Markets, Rent and WFH

https://macrocrunch.substack.com/p/markets-rent-and-wfh

by macrocrunch • 6 years ago

98 151 6 years ago

macrocrunch.substack.com

itake• 6 years ago

Many people I talked to in the bay area temporarily left b/c housing is unnecessarily expensive and the apartments there are not great to WFH.

Most of those people fully plan on returning to SF once their offices open back up, because they feel that they need to be in the office in order to grow their career.

I think its a bit presumptuous that tech workers are perm leaving the city.

coliveira5• 6 years ago

I agree that career grow will require living close to HQ, but some people don't care too much about career growth and prefer to live in a place they like. So I suspect that many people will never return.

jdxcode• 6 years ago

I think people with that mentality were unlikely to live in SV in the first place

caogecym• 6 years ago

If WFH becomes the new norm for a company, the concept of HQ would become irrelevant, companies I know are planning to fill physical work space with hotel seats, then you should be able to grow career via WFH no problem.

badfrog2• 6 years ago

I think its a bit presumptuous that tech workers are perm leaving the city.

The survey in OP suggests that they are, with two important caveats:

* This is obviously not even close to a representative sample of workers

* It's predicated on "if you had a choice", and we don't know how many people will actually have that choice

misun78• 6 years ago

This article doesn’t provide a baseline to compare the latest survey against? What percent of tech workers were already on the fence with regards to moving out before the pandemic hit?

base6982• 6 years ago

Anecdotal but:

6 of my 9 direct reports have asked about permenantly relocating.

marcosdumay3• 6 years ago

The most important caveat is that "they plan to". People fail to do all kinds of things that they plan to.

ixtli4• 6 years ago

For 15+ years I have noticed a certain set of people trying to make a claim that people are leaving or desire to leave "the cities" for the suburbs or rural areas in America. NYC growth has slowed since 2017, and certainly there will be a rush for cheaper housing as a result of COVID, but the physics that have driven people to urban centers hasn't changed at all.

lazerpants• 6 years ago

The Millenial generation is the largest birth cohort in the USA at this point. Their shifting preferences due to age may be very impactful on real estate generally, since many people are generally going through the same phases of life at the same time. This is likely one of the things that made urban real estate so desirable over the past decade too.

akamia2• 6 years ago

I've noticed the same thing and especially in tech. I have a few friends who are engineers and have this idea that if everyone went completely remote, cities would clear out as everyone rushed to buy acres of land in the country. I always find it a bit funny that these friends are also the ones who seem to have the most city oriented lives. They are going out to bars and restaurants all the time. They get their coffee from local artisanal coffee roasters and their beer from the many local microbreweries. They don't seem to recognize that the cities they think people want to flee offer more than just career opportunities.

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

but the physics that have driven people to urban centers hasn't changed at all.

I'd actually argue that one thing that has changed is that companies are much more amenable to at least part-time work from home. I agree the economic forces that have concentrated wealth and opportunity in cities hasn't and isn't changing, but I do think it will be much more viable for people to work at jobs where they only go in to the office, say, twice a week. In that situation I think a lot of people would be much more willing to live further out because traffic (a punishing factor in most cities) then becomes much less of an issue.

pocw• 6 years ago

Most tech companies are allowing company-wide WFH for the rest of the year and in come cases permanently. That's tens of thousands of people who can be elsewhere for at least 6 months and possibly forever. That seems like a change in the "physics" of the magnetism that has drawn people to SF and the bay area for decades. A lot of people who had to stay in the area due to work but who have been considering a move are taking the opportunity to relocate to places with lower cost of living.

Add that to the thousands of layoffs at startups over the last few months (and a presumed hiring slowdown), as well as thousands of H1B holders who are reassessing life choices. There could be a serious shift in housing supply and demand in the bay area. Oh let's also not forget the huge impact the pandemic is having on the service and hospitality industries.

I think we could see a long-term reversal of the trend of 15% annual rent increase in SF.

rhacker2• 6 years ago

The physics, specifically, are high paying remote jobs. That's the thing that is specifically changing with Covid. As to the points being made about artisanal coffee shops not in rural areas? That's the exact thing that changes when you have urbanites moving to small towns. They start restaurants, bars and coffee shops.

marcosdumay3• 6 years ago

For ~60 years the "physics" that drive people into large urban centers has been changing, with the changes getting much faster at the last ~20 years.

