In the early 2000's most startups wanted to be on the Peninsula. Young people wanted a life and lived in SF. The natural place for startups shifted to SF.
Now the Peninsula is too expensive for the young, and full of experienced people.
Could the next step be companies forming on the Peninsula by experienced execs with many remote workers?
Regardless - office rental prices have a way to fall in SF.
It's going to be anywhere except SF at this point. Peninsula, south bay, whatever.
SF is now so bad that people don't feel safe walking to their offices there. In the peninsula and south bay that is almost never the case.
However, this is not fundamentally about SF versus other areas. The real point of this Twitter post is to show how low demand is for office space. It's low everywhere, because it's hard to get funding to start a company when everyone is expecting a recession to start any time now.
Companies who are processing every single datapoint they can get their little paws on 24/7 are consistently saying we’re in for a recession. They aren’t going to be saying stuff like this out of the blue because it’s ‘harmful’ and the politicians want a different message to be heard.
Second, there’s absolutely no way increasing interest rates couldn’t lead to bad economic outcomes. If your company is profitable while paying 2% on debt and it goes up over that then something has to give. Maybe you cut staff, maybe quit giving employees free catered brunch and massages.
There’s too many people out there who only know a virtually 0% interest rate business environment as it’s been that way for quite a while.
Would be nice to pay 2009 residential rent prices in SF! Obviously different markets with very different levels of demand. All the more reason to jumpstart commercial-to-residential conversions.
Commercial rates are still way higher than residential. I’d be curious if it were actually possible to buy a whole floor of mini apartments and turn them into offices instead.
>"I’d be curious if it were actually possible to buy a whole floor of mini apartments and turn them into offices instead."
It used to be common for startups to do this really early on. Founders would rent a 3 bedroom and make it an "office" until they out grew it and could afford commercial.
"I’d be curious if it were actually possible to buy a whole floor of mini apartments and turn them into offices instead."
Someone should try that - instead of offices, give people small, offices/bachelor apartments with small kitchens, bathrooms, and sleeping quarters.
Have them work for 4 days where they are totally tuned in and productive with their team, and then give them 3 days off, where they can go home to their family and completely forget about work.
Sort of like the oil rig model, but for tech workers.
Wouldn't have to live in high COL areas, and have only one commute per week.
This is probably a horrible idea, but then again, the standard workweek that most in office workers adhere to right now isn't super stellar or efficient either...
> This is probably a horrible idea, but then again, the standard workweek that most in office workers adhere to right now isn't super stellar or efficient either...
Yeah but at least they get to see their spouses and children every day.
Despite the narrative about tech workers you see in the media, the vast majority of them are normal people with families who work normal hours Monday through Friday and are satisfied with their work-life balance.
> Yeah but at least they get to see their spouses and children every day.
Honestly, even working from home, I wouldn't outright dismiss the idea of 4/3 split, or even 2/2/2/1 split - the normal cadence means that, during the work week, I only get little low-quality/low-intensity time with my kids just after they wake up, and just before they go to sleep.
> This is probably a horrible idea, but then again, the standard workweek that most in office workers adhere to right now isn't super stellar or efficient either...
Who does this idea benefit? Who would want this arrangement? This only makes sense for folks who want/need to go all in on their job... in order to live in a crappy apartment that they do not own. This may make sense for some founders/early career founding teams. But I don't see it making sense outside of that. Most potential customers, investors, and future employees would likely be skeptical of a team that worked in this manner.
If it is my home and I don't want to leave how long does eviction take and how much does it cost the company? I suspect it is very Tennant friendly for rental law
This is what basically early onsite consultants do, working out of extended stay suites and traveling to the site 4 days a week, traveling home for 3 day weekends.
