Housing shortage means low-paid workers commute in from (usually) the East Bay, so the lack of late-night transit plus safety concerns make it not worth it for most minimum wage workers to work late.
Higher paid jobs like healthcare workers, no problem.
I dislike how transplants tend to broadly paint the East Bay. It isn't a cheap region either.
Most blue collar labor types living in the East Bay are in the Alameda County flatlands (parts of Newark, parts of Fremont, inner city Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Albany) or North Contra Costa County (Pittsburg, Antioch, Richmond).
But most of the unskillled labor underclass you see in the Bay Area cities tend to drive in/Bart in/ACE in from San Joaquin Country, Sonoma County, or Monterey County.
It's definitely cheap in comparison to San Francisco. It's more expensive than most of the country, sure.
And yes some parts of the East Bay are expensive, especially the neighborhoods on the hills or Piedmont/Claremont and further inland like Walnut Creek or Orinda etc. But let's be real, most of the East Bay is one big suburban wasteland.
There are a lot of folks living in East Oakland (with roommates, often) who work in SF restaurants.
> Higher paid jobs like healthcare workers, no problem.
There most definitely has been a decline in quality of healthcare due to decline in quantity and quality of healthcare workers relative to patients in the recent past.
Even though a job might be higher paid, it does not imply the pay to quality of life at work is sufficiently high to incentivize the desirable amount of labor sellers to pursue it.
SF was never a late night city, but it's become even sleepier in recent years. Some examples:
Orphan Andy's, Safeway on Market, and Pinecrest diner are no longer 24/7. Sparky's closed forever (a 24/7 diner). It's Tops Coffee Shop stopped staying open late and then eventually closed forever. Corner/liquor stores that used to be open late are closing well before midnight. Kowloon Tong Dessert Cafe used to be open until 2am most nights, but now they always close at midnight.
San Francisco was very much a late night city at least into the 1940s -- check out the historic posters hanging at the Fairmont Hotel advertising various live shows that _started_ at midnight.
+1 on this. I live around FiDi and I've been bumping into way more people on my morning and evening jogs that I have in the past 1.5 years. Most of the city has appeared to begun to return to a post-Covid normal of around 60% capacity (which also fits in line with RTO).
Absolutely. Low-income housing is the perfect use for all this extra office space. San Francisco has a problem where the low-income people who work to serve high-income people can't afford to live in the city that they work in.
Converting office space into affordable housing is a win for everyone, except the landlords, but I won't shed a tear for them ;-)
Who wants to live in a city if you can work from home? If you are poor and need housing subsidies and there are no jobs for you, there is no reason to live in the city to begin with. People go live where the jobs are. Without "white collar" jobs producing demand for services, there is much less demand for "blue collar" jobs.
If it's just cooping people up, there are cheaper ways to house people than maintaining expensive buildings that need financing and upkeep.
We've tried to convert offices to homes in the UK, and there's something particularly dystopian about the result. I think they have to make strange trade-offs to make the space useful, and its ends up being not very nice. I'm sure it's better than being on the street, but it isn't nice.
I grew up in the Sedgwick projects in the Bronx, and my grandma still lives there. She's been in the same rent-controlled apartment for 40+ years, which was affordable to her as a small business owner (hair/beauty salon).
She's now living independently at age 86, thanks to a social security check and a community where she's everyone's abuela. Rent-controlled housing made it easier to divorce her abusive husband and start a business back in the 60s.
not the person you are responding to, but I think they meant dystopian as in the "vibe" of the place. For example, many housing projects in France (where I live), tend to be basically large concrete rectangles, with very little green space. When compared to posher neighborhoods, with lots of trees everywhere, this can seem a little claustrophobic/totalitarian/dystopian. It feels like a less "human friendly" environment than you stereotypical suburb with front lawns.
I see where that's coming from, but to offer an alternate perspective the suburbs seemed "dystopian" to me at first - we moved upstate for middle/high school. The same 6-8 Stepford model homes on every street, strip malls filled with the same 10 stores (Walgreens/CVS, Costco/Walmart, etc), people dressed VERY similarly, and nobody walked anywhere. The teens in my suburban high school seemed way less happy and did more/harder drugs compared to the Bronx.
I'm not saying the projects were lovely. The elevators smelled like piss. But public housing - even ugly public housing - was a huge part in enabling two generations of single moms (my mom + grandma) to raise their families, start businesses, and thrive.
The practicalities of the original design and trying to adapt it means these conversions often have limited natural light, limited fresh air, are made from hard, unbreathable, manufactured materials, are very 'liminal', have bad acoustics. Have you read the theory of 'sick buildings'? Homes made from office space seem to end up very 'sick', with an impact on people's mental and physical health, and increasing isolation.
Theoretically, the wages should come up to make it possible to live there, assuming the service providers are actually having trouble hiring.
It seems to me there might be some disconnect in demand and supply of various labor types (not many unskilled jobs compared to the number of unskilled workers, vs not many software devs but lots of openings). It seems these forces drag the bottom down while pushing the top higher.
> Theoretically, the wages should come up to make it possible to live there, assuming the service providers are actually having trouble hiring.
Why, theoretically, would wages rise enough to make it possible for any worker to live in the city? I think the situation where workers with the worst alternatives and weakest negotiating position are stuck commuting into SF from outside is unfortunate but theoretically entirely understandable; SF wages aren't forced to rise to support someone living here, but only to be high enough relative to wages elsewhere to compensate for the cost of commuting.
"but only to be high enough relative to wages elsewhere to compensate for the cost of commuting."
True, but then the implied issues with not living in the city you work in become moot if truly compensating for the commute and cost of living outside the city.
I think maybe you mean something by "truly compensating" which isn't actually being achieved. But the lesser compensation we are achieving is still sufficient to impact people's behavior.
Suppose you're able to get two part time jobs with relatively little predictability in your shift schedule. Both are minimum wage, but one is in SF where the minimum is $17/hr and another is in Concord at $14/hr (the state minimum for a company with <25 employees). Say you live in Antioch, and can get to the Concord job in around 35 minutes for $4 with BART, and get to the SF job with more than 1h and $7.30 on BART (one way). So for every shift in SF you pick up, you get a $3 premium per hour relative to the Concord job, but for the first 2 hours that just goes to cover your extra BART fare, _and_ you lose an extra hour in transit. In dollars you still come out ahead on an 8 hour shift in SF relative to in Concord, but I think it would be unreasonable to say that "the implied issues ... become moot".
I say theoretically, because in a theoretical world the market would be efficient and the employee would be analyzing the income and costs. Your examples are using locale in a HCOL state. Now image if the workers there actually did analysis on moving to lower cost states.
Yes, the moot part is based on them being truly compensatedfor the extra commute, in which case it would be moot. It's much more interesting to me to look at the income inequality and market side than the "solution" of creating subsidized housing. I'd rather go after the true root problem than cover up one symptom and allowa the problem to persist.
You're looking at it as it exists today. I'm saying theoretically this other stuff should work (but may not in practice).
I think this line of thinking is just sloppy. "Theoretically" the efficient market only gets to pareto optimality, i.e. we can't make the commuting low-wager worker's situation better without someone else being at least slightly worse off, but there's no lower bound on how bad things can be for that low-wage worker. Nothing assures us that we converge to a state where at the low end "the wages should come up to make it possible to live [in SF]" or anywhere particularly close.
I find your thinking sloppy. There, was that helpful?
"better without someone else being at least slightly worse off"
Exactly. The point (if you go back through my comments) is that there seems to be a demand and supply imbalance based on the skill/type of labor. We should be looking at ways to slow higher end wage growth and promote it in the lower end. One way to do this could be around education. Essentially, increase the number of developers on the market while decreasing the number of people who are only qualified for the lower wage work. We've kind of seen this with the pandemic shrinking the labor force and driving those lower end wages higher.
You can't just convert office space into residential space. Completely different building codes. Just the retrofit for the plumbing makes it untenable.
I know this will get downvoted but, I say Throw the building codes out the window. Housing people is more important than regulations.
If it made a difference to your ability to get shelter, which would you rather choose: have shelter or live in a illegal tent under a bridge resting assured with the knowledge that there's a big book of rules in place.
The problem is not all codes are meaningless regulation, and some of the important ones are indeed expensive (and vice versa). If you yolo it, you get cases like the Grenfell tower fire, and a lot of people literally die.
This is how you get housing tenements, and SF has a history of over-paying for impermanent housing solutions (like tents in a parking lot, or cots in a navigation center).
Not all buildings in SF are high-rise open-plans. If you're imagining converting Salesforce tower, I see how that would seem impractical.
Most commercial office space in SOMA (old warehouse buildings) can be converted into live/work lofts.
If you're talking low-income housing, it could be closer to a dormitory setup. Common bathrooms and kitchens, etc. This used to be common in low-income urban rental property, and still is in some parts of the world.
Building Codes are words on paper. They can be changed more easily than physical buildings.
Think of most offices. Central elevator shafts and stairs and bathrooms. A massive floorplan with all the windows on the edges. How do you convert to residential? Have 5 feet by 500 feet units so everyone has light and a connection to plumbing by the elevator shaft? Residential buildings have a lot more access to natural light throughout the structure and they are plumbed entirely differently. Hvac and wiring too.
Dorm buildings are still thinner and have more access to natural light. No matter what you get these awkward units and dystopian unlit spaces internally. In places like nyc with huge, city block width apartments, there are actually internal voids that let in natural light deeper into the structure.
The problem with shared bathrooms & kitchens is that no single person is responsible for cleaning them and as a result they end up being messes. It can work (in theory), but in practice it ends up getting ruined by lazy jerks.
This doesn't describe a lot of office space in San Francisco, especially SOMA. There are a couple of high-rise open plans (like SF Tower), but many offices in SOMA are converted warehouses.
Check out 510 Townsend, one of the properties mentioned in the OP. What do you think about converting buildings like 510 Townsend into live/work lofts?
What do you think makes live/work housing more desirable than just live? I haven’t seen live work spaces and I’m not sure what the allure would be.
I used to be in the city, in essentially a shoe box that cost 5k a month, but with a fancy gym and common area. I moved to Marin during COVID and while I miss the food and walking distance/public transit activities I could do, I don’t think I can go back to the extremely small for the money living area. I’m hopeful a glut of new housing, hopefully spacious, will change that calculus.
This sort of setup would cross my mind while in college. The allure is that it would be similar to college - young people enthusiastic for learning but having fun too, no commuting, etc. As I got older it seems more like a nightmare since I hate my job and require more space/independence for my lifestyle/hobbies/family.
My wife and I made the opposite move. We had a house, a life, in the suburbs for more than a decade and now happily live in a 1 bedroom loft in SOMA. I would say that for our life, we live in a smaller (it's still pretty big, and not actually that expensive) in the city exactly because of the lifestyle/hobbies/family life we enjoy as a result. It's like the city is your living room.
True about the hobby types. I still think it generally applies for the live-work setup though. Mostly because it seems most people don't like their jobs and want a disconnect between their spaces. Also because of professional appearances etc influencing your off-hours activities if your coworkers are watching.
Even though work and housing aren't in the same buildings, military housing can provide a good lens into this.
> military housing can provide a good lens into this.
IMO, that's not really fair - at least for barracks. And I don't really think that "married" house style housing really applies since it's a suburb that just happens to be inside the base.
1. You don't own your barracks room. You generally don't have any ability to change furniture, appliances, paint, etc.
2. Barracks typically offer little privacy - there are periodic inspections, limits on guests, etc.
3. Military culture is a bit weird - there is often a very strong drinking culture, etc. It's not clear to me that the same social forces exist for a civilian live-work building.
