Riddle me this — if as the article says, San Francisco is a city of empty storefronts and missing young people, why are homes and real estate still the most expensive in the USA?
I would expect that if there is a mass exodus, the price of real estate would drop.
“the price of real estate would drop.”
Only after massive foreclosures. That’s coming.
DINKS.
It’s the lower downtown area. To get away, just pick the street with the highest incline, go up and do that one or two more times. The homeless don’t go upward.
That said, at the lower parts, it’s astonishingly bad.
all they really need is a grocery store and gas. Trader Joes can feed you well, most everything else you can buy online. Storefronts will be gone like a 1970s mall with a few specialty boutiques here and there and restaurants for the well heeled. I moved out of SF in 2016, the weather and setting are wonderful.
Real estates prices can be affected by relatively few transactions, since the vast majority of houses are not on the market at any given time.
As a result, investors of any kind (financial instruments, foreign investors are two examples) can make prices get high and stay high. These kinds of folks are heavily invested in San Francisco (and other urban and suburban CA) real estate.
These are the two groups most likely to bail if the market gets soft. As a result the markets with the highest prices are the riskiest, and when they fall they can fall very fast.
Because, CAPITALISM WORKS. All of the 'street floor store front shops' have moved to the second floor, and you can't get there without a keyword pass code.
They step over the stinken street people, never look, and go directly to their shops on the "safe floors".
The 'street people' are the 'underground people of the futuristic movies'.
F'em, until they rise up and kill you.
The sad thing is, they WILL.
They are yearning for detroit
You’re forgetting— when the price of real estate drops, speculators snap it up and run the prices right up again.
When my family lived as renters in the 80s in the Bay Area, we knew we had to stabilize the monthly payment by buying, otherwise continued rent increases would surpass our ability to pay, even with mid-level incomes.
We regularly attended auctions of foreclosed fixer-uppers, looking for ONE home we could buy to LIVE in.
We didn’t stand a chance.
High-powered corporate speculators — many Asian, we noticed— with suitcases of cash handcuffed to wrists strolled in & bid the prices way UP beyond our reach, often 2 or 3 times the expected bid.
Also, since real estate is an excellent means to launder money, you can bet drug money was fuelling at least some of the skyrocketing real estate prices.
The “suits” invariably ended up bidding against each other, with a couple of corporations snapping up ALL the properties.
It wasn’t unusual to see these newly purchased properties either sit vacant for several years, or flipped at 200-300% markup. Only the rich need apply.
Middle class has been priced out and a crash will only set off another corporate buying fever.
Insane concentration of high paying high tech jobs that also concentrate people near said jobs. A lack of zoning/rezoning that prevents redevelopment of old, obsolete properties.