This is more or less how my office was in ~2014-16. I believe some property developer turned a bunch of apartments near the Caltrain station (1 Bluxome St.) into offices, so the building was a mix of residential and startups (e.g. Goldbelly was based there for a while, and I think some VC fund of Michael Arrington's, and plenty of others I've forgotten). My office was in a loft, where our company was in the loft area and a different company had the downstairs living area, and we both used the bedroom (with a door) as a meeting room. IMO it wasn't really any worse than any other open office plan and had some benefits, like a full kitchen.
Sacks leaves out the lease duration for a reason. Prices on short term leases swing up and down dramatically more than a normal 10 year commercial lease. Still a great deal for startups, though, if they don't want to go remote.
This is weird, because it's not like commercial real estate prices in SFBA are unknowable except by an elite. You can get a pretty good sense of where they're at just by Googling.
I always found SOMA to be quite unpleasant. Huge tall glass office towers and some residential towers that make for a poor pedestrian experience, and an even higher degree of delinquency.
What makes SF charming is wooden Victorians, brick Beaux Arts apartment buildings, and hills. SOMA has none of that, but it has an extra dose of street crime.
Most of SoMa is old warehouses or auto shops. I'd actually prefer to work in the side of SoMa with the glass office towers, which is the area with very little delinquency (really anything to the east, starting at 4th street, is nicer).
When I think of SOMA, I think of that initial section south of market from about Spear to about 5th St, whereas the Auto Body shops are in the downtown section around 9th St and Harrison (which is a lot more walkable than the glass towers). But I've heard other people say "No, that's the 'Yerba Buena' district and the real SOMA starts below that and goes all the way to the central freeway. Anyways, I'm not going to die on that hill, it's just how I thought of the city. I enjoyed my time in the city but also saw a major quality of life bump when I left.
Will my car still get broken into every few months? Will I still have to walk over needles and human waste on my walk home? Will toothpaste still be locked up? San Francisco has a long way to go before it’s an attractive place to live and work again
It was an accurate description of mine having lived at two places on market (and east of VanNess) over a 4yr period.
You're right in that it's not "Most" in the sense that there's a lot more areas of SF, but if you work/life basically anywhere boxed in East of Van Ness, South of California St. , North of 16th street (Potrero Hill area) Then you're going to experience that daily. I'm a decent sized guy and I was physically assaulted twice in by homeless(mentally unstable) people.
I was tired of paying ~10% more in taxes than else where (and they still have their claws in me thanks to equity)
I was tired of being treated as an extremist when on the national scale I'm a moderate (and classically liberal relative to the national scale).
I was tired of living in a place where even as a 97th percentile income earner I'd never find a 3 bedroom home ownership (I want kids) affordable without also having a 97th percentile earning spouse. And also tired of moving because my landlord wanted to play a game of "Your rent is going up 10%", "Oh you gave notice, just kidding only 5%"... when I could live blocks away for 5% less. It's exhausting to have to fight that fight ever 12 or so months, and just feel straight up used by people who are playing games hoping the grief of moving is enough they can extract more out of someone who is basically the perfect tenant. And don't give me "Rent control" BS, essentially every rent controlled unit I saw was falling apart, old (thin walls, no amenities etc), and generally terrible places to live.
I was tired of being constantly treated unfairly or as less than due to my race, gender, and religious views.
I was tired of Newsom and other elites hypocrisy, and the people who refused to call him out on it.
I was also a bit tired of the hype culture, where the lowest mental state you could be is "Excited, and so happy", everyone is a "CEO/Founder", and if you're not going to Tahoe, then are you even alive? I want to live somewhere that I can be honest about how life is going and not be ostracized.
You could have saved yourself a lot of typing by just stating that you are Republican. California has a super high median family income that easily overcomes the extra tax [1].
You probably shouldn't have moved to California in the first place. You can get almost as much pay by working remotely for California based tech companies.
I've lived in SF for over 6 years, in at least 10 different neighborhoods from fidi to Mission to lower pac heights. This is completely accurate in my experience.
In 30 years of being around SF, this is really only accurate of Tenderloin, Civic Center, SOMA, Market and Mission St, roughly 10% of SF. Almost every time someone complains about SF, they're describing their experience in SOMA or near BART.