4. The barracks are sometimes raided for off-hours extra duty. This downside doesn't really exist in the same way for civilians.
> The barracks are sometimes raided for off-hours extra duty. This downside doesn't really exist in the same way for civilians.
Yet. "Ron, according to the security system there was movement inside of your company dorm room last night at 8PM when we emailed you. Since you were just at home anyway why did you decide to not be a team player?"
Yeah, I'm not talking about barracks, but more like the family apartments or houses. The main issue I see crossing over in either civilian or military life with this setup is that everyone in that "suburb" works for the same employer. There can certainly be issues where personal problems become career problems and vice-versa. At least military housing is segregated by grade, but the civilian side could have you living right next to your boss. Too bad if they don't like something you do.
"The barracks are sometimes raided for off-hours extra duty."
Unless you work in IT and are on-call or the on-call doesn't answer (not fully the same, but still...).
Zoning is the important piece. In a live/work building, tradespeople can run appointment-based services businesses like:
Hair/nail salons, waxing and esthetician services, makeup and photo studios, etc.
Every nail salon in 10 square-block radius of me (in SF, SOMA) closed during the pandemic. SF residential rents aren't affordable for a trade/services businessperson. Tradespeople stopped commuting 2+ hours into the city when businesses fled. For a city to thrive, services/trade labor needs to live near their work.
On a personal level, I want to run a small manufacturing shop to dog-food my own product (https://printnanny.ai/ - automation for 3D printer ecommerce shops).
My options are currently:
* Move to a single-family home in surburbia, so I can work out of a garage/shed.
* Lease a business-zoned office suite in SF, commute every day.
* Live in a building zoned for business/residential, so I can legally run an office without inviting ire from an SF condo HOA.
* leave the Bay Area and go somewhere with higher quality of life and lower real estate prices (read: basically anywhere that isn't Tokyo or NYC), go for residential housing + commercial property
I like it here! I might even love living here - at least enough to want to dig in and tackle tractable problems, like converting commercial real estate to housing supply.
But those aren't the choices. The choices are A - get a commercial tenant that pays the high price you mention, if there aren't any tenants your choices are B - leave it vacant C - rent it out to a lower paying customer (residental).
Option C involves a large investment to convert the property into one that legally allows for residential usage and that people, with money to pay rent, would want to live in. It also blocks option A, without spending all the money to undo things, if the economic situation changes or there's a bailout. So not a clear winner versus simply waiting.
My point is that many buildings, like the one I live in now, do not need changes. They intelligently designed and built it from the beginning to serve both uses well. I'm pointing out that this is a smart approach. If a building needs a ton of renovations to make it meet code for residential occupancy than its not a good building to consider for this. I would say this is a corner case, ignore those. Just convert the 25% easiest buildings that need minimal if any changes.
Not necessarily. B wins if you depend on the value of the property for some reason or another. Commercial properties are valued based on the net present value of the rents you can get. If you pretend that you can get a higher rate than the market will bear, you can keep the valuation of your building up during a downturn. If you accept the lower-paying tenant, you lower the perceived valuation of the building. This only matters if you have a commercial mortgage... which is every building these days.
This is utterly stupid, but it is driving rental vacancies in NYC.
You can't just rent out an office as an apartment. There are large costs associated with retrofitting the office space to be up to code for a residential unit. These retrofits would also likely lower the properties value as an office space. So C is not an obvious win in all cases - otherwise all landlords would be doing it.
Yes you can, if it was designed as such from the beginning. I literally live in one now. They go back and forth between residential and office occupancy with each lease, with no changes to the building or spaces themselves. It just has to be done right. My apartment is exactly identical to how it was when the previous tenant used it as an office.
It's a large 2 story loft space. It has a full kitchen (as most offices do too these days), and 2 full bathrooms. There is a loft bedroom and small closed off office space that are both conference rooms when it's in office mode.
Really, how different are offices from apartments? You have space, kitchen, bathrooms, etc.
The only thing that is weird is most offices don't have a washer and dryer, other than that if I walked in this space and it was decorated as an office I wouldn't think twice, same in apartment mode.
Does it scale down? I can see two floors of an office building making a (very expensive) apartment but what about a cheap 1 bedroom? In "office mode", the office unit would be < 50% office, with most of the floor plan as bathrooms, laundry, and kitchen.
I would argue that I live in a cheap 1 bedroom, it exactly this that you describe.
The bathrooms are a wash, both commercial and residential spaces require them. If anything the bathrooms in this arrangement are a bit smaller than traditional commercial bathrooms.
Same with the kitchen, commercial spaces have them, every place I've worked for the last 15 years has had one. So that's a wash. Also, our kitchen isn't huge, it's of similar size to those kitchens.
That leaves the laundry. For us it's a stacked unit in a small closet in the bathroom. They could easily be removed and then the closet could be used for bathroom cleaning supplies and no-one would ever suspect it wasn't just an office.
So the real comparison is:
Residential:
1500 Sq ft loft, small glass office and loft bedroom, 2 full baths
Commercial:
1500 Sq ft office, 1 large loft conference room, 1 small glass conference room/office, open Floorplan for 10-15 desks, 2 bathrooms with shower, full kitchen
Both have door service, package receiving and security services provided on site, parking space
I'm sure there are buildings which are built to both codes. In the general case, there is significant costs in time and money to convert an office to a legal apartment unit.
I've never understood why there isn't a D - lower prices until you get a commercial tenant who's willing to take you up at your asking price. As others have mentioned, converting from commercial to residential isn't cheap. Why do commercial prices stay sky high with a high vacancy rate?
The property owner almost certainly has debt that needs to be refinanced every few years. Willingness of a lender to finance is based on projected rental income. If the asking rents are high, the projected income is high. This apparently works for a while even if the property is not actually leased. It would seem to me that at some point the lenders would start saying "yeah the projected income looks great but we notice that the building has actually been vacant for two years..." but I don't operate in this world so it's something of a mystery to me.
However if the building value has dropped, the lender's collateral value has dropped and probably below their owed balance. No one wants to 'realize' the new lower value, including the lender, so they tend to extend the loan and hope for the best.
That'd be true, if commercial property owners still had to pay their mortgages.
Commercial property owners are seeking forbearance agreements with their lenders. Forbearance is like hitting the "pause" button on a lending agreement, with the hope that market conditions bounce back and the original loan terms can continue.
What that means in practice is that a massive amount of real estate will rot, unused, in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Seeking does not mean "will get." Banks lose money from forbearance agreements - especially when there is a reasonable out like converting to residential.
My building on SOMA did this. The owners were smart when they built it out and the apartments work well as offices or apartments. During the pandemic they pretty much went all residential. It's so efficient and smarter from the building owner perspective, you double your potential customer base.
Yup, exactly. It's not that weird, every office I've worked at in the last 10 years has had a full kitchen and shower, it's almost a required perk in the bay area. The only weird thing IMO is it has a washer and dryer, I've not worked in an office that has those, that's the only difference from "normal" IMO.
This is such a great example, wish I could upvote this to the top. I think most people are imagining converting high-rises like Salesforce tower.
Most commercial office space in SOMA is a converted warehouse. Live/work apartments and lofts have already been converted from the same buildings. Let's do more of these!
> The current asking price is $2,395,000. Our experienced agents can help you determine whether that is a fair amount for the property. What's more, we'll help you strategize and submit a smart offer that will get accepted based on current market conditions.
Not sure how you figure? Minimum wage in Illinois comes to $2600/month for 40 hours/week. You're giving them a room in a place where the prevailing rent is clearly over $2000/month, which is hard to price at less than $1000/month (a "two roommates" situation)... so your proposed value package is well over twice the HOA fee.
Single employee is 11$/hour in Chicago unless they are a domestic worker.
$15.40 for employers with 21 or more employees (including all domestic workers, regardless of the number employed) $14.50 for employers with 4-20 employees
I think we might be saying the same thing? My reading of the grandparent was that the individual responsibility for the HOA / maintenance fee was outrageous because it "literally" represented approximate CoL for a whole additional human, which just isn't accurate. But the entire point of these collective fees is to pool them and use them for amenities which are not available to individuals. Of course collecting money and spending it represents the ability to pay for labor; that's the dominant cost of most expenses! I'm not too familiar with the Chicago housing market, but in the New York market these fees go to pay full-time salaries for supers, doormen, elevator men, maintenance folk, etc., many of whom also get housing in the building at a reduced or included rate.
One would have to check that particular example, but in general, there are buildings in SF and NYC where the HOA fee covers amenities that are, frankly, hotel-like. Staffed gym with climbing wall, 24/7 valet parking, food can be sent up from the ground-floor cafe at no delivery cost, etc.
Everyone forgets about insurance, which often comprises a major portion of expenses especially as buildings gets older and the hoa management gets less eager to price shop.
My first apartment in SF was a condo. The landlady offered to sell it to me, but I lost interest when I realized $1600 of the $1900 I paid in rent went to the HOA.
HOAs can go from the bare minimum "we pay someone to mow the center divider" (some will actually exist and have no fees) to the "we pay for the entire country club this house is part of, including limo service and more".
Condo HOAs usually cover the maintenance of the shared building parts (HVAC, roof, plumbing outside the units, etc). One danger sign is a condo with a HOA that is too low - it likely means maintenance is being put off or done incorrectly or you're going to get hit with a special assessment soon.
Yes, but I ended up buying a 1br in SF for a comparable price. The HOA fee was $650/mo. The building had 24/7 front desk staff, twice-monthly unit cleaning service, a small gym, a hot tub, and a full-time building engineer. All the while dealing with a lawsuit against the builder for leaks. And our reserve was quite funded. Where was the money going in Chicago?
If they were suing the builder, it was probably still a relatively new building.
Older buildings start getting hit with the "every 20/50 years" maintenance, and also get hit with lawsuits against the building/HOA itself. Those can start to add up over time.
And the size of the building can also affect it; a smaller building with the same amenities would have higher HOA fees.
I personally wouldn't touch them with a fifty state pole, but some people like it.
These cost levels are either employing a lot of service (valet, doorman, etc) or are under-accrued for the big CapEx bills they have coming due (careful!)
Absolutely. HOAs bring out the worst in people. If you're reading this and you don't own a house/condo yet, think twice before you buy into an HOA community. HOAs can quickly devolve to point where entire meetings are spent discussing whether or not someone should be allowed to put chickenwire on the bottom of their back fence (true story).
And, unlike you're principle payment (which at least is an asset), HOA payments are something you will never see any return of value on, especially since they reduce the desirability of the property in question. If you doubt this, Just ask anyone who's had an HOA, whether or not they'd rather buy a property with an HOA or one without.
At the same time, you should consider possible shenanigans that your neighbors may get up to. While there is always a lot of petty stuff going on in our HOA, I also see a lot of chatter from people on nextdoor who don't live in an HOA and their neighbors can be quite annoying. Loud roosters waking you up at 4am and the like.
Many of the "hoa-style" complaints can be dealt with by careful inspection of the local laws before buying. You can find communities that ban roosters (the one I'm in does, and charges $25 a year "hen fee" for up to three hens lol).
Living with other people is annoying, but you can work to mitigate the biggest issues, and sometimes the right answer might be a HOA. Investigate the HOA before buying and talk to your potential neighbors. Many people will gladly go out to dinner/drinks if you ask and bitch about any problems there may be.
And there will always be problems; the key is determining if they'll be annoying enough for you to bypass it.
