There’s a huge construction boom in my area but it’s all fucking rental apartments for the incoming techbros. Literally dozens of buildings have been built in the past few years with thousands of units - all rentals. Because that’s all the REITs will fund. It’s infuriating. I’d love to move to a bigger condo or house but everything around here is so overpriced I, can’t afford it.
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I dunno. I am gonnna guess, “There is not enough room”.
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240 sq.ft doesn’t sound that bad. I own a 134 sq.ft flat in a kamienica type building that was formerly a military housing. While this isn’t for everyone, I really like it.
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I don’t think footprint is such a problem. A well insulated building will be more efficient than 50 tiny houses leaking heat.
If sustainability is the concern, to have a small building with central heating and a shared laundry room seems to make more sense to me. Also, renovation is more carbon efficient than building new things.
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Sure, but Rocky was always there, just hangdogging around. And then Angel wound show up mooching…
Yeah, I know “super commuters” too. I know people who commute between Sacramento and the bay area… I’ve known them to be doing it for forty years. Why? “They get more up there than down here”. I thought they were nuts for that, but they do it.
I dearly LOVE the myth that property is “held” open… With the property tax rates and mortgage payments that have to be made, only someone who doesn’t make those payments could possible beleive that’s going on.
If you’re an owner and you DON’T live in it, a property in the bay area with a tax assessment value of 500,000 is over 16,000/year or more. That would be a property purchased in the past 10 years. Assuming 10 percent down on that property, payments of 48,000/year on the mortgage are very likely, and higher is not unheard of… And then there is homeowners insurance of about 4,000/year (minimum… The mortgage holder requires it) for a total of 68,000 in annual outlay. Those outlays go up if there is ANY maintenance that needs to be done.
Anyone who seriously thinks people will just randomly blow nearly 70k a year down the toilet in the name of “greed” have little understanding of what greed is.
For the record, you’re the one who cited the known inaccurate article.
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I think the house she’s talking about was badly designed. I lived in a 280 square-foot gardeners cottage for the last 10 years and even managed to have nine people in it at one time. Remodeled it six years ago to a 600 square-foot Palace. Happy then, happy now. ( it doesn’t hurt that it has a decent sized garden ).
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PS. This is in North Berkeley. I thought I was going out on a limb when I bought it in 1999. Now I’m really glad I did.
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Well… it’s not so tiny now (went from 280 sq. ft. to 600) but my house just about quadrupled in value, after 20 years. For the usual reason - location location location. Plus a quite nice job on the remodel.
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Why should we believe you and not the Chronicle?
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Because the Chron ran a retraction. Go look for yourself… I won’t look it up for you
No they did not. That’s not what the word “retraction” means.
Why should we believe your lies instead of an article at a major newspaper?
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It just strikes me that Walden Pond without the pond would be something like Alcatraz.
You can stay in these places - you just can’t live in them. Still, I did manage to live in a 16ft caravan for a while and it was fun. I’m also quite taken by the Cube houses designed in England. Tho, not sure how long it takes before claustrophobia kicks in.
Trip to Mars, anyone?
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The point is that the people are betting that the place will go up in value by more than 20k/yr; the people buying up land in SF aren’t the kind of people who need mortgages.
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And yet this happens all the time with commercial real estate, where the carrying and opportunity costs are even higher. Time and time again, I’ve seen greedy landlords kick out stable, long-time, loyal business tenants because they think they can get more from some as-yet unspecified future tenant. And then the property sits vacant for years, while the mortgage and property taxes and insurance continue to be paid on it, as the landlord stubbornly sticks to demanding a higher rent than that charged to the old tenant.
Such “own goals” are a classic aspect of greed, and landlords (especially small-time ones) are particularly susceptible to it. So yeah, I can see residential properties being held vacant – not only by oligarchs who can afford to pay cash but also by greedy fools.
“Correction” != “retraction” in the news business. The latter is a full withdrawal of the article, meaning it would have been pulled from the Chron site entirely. The correction having been made, the essential point of the story still remains the same: even the San Francisco area’s relatively low vacancy rate is still unacceptable, and indicates that there are still landlords so greedy that they’re willing to hold out for even more exorbitant rents or sale prices than are already the norm there.
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The gathering is more fun yes but fewer yuppies and trust funders means worse drugs 
The small working class homes in Ireland used to be packed with children, so the neighborhood pubs became the meeting place for adults. Thus was alcoholism created.
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Yep. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t highlight that fact at every given opportunity and attempt to make it for everyone.
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All the more reason to BYOD!
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The phenomenon is well-documented. You might as well be arguing gravity doesn’t exist because birds fly.
Oh, fer chrissakes:
From the article:
Editor’s note : An earlier version of this story stated over 100,000 homes were vacant in San Francisco. In fact, the LendingTree study was referring to the San Francisco metro area, not just the city of San Francisco itself.
What inaccuracy? With the correction, it is exactly appropriate to your assertion.
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