I really don't think there's enough evidence to say the change is on the direction of people abandoning cities (but the largest ones already slowed down their growth to a minimum). But it's unreasonable to expect the COVID changes to be undone. Things change slowly because people resist changes; but once they change, people will resist reverting them.

base6982• 6 years ago

but the physics that have driven people to urban centers hasn't changed at all.

Other than being unable to do anything social and a large portion of restaurants/cultural opportunities are ceasing to exist?

I'm not paying $4000/month to get lukewarm food delivered at 20% markup.

JMTQp8lwXL• 6 years ago

If you're living somewhere with a third the cost of SF, is it necessary to further your career growth? Outside the city, people will realize there's more to life than high tech and lean into the "life" portion of work-life balance.

ironman1478• 6 years ago

I think if you enjoy your job enough, then yeah. Some people just really like their job and org enough to dedicate extra time to it and that's fine (as long as their paid proportionally, don't work for free). I don't love my job and tech that much though

josh2600• 6 years ago

There are salary adjustments when you leave urban areas like SF.

notyourwork2• 6 years ago

It's hard to generalize what everyone wants. Not everyone wants the same things in life.

closeparen2• 6 years ago

There is also more to life than big cheap houses. People to meet and things to do with them, for example. A pleasant and engaging public realm.

jcims• 6 years ago

Career growth slides up and down the priority stack for many as they go through life. For young folks just getting started, absolutely. For folks that are 15-20 years in, starting to plateau in comp, have a family, maybe have some parents that need care, etc, career growth can start to fall away as a major motivator.

temp231239• 6 years ago

I am really happy that people who always wanted to work remotely outside of crowded and overly expensive cities now have an opportunity to do that.

I also remember seeing in news some states mandating quarantine for people moving b/w states. I wonder if that is intended to deter people from making such move out of cities which can lead to the collapse of the cities businesses.

ghaff7• 6 years ago

It's the more rural areas that are putting requirements on people coming into their states, not cities/states keeping people from leaving. (And the requirements I'm aware of may weekend getaways harder but they're not a real barrier for someone making a long-term move.)

baddox• 6 years ago

Is it really so easy to move out in the few short months since the pandemic hit? I wonder if these people were living in a shared housing situation and didn't have a lease or a lot of physical possessions to worry about. I'm in downtown SF and have been considering moving somewhere in the Bay Area where I can step outside and not be in a literal and figurative cesspit, but it's really not easy. Or maybe I'm just getting old and have too much furniture. I certainly can't imagine just hopping out of town when the pandemic hit and then hopping back once it blows over.

ghaff7• 6 years ago

I've probably always had too much stuff. It's admittedly easier these days to have more possessions be small and digital. But moving has always been a major operation for me. Certainly not something I was going to undertake casually for a few months.

seangrogg2• 6 years ago

Anecdotal, but I was actively looking to get out of FAANG for a fully WFH position and managed to get one. About a month and a half later - with my lease coming due - I left San Jose. No need to pay the exorbitant rent and taxes and get peanuts in return.

seibelj• 6 years ago

High-taxation states that rely on their highest-income citizens to pay for massive pension obligations and bureaucracy are in for a rude awakening. Short of making it illegal to move out-of-state, I don't see how they can stop this from blowing a hole in their finances. I consider this a good thing - it (hopefully) will enforce some fiscal discipline - and the fallout will be interesting to watch.

cptroot• 6 years ago

I mean, doesn't California tax you even if you live somewhere else but work in California?

badfrog2• 6 years ago

If you physically work in California yes. I don't know what happens if you work for a company whose HQ is in California but you're physically in a different state.

beaner• 6 years ago

Would be interesting to hear the answer if anyone knows it.

steffan2• 6 years ago

People will just transfer to satellite offices / companies will establish a presence outside of California. I'm sure at some point the CA legislature will attempt to tax any "work that has a material benefit to a California business", but that is a shaky legal argument.

proverbialbunny• 6 years ago

California will not tax you if you live out of state, but if you have anything registered in CA, like you have a car registered in CA, or you own property in CA, like are a landlord, then CA will want you to pay taxes as if you live there, because the state can't identify if you live there or not.

coliveira5• 6 years ago

NYC already has arrangements for this. Since a lot of people live in NJ and CT, they have city taxes that apply to people working there and living in other states. I believe most states with high tech industry will do just that. It is not a difficult problem to solve like some people imagine.

koolba2• 6 years ago

The city taxes are based upon the number of days you spend in NYC above a minimum (14-days). If you work from home from a different city / state, you won't pay city tax if you never travel to NYC.

tomnj• 6 years ago

This is not correct. Non NYC residents with NYS source income do not pay NYC (resident) tax, But they do pay NYS tax.

