Posted on 06/07/2013 7:00:07 AM PDT by reaganaut1
SAN FRANCISCO — VISITORS have forever left their hearts in San Francisco. But leaving the rest of your body here isn’t so easy: there’s no place to live.
The City by the Bay is going through one of its worst housing shortages in memory. With typical high demand intensified by a regional boom in tech jobs, apartment open houses are mob scenes of desperate applicants clutching their credit reports. The citywide median rental price for a one-bedroom is $2,764 a month, but jumps to $3,500 in trendy areas.
One reason for the shortage? Me.
I’ve recently joined the ranks of San Francisco landlords who have decided that it’s better to keep an apartment empty than to lease it to tenants. Together, we have left vacant about 10,600 rental units. That’s about five percent of the city’s total — or enough space to house up to 30,000 people in a city that barely tops 800,000. I feel a twinge of guilt for those who want to settle in this glorious city but can’t find a flat. But after renting out a one-bedroom apartment in my home for several years, I will never do it again. San Francisco’s anti-landlord housing laws and political climate make it untenable.
My partner and I bought our home in the city’s Castro neighborhood in 2004. We live upstairs and there’s a smaller rental downstairs. At first we had wonderful tenants, and the income helped make our mortgage payments more affordable.
Then we rented to a man who began as a good neighbor, but who soon became a nuisance — and who eventually became destructive and dangerous. It started one night when the tenant forgot his keys and rang our doorbell at 2 a.m. until we let him in. Then it happened again and again and again.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“...My partner and I bought our home in the city’s Castro neighborhood in 2004...”
Maybe he should grow up and marry a woman instead of hanging out with faggots in faggotown.
Thank the Lord for a small, paid in full house in a non-demented area (generally speaking). They can keep their high dollar rental birdhouses in the chity dwellings.
“I’ve recently joined the ranks of San Francisco landlords who have decided that it’s better to keep an apartment empty than to lease it to tenants.”
This is nonsense. Landlords don’t keep apartments empty, even where there are really bad tenant ordinances that are stacked against the landlord. It’s just not financially viable to pay the mortgage on a rental property if you are not renting it out.
“Together, we have left vacant about 10,600 rental units. That’s about five percent of the city’s total”
This demonstrates my point. Five percent vacancy is well within the natural range of vacancy in the apartment market. Three to five percent of the apartments in any area are usually vacant, not because landlords don’t want to rent them, but because they can’t lease them quickly enough to avoid some vacancy. There is no trend of landlords intentionally not renting, or the number would be higher.
See the Movie Pacific Heights, starring Michael Keaton and takes place in San Francisco.
He played the Ultimate “Problem Tenant” whose ultimate goal was to push the Landlord into an action that would allow him the ‘take’ the house legally. In the movie he failed but the tactics and extreme legal ramifications were discussed very frankly.
Look for the city to either commandeer or compel people to rent out their property through further fascist regulations. I wouldn’t put it passed them in this day and age.
There is an easy way to handle tenants
Put in a high rent in the paper (in this cast $3000 a month should do) and then tall people who come to see that the rent is only $2500 - but you are VERY STRICT, you demand first, last, deposit, license, credit report, on-site inspecions on demand and signing a WAIVER OF THOSE STUPID RIGHTS - its amazing how many people will.
And if you are not intending to screw them yourself, then it is a win-win for all.
Beat me! Great minds think alike. Oh yes, personally I hated the movie. But I watched it because of the premise and learned a lot from it.
9.6....... the Biggun
That will solve all the problems
Maybe he should grow up and marry a woman instead of hanging out with faggots in faggotown.
When you understand that marxists want to abolish private property, this makes perfect sense. They can’t seize it just yet, as they would like to, so they put restrictions on it so that it isn’t private property any more but we can enjoy the illusion that we actually ‘own’ something while we let the government confiscate a portion of it each year in what are called ‘property taxes.’
—yep—thirty years ago when I lived there , it was already known by tenants that you could get away with about a ‘free’ year by starting the “protest” process-—
If you check out padmapper, 2 bedrooms in SF run from 3000 to 5500. Which is nuts. I don’t get how people afford it; while rent control in old buildings men’s some people are paying little, I don’t get where the people with enough money to rent those places are coming from. You’d have to make 250k+ to actually afford those places. Either people who want to live in so-so apartments are richer than I thought, or they are sacrificing retirement savings and any hope of savaging up enough to buy a home.
...and don't mind stepping in human excrement on the sidewalks, fending off panhandlers, putting up with druggies at every turn, and worst of all existing in the "political climate" that produced everything Scott rales against in this article.
I couldn't wait to get as far away as possible from "Everyone's Favorite City". The last time I was there I left with the first throbbing headache I had had in years.
Every complaint launched in this article results from the mad atmosphere of "liberalism" that pervades San Francisco.
Housing prices are just ludicrous. I pay less than $1500 a month mortgage (including taxes) on a 2900 sq ft $300,000 new home in Texas. You people of the left and the other left coast are just nuts.
“2 bedrooms in SF run from 3000 to 5500. Which is nuts. I don’t get how people afford it”
They afford it by having 4 or 5 roommates. I guess that’s OK if you’re 22 and “finding yourself” in SF, but once puberty is completed it gets unbearable.
Plus in Texas you can shoot hookers when they don’t put out...
You must not have read the article (I KNOW!! THIS HAPPENS ON FR? LOL)
It’s a lower small apartment in the home they live in.
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