One friend years ago pointed out that he could buy a much nicer house if he spent the HOA payment on mortgage instead; and so went that way.
not all the rules are in the HOA booklet. For example, ours doesn't say anything about banning vegetables in the front yard, not a single rule. And yet, if we even so much as grow fava beans, the HOA will say we can't do that due to the catch all rule: "No unplanned modifications". It's all up to the HOA directors mood and discretion. And while you may currently have a reasonable HOA board, that can quickly change with just one election.
Wow - "no unplanned modifications" is a really big loophole, I wonder if that refers to some "master plan" somewhere in a cupboard behind the leopard.
And yeah, the elections can change everything - and sometimes nobody cares and you can run for the HOA board and effectively take control muahahahahah.
Er, I wouldn't know anyone who would do that. Ever.
It can also be changed more permanently with changes to the covenants. Many covenants require a super majority vote of the members so even a future bad board member can be restrained to an extent.
I have a home in an area without an HOA and I have had a 100% resolution rate by just talking and explaining. Being decent and pragmatic goes a long way.
For shared building situations, like a condo in a downtown highrise, I think they're unavoidable: there's inherently shared resources that require maintenance and co-ordination, even if there's a mininum of services. Add in things like a pool, shared gym, doorman, or large recurring maintenance (roof), and you absolutely need a governing body to collect costs for that and handle the work, which is, in essence, an HOA.
You're confusing apartment living vs. living in your own private house with an H.O.A
You can't live with 200 other families in a shared building without some sort of structure. What's allowed and what isn't, Can dogs swim in the shared pool? Can you ask the doorman to go find a parking spot around the block?
The HOA in question is a shared building. Which is more like a corporation, with 20-30 employees.
Oh god you don't even know. A pool in a shared living building/setup is a recipe for every sort of possible disaster known to man, and some known only to an advanced AI trained on horror movies.
In my mother's apartment building there a guy who uses his kayak in the swimming pool to practice his rolls etc. You can imagine the angst when parents bring little Johnny down for his swim. Or when tenants have a rowdy party around the pool. She is grateful that COVID rules effectively shut the pool down for a couple of years. So yeah I can totally imagine someone wanting to let their dog swim in the pool
They also save a ton of time spent on sourcing maintenance, getting competitive bids, and managing the process. Not something most can appreciate until they own an older home. They also reduce the odds of one batshit crazy neighbor destroying quality of life and property values for the rest.
Too many people think of an HOA fee as throwing away money, but I think it's a net savings in a small and well-run HOA (and these do exist!). The money all goes to the upkeep of the building or complex with minimal overhead, so none of the fee feels wasted: it'd cost more to do it alone. A local management company charges a fee but they're local employees and it's better than trying to manage the books myself. Larger HOAs -- like where full-time maintenance staff is necessary -- can have very high fees, but, paying people fairly on an ongoing basis requires ongoing money, no matter how you slice it.
Part of the challenge is determining the quality of the HOA before buying, and that quality can change over time. And you may have minimal influence over it.
"Another reason to avoid HOAs at all costs, over the lifetime of the property the cost is astronomical."
Hate to break it to you, but the maintenance costs for a house over the lifetime of the property are astronomical. True, if you are a do-it-yourselfer and want to do all the maintenance work yourself you can save money. But the comparable cost to pay someone for things like yard work, internal repairs and upkeep is, in my experience, much higher in a house than a condo because you don't get the benefit of scale and good, defined supplier relationships. E.g. in a condo building you're paying a landscaping company to do the yard work, but that work is split amongst 50 or whatever condo owners.
I'm not sure of that for a variety of reasons. Labor is more expensive in higher cost areas. Elevators in a skyscraper are built to a much more stringent code than elevators in a three story building. Building codes in general may be higher. Quality of materials and fit and finish may be higher with higher maintenance costs. There may be more regulatory hurdles to making any new construction or renovations. HOAs may include real estate/other taxes and mortgage interest payments in some cases. Tons of little things can add up.
Typically, an HOA for a condo covers all maintenance interior and exterior, so that's not insane. And the ongoing cost for the HOA should be reflected in a lower up-front price, if buyers are correctly evaluating the total cost of ownership.
The premise for the HOA to do this is that it's better for occupants to report problems for professional remediation, rather than to DIY or neglect them until it becomes worse for someone else in the building.
I just sold a house in Vancouver after living in it for over a decade. The amortized cost of maintenance was less than 100 CAD/mo; and that included new quartz counters, a new roof, new hot water tanks, a whole yard remodel, new flooring, and so on.
What the hell are they burning nearly a grand USD per month per suite on?
Shared spaces need shared employees. Employees legal to work in the U.S, at the wages which are normal in SF (you don't want to keep hiring and have people quit after 1 month because someone is paying them more)
I also find elevators to add a decent amount to the overhead
Not everyone is fit for condo living, but those who do prefer to have a building manager full time on site they can talk to. They also want amenities, a gym or even a pool (which means paying a lifeguard), a rooftop or shared working space. And trust me the condo owners aren't going to go and mop that rooftop or gym, they're going to need even more employees to do that
A new roof is in the ballpark of $10-$20k. Decent quality flooring is $10-20 per square foot; for a 2000 square foot house, this is $20-$40k in materials alone. Quartz countertops are $100 per square foot; for a typical kitchen, this usually comes out to $10-$20k (again, not counting installation).
Labor is about $300 per hour in Seattle area. For example few years ago window was $250 and installation $300 and less than one hour. Complete brake job, calipers, rotors and pads is $1200+tax. I bought parts for $350 and installed myself in 3 hours.
Ah right, that's a major scandal here in BC that I had forgotten about. Condo fees are soaring because insurance is going through the roof for that entire class of housing.
I suppose it can vary but the condo HOAs I've had experience with only maintained the exterior and common areas. Anything inside the outer walls of the unit was the owner's responsibility. So leaking roof, the HOA would fix. Leaking pipe inside, or furnace or water heater problem, the owner would have to handle.
> Typically, an HOA for a condo covers all maintenance interior and exterior, so that's not insane
It depends a bit on where you live, but that's typically not true. For a condo, the owners are responsible for interior maintenance (for example, plumbing issues within the unit, as opposed to plumbing issues within the walls).
There are plenty of much smaller/cheaper condos in SF with HOAs that are $1500+. I'm still baffled what they are spending that on. Here's a $860,000 condo with a $1876 HOA.
> Fees Include: Common Area Electricity, Door Person, Insurance (Common Area), Landscaping/Gardening, Management Fee, Pools, Spa, or Tennis, Reserves, Security Service, Water
> HOA Amenities: Community Pool, Door Person, Elevator, Gym/ Exercise Facility
That stuff costs money; if you don't want it then that isn't the building for you! Having recently moved from a condo to a non-HOA house, I am realizing how much extra time it takes to maintain a house (plus all the little extra costs here and there that add up). Condo HOAs are a mandatory convenience fee, and if you are a busy person they might really be worth it.
Single-family detached house subdivisions with HOAs are a different world. Stay far far away.
The housing opportunity in SF is in all the vacant and underutilized space in the Sunset. Downtown offices do not have the egress, plumbing, ventilation, electricity, or telecomm capacity to be economically converted to dwellings in anything other than a makeshift, emergency fashion.
There's plenty of warehouse office space in SOMA that could meet residential coding requirements. I think most people in this thread are imagining converting high-rise open plans, like Salesforce tower - but most offices in SOMA are actually in warehouse space that's easier to convert. That's why I linked an example of live/work lofts.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't utilize outer Sunset space too! There's already great public transport to the SOMA area though.
It's a shame to let commercial real estate rot in forbearance, when it's surrounded by the infrastructure needed for excellent city living.
i was actually wondering about this. doesn't section 8 housing vouchers take care of this?
it also seems like it could lead to increased rents, if you have the government guarantee rent will be paid, you can raise it by a lot and not worry about people not paying, or even not being able to afford it.
Not all office space is amenable to residential conversion, since the floor area to exterior wall ratio is often much too high for an apartment building (windowless offices are fine, windowless living rooms, not so much).
An office/apartment hybrid might work. I could imagine dividing the building, with offices in the inner core and apartments surrounding the core. The core and surrounding apartments would be totally separated, with separate lobbies and elevators. Although the offices would be totally windowless hellscapes, at least the apartments would have lots of light.
Clocktower lofts are also very unlike currently vacant offices. Old industrial buildings had large open spaces that turned out to be easy to reconfigure. Most empty buildings now are more like 100 Van Ness which stayed empty for many years until its value dropped to a fraction of what it had been. And that conversion was still expensive enough to be risky and force offerings to the high end to make the math work out. This is going to be a rough ride.
Which means that around 4.8 million square feet are now available for modification into desperately needed residential space, if only the city would permit it.
Owners of the vacant office space who like collecting rent more than they hate the expense, risk and hassle. Landlords pay for it, in the expectation of making it back from tenants.
Commercial properties are often owned by massive real estate conglomerates who don't have much incentive to convert a property unless they're going to immediately offload it afterwards.
And the buildings that are owned by individuals/families may be owned outright so they don't have much loan pressure on them.
I wish it was a solution to housing, but it's going to be very expensive to try to retrofit the additional plumbing, HVAC and electricity load for residential space. It's also expensive to keep a building open, so I can imagine you'll need a high occupancy percentage to also make it work.
The city seems to be at it's most lively since covid, but the offices are still empty. Before covid SF actively did it's best to antagonize the companies who's tax revenue it relied on. Now that they've taken their ball to play elsewhere, I don't see what the city is going to do for revenue.
I work in the financial district and the number of empty spaces that used to house cafes and restaurants is shocking. Unless they manage to pivot that office space to housing (Very difficult for multiple structural reasons), the downtown of SF is going to continue to look like Zombieland.
Are you suggesting that an American city could socialize a large chunk of its private real estate with the stroke of a pen or that landlords are waiting for some legal change to turn their office/retail space into homeless shelters and needle exchanges?
Boston has done it, I worked with an affordable housing group that worked on this stuff. The difference was these were largely undeveloped lots, not office buildings.
The 5th Amendment of the US Constitution specifically permits eminent domain with "just compensation" so yes an American city could take a large chunk of its private real estate under eminent domain and put it to "public use". Converting vacant office buildings into homeless shelters would absolutely count as a "public use".
Buying some of the most expensive real estate in the world with “just compensation” seems like it’s more than a stroke of a pen.
Further, the court cases this will bring will take _forever_ because one side will be extremely well funded and the other side will be the city of San Francisco. Not the stroke of a pen.
You mean the stroke of a pen and a massive amount of money (to buy the buildings, convert them to the legal standards for such spaces, manage the buildings, manage the programs, etc, etc.).
No. The problem is deeper than that. Adding more housing and more services will help but don't kid yourself into thinking that these things are free or that they will magically make the problems disappear. People will still be on drugs. People will still have mental health problems. People will still commit crimes. The amount of work required is bigger than any writing implement can accomplish.
Nope. after this even more people would move into SF increasing the homeless population and the demand for low income housing. Or do you actually believe that the majority of homeless people in SF grew up there?
> Before covid SF actively did it's best to antagonize the companies who's tax revenue it relied on.
I think that's a misleading characterization. The city notoriously gave tax breaks to large tech companies, accompanied by some weak rhetoric about supporting local communities, but with weak or no oversight confirming any real local benefits.
I also think it's important to distinguish between _office space_ and _retail space_. Retail and restaurant spaces will also struggle to get filled if neighborhood office workers are getting catered in-office lunch, getting delivery from ghost kitchens, and buying goods from amazon etc. I.e. the way we live and work increasingly supports the Zombieland street-level experience.
> The city notoriously gave tax breaks to large tech companies
The city notoriously set up large and complex taxes on tech companies in SF and then randomly and unpredictably granted breaks to the ones that had the best lobbying.