See https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/personal-income-tax-...

programmertote• 6 years ago

I live in NJ and work in NYC. I don't need to pay the city tax. I only have to pay the state tax. Your understanding of this is inaccurate.

ed25519FUUU• 6 years ago

I just hope the fallout doesn’t “fall out” before I get a chance to move first!

d3ad1ysp0rk• 6 years ago

This assumes that the states that fund pensions and "bureaucracy" (which is a term that often is used for gov spending regardless of efficiency) are not desirable places to live in general (sometimes as a result of spending). As a separate point, California doesn't even hit the top 20 states by per capita spending. [1]

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Total_state_government_expenditures

qppo3• 6 years ago

Wealth transfer/vacancy taxes are one proposed solution. There's a guy running for mayor in Berkeley that wants to impose a wealth tax for example, and his scheme to prevent people from moving is to charge massive exit taxes to get their money anyway. Which I doubt would hold muster in any court, but who knows.

No idea on the specifics.

fzeroracer3• 6 years ago

Personally, I think people that move to lower-taxation states are going to be in for a rude awakening when they realize how poorly funded local infrastructure is and how much they took for granted.

Speaking as someone that's lived all across the US, I don't think people understand how dire even the major non-coastal cities can be.

rhexs• 6 years ago

While I understand this was most likely posted in a fit of brief anger, the non-coastal areas are not a desolate wasteland.

ralfhn2• 6 years ago

Interesting. Can you give some examples of things you take for granted in a costal city that you don't get in a major non-coastal one?

what does "local infrastructure" mean here? because I know schools, for instance, are way worse in coastal cities with high taxes than, say, the midwest.

ratfaced-guy• 6 years ago

This is funny because I have found this to be the exact opposite. Utah, Florida, Texas has better infrastructure than California, New York, Massachusetts. Are some low-tax states shitholes? Yes, but there are definitely low-taxation states that are well run. It really has nothing to do with the rate of taxation (beyond a certain point), it's more about the quality of government and the priorities of where the spending should go.

njsubedi• 6 years ago

More companies are now hiring remote staff, so this is certainly going to have a long term effect. The rent might keep dropping, and at some , will there be an equilibrium because more people might start moving in because of the reduced cost of living?

x87678r• 6 years ago

Yeah if housing dropped to something sensible I'd probably move there. Which is why they'll never be sensible. :)

SpicyLemonZest• 6 years ago

Not necessarily. Detroit, for example, just stopped having people show up after it stopped booming. I certainly think it's possible to reach a new equilibrium, but I don't know if SF is going to manage it.

conanbatt• 6 years ago

Human behavior is always complex and is rarely capture merely by a single number like "Rent".

Yes, rent is the #1 problem in San Francisco and maybe even California, but it is high because there is a lot of demand. Even building a million units might not make a serious dent in the rent pricing, because as the housing quality would improve more people would move in, and end up like New York: high rents and high density.

There are some unique features of the SF market: 25% of immigrants that will show a different elasticity (they literally cannot move to another state, it would be illegal), but at the same time immigration hostility means that people running out of visas will not be renewed, and then the general situation that moving out is more cumbersome, risky, and uncertain meaning it happens a lot less.

I wouldn't count on this to mean that rents will crash a lot more, but there might be a new equilibrium that is a bit lower.

raiyu• 6 years ago

A lot of companies didn't take remote work seriously. They used it for small teams and specific areas but as the pandemic forced everyone to adopt WFH and remote every company has had to become efficient at it.

I think a lot of the survey is accurate. There will be a lot of people that decide to permanently relocate. It's already visible in the market data from rent because even as people are considering leaving, the second side of the equation is that people have stopped moving in.

These two factors together will create a shift whereby for the next two years rents will drop, however after that, as the world moves forward and recovers, SF will ultimately rebound as other metro areas as well.

