4 ms·

That is not necessary. If prices get so high that no one wants to or can afford to live in SF, then the prices will naturally decline. I'm old enough to be a

by steven2012 13y ago

That is not necessary. If prices get so high that no one wants to or can afford to live in SF, then the prices will naturally decline. I'm old enough to be a crusty dot-com boom veteran. Rent prices were about as crazy as they were today, except it was more in the South Bay than SF, so no one appeared to care as much. My 2 br apartment in the South Bay went from $1700/month to $2300/month after the lease was up. We had to move out and into a shitty rental in Sunnyvale for 2 years, when the rent prices started to drop because of the dotcom bust. So, the supply-demand equation is very real, and at some point, prices will abate. Nothing goes up forever.

smartestone 13y ago
lol at your baseless wishful thinking Cry me a river. The demand if from millionaires an billionaires both foreign and domestic. Whatsapp made each employee a millionaire many times over. Twitter IPO. Rich Chinese & Russians. What goes up will keep going up, lib.
enraged_camel 13y ago
>>That is not necessary. If prices get so high that no one wants to or can afford to live in SF, then the prices will naturally decline. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. For people outside the tech industry, this is already becoming the case. This is why entire neighborhoods are being gentrified: middle and lower-middle class can no longer afford to live there. Tech workers though? Their companies have bottomless pockets. Google can afford to increase employee wages to keep up with increasing real estate prices. The issue is that Google employees need services like everyone else: police, firefighters, teachers, water, electricity, sewage, just to name a few. But if those service-providers can't afford to live in the city, then what will happen? Probably this: http://imgur.com/CbyLy7O http://imgur.com/CbyLy7O
- steven2012 13y ago
  To say that tech companies have bottomless pockets actually shows that you have a fundamental understanding of the problem. Since you don't live in SF, I'll chalk that up to you buying into the media hysteria and not really knowing how life has been here over the past little while. People have always been predicting about how basic services will stop functioning because the workers will be unable to afford it, and it just won't happen. There will always be people to pick up the work. In terms of tech companies having bottomless pockets, tht's simply nonsense. Startups can't afford to keep up paying Google-like wages (~200k/yr + $100k/yr in RSUs). And just like the dotcom boom, there will be a reckoning when "promising" startups don't get bought up by Google or Facebook, and their investors start fleeing en masse. Then, as people start moving out of the $5000/month 2 br condos in Mission Bay (as one of my friends were actually paying), prices will drop. It's just the nature of the beast.
- DannyBee 13y ago
  I'm not sure what your concern is here. What makes you assume these people live in the city? While the cartoon is cute, One of two things will happen: 1. The service will decline, people will complain, and the salaries will increase until they are enough to live in the city, or attractive enough to someone to commute. 2. The service won't decline, because these people were not living in the city anyway. Most of the police officers i knew for DC, for example, lived in the suburbs of Maryland (a 1 hour commute). I doubt most teachers in the bay area were living in SF, they were priced out of the market a long time ago.
dllthomas 13y ago
"So, the supply-demand equation is very real, and at some point, prices will abate." Only if demand goes down or supply goes up. The dotcom bust was an example of demand going down, but I don't see that it had anything to do with the high price of housing. "Nothing goes up forever." I don't think you can count on anything going up forever, but I'm not sure I would want to bet too heavily on any particular thing not going up forever - particularly when you consider that something could "go up forever" while having a horizontal asymptote. Note that I'm not saying nothing else can solve the problem - another decline in tech certainly would - but for it to be the high prices that solve the problem requires those high prices be able to motivate useful behavior.

smartestone 13y ago

lol at your baseless wishful thinking Cry me a river. The demand if from millionaires an billionaires both foreign and domestic. Whatsapp made each employee a millionaire many times over. Twitter IPO. Rich Chinese & Russians. What goes up will keep going up, lib.

enraged_camel 13y ago

>>That is not necessary. If prices get so high that no one wants to or can afford to live in SF, then the prices will naturally decline. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. For people outside the tech industry, this is already becoming the case. This is why entire neighborhoods are being gentrified: middle and lower-middle class can no longer afford to live there. Tech workers though? Their companies have bottomless pockets. Google can afford to increase employee wages to keep up with increasing real estate prices. The issue is that Google employees need services like everyone else: police, firefighters, teachers, water, electricity, sewage, just to name a few. But if those service-providers can't afford to live in the city, then what will happen? Probably this: http://imgur.com/CbyLy7O http://imgur.com/CbyLy7O

steven2012 13y ago
To say that tech companies have bottomless pockets actually shows that you have a fundamental understanding of the problem. Since you don't live in SF, I'll chalk that up to you buying into the media hysteria and not really knowing how life has been here over the past little while. People have always been predicting about how basic services will stop functioning because the workers will be unable to afford it, and it just won't happen. There will always be people to pick up the work. In terms of tech companies having bottomless pockets, tht's simply nonsense. Startups can't afford to keep up paying Google-like wages (~200k/yr + $100k/yr in RSUs). And just like the dotcom boom, there will be a reckoning when "promising" startups don't get bought up by Google or Facebook, and their investors start fleeing en masse. Then, as people start moving out of the $5000/month 2 br condos in Mission Bay (as one of my friends were actually paying), prices will drop. It's just the nature of the beast.
DannyBee 13y ago
I'm not sure what your concern is here. What makes you assume these people live in the city? While the cartoon is cute, One of two things will happen: 1. The service will decline, people will complain, and the salaries will increase until they are enough to live in the city, or attractive enough to someone to commute. 2. The service won't decline, because these people were not living in the city anyway. Most of the police officers i knew for DC, for example, lived in the suburbs of Maryland (a 1 hour commute). I doubt most teachers in the bay area were living in SF, they were priced out of the market a long time ago.

dllthomas 13y ago

"So, the supply-demand equation is very real, and at some point, prices will abate." Only if demand goes down or supply goes up. The dotcom bust was an example of demand going down, but I don't see that it had anything to do with the high price of housing. "Nothing goes up forever." I don't think you can count on anything going up forever, but I'm not sure I would want to bet too heavily on any particular thing not going up forever - particularly when you consider that something could "go up forever" while having a horizontal asymptote. Note that I'm not saying nothing else can solve the problem - another decline in tech certainly would - but for it to be the high prices that solve the problem requires those high prices be able to motivate useful behavior.