I don't think so, and even if that were the case you've described the locations where a huge portion of SFs population lives.
I currently live in Haight, it's nearly just as bad as those you listed. I'm on Divisidero right now, there is poo everywhere and I can see needles in some gutters nearby.
The areas where there are only single family homes are fairly clean, but anywhere people actually go when they leave their homes is filthy.
In 30 years of being around SF, this is really only accurate of Tenderloin,
Civic Center, SOMA, Market and Mission St, roughly 10% of SF
Most of San Francisco has been pretty rough for most of its history. The Haight has struggled with being a destination for street kids for going on fifty years. Vis Valley? Probably the most infamous projects west of the Mississippi. Chinatown? That's pretty much always been tenement housing and the sort of grunge that you get with that many people essentially living on top of each other.
Those are two very cherry picked examples. And I agree I'd probably have a totally different view of SF if I had lived there instead. But you're also talking like 30+ minutes commute to an office near Market street/Civic Center/SOMa
Fair, but people throughout the Bay Area- those living in South Bay for instance- deal with commutes of such lengths every day, if not longer. Plenty of people live in Oakland and the East Bay and commute to San Francisco. Richmond and Sunset seem to be a destination for the savvy who want S.F. amenities and manageable commutes at cheaper rents without living outside of the city. Not to even mention those who live in Portola, Excelsior, or even Daly City.
Also, Portrero Hill and Dogpatch are just east of the Mission. Dogpatch is (was) on the up and up before the pandemic.
For those taking ^^ advice, NB: but also to deal with not being protected from the crazy weather patterns by Twin Peaks. The weather west of twin peaks is quite a bit more chaotic (stronger wins, more fog) than elsewhere at least as I recall living in it.
like, half of the city is a 'cherry picked example'?
what about the marina. or noe valley? or corona heights?
i think tech people live/visit in soma/mission/market and then write off the entire city based on that--like the only place to live in 7th and minna and everything else isn't close enough to.... something....
I guess I basically think of stuff west of van ness to be like the "suburbs" of San Francisco. It's not nearly the same density as the core. Sure it's much more dense than like the suburbs of Austin, but also far far less going on besides little pockets like Divis or Cow Hollow .
Maybe it's not accurate for someone who lives in Twin Peaks and never leaves their house, but anyone who goes to any part of the city that could be called "downtown" sees needles and human waste every single day, and is very likely to have their car broken into if they leave it overnight.
As an SF resident for over a decade, it is absolutely accurate. SF was not as much like this before, but over the past 15 years, it has become an absolute hive of scum and villainy. I am not joking about this at all, several times I have seen people get into physical altercations on the street with mentally deranged drug addicts. I've had my car broken into so many times that I've had to rent a garage space for $550/month. This used to be only characteristic of the Tenderloin and its surroundings, but it has spread far and wide. Well into SOMA, the mission district, and beyond.
As a Bay Area resident for 2+ decades, SF was very much like this before the Twitter boom brought tech into SF. SOMA, Mission etc were never areas where you could, 'leave your car' and not expect it to be broken into. I read your garage space comment and laughed, in '99 my friends in SF faced the same issues.
SOMA was mostly residential hotels before those were converted into nice apartments and the residents were kicked to the streets. Before the ballpark there was never really any reason for tech workers to go in there.
Mission was quite dangerous to walk around after night before it was deemed hip and thus gentrified.
The period around the 2010 era was the nicest SF has ever been since Mark Twain walked the sidewalks.
Now that every programmer has tasted the amazing quality of life that remote work brings, will SF ever go back? Tripping over needles may be a thing of the past.
Honestly the majority of programmers I have interacted with are now going back in to the office most days. The social isolation of remote work is sinking in.
I am not sure. Sometimes I think that politicians who allow their cities to degrade into crime and filth do it because they understand that such changes drive away those who are most likely to vote against them.
