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> All other rents will rise as well, because all owners will see what everything else costs and continue to charge ridiculous amounts for their spaces. Don't b
by fennecfoxen 13y ago
> All other rents will rise as well, because all owners will see what everything else costs and continue to charge ridiculous amounts for their spaces.
Don't be absurd. Owners are already well aware of the fact that there are rich Google engineers beating a path to their door, and are glad to charge said engineers as much as they think they can get away with. Additional housing is competition, and if they affect prices they will cause them to fall, as various Google engineers will have an alternative to Mission-district Victorians and other existing housing stock.
- samstave 13y agoHistory disagrees with your theory. I moved back to the bay area in 1997. There have been thousands upon thousands of new homes and apartments built since then. I have yet to see one drop in rental prices. Your statement only looks good on paper.
- krschultz 13y agoIf there are thousands of units built, but demand increases by tens of thousands, prices are not going to go down. NYC is building at a much faster pace than SF, but according to the census on the order of 300,000 people moved into the city between 2010 and 2013. That is exerting huge demand pressure on prices even with the new buildings going up. The only way for prices to go down would have been adding housing stock for more than that increase - which didn't happen.
- samstave 13y agoEXACTLY my point. Which invalidates FennecFox's comment where he said: "Additional housing is competition, and if they affect prices they will cause them to fall, as various Google engineers will have an alternative to Mission-district Victorians and other existing housing stock."
- jacobr1 13y agoThat is because even as supply rises, demand continues to increase above supply.
- samstave 13y agoEXACTLY my point. Which invalidates FennecFox's comment where he said: "Additional housing is competition, and if they affect prices they will cause them to fall, as various Google engineers will have an alternative to Mission-district Victorians and other existing housing stock."
- fennecfoxen 13y agoNo, that's not your point, or at least it wasn't. Your original point was that adding housing would make renting in San Francisco more expensive. That point remains false. High rents cause construction, not the other way around. The thing that makes San Francisco more expensive is advertising revenue collected by Google and Facebook or whoever, paid to software engineers and then to landlords. Add something making it a lot more expensive and something making it a little cheaper, and you still get "quite a bit more expensive", go figure. Apparently I need to spell that out! Truly this thread is a bastion of intellectual excellence.
- samstave 13y ago"Your original point was that adding housing would make renting in San Francisco more expensive. That point remains false." No, it does not. Look at the actual cost of rents in SF over time. You're arguing that adding these properties is causing competition and in addition, "google engineers" could migrate from housing in the mission to these new luxury condos, thus freeing up the mission places for (presumably lower rent/income) others... I gaurantee you this will not happen. Assume that some googler DOES move out from their vitorian apt in the mission to a glass tower near twitter... their new rent will be higher than what they paid in mission - and the apt they left will charge a higher rent (or possibly equal) to what they paid. My landlord has 85 properties she owns and rents. She speak of the $3,300 single-room rents she is getting in SF with glee.
- spikels 13y agoMaybe you missed it but rents dropped in the early 2000s when demand decreased after the first internet bubble popped and were flat in the mid-2000s.