This will be a short term solution, to a long term problem, in that there isn't enough housing supply in SF for the next decade unless this trend is permanent, which I don't believe that it is.

xfour• 6 years ago

Yea, I have a similar take on it that as this WFH drags on, I mean most companies have said until the end of the year. It's been 4 months and feels like forever, add at least another 6 months and we're going to back into the new normal.

If for example Newsom or SF pushes back dates or asks for draconian style "masks all times, 2 people per conference room" or whatever vs. what has been forced to "work fine" for all these companies, people will just realize this is silly to try and put the "genie back in the bottle".

Status quo pull works against returning to offices I believe more and more as this drags on.

ixtli4• 6 years ago

I've lived in NYC for nearly 10 years, have no plans to leave, and would really, really welcome a rent or apartment price reduction. However, I've been promised this magical thing every time there's some sort of disaster or terrorist attack and it never seems to happen! Curious!

Sarcasm aside, when we will we start to hold people like this accountable for the implicit and explicit predictions that are so easy to make? How can we even evaluate if this ever came to pass?

chadlavi2• 6 years ago

As a fellow New Yorker, I think probably a much bigger impact for us is tourism and foreign wealth parking. People coming to NYC and staying in AirBnBs and Russian/Chinese/Saudi wealth dropping cash for properties to give their children pieds-a-terre have a way bigger impact than other middle/upper-middle income tech workers.

pclmulqdq• 6 years ago

I'm also in NYC. If AirBnB went under, the real estate market here would be in deep trouble.

1MoreThing• 6 years ago

There's pretty robust housing market data out there.

Anecdotally, an apartment in my building in SF with the exact same layout as mine (I got new terms and re-signed the lease in May) is now renting 10% cheaper than I signed two month ago.

pureagave• 6 years ago

I left my apartment in SF in May and they now have it listed for about 15% less than I was paying and they are tossing in a $1k move in bonus.

pcurve• 6 years ago

I don't live in NYC, but NYC will always be a desirable place to live, especially for older population. It's an epicenter for culture. It's a popular tourist destination. It's a home to old money. It has 2 giant international airports nearby. Barring some catastrophic environmental or natural event that makes it undesirable to live, I personally feel people will always want to live in NYC. It's an icon, like Paris and London.

neutronicus2• 6 years ago

It's hard to observe what happens in real terms

Even if NYC rents don't go down, they can go up [faster] elsewhere driving nation-wide inflation, effectively reducing NYC rents. I don't know one way or the other whether this has happened but it's something to keep in mind before scoffing at historical predictions of rents going down in NYC

bluntfang2• 6 years ago

I've lived in NYC for nearly 10 years, have no plans to leave, and would really, really welcome a rent or apartment price reduction.

If you aren't willing to leave, you aren't negotiating.

ixtli4• 6 years ago

This is not true. I currently live in a really nice apt that I rent. My landlord hasn’t substantially raised my rent in 3 years. I will eventually buy once I find something that motivates me but what actually empowers me to negotiate buying is that I’m content to walk away from the table. I don’t have to change my living conditions right now even if I would really like to.

rhacker2• 6 years ago

I don't understand the post-covid question. If they are moving away from the bay area, are they planning on driving 2 to 3 hours a day to get to the office to show up?

chaostheory• 6 years ago

If they only have to show up 1-2 days a week or 1-2 days a month, yes. This is what happened at one of my old companies in the SF Peninsula. Most of the employees lived in Walnut Creek or further. This was pre-COVID.

Not everyone wants to move out of California, but there are a lot of people who don't want live in the Bay Area; but want it easily accessible during the weekends.

VBprogrammer• 6 years ago

I think it's reasonable to assume that most companies will have a different attitude to work from home after COVID-19. Whether that translates to 100% remote is an option for anyone who asks for it I'm not completely convinced. If it does it will certainly change my long term plans in a number of different ways.

maire• 6 years ago

I have a rental property in Santa Cruz county that came up for rent in June. I talked to the property manager about the rental market and he said he was getting calls from people who work in San Francisco but want to live in Santa Cruz! So yes - Santa Cruz is benefiting from the new work at home policy.

andy_ppp2• 6 years ago

I’m really worried that we haven’t even seen the start of this financial unraveling yet. I’m sure tech workers like us will be okay, but essentially everything else is broken. If the rest of the economy is falling apart tech won’t be far behind. Is there anything that can alleviate my concerns?

troughway2• 6 years ago

A bit of therapy might help. Getting off of HN and other sources that cause you anxiety would be a good start.