> accompanied by some weak rhetoric about supporting local communities
And billions of dollars sent into homeless slush funds for activists and nonprofits with no accountability for how the money was spent.
> And billions of dollars sent into homeless slush funds for activists and nonprofits with no accountability for how the money was spent.
I'm not claiming that the city spends responsibly, but next month SF will at least vote on a ballot measure which would create an oversight commission for HSH spending and programs, and require audits of services provided. We have an opportunity to improve things.
No, the city is a notoriously high tax, hostile and bureaucratic hellscape when it comes to running any kind of business. Just because they are corrupt and hand out a few token tax breaks to their richest cronies doesn't make them business friendly.
I don't know, on balance, which way it tilts, but 2018 Prop-C is an example of such antagonizing. At least one company moved HQ out of the city for that reason.
What if I told you the manhattanization of downtown was never the dream of local San Franciscans and only a fleeting goal of elite-funded politicians who used job growth during their tenures as pols here to argue that they should be elected or appointed to state-level leadership? What if San Francisco got that Zombieland back, because to many San Franciscans, even a bustling business sector full of people wearing tech fleeces WAS a Zombieland?
I've lived all over the country, and these problems are not unique to California, large cities, or "Libral" areas. These are problems all over. Rather than fear monger it would be better to search for and then provide an example of a city that is doing it right, taking care of the problem, an example for the rest of us to follow.
The problem (for your argument) is that there are plenty of examples of these, they're typically European amd Scandinavian cities with high taxes and "libral" or "communist" (in your view) leadership. So in doing so you would move past this stage to the next one and understand that these things are complex societal issues that need complex nuanced solutions and dialog surrounding them.
Location, location, location. Being a dysfunctional city is a small factor compared to the climate and nearby natural beauty. There is no shortage of people who would live there if they could afford it.
Second this. What people outside the bay area miss is the location quality that is not possible to mimic. Unparalleled geologic features (Bay, Coastline, Hills) add on that you have many world class educational facilities that aren't going anywhere and an economy that has always ebbed and flowed but has a strong undercurrent of strength and resilience. Oh yeah and possibly the best food on the planet which has some value even if you don't really care about food.
Will it be the same? No but cities never revert they always change and remain dynamic as us humans do.
Best food on the planet? Seriously? I mean SF is pretty good but I'm not going to choose it over New York or London.
In addition while climate (though people will argue about the city itself as opposed to the South Bay) and natural beauty add to SF's appeal, I'm not sure how many it would draw absent the economy. Certainly there are many mostly East Coast plus Chicago cities that attract a lot of people without the climate or mostly the geography.
But if you're someone who values nature along with a solid food scene and a strong white collar job base (Software, Hardware, Biotech/Pharma, Healthcare, Accounting, West Coast IB) your only real option is the Bay Area (not just SF, San Jose is also a great city - especially as an Asian American). That's not to say NYC or London are bad, but if you value being able to bike in the mountains in 20 minutes or trail run at a 4,000 ft elevation in 30 minutes, it's hard to beat the Bay Area.
Denver/Boulder is another obvious one but not as large a job base in a number of areas and, of course, it snows in the winter. Salt Lake City for a smaller city--same.
Boston ticks a lot of the boxes but, again, snow and you're a couple hour drive from real mountains.
100% agree about Boston - it's basically an East Coast version of the Bay Area, but software is very clearly overshadowed by Biotech/Pharma and the tech industry leans cybersecurity+defense (not a problem for me personally, but a harder industry for your stereotypical HN commentator to break into tbh).
And I agree that Denver and SLC are both similar as well, but they don't have as deep and diverse a white collar environment yet. As a Bay Area native, only other metropolitan I've seriously considered living long term are Boston, DC, Seattle, and San Diego. But not all of them are one-to-one similar to the Bay.
really depends on what you like! I cant for the life of my find good mexican food in London vs it being a dime a dozen in SF (but ofc easily beat by SoCal or Texas). small wineries are likewise not going to be found in every part of the globe. but this is typical of the west vs east coast divide in the US -- it's very hard to find everything from one coast on the other.
Agree that it would mostly be "a nice place to live" a la Seattle or Portland, than the forlorn days of $3k/1bd for a mediocre soma apartment of yesterdecade.
Mexican and Southwestern seem to get particularly hit or miss once they get away from their home base. I assume there are decent examples in NYC. But I don't even know any in Boston--not that I'm a particular export.
As someone who lived in SF for a few years and has lived in NY for most of my life Mexican food options seemed to have improved a lot over the last few years on the east coast. That said there are definitely more abundant quality options in SF and the west coast.
i think big cities will always attract people. companies will do more to bring people back over time. the bay area will not be a leader in this space.
i don’t think anyone doubts that when the commute is reasonable and office perks good it’s better to be in an office. mostly for social reasons. sf had some of the longer commutes in the country
some other better connected metro area will grow bigger and more successful and then things will have a forcing function to make it less painful to go into the office
Certain demographics of generally younger people in particular. Mind you, this isn't a law of nature. A lot of now "elite" cities were still losing population 25 years or so ago. And when I graduated in the mid-80s, Manhattan aside, almost none of my classmates moved to a downtown.
That said, very anecdotally, my company is has actually added some space downtown even though I understand our suburban office is pretty empty. (Boston area)
That was unique to American (and to some extent Canadian) cities due to urban planning policies that prioritized suburban commuters over city residents.
And somewhat uniquely American urban problems that basically led to a lot of white middle class people (and many companies) just abandoning the cities because it was basically the path of least resistance for them.
> i don’t think anyone doubts that when the commute is reasonable and office perks good it’s better to be in an office.
This is manager fantasy. You're not going to find enough talent to fill an office with a 'reasonable' commute in my city. Its silly to hire based on commute time, so inevitably any office situation like this will have a bell curve of commute times, with some being 1+ hour each way - a crazy waste of productivity.
Just took a cursory look at SF rents and looks like they have come down quite a bit since 2019. Seeing a ton of studios for around 1700 with 1bd's at 2300, that's a-lot don't get me wrong but IIRC a studio was 2300 in 2019.
Although the article seems to suggest that while office vacancies are double the historical average, prices have only fallen 10% from the highs in 2020. Seems like the market hasn't accepted the shift yet.
Commercial properties are notorious for never wanting to lower lease/sqft rates - going so far as to do all sorts of modifications/rebuilding "for free" to keep the lease rates high (even if empty).
It has to do with the valuation of the properties and not needing to get the cashflow for a VERY long time.
I can agree with your second two points, in some circumstances.
But... I don't go to work to socialise. I hate the idea that my social life is tied to my work. Since moving to work from home permanently, I've built social connections with people who actually live in my community which I far prefer.
I like some of those, maybe 10% of the time (because i'm reasonably anti-social), but man it has to be really good to put up with a commute.
Wasting 1-2 hours of my day, with the potential to have it become a 4 hour drive once every week or two.. just way too rough.
I honestly don't get how people put up with commutes. Like, honestly and really. It feels like i'm just destroying any chance i have for downtime during the weekdays. Throw in chores, and oof. Plus i don't have kids.. i can't imagine having kids on top of a commute.
I’m happy to pick a job based on the commute. It’s not hard in the Bay Area to find something good and close. I’ve never had more than a 15 minute commute when living here.
I worked in Tacoma (Washington State) and the drive on I5 there could turn a 25 minute drive into a 4 hour slugfest. Worse yet, about once a week it would be 3 hour drive, almost without fail. It was awful.
I rear ended someone last week near the end of a ~90 minute commute home (there was unusual traffic but it's still an hour minimum) and it really was the wake up call I needed to remind me why I was so opposed to working in my country's capital. At this point I think I'm ready to quit my developer job and take a 50% pay cut for any desk job with a reasonable commute (no developer jobs open in my country right now as far as I can tell).
I ride my bike to work. It's fantastic. Commute isn't a four letter word to me - I get exercise, time to think, I see my neighborhood and surroundings in a new way through all the seasons. I don't do it every day, sometimes I WFH or drive to work, but most of the time, 8 months out of the year, I ride my bike.
Someone is going to come along and say "BuT I dOn'T hAvE AnY bIkE pAtHs!"
That might be true. Almost nobody has a bike path from their front door to their office. I sure don't. But if you stare at a map long enough, you'll find a way. It might mean you add a detour to ride a safer route. It might mean you have to drive half way. It might mean you take public transit half the way. I can't solutionize for everyone, but changing up your commute really changes things. It doesn't have to be such a miserable existence.
Not sure if you are in the US, but here what you are saying is absolutely not true for most people. Most of the country is so incredibly car centric that there’s absolutely no way you could bike 30 miles across a city. And then in most places the public transit is incredibly bad.
For example, I am a 40 minute, 30 mile drive from the city center. Most people in this area would consider that a reasonable commute. It would take 2 and a half hours to bike that distance in melting Florida heat and heavy aggressive traffic. It would take 2 hours by a succession of busses.
If I wanted to live a nice bikeable distance from the business center, I would pay dearly for it home price.
It didn’t have to be like this, but at this point we are so committed to suburban car-centric sprawl that there is now way back for most of the country and things like walkability, bike friendly and rapid public transit are going to remain luxury goods.
I'm in the US. I'm 10 miles from my work, in one of the eastern-most suburbs. I cross dozens of major stroads (arterials with HEAVY vehicle traffic) in my commute. The temps here in the summer are regularly 90+ degrees.
Solution? I got an e-bike. Again, I'm not saying everyone can bike the whole way. Take a bus for the first or latter half. It can be done if you actually want to make the change.
Why are so many onsite advocates bringing socialising up? We are not there for their mental health or to fill in voids in their personal life. Have they considered that many of their socialising needs are not satisfied precisely because of office work that mandates people waste their time commuting or being far from their loved ones in the first place? It’s not that i dont sympathise, but seriously.
I don't think we should force people to come into offices, but I am a strong advocate for having offices. I cannot work at home. I need a minimum number of people around, preferably people with whom I am doing some work, to get anything done. If I'm at home by myself, even for a day, I sit in a depressed pit and do no work. I understand that many, many people do not feel this way, but the idea that people would want to work from home is utterly bananas to me.
> I need a minimum number of people around, preferably people with whom I am doing some work, to get anything done.
Doesn't seem like you need an office for that, though? You can invite your coworkers over to your home, go to a coffeeshop/bar, even the library. I went to the local library the other day and it was effectively vacant. I bet they would welcome your group with open arms to find some use for the space.
Work from home doesn’t mean work from home, it means work from anywhere.
All the WFH coworkers I've had were too spread out for that to be possible. Yes, "100% remote" means you can work from anywhere, but it also means your company can hire from anywhere.
No need for nationalistic conspiracy theories. If your employer wants to replace you with an outsourced company or worker they will do so regardless of remote work policies, as it already happens.
My apologies. I see this statement often on some very odd forums, implying people will be outsourced and jobs sent abroad. I jumped to conclusions too early.
Here in europe my coworkers and i debated a few times wether we should all take a trip to spain and work from there for a week. A team building exercise which we can afford since we dont waste money commuting. Maybe you could explore something similar, or if not, go out with friends and live your life outside the 8 hours.
I work for an office-optional company and my nearest coworker is 500 miles away. For what reason would companies constrain themselves to the local talent pool just so you can have some friends? And if they are willing to do that for you, we're right back to the venue not mattering.
That’s nice for you, but you will not be dragging me into the office just because you need people staring over your shoulder to get any work done. I’m not your motivation coach unless you are paying me to be. Seems you want your coworkers to provide this service to you for free even if it hurts their productivity.
Incidentally there are virtual office zoom call services where you can get on a call and work with other people who have the same issue of not being able to work on their own.
