15 ms·

San Francisco rents are bad. San Francisco purchase prices are balls-out disgusting: 30 to 50 years' worth of rent. Typical in the US is 15, and that's only bec

San Francisco rents are bad. San Francisco purchase prices are balls-out disgusting: 30 to 50 years' worth of rent. Typical in the US is 15, and that's only because of the mortgage interest tax credit (which drives purchase prices about 30-50% higher than they otherwise should be). Buying at current levels would only make economic sense if you expected rents to keep going up. Right now, buying is a bad move unless you expect the extreme rent situation to worsen (rather than mean reverting) in the long term (20-30 years). Given that it'd take just one genuine progressive mayor to crush the NIMBYs and allow new development, I think that that's a bad bet.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Given that it'd take just one genuine progressive mayor to crush the NIMBYs and allow new development Well, in an alternate reality where the City and County of San Francisco is a mayoral dictatorship (and using a suitably special definition of "progressive", though that's somewhat tangential) this might be true. Of course, in that alternate reality, you'd still need the mayor with that preference to somehow get elected in San Francisco, which might require even a bigger divergence from the universe we live in than San Francisco having the kind of political structure which would empower a mayor alone to impose the changes you describe.