Der_Einzige• 6 years ago

Such a terrible response to someone venting out their economic anxieties.

noodlenotes• 6 years ago

The underlying assumption in your comment is that worrying is bad.

Worrying is a great thing! When I get in the car, I worry I might have a car accident, so I wear a seat belt and pay attention to the road.

Either you think OP's concerns aren't well-founded or you think their psychological way of dealing with worry is bad. Since you don't know OP and OP is questioning the former, why not address the question "should we be worried about the economy?" rather than tell OP to go to therapy?

andy_ppp2• 6 years ago

I think you're suggesting that a great depression isn't the most likely outcome of the current crisis, to say that maybe my fears are unfounded because X, is fine, but to say I need psycological help because I see an outcome down the road that I think a lot of people see coming [1].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/14/ray-dalio-on-coronavirus-eff...

To be fair that article gives a more rounded view - it might be bad for 5 years but we always recover. No need to worry about the huge US debt or a death spiral as things unravel!

jedberg4• 6 years ago

The US economy is fairly diverse and adaptable. While a lot of jobs you are used to have or will disappear, new jobs will take their place. It's already happening.

I just saw an ad for a "contactless remote video broadcast studio". It's like an RC cart with a pro camera and teleprompter. Someone comes in a van and drops it at your front door, and then it gets remotely driven around your house until they find the filming spot. Then the director controls it remotely while directing you.

So we have the "camera delivery driver" and "cart maintenance" jobs that were created. That business will also need vans to drive the equipment around. And the director gets to keep their job and so does the actor.

There will for sure be a lot of short term pain as people adjust to the new reality, but the jobs will shift and people will come up with new ideas. The existing diversity of our economy will help a lot.

paulcole• 6 years ago

So we have the "camera delivery driver" and "cart maintenance" jobs that were created.

How many jobs were lost to create 2 jobs? The cameraman? The union goes who do lighting, sound, etc.? The support staff for the on-site crew?

0_____02• 6 years ago

I'm not sure how seriously I would take survey data from Blind. IME Blind's population tends to be the crankiest and most reactive people in tech. It's not surprising that they're unhappy on the whole.

magneticnorth3• 6 years ago

The author says the stock market rallies are "Not suprising when you take into consideration the amount of liquidity being injected into markets by the BOJ, ECB, FED and PBOC."

Have we ever seen this happen before - either in the US or another country in a similar circumstance? What are the medium- and long-term consequences of this amount of liquidity being artificially introduced?

I'm finding the longer-term market behavior basically impossible to predict & understand; I expect I'm not the only one but would love it if anyone can shed some light on what to expect in the next few years.

anthony_r• 6 years ago

Every single metric points to low returns, probably even negative over the next 5-10 years: CAPE, average investor allocation to stocks vs bonds, bond yields themselves, market cap / GDP, basic demographics. That is all without even considering covid and the response to covid.

credit_guy2• 6 years ago

Cheap money is addictive. Japan has had cheap money (basically zero interest rates) for decades. It appears very difficult for them to get out of that place.

Cheap money (very low interest rates) means cheap mortgages, and in turn this means high real estate prices. So high that you produce a trap. Housing becomes an investment vehicle, and increasing rates means you are destroying savings for millions and millions of people. Millions of people who are politically active. Whatever measures someone tries to enact that result in their real estate depreciation, they'll make sure to oppose.

Raising interest rates then requires fortitude. Generally, a developed country's central bank is independent of the other branches of the government (executive, legislative, judiciary). It has so much power, that it should be recognized as the fourth branch - monetary. Being led by technocrats who, in principle, should not care about voting arithmetics, the central bank should not hesitate to raise rates when the economic stimulus is not needed anymore.

But theory is theory, and practice is practice. In real life, you may have a president who threatens the central bank governor via twitter, and the governor all of a sudden decides to cut rates instead of increasing them. And that was before Covid19.

Prediction (and not only mine): we'll be stuck with these close-to-zero or negative rates for decades to come.

That means real estate will continue to be sky-high. That kills mobility, that makes it hard for the young generation to get jobs in the main metropolitan areas.

