SF startup lets would-be tenants bid for apartments

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SF has pretty strong rent control, so once you're locked in, you're pretty safe. I got lucky in town. Though the drawback is that I won't be able to ever upgrade to a larger apartment from our one bedroom if my wife and I want a family because We'll never be able to afford 2 bedroom prices. Hell, I wouldn't even be able to afford 1 bedroom these days. If I somehow get kicked out, I'll have to move out of the city. Or into the tenderloin... Even those prices are going up.
 
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SF has pretty strong rent control, so once you're locked in, you're pretty safe. I got lucky in town. Though the drawback is that I won't be able to ever upgrade to a larger apartment from our one bedroom if my wife and I want a family because We'll never be able to afford 2 bedroom prices. Hell, I wouldn't even be able to afford 1 bedroom these days. If I somehow get kicked out, I'll have to move out of the city. Or into the tenderloin... Even those prices are going up.

Rent control only exists on properties built before 1979.
 
Bay Area housing price issues extend way, way beyond San Francisco. If you work in tech and want to work within 90 minutes of your office, you're going to deal with some seriously inflated prices.

I'm in the outskirts of the North Bay, about an hour+ from SF but too far too commute if you factor in traffic. Rents here have shot up 70-80% or more even for the shittiest of closets. It's gotten bad enough my city just put a temporary emergency freeze on rent increases over 3% until they can decided what the hell to do, and are considering rent control for anything built before 1995. I feel overwhelmingly lucky I moved in about 5 years ago and have reasonable, independent landlords instead of a faceless rental agency. I still see myself being priced out of Northern California in the near-ish future
 
burn it down
My very first thought.

What an elitist shithole this place is turning into. People who want to live here are making this place unbearable and wildly unaffordable or flat out impossible for those who already do.

What about doing it Uber style? Surge rent pricing! Want to keep living in your beach-house during the holidays? The rent just tripled!
That's the spirit of innovation, right there.
 
The real solution is super-fast mass transit, so that people can live further away from work, which would help redirect development to less developed areas and spread out the increase in value of houses away from major urban centers, effectively cooling it.

Looks like sadly if you leave it to the free market none of this will happen, it necessitates a concerted effort from a government with a long-term vision, nothing we'll see happen here in North America.



Haha, of course, there is no such thing as anything being overvalued in a free market, right.

Actually this entire issue is resulting from the lack of a market, not because of it.

With this much value being suppressed, there's a lot of financial incentives to find solutions. But due to land rights, regulations, and so on, the market actually is prohibited from addressing the current situation in the most efficient way.

If there was anything like a free market in SF the amount of housing would double overnight.
 
Actually this entire issue is resulting from the lack of a market, not because of it.

With this much value being suppressed, there's a lot of financial incentives to find solutions. But due to land rights, regulations, and so on, the market actually is prohibited from addressing the current situation in the most efficient way.

If there was anything like a free market in SF the amount of housing would double overnight.

There is plenty of cheap housing available, it's just too far, hence we need rapid mass transit so people can live further from work. It's clear this is the solution, but we are so behind on this that it isn't even contemplated.
 
Fucking lol

There is way too much government intervention in SF to be anything close to libertarian

If SF and the region were actually libertarian, the housing situation wouldn't be as bad as it is now. But there's not much anybody can do to lower housing prices now even if they deregulated everything. The entire area hasn't built enough housing every year for the last 30 years or something like that. The best somebody can hope for is that it slows down.
 
There is plenty of cheap housing available, it's just too far, hence we need rapid mass transit so people can live further from work. It's clear this is the solution, but we are so behind on this that it isn't even contemplated.

In other words, that cheap housing isn't really relevant. It's out of market.

A free market would have built taller buildings with tons of housing by now. The city would be growing upwards to meet the insane level of demand.

Meanwhile, you're blaming the free market for not producing rapid mass transit to the city, something it's not allowed to do by the government. You think a company can buy all the land rights, utility rights, etc to actually build such a thing? They can't use eminent domain like that. Instead you get Google buses that people hate even though they're actually one of the few mass transit options a company can provide.
 
This reminds me of my friend who used to make a dozen or so fake accounts and give long 1 star reviews for any apartment complex he lived at, hoping to drive their occupancy rate lower to avoid any rent increases.

I discovered shortly after moving to California that almost every apartment complex has the exact same 2-star average and crappy reviews on Yelp: bitching about loud tenants, being not-so-secretly racist about who lives in the neighborhood, and whining that the people in the rental office were perfect amazing angels until they were replaced with Satan himself. It didn't occur to me at the time that this was in part people trying to keep rent down but....

I don't understand how this would benefit the consumer at all.

To state more baldly what others have suggested, it works great for the consumer as long as the consumer is the guy at the top of the bidding chain who wants to secure a place by bidding way above nominal market value.

SF has pretty strong rent control, so once you're locked in, you're pretty safe.

Well, until you get Ellised, or evicted for owner residence or capital improvement or condo conversion....

What an elitist shithole this place is turning into. People who want to live here are making this place unbearable and wildly unaffordable or flat out impossible for those who already do.

I wouldn't say I regret my choice to move out here exactly but it's clear the tech migration was a massive net negative and a lot of the people I know are in the early stages of figuring out how to get out of town again.

If there was anything like a free market in SF the amount of housing would double overnight.

Well, not exactly, because that would tank housing prices and put all the developers building the new housing out of business. Unfortunately, a housing bubble driven by lack of supply has a lot of the same problems as a housing bubble driven by unsustainable demand -- like the fact that your only real options are either a catastrophic pop, or a measured deflation over 10+ years.
 
I wouldn't say I regret my choice to move out here exactly but it's clear the tech migration was a massive net negative and a lot of the people I know are in the early stages of figuring out how to get out of town again.
SF has always been a city filled to the brim with people from somewhere else, and they've always been welcome. Most people I met would usually stay or a while but then find their way to other places where things moved a little quicker, where there was more day to day intensity, where things weren't quite so chill. SF was a place to relax, with the rat race left to other places.

The only reason the current influx of people has become a problem is that what was a normal cycle of migration got twisted by jacking up prices to insane levels with tech company lucre which led to displacing everybody who grew up here over generations and had roots in family, friends and the community. I can't put too fine a point on this, but everybody who rented here pre-internet era is being displaced, pushed out and scattered to the winds. And everybody who is still here spends too much time discussing plans for when they're eventually washed away from their apartments in the next wave of property manager dirty-tricks, and where they might end up, or else what their plans are to somehow deal with their rents doubling or tripling.

No room to relax when the sands are shifting under your feet and you can't feel at ease in your own home. And that's changed the tenor of this place. Its now become a rat race for all but the rich.

I don't want newcomers that love this city to feel like they're the scapegoat for all the city's ills - they're not. But there is a right way to come here and a wrong way. And we're seeing the result of too many people with too much money all vying for the same small location too quickly, and the willingness of some of those people to pay double, triple or more, and cover years at a time with cash, has led to sweeping evictions and unsustainable price increases for everybody else.

Its just fucked.

Sorry if I'm a broken record in these threads.
 
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