As in, chosing to have an electorate strangle hold over a shitty city vs being competitive in a thriving one.
I have no evidence of this being a conscious choice other than not being able to find an alternative explanation.
Or, A 10 year boom in SF tech real-estate is winding down, places will become more affordable, apartments will have to be rented for less. Non-tech workers will move in to replace those that leave, and for some, the gentrification nightmare of the last decade will be over and SF will return to a place that can house artists, workers and families.
Good weather will keep SF desirable, and with the other knock-on effects, unlike Detroit.
Not to mention that it’s not a one-industry town. Don’t think biotech, for instance, has been affected like software has. Let alone finance and so forth.
Off topic but David Sacks / Peter Thiel / Elon - We should not give importance to these guys. Anti-democratic. You would think such smart people would preserve their eco-system . society for future and great good, but they think so short-term as now they have money and self-preservation kicks in. Screw this guy and let's stop putting him on a pedestal for our future common good.
It should be worth noting that Elon hasn’t paid rent in any of the Twitter offices globally. And has been evicted for rent non payment in some of them. David Sacks is his close ally and I would not be surprised if this was some weird renegotiation tactic for their offices.
You seem to recognize that the three people you mentioned are, by any objective standard, awful people. Depending on which billionaire you look at, you'll see variations of this. For example, the billionaires (eg Koch, Musk) who spend huge sums in derailing (pun intended) any effort to build public transport infrastructure in the US (eg [1][2]).
The question then becomes why. There are really three roads you can go down:
1. You blame a specific group (eg ethnicity, religion, etc). We'll call this the Kanye Road to Antisemitism;
2. You see such individuals as simply bad apples, exceptions. If however you look you'll find pretty much any billionaire is awful and in some way is seeking to destroy the system that made (and continues to make) their very wealthy possible; or
True. Not smart in all areas. However, it is disheartening to see they can't put 2+2 together or they can but as money is involved, they are being **ts.
Honestly I can see their logic. I think democratic principles fail as the general population gets desperate and votes in their short term self interests instead of a long term common good. This is why it’s popular to vote for people who will immediately lower your taxes, damaging as it may be to the governments funding.
We need leaders who can make decisive actions on generational time scales.
> need leaders who can make decisive actions on generational time scales
Blake Masters, a Thyle acolyte, is a literal monarchist. That is not generational thinking, it’s looking at Rome and thinking it would be swell to live under Augustus if you’re already at least a bit rich. I have never campaigned in Arizona, and I donated heavily in Maricopa county in the last Senate cycle.
"Monarchist", for what it's worth, is a euphemism. There is a more precise term for looking back at Rome and thinking we'd be better off with an Augustus.
It's "fascist", classically. For the Italian movement during the 20s-30s this idea was quite explicit. Roman empire was a strong theme in Italian propaganda, with Mussolini fashioned as a Caesar / Augustus type. It was effectively the same in Germany, although less literal.
Elon Musk has done plenty of long term thinking. Colonizing mars isn’t something we will see much benefit from, but our grandchildren and great grandchildren might.
Attempting to colonize Mars is idiotic, as is setting in motion plans to begin working towards that goal. There's an entire continent on Earth we haven't figured out how to colonize yet. This is exactly why we don't want a new Caesar: we'll be hostage to their dumb science fiction kinks (until they murder us for pointing out how dumb what they're saying is, if history is any guide).
I do lots of long term thinking as well, but you probably don't want me as your autocratic ruler. I'd like my grandchildren to have a chance at surviving on this world.
I don't know about yikes. Hard to make the case that there's a ton of value in commericial space with the crime, drugs, and filth that constitutes soma, especially now that office space is just an incidental thing to most SF companies.
I've been all over the US, and I recently visited SF for the first time on a work trip.
Never seen such a desolate place, and I say this as someone who has been homeless before and slept in homeless shelters. Homeless shelters in Boulder, CO were about x10 less sketchy than the streets I walked around in downtown SF.