Can't both models for work exist at the same time? At my job there's a 'work as much remote as you want', but for similar reasons mentioned above, I tend to work more at the office. Am I forcing others to join me? No. I simply assume that those that come to the office, enjoy being there. Whatever their reason might be, doesn't matter. The fact that you are referring to what to me seems like a basic human need as some kind of a service is frankly a bit absurd. John Doe wants to be a cashier because he enjoys seeing and talking with different people. Do you send him a bill after coming back from the grocery store?
The issue is that back to office people seem to wish to make that mandatory. John Doe can be a cashier all they want, people shop online anyway - because we have lives outside offices and we dont want to spend them wasted commuting. John Doe is a dying breed unfortunately.
Oh yeah I think it’s a basic human need, but not one I need to get at work. The workplace is a monetized environment. I provide a service and I get paid for it. If I’m not getting paid I’m not going to be there and will put my energy to much more meaningful endeavors. The emotional labor of providing camaraderie and mentorship in an on-site location is an add-on service from me for an extra fee.
People who want to be in an office should have it available or work for companies that can provide it. People like me can avoid it or only do it when the paycheck is right.
My family is my family, my friends are my friends and my coworkers are my coworkers.
Surely the answer is just to have some companies be remote, and some be office based. IMO the big flaw with what companies are trying to do right now is mix these.
They never said it shouldn't be optional? OP wasn't asking why some people thing everyone should go back to the office. They were asking why some people like going to the office.
I struggle to meet people in general, and it's not because I'm spending a lot of time commuting. I appreciate being able to go to an office and socializing with coworkers.
In our remote team we have occasional virtual beer sessions, and better yet, we plan for bbqs every now and then. Also we sometimes play starcraft or just call each other. But we do this voluntarily as opposed to being forced by our peers. I absolutely dont mind making friends at work but voluntarily.
Clearly people who want to go to an office should join companies/teams that go to an office and people who don't should join companies/teams that don't.
Or there could be, ya know, a mix. Again, you are trying to impose either or, whereas those of us who work from home want to be accommodating. Perhaps because we, despite working just as hard, are a bit more laxed in how we view the world around us.
But why at our expense, both financially and mentally? The desire to work onsite, if you think about it, demands that others are in the office with you - since what you need is other people to make it enjoyable for you.
As i said, i dint mind people wanting or working on site. But that demand seems to either directly or indirectly mandate that others work onsite as well.
So why should earn less and live in worse conditions just so that you can chat with me in an office?
In my my experience it is a trade off. I find most full time remote employees not to be very productive. I would rather pay more to hire local in office.
In some instances it is so bad that I would rather pay more to hire a local novice and train to the role.
My guess is that your employer is mistaking remote work for cheap outsourcing. Probably budgeting for less and thats reflected in the quality of work. Otherwise i cant see how local junior devs can perform better than senior remote engineers. Either that or its your own conscious bias that impedes delivery.
This changes things a bit as it seems like the issue is not remote workers and their skills. When i was a hiring manager i specifically asked new hires to get things up and running on their own, as a means to review our documentation. If they couldnt then we needed to improve. If you needed to “network” to get things done then that was a sign of bureaucracy. I kept teams small so that they could self service. Code was also split so it was manageable from a cognitive perspective not just technical.
But there is nuance to everything and varying levels of complexity, however people maintain kernels such as linux or operating systems such as freebsd or other massively complex and successful open or commercial products without ever meeting face to face.
Many years ago when i heard people talking about remote i simply couldnt get my head around it. I wanted buts in the seats and people in front of whiteboards. I just couldnt comprehend how entire companies operate without even having an office and they weren’t mom and pop size. Until it clicked. If a company can have offices spread across continents, let alone remote customers, then it surely can hire remote employees.
I would take everything you listed above as signs that things need to improve. Remote is not the issue here.
Also if you dump me in a room with 20 people just to get your code up an running i might think i am at a highschool not a proper workplace. Similarly if i need to jump through hoops to get things done then thats not a desirable place to work at regardless of pay or remote work.
I didnt mean to imply that the remote workers themselves are any inferior than local. I think you are right that it comes down to complexity and the degree to which projects and tasks can be compartmentalized.
I work in biotech and of my projects has probably 200 engineers and scientists working on interdependent tasks, and 10 years of accumulated knowledge. Requirement and knowledge management can only go so far, so networking becomes critical to find subject matter experts, or someone can point you to one when you need answers.
I think there is some threshold of work scale or interdependence where remote work breaks down. That is to say, any productivity benefits from remote work scale linearly and communication challenges scale exponentially. This of course assumes that there is some communication friction for remote relative to in person.
I see your point. Cross domain setups may struggle with remote work, as indeed devs needs to sometimes sit next to domain experts to better understand what they are aiming to achieve. Wondering if some of that can be mitigated by better story writing and specing or hybrid work, but either way i dont have a solution that makes sense as i have never been in your position. You did however show me a new perspective, as i assumed a tech company or the crud types that dont need that level of interdisciplinary communication, and i thank you for that.
Happy to provide my perspective. Of course I acknowledge that you are certainly right that some types of work can be fully remote or even benefit from it. After all, there's always been types of work with clear requirements that can be shopped out or contracted.
Anyone who claims that everything can be work from home or everything must be in office is missing the big picture.
It's amazing how daft these guys are, socializing at work is a fundamental way of building better relationships and being able to deep dive into more complex and controversial issues. Humans operate off of trust and treating everyone as an anonymous worker bee is only a recipe for getting basic work done that streams down from management.
Following your logic there should be no ecommerce, since you cant step into a building and establish trust. Also there should be no companies distributed geographically since people cant “deep dive” into “controversial issues”. Such a dated concept and so not fit for modern day.
But the notion that people cant convey ideas while remote shows you either havent worked with experienced people or are inexperienced yourself.
I specifically mentioned socializing at work and working with complex and controversial issues, how does buying something online relate to that? I also never said that people can't convey ideas while remote, the post I replied to made one vague mention of on-site requirements, I made none. Just the implication that on-site leads to better building of trust.
I would never personally advocate for full on-site and I am actually a supporter of full remote work. I just don't pretend it's already perfect and that we can function by just purely conversing about work like we are JIRA ticket machines.
Also, geographically distributed companies will still tend to have the majority of people in a team or sub-team in one area but nothing is 100%. Different geographies usually have different responsibilities. Companies will also do all kinds of other methods of team building that is mostly social to compensate like flying everyone to a singe location occasionally or remote activities.
> treating everyone as an anonymous worker bee is only a recipe for getting basic work done that streams down from management.
I might blow your mind but there is a whole spectrum between being stuck with colleagues in an office 2000 hours a year and being an anonymous working bee
Yes, there is a spectrum to everything and my comment was not absolute about working hours either. I was not proposing we go to the office full time, simply that socialization at work is a core piece of building trust at work which is fundamental to deep collaborative efforts.
And the implication obviously is that socialization works better in person, but I didn't say it was exclusive to that. The person I responded to did say something about on-site requirements but it was vague.
Many of us find the social life aspect of office work very important to mental health. At my last office job my commute was 90 seconds (literally), and I had an active and healthy social life outside of work. You've created an imagined person whose wants are easier to dismiss.
You may be an outlier but the vast majority of office workers live way farther than 90 seconds from their office. The mental health aspect is something i empathise with but not on my dime. By having to commute to work just so you can socialise with me i am basically paying money out of my pocket. Instead you should be free to be on site and i should be free to be remote and not hear you demand that you need my presence there to help your mental health. Thats selfish, with all due respect.
I used to be same. Until i realised that remote work lets _me_ choose an environment where i fit in. After years wasted in london thinking about how cool it is and how much that city has to offer i realised it’s lonely as heck. Then i figured i would rather move on the country, get to know my neighbour, maybe bbq in a garden and have a small group if misfits like myself over for a beer every now and then. Heck i can even make my own starbucks at home in a nice office room that turns into a man cave at the switch of a button. I can do my hobby gardening, my own bread, maybe even learn how to do my own beer. I am not the hippie type but i found these to be better for my mental health. Those two hours not commuting work out at ten hours saved per week. Not to mention i can cook while i work (and plan the code, day or architecture in a quiet setting).
Doing all of this in a city jam packed by people rushing to offices would have been impossible. Making friends also since its a large city and there is no time to meet and maintain relationships anyway.
I think keeping an open mind and exploring the options remote work give you might help fix the issues that might impede socialising. The alternative is not even knowing you can do better, but maybe in the right setting - which you could explore by remote working.
A home where your may live with a good number of people and no workspace besides your bedroom can be very distracting. And assuming all software engineers are paid MAGMA wages and are higher class workers than others in their company is absolutely incorrect
"You can still socialize digitally with others if you work from home, or step out and get lunch or coffee at local businesses and be around people."
I don't think socializing digitally is a sufficient substitute. Being around people I don't know isn't socializing because I don't have a relationship with them."
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"A home is no more distracting than an office."
My apartment is quiet, I have two cats, I'm not near any loud roadway just a park, and my building has sound proofing so I never hear my neighbors.
Everyone has a different living situation but your comment implies it's the same for everyone.
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"Work is what happens when your laptop is open. Make a ritual of closing it to symbolize the end of your work day and you get the same effect."
This is not sufficient for me. I don't know why you think what works for you psychologically would work for others.
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"Working from an office sucks and is for lower class jobs IMO. It is beneath a software engineer’s esteemed status.
This is such a stupid comment that I'm just going to call you an asshole and take the flag.
Not every single worker needs work to socialize with others. Some people have places of worship and other things to socialize.
All this means is that working in an office should be optional. Forcing it on everyone just because some people use work to socialize is not intelligent.
There may be a gamut of people replying saying "I don't go to work to socialize" but work is definitely a place to network and find new colleagues and opportunities beyond. Trying to say that any work one does is done without any interaction with your coworkers apart from sparse Slack/Teams messages just isn't true
This sounds like an extrovert talking. I don’t network, find new colleagues, find opportunities beyond at work. As an introvert, all of that sounds absolutely anxiety ridden terrifying. Thankfully I am fully remote now so all of the interaction I have to do with coworkers is over slack.
Heating a solo home isn't a big deal compared to the combined costs of heating a shared space and gas to commute. Employers cheaping out by paying gas but not paying your heating is a different story
> The need for changing location for mental delimination of work
This is actually the biggest reason for me. Even after nearly 2 years of WFH I didn't find it nearly as easy to mentally separate from work. Leaving the office at 4pm does that much more effectively. I went back to working at the office as soon as it was possible.
The travel to a new location is the key for me. Walking around the block and coming back to my apartment isn't going to cut it.
As for locations:
- Coffee shops are noisy and staying there multiple hours is both inappropriate, you could have power issues, wifi issues related to speed.
- Being outside requires some internet device which may not be reliable or fast, power issues again but I guess you could just have a backpack with a USB power bank. The sun makes it difficult to see, you need to find a table, bugs, animals, other people, rain, heat, cold, etc
I've tried these things. My home setup is dual 27 inches with a physical keyboard. This improves my performance greatly, maybe I could get used to a laptop but that would require an adjustment period.
As a company, I would think that I don’t want you socializing - you are here to work, not to chit chat. And I don’t want you to mentally deliminate work. I want you working from morning to night.
Edit: note that I’m an individual contributor and not in any sort of management position - but I imagine this is how management types think.
Not all commutes are long. Mine was about 30 minutes by train and I used that time to clear my head and prepare myself for work. On the way back I used it as a way to relax and switch off.