Maybe working from home will be an antidote to that.

magneticnorth3• 6 years ago

Interesting the tie-in to real estate & mortgages - makes a lot of sense, thanks for elaborating.

qppo3• 6 years ago

Raising interest rates then requires fortitude

Like Paul Volcker, who did an immensely unpopular thing (soaring interest rates that caused unemployment in the short term) but ultimately created a much stronger economy.

davidw4• 6 years ago

Japan has very much not treated homes as an investment vehicle though.

https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

I do have some recollection of commercial real estate being bonkers there for a while, so maybe they've managed to treat one as an investment and the other as something necessary for people to live in.

davidw4• 6 years ago

Here's a chart:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

Many predicted doom and gloom and massive inflation when this started during the last recession, but that never came to pass.

I have no idea what will happen, and am kind of wary of everyone trying to sell a story. There are a lot of doom & gloomers who predicted 8 of the last 3 recessions, as well as "this is fine" optimists too.

magneticnorth3• 6 years ago

Agree on being wary of everyone trying to sell a story. This is one of the things I love most about HN, though - people will often share very different thoughtful perspectives, with the sources & data to back it up.

Thanks for sharing your thoughtful perspective with the sources to back it up :)

freewilly1040• 6 years ago

My impression is that this response is basically a replay of the response to the 2008 crisis, perhaps on a bigger scale.

My prediction is that market behavior is going to be driven by politics. Wealth inequality was already intolerable and the consequences of this crisis are almost entirely falling on the working class. It is obscene that equity holders are doing as well as they are doing with the amount of unemployment we have at the bottom. The other shoe will drop.

marcosdumay3• 6 years ago

As long as financial instruments absorb the extra money, you won't see much happening on the real economy. Only the shadow of a huge finance tower with the involved people getting crazy (and always crazier) amounts of money that aren't available at the real side of things.

If people suddenly decide to cash-out, all hell breaks loose. But on a more realistic scenario, it only does so slowly, so make sure you are long on luxury goods.

12xo3• 6 years ago

SF has seen its economy and population ebb and flow a lot over the last 50 years. The city in the 70's was full of empty buildings and houses. Then the Gay boom of the 80's changed the population and gentrified a lot of the dilapidated communities. Then the Savings and Loan crisis led to another slump... Fast forward to the late 90's and everything was booming. Real estate exploded with the Dot Com boom. And then....

If you were around SF in 1999-2001, you know how fast things can change. There was a mass exodus back to the east coast. Rentals that used to garner 40 applicants were vacant. Things were ugly until a few years later when the next boom hit.

Will this one be any different? Maybe. They built a lot of office space but SF is and will always be a highly desirable city. Santa Clara or Fremont? Not so much...

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

If you were around SF in 1999-2001, you know how fast things can change.

I was, and I remember it being specifically noted in local media shortly afterwars that while the same was not true of some parts of the Bay Area, SF did not see a decline in housing prices as a result of the bust, though it did see a temporary decline in the rate of increase.

jedberg4• 6 years ago

The lack of decline in SF housing prices is deceiving. Landlords won't reduce the base rent because of rent control. Instead they'll leave units vacant or offer a few free months or $0 deposits.

So the stats might show a flatness in rental rates, but in reality there was a drop. And then as soon as the crisis is over, people want to move back and the rents start going up from that flat base rate after the incentives stop.

ghaff7• 6 years ago

Housing prices can be pretty sticky. A lot of owners would rather try to ride out a downturn rather than make a sale at a depressed price.

12xo3• 6 years ago

Well to be fair the interest rates were halved during the post 9/11 / dot.com bust. Which to many, is the reason the prices didnt fall as buying power increased.

et-al• 6 years ago

Mission San Jose High School in Fremont is one of the most competitive high schools in California. And there's great Indian and Chinese food in the area. So as boring of a mundane subdivision landscape it is, there's plenty of reasons why Fremont will still be desirable for parents in the Bay Area.

In general, the Bay Area has great weather, sailing and skiing, international airports, and that's enough to bolster demand for the long run.

12xo3• 6 years ago

Nothing wrong with civic pride but Fremont is not even going to be listed on the top 10000 most desirable places to live in California...

jedberg4• 6 years ago

I commented on this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23706268

"I think some of this is temporary. My friend just left NYC. They loved it there, but since everything is closed, there was no reason to stay. The bars, clubs, and restaurants were the main reasons they were there.

They figured they might as well save money and move back home with their parents until everything opens again. Then they'll probably go back.

I suspect things will pick up in SF as the bars and clubs and restaurants open again."

dang• 6 years ago

Related from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23705741

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