I'm not sure where we were exactly, but there was homeless shooting up in the street at least once every few blocks, plus garbage everywhere and human waste.
I'll take the hits. It's lefty paradise. The city is 85% democrat and has the highest per capita tax revenue of any city in the USA. In other words they have the most money to solve problems via the government which is generally what the left thinks is good. The policies the city choose via its democrat leadership arguably lead to exactly what the city is.
ps: this post does not mean I'm on the right or that the right has all the solutions. But I do tend to think many left solutions are counter productive and I think SF is good example of unintended consequences.
The terrible governance that we see in San Francisco (and to an extent in the rest of California) isn't so much due to leftists per se, but rather the inevitable result of single-party rule. Since the state Republican party has essentially committed political suicide, Democrats know that they will get elected no matter how badly their policies impact regular people. Decisions and political appointments are based on ideology rather than results.
Other states that have single-party Republican rule have just as severe governance failures and corruption.
Some of the blame lies with the system of non-profits and perverse incentives (if they solve the problem they cease to exist and their upper management and other grifters lose their cushy jobs), so they devise solutions that seem plausible yet never produce results for the target population, except again for the upper management and system.
Ok, let's get into some definitions and corrections.
SF isn't a lefty paradise. It's a liberal paradise. "Liberal" has pretty much become synonymous with "neoliberal". And by "liberal" i include the vast majority of Democrat and Republican voters (certainly as neoliberals). Liberalism is really about aesthetics and is performative, like how racism famously ended when we elected a black president or misogyny ended when we appointed a female Supreme Court justice.
The primary differentiating factor between Democrat and Republican voters are social issues but here's why it's aesthetic/performative. Democrats might tend to self-identify as being against racism but, as you see in the Bay Area, will tend to adamanatly oppose any effort to build more or cheaper housing.
The entire political spectrum in US politics still works at the behest of corporate interests, first and foremost.
My point here is that you cannot separate economic from social policy, which is why such labels as "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" are fundamentally flawed.
If SF were truly a "lefty paradise", it would attack the core issue of homelessness and poverty (and the resulting crime), which is housing. But instead, you have superficial/aesthetic policies aimed at reducing the appearance of homelessness (eg clearing out homeless encampments).
There is no meaningful "lefty" or "leftist" movement anywhere in the United States. What many people label as "lefty" or "liberal" anywhere else in the world would be labelled as "center right" politics.
Complaining that the only thing SF does to address homelessness is clear out homeless encampments is exactly what the left does 24/7 in this city. Then they demand that the city double-down (for the umpteenth time) on all the other programs that the city dumps billions into.
And the whole corporate conspiracy canard simply doesn't work in this city, either. All the "pro corporate" reforms from the past decade were responses to the city absolutely freaking out about companies fleeing and the city losing the billions in revenue it relies upon for its social program expenditures, which on a per capita basis might exceed even most European cities, let alone other cities in the U.S.
But you're absolutely correct that the one thing the left doesn't do is the one thing that would help the most: reduce the cost of housing development. (As opposed to what the city has done and continues to do--create tens of thousands of 100% publicly funded units for the homeless, which because even the city is obliged to follow its own anti-housing policies, results in unfathomably poor RoI for the already unfathomably huge sums of money dumped into these projects. And which because it's become a drug addict mecca, generates homeless addicts faster than it can house them. Though, to be sure, the city has been this way regarding drugs for decades. My mother does in-home care with older drug addicts in assisted living facilities, and stories about how they got sucked into the SF drug culture in the 1970s and 1980s are common. Though unlike today, Marin was also an epicenter of predatory drug culture, the human detritus--and I mean that to insult Marin, not the individuals who suffered and continued to suffer--of which typically ended up in SF.)
All of that goes to show that the left/right dichotomy breaks down and is rendered meaningless in San Francisco. It's more of an issue of those who are willing to contest the entrenched landowner interests against those who are not. In that, the NIMBY/YIMBY/PHIMBY debate is rivened by sniping from all sides. One needs only glance over at the corresponding social media flamewars to realize how much of mess it is.