My parents met at work and I've made friends at previous position and remained friends with them. I also think that being in close proximity is important to me. For example people around the world travel home for the holidays instead of using a webcam. Since the cost and time of that travel is significant must there be a reason why it's important.
Socializing is an important part of building relationships. No developer is an island, with remote work I have much weaker relationships with my coworkers and we collaborate a decent amount less. It's much, much harder to figure out what other teams are working on/stuck on. Generally everyone is just more silo'd, and I don't think that's good for productivity, growth, or my mental health. In the office I'd end up learning new things constantly talking in the hall or at lunch. Now I rarely talk to coworkers about non work things which means we also end up talking about work less.
I've done both, and I have been working from home for the last four years, but I don't think it's that clear cut. Another way to put it: "why use part of your home for work space, and pay for your worktime utilities, when your employer should pay for that?"
Yeah, anytime we're discussing work from home it's important to realize that people's living situations are very different.
In my case, our house has a room that is basically only big enough to be an office, and we have solar that means we barely pay for electricity. It's a no-brainer for me to save the time and money that would be sunk in a commute and just use that room for work. However, I can totally see how someone without that extra space would find an office important.
I think what would be optimal for society is if we could reclaim the space that is used for central, commuter offices and bring that space closer to home. Whether that's building more homes that have rooms specifically designed to be offices, or building coworking spaces in the middle of residential areas, we need to do something to eliminate commutes. The amount of pollution, accidental deaths, property damage, and wasted time inherent in people driving to work is insane. Technology is at the point where, for most office workers, the harm caused by commutes far outweighs the benefits of being in a centralized work environment.
Because Im using that part of a home for workspace anyhow when Im off the clock. Its a laptop on a table, its not a huge investment. And also you are ignoring commuting and all associated monetary and time costs. With wfh and no commuting its like I have a 26 hour day. Then you miss out on a lot of potential parallelism like doing laundry or working out during zoom meetings.
Most people's commute sucks. And for those with less sucky commute, they mostly pay a premium for their rent to be as close as possible to their workplace. Both situations are horrible and the benefits of WFH are vast, not only to people who want it, but also those who don't.
Lots of messed up things with Austin real estate, but office spaces are not this empty. In fact I have heard that it is one of the less empty metro areas right now, in terms of office space. There also seems to be a lot of traffic downtown, which is annoying but means someone must be working/living there.
But again, lots of messed up things in the real estate market of Austin generally; the residential market has essentially frozen up, with sellers unwilling to admit how much things have dropped, and the buyers unwilling to pay for houses they know aren't going to be worth that much in a year's time or less.
Wish this was happening in london uk, and ideally that space converted into housing. The less people having to commute to on site farms the better for the environment.
I don't understand why working in an office isn't optional for certain jobs. If you want to go to the office, go in. If you want to work remote, then work remote. Why should either remote, hybrid, or on-site become a top-down policy imposed on all employees?
Having a team split between remote and on site isn't a great situation for anyone. A team that is entirely remote can adapt to remote, asynchronous ways of working. A team that is entirely on site just needs to do what they've always done. Collaborating effectively in a team that is split between the two is very difficult, because the communication methods that are natural to one half of the team are foreign to the other half. Remote employees in particular tend to get isolated from the rest of the team.
If your company has enough employees that are interchangeable enough to organize teams based on the work preferences of the employees, you could probably make it work. But most companies don't have employees that are that interchangeable.
> Collaborating effectively in a team that is split between the two is very difficult.
I'm on a split team, it's the same as remote except you can send DMs and create groups chats with some of the team IRL and you have multiplayer rooms join video calls.
Because "Office Vacancy Rate in San Francisco Just Hit a New High", That means property owners aren't making money. Workers aren't out spending to come in, stay and leave. All that is taxable, which is why government officials want people back in the office. In every city, the downtown core's tax revenue subsidizes the suburban sprawl all around it. Good overview of the research on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
Several US cities are in for a world of hurt now that there are no more trillion dollar COVID stimulus bills on the horizon and the cost of servicing debt has gone up very quickly. And yet they seem blissfully unaware.
The idea, and economics, of converting office space to housing is fascinating to me. Once you think about it for more than a moment you realize there are some major difficulties. A modern office high rise, for example, may have windows only on the outer edge of a vast floor plan. There may be one or two large bathrooms per floor, with no plumbing or even walls to contain plumbing anywhere else. The HVAC may be zoned per-floor. Gas and electric is not metered separately.
So depending on the building it could be a huge cost to turn into livable residences, much less desirable ones that would offset the expense.
Not to say it can’t be done but it seems really hard.
San Francisco wants keep its completely asinine regulatory cake and eat its wishful thinking cost of living too. Reality will win on one side or the other.
It would be great if all the giant warehouse spaces that got converted to “creative office space” could be put back to work as PDR space. You don’t need 20ft ceilings and 3-phase power to make CRUD apps for HR management or whatever
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadHigher paid jobs like healthcare workers, no problem.
Most blue collar labor types living in the East Bay are in the Alameda County flatlands (parts of Newark, parts of Fremont, inner city Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Albany) or North Contra Costa County (Pittsburg, Antioch, Richmond).
But most of the unskillled labor underclass you see in the Bay Area cities tend to drive in/Bart in/ACE in from San Joaquin Country, Sonoma County, or Monterey County.
And yes some parts of the East Bay are expensive, especially the neighborhoods on the hills or Piedmont/Claremont and further inland like Walnut Creek or Orinda etc. But let's be real, most of the East Bay is one big suburban wasteland.
There are a lot of folks living in East Oakland (with roommates, often) who work in SF restaurants.
There most definitely has been a decline in quality of healthcare due to decline in quantity and quality of healthcare workers relative to patients in the recent past.
Even though a job might be higher paid, it does not imply the pay to quality of life at work is sufficiently high to incentivize the desirable amount of labor sellers to pursue it.
Orphan Andy's, Safeway on Market, and Pinecrest diner are no longer 24/7. Sparky's closed forever (a 24/7 diner). It's Tops Coffee Shop stopped staying open late and then eventually closed forever. Corner/liquor stores that used to be open late are closing well before midnight. Kowloon Tong Dessert Cafe used to be open until 2am most nights, but now they always close at midnight.
The Clocktower lofts on Bryant & 2nd Street are a great example of live/work offices and condos for the luxury market. Let's do the mid-market next!
Converting office space into affordable housing is a win for everyone, except the landlords, but I won't shed a tear for them ;-)
Who wants to live in a city if you can work from home? If you are poor and need housing subsidies and there are no jobs for you, there is no reason to live in the city to begin with. People go live where the jobs are. Without "white collar" jobs producing demand for services, there is much less demand for "blue collar" jobs.
If it's just cooping people up, there are cheaper ways to house people than maintaining expensive buildings that need financing and upkeep.
She's now living independently at age 86, thanks to a social security check and a community where she's everyone's abuela. Rent-controlled housing made it easier to divorce her abusive husband and start a business back in the 60s.
How is that dystopian?
I'm not saying the projects were lovely. The elevators smelled like piss. But public housing - even ugly public housing - was a huge part in enabling two generations of single moms (my mom + grandma) to raise their families, start businesses, and thrive.
The practicalities of the original design and trying to adapt it means these conversions often have limited natural light, limited fresh air, are made from hard, unbreathable, manufactured materials, are very 'liminal', have bad acoustics. Have you read the theory of 'sick buildings'? Homes made from office space seem to end up very 'sick', with an impact on people's mental and physical health, and increasing isolation.
That's how it's dystopian.
It seems to me there might be some disconnect in demand and supply of various labor types (not many unskilled jobs compared to the number of unskilled workers, vs not many software devs but lots of openings). It seems these forces drag the bottom down while pushing the top higher.
Edit: why disagree?
Why, theoretically, would wages rise enough to make it possible for any worker to live in the city? I think the situation where workers with the worst alternatives and weakest negotiating position are stuck commuting into SF from outside is unfortunate but theoretically entirely understandable; SF wages aren't forced to rise to support someone living here, but only to be high enough relative to wages elsewhere to compensate for the cost of commuting.
True, but then the implied issues with not living in the city you work in become moot if truly compensating for the commute and cost of living outside the city.
Suppose you're able to get two part time jobs with relatively little predictability in your shift schedule. Both are minimum wage, but one is in SF where the minimum is $17/hr and another is in Concord at $14/hr (the state minimum for a company with <25 employees). Say you live in Antioch, and can get to the Concord job in around 35 minutes for $4 with BART, and get to the SF job with more than 1h and $7.30 on BART (one way). So for every shift in SF you pick up, you get a $3 premium per hour relative to the Concord job, but for the first 2 hours that just goes to cover your extra BART fare, _and_ you lose an extra hour in transit. In dollars you still come out ahead on an 8 hour shift in SF relative to in Concord, but I think it would be unreasonable to say that "the implied issues ... become moot".
Yes, the moot part is based on them being truly compensatedfor the extra commute, in which case it would be moot. It's much more interesting to me to look at the income inequality and market side than the "solution" of creating subsidized housing. I'd rather go after the true root problem than cover up one symptom and allowa the problem to persist.
You're looking at it as it exists today. I'm saying theoretically this other stuff should work (but may not in practice).
"better without someone else being at least slightly worse off"
Exactly. The point (if you go back through my comments) is that there seems to be a demand and supply imbalance based on the skill/type of labor. We should be looking at ways to slow higher end wage growth and promote it in the lower end. One way to do this could be around education. Essentially, increase the number of developers on the market while decreasing the number of people who are only qualified for the lower wage work. We've kind of seen this with the pandemic shrinking the labor force and driving those lower end wages higher.
If it made a difference to your ability to get shelter, which would you rather choose: have shelter or live in a illegal tent under a bridge resting assured with the knowledge that there's a big book of rules in place.
Not all buildings in SF are high-rise open-plans. If you're imagining converting Salesforce tower, I see how that would seem impractical.
Most commercial office space in SOMA (old warehouse buildings) can be converted into live/work lofts.
Building Codes are words on paper. They can be changed more easily than physical buildings.
A dorm (ie. shared bathrooms/kitchen) wouldn't have this issue.
Check out 510 Townsend, one of the properties mentioned in the OP. What do you think about converting buildings like 510 Townsend into live/work lofts?
I used to be in the city, in essentially a shoe box that cost 5k a month, but with a fancy gym and common area. I moved to Marin during COVID and while I miss the food and walking distance/public transit activities I could do, I don’t think I can go back to the extremely small for the money living area. I’m hopeful a glut of new housing, hopefully spacious, will change that calculus.
My wife and I made the opposite move. We had a house, a life, in the suburbs for more than a decade and now happily live in a 1 bedroom loft in SOMA. I would say that for our life, we live in a smaller (it's still pretty big, and not actually that expensive) in the city exactly because of the lifestyle/hobbies/family life we enjoy as a result. It's like the city is your living room.
Even though work and housing aren't in the same buildings, military housing can provide a good lens into this.
IMO, that's not really fair - at least for barracks. And I don't really think that "married" house style housing really applies since it's a suburb that just happens to be inside the base.
1. You don't own your barracks room. You generally don't have any ability to change furniture, appliances, paint, etc.
2. Barracks typically offer little privacy - there are periodic inspections, limits on guests, etc.
3. Military culture is a bit weird - there is often a very strong drinking culture, etc. It's not clear to me that the same social forces exist for a civilian live-work building.
4. The barracks are sometimes raided for off-hours extra duty. This downside doesn't really exist in the same way for civilians.
Yet. "Ron, according to the security system there was movement inside of your company dorm room last night at 8PM when we emailed you. Since you were just at home anyway why did you decide to not be a team player?"
"The barracks are sometimes raided for off-hours extra duty."
