, but it's only indirectly that it happens as a result of the buyers. The property owners are perfectly free to lease their properties for less than the mar

• PavlovsCat 13y ago
  Going as far as "the market can bear" with something like housing to me is a pathological aspect of society. You simply take for granted that it's okay to shuffle people around like that. Also, the market adopts to money, not people. Only if people spend to reflect their peopledom, it indirectly does.
  • bmelton 13y ago
    Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, I'm honestly not savvy enough to say definitively, but the converse of that is equally worrisome. As near as I understand it, getting something for the 'going rate' is impossible. Homes are selling for 80% above asking on the same day they hit the market. I personally know of someone who found a home through a friend that had literally not hit the market yet, placed an offer in the hour that it did hit the market, for something crazy like 40% above asking, and was told, on the same day, that his offer had been bested. The market may be acting irrationally, but if one wants rational things (e.g., a place to live without dying) and money is less an issue than personal security, what exactly are they to do? Sure, placing fair market offers might feel good, but if one were to do that, they would not have a place to live. If someone could do that, then there wouldn't be a problem. I can't see how pretending the problem doesn't exist is going to change anything. Convincing nearly everybody to artificially deflate the market simply won't work, no matter how many conscientious people are involved, because it literally only takes one moneyed asshole to arbitrage the system into exactly how it is now, except now we've got one developer with all the money instead of many homeowners with parts of the money... but either way, the net result is the same, property prices are higher. I agree that coerced exodus isn't pretty, but as I understand it, real estate in Oakland is downright cheap by comparison, and it's a very short commute away (though I've never done the bridge in traffic). As for your other example, picking an unhip district and moving there is just more of the same problem. If everybody did that, there'd just be even more displacement from even more places. I don't know of any ungentrified areas in San Francisco, but while you might be able to find a place in a Tenderloin-esque sort of place for cheap, any attempts at making it nice also makes it appealing to others, and the cycle repeats. The core of the problem is that supply is artificially constrained, and demand is high. This leads to the expected raise in price for the good demanded, and is the basic tenet of economy that's been taught for almost 100 years. It's not a law, but markets, rational or irrational, tend to follow its prescriptions, and in this case, the markets are acting rationally. The easy solution is to unconstrain supply, which requires petitioning the San Francisco (and possibly surrounding) legislatures to change lessen building restrictions, not hating on Google. Rent control is possibly an option as well, which San Francisco already has, but it isn't apparently working. I don't know if this is because the Ellis act is being exploited or because rent control is generally exploitative to property owners, or some other combination of factors that I'm not aware of. Editing to clarify a point -- I'm not asserting that rent control is exploitative. I've seen compelling arguments for and against them, but I don't have any domain-specific knowledge or information above and beyond what I've read on the internet -- just stating that as a possibility.