That sad thing is that SF is a very liberal and compassionate city. Voters perennially approve increased taxes to fund homeless, drug, and housing initiatives. By any standard except the extreme radicalism of today's culture warriors, achieving a workable, productive, and liberal consensus should be trivial.
The majority of SF residents are renters. And a good number of homeowners would be happy to relinquish some control regarding zoning to improve the bureaucratic situation--certainly anyone who has owned property in this city for any significant length of time has come to appreciate the excessive cost in both time and money of doing anything to their properties.
But national politics has completely overshadowed local politics. Renters oppose easing development costs (even when they come with extraordinary dislocation protections, such as mandatory, multi-year rent cost reimbursements) because the national political ideology of the left has daemonized any and all development as gentrification, which is intrinsically evil. It's a sister phenomenon to anti-corporatism--corporations are intrinsically evil, and therefore anything which might benefit corporations is to be rejected. No wonder politics on the left has become performative--that's exactly what the ideology and its advocates now demand. (The same is true of drug policy--precisely nobody in SF, or perhaps most of the U.S., IMO, opposes "harm reduction" as a primary consideration and target for drug and homelessness policies. But the left has transformed "harm reduction" into a rigid set of performative policy mandates.)
You have to acknowledge that things have gotten pretty out of control in SF, and that those kinds of behaviors and policies wouldn't be acceptable "anywhere else in the world" either. SF is radical by any standard.
> There is no meaningful "lefty" or "leftist" movement anywhere in the United States
In your European city, can you walk into a shop and steal €900 of goods with full confidence that 1) you won't be arrested and 2) even if you were, the state would decline to prosecute? You don't have to call it left if you don't want to, but it's certainly not the standard.
Exactly. But most Americans don't realize just how normalized right-wing politics are in the US, which is why silliness such as this [1] gets traction.
Europeans, even right-leaning Europeans, will generally support universal access to affordable healthcare. That's just one example.
I just returned from one of the most tony neighborhoods in TX. In the last week, my niece had hide in a restaraunt kitchen after a carjacking gun battle broke out front, a store was mob raided, and she had to call the cops to a posh hotel where a woman was being beaten in the parking lot while the valets watched.
I think it hit a low point during and just after 2020. I would guess it's slightly better now just based on my few visits there. For sure there is a ton of daily cleaning going on now on the side walks which helps just lifting up the entire perception of the street. It was smelling of urine constantly, now it's not nearly as bad any more.
The mayor finally snapped and realized that things need to change, but every attempt to improve the situation is opposed by some interest group or group of residents who still hold on to the same bad set of policies that let the problem get so bad in the first place.
When you have more than a billion dollar spent every year on homelessness, do they really want homelessness to end? Think about it. They call it “homeless industrial complex” for a reason.
My first question whenever thinking about these numbers is: If we just give them that money, will they stay homeless? I bet many would be more than able to get their life in order, if you gave them 50k … that’s more than minimum wage for SF.
I think that’s where social workers (I think?) draw the distinction between chronically homeless and someone experiencing homelessness.
The average person who experiences homelessness stays homeless for 237 days[1]. That’s the highest estimate I could find on google. Some were as low as 90 day average.
I bet a lot of those people could fix the problem a lot faster, if you gave them minimum wage money for a year.
Doesn't that justify a "yikes" response for the reasons you listed? It is abnormal for rent over a decade+ to be flat given inflation, so something bad has to have happened.
Why is this top comment? How is it relevant to the topic?
Or we have now a new Godwin, where it’s enough to mention that someone doesn’t give enough lip service to support Ukraine to discredit his opinion on anything?
Now the Peninsula is too expensive for the young, and full of experienced people.
Could the next step be companies forming on the Peninsula by experienced execs with many remote workers?
Regardless - office rental prices have a way to fall in SF.