Unless you work in IT and are on-call or the on-call doesn't answer (not fully the same, but still...).
Hair/nail salons, waxing and esthetician services, makeup and photo studios, etc.
Every nail salon in 10 square-block radius of me (in SF, SOMA) closed during the pandemic. SF residential rents aren't affordable for a trade/services businessperson. Tradespeople stopped commuting 2+ hours into the city when businesses fled. For a city to thrive, services/trade labor needs to live near their work.
On a personal level, I want to run a small manufacturing shop to dog-food my own product (https://printnanny.ai/ - automation for 3D printer ecommerce shops).
My options are currently:
* Move to a single-family home in surburbia, so I can work out of a garage/shed.
* Lease a business-zoned office suite in SF, commute every day.
* Live in a building zoned for business/residential, so I can legally run an office without inviting ire from an SF condo HOA.
* leave the Bay Area and go somewhere with higher quality of life and lower real estate prices (read: basically anywhere that isn't Tokyo or NYC), go for residential housing + commercial property
unless you have some reason to pick SF?
Between B and C C is the clear winner.
This is utterly stupid, but it is driving rental vacancies in NYC.
I would say then the solution is to reform those laws, while we're at it we should reform the property tax laws in California.
Really, how different are offices from apartments? You have space, kitchen, bathrooms, etc.
The only thing that is weird is most offices don't have a washer and dryer, other than that if I walked in this space and it was decorated as an office I wouldn't think twice, same in apartment mode.
I would argue that I live in a cheap 1 bedroom, it exactly this that you describe.
The bathrooms are a wash, both commercial and residential spaces require them. If anything the bathrooms in this arrangement are a bit smaller than traditional commercial bathrooms.
Same with the kitchen, commercial spaces have them, every place I've worked for the last 15 years has had one. So that's a wash. Also, our kitchen isn't huge, it's of similar size to those kitchens.
That leaves the laundry. For us it's a stacked unit in a small closet in the bathroom. They could easily be removed and then the closet could be used for bathroom cleaning supplies and no-one would ever suspect it wasn't just an office.
So the real comparison is: Residential: 1500 Sq ft loft, small glass office and loft bedroom, 2 full baths Commercial: 1500 Sq ft office, 1 large loft conference room, 1 small glass conference room/office, open Floorplan for 10-15 desks, 2 bathrooms with shower, full kitchen Both have door service, package receiving and security services provided on site, parking space
Commercial property owners are seeking forbearance agreements with their lenders. Forbearance is like hitting the "pause" button on a lending agreement, with the hope that market conditions bounce back and the original loan terms can continue.
What that means in practice is that a massive amount of real estate will rot, unused, in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Fantastic for bike commuting.
Most commercial office space in SOMA is a converted warehouse. Live/work apartments and lofts have already been converted from the same buildings. Let's do more of these!
https://www.rubyhome.com/idx/461-2nd-street-san-francisco-ca...
The monthly HOA is $941 lol
I know places in Austin where (and this was years ago), HOA fees were $1100 for a condo in the $1.2 million range.
And, to be clear, I'm not saying 941 is "cheap" on an absolute basis, just that it is for a condo that is already that expensive.
So 11 * 40 * 52 / 12 = 1906$/month + SS.
$15.40 for employers with 21 or more employees (including all domestic workers, regardless of the number employed) $14.50 for employers with 4-20 employees
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/minimum...
But, you can subtract reasonable room and board fees, so actual cost could be lower if you had a spare room and someone was willing to take the job.
2k plus a room.
Sounds like it could have been a co-op which would include taxes in the HOA.
Condo HOAs usually cover the maintenance of the shared building parts (HVAC, roof, plumbing outside the units, etc). One danger sign is a condo with a HOA that is too low - it likely means maintenance is being put off or done incorrectly or you're going to get hit with a special assessment soon.
Older buildings start getting hit with the "every 20/50 years" maintenance, and also get hit with lawsuits against the building/HOA itself. Those can start to add up over time.
And the size of the building can also affect it; a smaller building with the same amenities would have higher HOA fees.
I personally wouldn't touch them with a fifty state pole, but some people like it.
Unfortunately all the newer homes have HOAs in my area. I am stuck with older homes or I have to buy a lot and build to get something modern.
HOAs are also a breeding ground for petty arguments.
And, unlike you're principle payment (which at least is an asset), HOA payments are something you will never see any return of value on, especially since they reduce the desirability of the property in question. If you doubt this, Just ask anyone who's had an HOA, whether or not they'd rather buy a property with an HOA or one without.
Living with other people is annoying, but you can work to mitigate the biggest issues, and sometimes the right answer might be a HOA. Investigate the HOA before buying and talk to your potential neighbors. Many people will gladly go out to dinner/drinks if you ask and bitch about any problems there may be.
And there will always be problems; the key is determining if they'll be annoying enough for you to bypass it.
One friend years ago pointed out that he could buy a much nicer house if he spent the HOA payment on mortgage instead; and so went that way.
And yeah, the elections can change everything - and sometimes nobody cares and you can run for the HOA board and effectively take control muahahahahah.
Er, I wouldn't know anyone who would do that. Ever.
You can't live with 200 other families in a shared building without some sort of structure. What's allowed and what isn't, Can dogs swim in the shared pool? Can you ask the doorman to go find a parking spot around the block?
The HOA in question is a shared building. Which is more like a corporation, with 20-30 employees.
That's a thing???
Part of the challenge is determining the quality of the HOA before buying, and that quality can change over time. And you may have minimal influence over it.
Hate to break it to you, but the maintenance costs for a house over the lifetime of the property are astronomical. True, if you are a do-it-yourselfer and want to do all the maintenance work yourself you can save money. But the comparable cost to pay someone for things like yard work, internal repairs and upkeep is, in my experience, much higher in a house than a condo because you don't get the benefit of scale and good, defined supplier relationships. E.g. in a condo building you're paying a landscaping company to do the yard work, but that work is split amongst 50 or whatever condo owners.
Just because the land is more expensive doesn't mean your elevator maintenance contract should be.
The premise for the HOA to do this is that it's better for occupants to report problems for professional remediation, rather than to DIY or neglect them until it becomes worse for someone else in the building.
I just sold a house in Vancouver after living in it for over a decade. The amortized cost of maintenance was less than 100 CAD/mo; and that included new quartz counters, a new roof, new hot water tanks, a whole yard remodel, new flooring, and so on.
What the hell are they burning nearly a grand USD per month per suite on?
I also find elevators to add a decent amount to the overhead
Not everyone is fit for condo living, but those who do prefer to have a building manager full time on site they can talk to. They also want amenities, a gym or even a pool (which means paying a lifeguard), a rooftop or shared working space. And trust me the condo owners aren't going to go and mop that rooftop or gym, they're going to need even more employees to do that
This is probably the meat of the cost.
When I demo'd the floors the labour cost was my own time; rather than the market rate.
The roof only hit me back about 5k.
Flooring was only about 3k, I did cheap laminate because carpet gives me allergies and I have kids.
People are very bad at working out total cost of ownership, but it could work if the prices were very low and much of the labor was done by the owner.
Is labour just that much more expensive in the USA?
It depends a bit on where you live, but that's typically not true. For a condo, the owners are responsible for interior maintenance (for example, plumbing issues within the unit, as opposed to plumbing issues within the walls).
https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/611-Washington-St-94...
* A lot of amenities (pool and gym) are provided with the HOA.
* The reason 1200 sqf in a tall building is so cheap ($860k) is probably because the high HOA is discouraging buyers.
> Fees Include: Common Area Electricity, Door Person, Insurance (Common Area), Landscaping/Gardening, Management Fee, Pools, Spa, or Tennis, Reserves, Security Service, Water
> HOA Amenities: Community Pool, Door Person, Elevator, Gym/ Exercise Facility
That stuff costs money; if you don't want it then that isn't the building for you! Having recently moved from a condo to a non-HOA house, I am realizing how much extra time it takes to maintain a house (plus all the little extra costs here and there that add up). Condo HOAs are a mandatory convenience fee, and if you are a busy person they might really be worth it.
Single-family detached house subdivisions with HOAs are a different world. Stay far far away.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2111-Hyde-St-401-San-Fran...
The housing opportunity in SF is in all the vacant and underutilized space in the Sunset. Downtown offices do not have the egress, plumbing, ventilation, electricity, or telecomm capacity to be economically converted to dwellings in anything other than a makeshift, emergency fashion.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't utilize outer Sunset space too! There's already great public transport to the SOMA area though.
It's a shame to let commercial real estate rot in forbearance, when it's surrounded by the infrastructure needed for excellent city living.
it also seems like it could lead to increased rents, if you have the government guarantee rent will be paid, you can raise it by a lot and not worry about people not paying, or even not being able to afford it.
not at all.
An office/apartment hybrid might work. I could imagine dividing the building, with offices in the inner core and apartments surrounding the core. The core and surrounding apartments would be totally separated, with separate lobbies and elevators. Although the offices would be totally windowless hellscapes, at least the apartments would have lots of light.
I think that's a bold statement already
The answer is no. Why? because the city collects more taxes from commercial zoned stuff.
And the buildings that are owned by individuals/families may be owned outright so they don't have much loan pressure on them.
I work in the financial district and the number of empty spaces that used to house cafes and restaurants is shocking. Unless they manage to pivot that office space to housing (Very difficult for multiple structural reasons), the downtown of SF is going to continue to look like Zombieland.
Further, the court cases this will bring will take _forever_ because one side will be extremely well funded and the other side will be the city of San Francisco. Not the stroke of a pen.
I think that's a misleading characterization. The city notoriously gave tax breaks to large tech companies, accompanied by some weak rhetoric about supporting local communities, but with weak or no oversight confirming any real local benefits.
I also think it's important to distinguish between _office space_ and _retail space_. Retail and restaurant spaces will also struggle to get filled if neighborhood office workers are getting catered in-office lunch, getting delivery from ghost kitchens, and buying goods from amazon etc. I.e. the way we live and work increasingly supports the Zombieland street-level experience.
The city notoriously set up large and complex taxes on tech companies in SF and then randomly and unpredictably granted breaks to the ones that had the best lobbying.
> accompanied by some weak rhetoric about supporting local communities
And billions of dollars sent into homeless slush funds for activists and nonprofits with no accountability for how the money was spent.
> no oversight confirming any real local benefits
Accurate
I'm not claiming that the city spends responsibly, but next month SF will at least vote on a ballot measure which would create an oversight commission for HSH spending and programs, and require audits of services provided. We have an opportunity to improve things.
https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi....
I've lived all over the country, and these problems are not unique to California, large cities, or "Libral" areas. These are problems all over. Rather than fear monger it would be better to search for and then provide an example of a city that is doing it right, taking care of the problem, an example for the rest of us to follow.
The problem (for your argument) is that there are plenty of examples of these, they're typically European amd Scandinavian cities with high taxes and "libral" or "communist" (in your view) leadership. So in doing so you would move past this stage to the next one and understand that these things are complex societal issues that need complex nuanced solutions and dialog surrounding them.
Will it be the same? No but cities never revert they always change and remain dynamic as us humans do.
In addition while climate (though people will argue about the city itself as opposed to the South Bay) and natural beauty add to SF's appeal, I'm not sure how many it would draw absent the economy. Certainly there are many mostly East Coast plus Chicago cities that attract a lot of people without the climate or mostly the geography.
Boston ticks a lot of the boxes but, again, snow and you're a couple hour drive from real mountains.
And I agree that Denver and SLC are both similar as well, but they don't have as deep and diverse a white collar environment yet. As a Bay Area native, only other metropolitan I've seriously considered living long term are Boston, DC, Seattle, and San Diego. But not all of them are one-to-one similar to the Bay.
Agree that it would mostly be "a nice place to live" a la Seattle or Portland, than the forlorn days of $3k/1bd for a mediocre soma apartment of yesterdecade.
That's also the problem when there is no way to restrict people who cannot afford it
i don’t think anyone doubts that when the commute is reasonable and office perks good it’s better to be in an office. mostly for social reasons. sf had some of the longer commutes in the country
some other better connected metro area will grow bigger and more successful and then things will have a forcing function to make it less painful to go into the office
Certain demographics of generally younger people in particular. Mind you, this isn't a law of nature. A lot of now "elite" cities were still losing population 25 years or so ago. And when I graduated in the mid-80s, Manhattan aside, almost none of my classmates moved to a downtown.
That said, very anecdotally, my company is has actually added some space downtown even though I understand our suburban office is pretty empty. (Boston area)
This is manager fantasy. You're not going to find enough talent to fill an office with a 'reasonable' commute in my city. Its silly to hire based on commute time, so inevitably any office situation like this will have a bell curve of commute times, with some being 1+ hour each way - a crazy waste of productivity.
It has to do with the valuation of the properties and not needing to get the cashflow for a VERY long time.
A situation at home that is distracting
The need for changing location for mental delimination of work
But... I don't go to work to socialise. I hate the idea that my social life is tied to my work. Since moving to work from home permanently, I've built social connections with people who actually live in my community which I far prefer.
I miss everyday banter and eating lunch with my co-workers.
Wasting 1-2 hours of my day, with the potential to have it become a 4 hour drive once every week or two.. just way too rough.
I honestly don't get how people put up with commutes. Like, honestly and really. It feels like i'm just destroying any chance i have for downtime during the weekdays. Throw in chores, and oof. Plus i don't have kids.. i can't imagine having kids on top of a commute.
Someone is going to come along and say "BuT I dOn'T hAvE AnY bIkE pAtHs!" That might be true. Almost nobody has a bike path from their front door to their office. I sure don't. But if you stare at a map long enough, you'll find a way. It might mean you add a detour to ride a safer route. It might mean you have to drive half way. It might mean you take public transit half the way. I can't solutionize for everyone, but changing up your commute really changes things. It doesn't have to be such a miserable existence.
For example, I am a 40 minute, 30 mile drive from the city center. Most people in this area would consider that a reasonable commute. It would take 2 and a half hours to bike that distance in melting Florida heat and heavy aggressive traffic. It would take 2 hours by a succession of busses.
If I wanted to live a nice bikeable distance from the business center, I would pay dearly for it home price.
It didn’t have to be like this, but at this point we are so committed to suburban car-centric sprawl that there is now way back for most of the country and things like walkability, bike friendly and rapid public transit are going to remain luxury goods.
Solution? I got an e-bike. Again, I'm not saying everyone can bike the whole way. Take a bus for the first or latter half. It can be done if you actually want to make the change.
Doesn't seem like you need an office for that, though? You can invite your coworkers over to your home, go to a coffeeshop/bar, even the library. I went to the local library the other day and it was effectively vacant. I bet they would welcome your group with open arms to find some use for the space.
Work from home doesn’t mean work from home, it means work from anywhere.
No need for nationalistic conspiracy theories. If your employer wants to replace you with an outsourced company or worker they will do so regardless of remote work policies, as it already happens.
Here in europe my coworkers and i debated a few times wether we should all take a trip to spain and work from there for a week. A team building exercise which we can afford since we dont waste money commuting. Maybe you could explore something similar, or if not, go out with friends and live your life outside the 8 hours.
Incidentally there are virtual office zoom call services where you can get on a call and work with other people who have the same issue of not being able to work on their own.
People who want to be in an office should have it available or work for companies that can provide it. People like me can avoid it or only do it when the paycheck is right.
My family is my family, my friends are my friends and my coworkers are my coworkers.
Zoom absolutely does not count.
There is life outside of work, but that doesn't mean work needs to be lifeless.
As i said, i dint mind people wanting or working on site. But that demand seems to either directly or indirectly mandate that others work onsite as well.
So why should earn less and live in worse conditions just so that you can chat with me in an office?
I will value positions that fit my needs, and you are free to do the same.
When hiring, I will select employees that meet the onsite requirements and fit the culture.
In my my experience it is a trade off. I find most full time remote employees not to be very productive. I would rather pay more to hire local in office.
In some instances it is so bad that I would rather pay more to hire a local novice and train to the role.
The main challenges are onboarding and building an internal networking so that they can get the information they need.
Things you would ask a coworker in 5 minutes take months to figure out.
Some of this is obviously company specific, but 20 new hires in a room learn 20x as fast as one alone.
But there is nuance to everything and varying levels of complexity, however people maintain kernels such as linux or operating systems such as freebsd or other massively complex and successful open or commercial products without ever meeting face to face.
Many years ago when i heard people talking about remote i simply couldnt get my head around it. I wanted buts in the seats and people in front of whiteboards. I just couldnt comprehend how entire companies operate without even having an office and they weren’t mom and pop size. Until it clicked. If a company can have offices spread across continents, let alone remote customers, then it surely can hire remote employees.
I would take everything you listed above as signs that things need to improve. Remote is not the issue here.
Also if you dump me in a room with 20 people just to get your code up an running i might think i am at a highschool not a proper workplace. Similarly if i need to jump through hoops to get things done then thats not a desirable place to work at regardless of pay or remote work.
I work in biotech and of my projects has probably 200 engineers and scientists working on interdependent tasks, and 10 years of accumulated knowledge. Requirement and knowledge management can only go so far, so networking becomes critical to find subject matter experts, or someone can point you to one when you need answers.
I think there is some threshold of work scale or interdependence where remote work breaks down. That is to say, any productivity benefits from remote work scale linearly and communication challenges scale exponentially. This of course assumes that there is some communication friction for remote relative to in person.
Anyone who claims that everything can be work from home or everything must be in office is missing the big picture.
But the notion that people cant convey ideas while remote shows you either havent worked with experienced people or are inexperienced yourself.
I would never personally advocate for full on-site and I am actually a supporter of full remote work. I just don't pretend it's already perfect and that we can function by just purely conversing about work like we are JIRA ticket machines.
Also, geographically distributed companies will still tend to have the majority of people in a team or sub-team in one area but nothing is 100%. Different geographies usually have different responsibilities. Companies will also do all kinds of other methods of team building that is mostly social to compensate like flying everyone to a singe location occasionally or remote activities.
I might blow your mind but there is a whole spectrum between being stuck with colleagues in an office 2000 hours a year and being an anonymous working bee
And the implication obviously is that socialization works better in person, but I didn't say it was exclusive to that. The person I responded to did say something about on-site requirements but it was vague.
Doing all of this in a city jam packed by people rushing to offices would have been impossible. Making friends also since its a large city and there is no time to meet and maintain relationships anyway.
I think keeping an open mind and exploring the options remote work give you might help fix the issues that might impede socialising. The alternative is not even knowing you can do better, but maybe in the right setting - which you could explore by remote working.
You can still socialize digitally with others if you work from home, or step out and get lunch or coffee at local businesses and be around people.
A home is no more distracting than an office.
Work is what happens when your laptop is open. Make a ritual of closing it to symbolize the end of your work day and you get the same effect.
Working from an office sucks and is for lower class jobs IMO. It is beneath a software engineer’s esteemed status.
I don't think socializing digitally is a sufficient substitute. Being around people I don't know isn't socializing because I don't have a relationship with them."
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"A home is no more distracting than an office."
My apartment is quiet, I have two cats, I'm not near any loud roadway just a park, and my building has sound proofing so I never hear my neighbors.
Everyone has a different living situation but your comment implies it's the same for everyone.
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"Work is what happens when your laptop is open. Make a ritual of closing it to symbolize the end of your work day and you get the same effect."
This is not sufficient for me. I don't know why you think what works for you psychologically would work for others.
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"Working from an office sucks and is for lower class jobs IMO. It is beneath a software engineer’s esteemed status.
This is such a stupid comment that I'm just going to call you an asshole and take the flag.
All this means is that working in an office should be optional. Forcing it on everyone just because some people use work to socialize is not intelligent.
Must be a cultural thing, but in my sphere 'home' is where a lot of socializing with others takes place.
Others may be:
* Access to specialist resources/equipment which is only available in the office,
* Costs of heating / cooling / etc. (more significant now, in Europe at least),
This is actually the biggest reason for me. Even after nearly 2 years of WFH I didn't find it nearly as easy to mentally separate from work. Leaving the office at 4pm does that much more effectively. I went back to working at the office as soon as it was possible.
As for locations: - Coffee shops are noisy and staying there multiple hours is both inappropriate, you could have power issues, wifi issues related to speed.
- Being outside requires some internet device which may not be reliable or fast, power issues again but I guess you could just have a backpack with a USB power bank. The sun makes it difficult to see, you need to find a table, bugs, animals, other people, rain, heat, cold, etc
I've tried these things. My home setup is dual 27 inches with a physical keyboard. This improves my performance greatly, maybe I could get used to a laptop but that would require an adjustment period.
Edit: note that I’m an individual contributor and not in any sort of management position - but I imagine this is how management types think.
Shameful.
Mentoring
Engineering a physical product. Maybe not the norm on this forum, but certainly the norm for many engineering jobs.
What a dystopic world we live when where "work" became the main, if not only, source of socialisation.
I use the hours I shaved off by not commuting for real socialisation
My parents met at work and I've made friends at previous position and remained friends with them. I also think that being in close proximity is important to me. For example people around the world travel home for the holidays instead of using a webcam. Since the cost and time of that travel is significant must there be a reason why it's important.
I spend far more hours at work than I have for socializing outside of work, with or without commutes.
In my case, our house has a room that is basically only big enough to be an office, and we have solar that means we barely pay for electricity. It's a no-brainer for me to save the time and money that would be sunk in a commute and just use that room for work. However, I can totally see how someone without that extra space would find an office important.
I think what would be optimal for society is if we could reclaim the space that is used for central, commuter offices and bring that space closer to home. Whether that's building more homes that have rooms specifically designed to be offices, or building coworking spaces in the middle of residential areas, we need to do something to eliminate commutes. The amount of pollution, accidental deaths, property damage, and wasted time inherent in people driving to work is insane. Technology is at the point where, for most office workers, the harm caused by commutes far outweighs the benefits of being in a centralized work environment.
If you're working from home, you should be writing off that office space come tax time, which should offset the utility cost.
Alas, most offices are optimized for 1) cost-per-person 2) modern looks and an open concept
My home is much better for working than my workplace is
But again, lots of messed up things in the real estate market of Austin generally; the residential market has essentially frozen up, with sellers unwilling to admit how much things have dropped, and the buyers unwilling to pay for houses they know aren't going to be worth that much in a year's time or less.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-10-17/california-...
If your company has enough employees that are interchangeable enough to organize teams based on the work preferences of the employees, you could probably make it work. But most companies don't have employees that are that interchangeable.
I'm on a split team, it's the same as remote except you can send DMs and create groups chats with some of the team IRL and you have multiplayer rooms join video calls.
daily status meeting over teams. jira for tasks. teams for chat if I have questions.
Also the cities are dying because the suburbians aren't commuting in!
Maybe it's not as simple as people want to make it out to be, and cities are more dependent on suburbs that simple YouTube videos want to admit.
Office workers: I want to work in the office AND I want you to work in the office as well.
So depending on the building it could be a huge cost to turn into livable residences, much less desirable ones that would offset the expense.
Not to say it can’t be done but it seems really hard.