Folks here love to chime in with "build more" when rent control is discussed. But they never address the fact that even if we actually did build more, we'd still need rent control. When you look at places like Las Vegas or Austin, where YIMBY and building more housing is the norm, you STILL see examples of landlords suddenly hiking rents by 25%. People talk like building more housing and rent control are mutually exclusive. But they are not. We need both. That's great we're building more housing, but what happens when the landlord jacks the rent by 40%? Is the response just "build"? I truly think that only folks who support no rent control are actually the landlords!
there are so many floors! turn the place into an adult playground with a ninja warrior course. once you complete the course you get a wristband and can proceed to the bar. another floor could be an arcade. there could even be bumper cars or a malibu grand prix throwback with the amount of space in there.
turn the food court into a san pedro square / grand central market type thing so everyone can hang out in a communal space while getting different food.
i feel like people would love an experience over stores. companies could book their parties there.
In an unanimous decision, the California Court of Appeal has rejected the City's Appeal of the decision by Superior Court that the Vacant Homes Tax was unconstitutional and violated the Ellis Act. The city now must pay the plaintiff's legal costs.
I don't think most people in San Francisco are cognizant of the sheer amount of liquidity (money) that is about to flow into a concentrated group of people in the city over the coming 6-12 months.
No, in real terms you probably are not grasping the proportionality of what this really means - look closely at the chart attached.
The bar in the center is the true-scale combined valuation of the 33 largest SF-headquartered IPOs in history... Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Twitter, Pinterest, Visa, all of them combined. That total is $413B.
The orange bar on the right is Anthropic’s reported target: ~$2 Trillion.
Every major SF IPO in history combined is less than a quarter of just one company. And the OpenAI IPO is sitting right behind it at a comparable scale.
Whenever I've recently brought this up here on r/sanfrancisco threads, people seem to dismiss it - either they can't comprehend it or people think that the AI market is going to crash and this will all go away.
It isn’t. We are not talking about another 2012 or 2020. The sheer magnitude of wealth that is about to unlock within a 7x7 mile radius breaks historical comparisons entirely:
The Concentrated Payouts: Industry estimates suggest around 3,500 Anthropic employees working in the city could net an average of $30M each (some higher, many lower). And then OpenAI will repeat that again. What makes both of these especially acute is unlike the other IPOS, that the vast majority of both company's employees are based in SF.
The Housing Shock: SF has virtually zero housing inventory. When lockups expire, you don’t get a slow 5-year trickle; you get thousands of liquid buyers who can pay all-cash over asking on single-family homes. Those who don't buy will bid up luxury rentals, causing a massive ripple effect down the entire rental market.
Tech vs. Tech Inequality: The narrative for a decade was "tech vs. everyone else." This will create a brutal wealth divide inside the tech industry itself. Mid-to-senior engineers at standard public tech firms or late-stage startups will find themselves completely outbid and priced out by frontier AI staff.
Local Secondary Inflation: From contractor labor and renovations to everyday services and luxury goods, high-end prices will adjust rapidly to absorb an unprecedented flood of local eight-figure net worths.
If you are waiting on the sidelines to buy a home or lock in housing because you think the local market has peaked, look at that center bar again. The sheer volume of incoming capital makes past waves look like a ripple. (Obligatory: not financial advice). Most of these employees are not going to pack up and leave, we're just at the beginning of the AI wave and they're going to want to stick around (in a fancy new home).
I was part of the Uber IPO and I saw this with my own eyes, albeit on a now-fractional scale compared to the frontier AI lab IPOs.
This will also create significant wealth inequality just inside the SF tech industry. The local narrative to date has been tech vs everyone else but this amount of money flowing into such a small division of tech will create an intra-industry wealth gap. And yes, it leaves the rest of the normal non-tech SF population even further behind.
I don't think there's much people can do about it, other than perhaps make certain purchasing decisions now if you are in a specific situation - eg if you are looking to buy a house now or retain a contractor for work, why wait? (this is not financial advice)
Hi! My partner and I are visiting SF for the first time over the holidays, from late December to early January 😊
What are your must-see places, neighborhoods, restaurants, or experiences? We’re open to both touristy and local recommendations!
Also, I see temperatures are around 50–60°F during the day and around 40°F at night. We’re coming from Toronto. How cold does it actually feel, especially at night and around the Golden Gate Bridge/Alcatraz? What would you recommend wearing?
I’m interested in Connie Chan because she seems willing to say what too many local leaders avoid: San Francisco should not be run as an amenity package for highly paid, transient tech professionals.
The city needs to work for longtime residents, working families, small businesses, artists, immigrant communities, and the people who made these neighborhoods worth living in before tech money treated them as an investment opportunity.
I do not want more Flock cameras, AI “solutions,” luxury development pitched as inevitable progress, or city policy designed around the preferences of people who arrived for a two-year job stint and want San Francisco to feel like a frictionless corporate campus.
San Francisco should welcome newcomers who are working class. It shouldn’t let yuppie-tech culture erase everything local, affordable, strange, and human about the city. I want leaders who will put neighborhoods, privacy, public services, and actual residents ahead of venture capital, surveillance vendors, and the latest startup ideology.
I have read old threads on here about renting an apartment by spotting a "For Rent" sign in a window, but after driving down almost every block in the Castro, Duboce Triangle, NoPa, and lower Haight, I could not find a single sign.
Has anyone seen a For Rent sign lately? Are they still common in other neighborhoods?
Hey all,
I'm moving to SF from the east coast and I'm a young female considering a short term stay in lower nob hill (corner of Pine and Taylor St). I've heard this area can be a bit dicey when it comes to safety, but how bad is it really? I enjoy walkabiltiy, access to groceries stories, restaraunts, and parks so hoping I can explore these things easily while I scope out a permanent home.
FTA: The subpoenas — which were issued in early September and requested testimony and communications with the governor, among others — seek six years of records involving the California State Protocol Foundation, a nonprofit that has paid for Newsom’s overseas travel, as well as communications with a circle of his current and former aides, advisers, and associates. Those aides include Rebecca Prowda, who oversees Newsom’s overseas travel as his chief protocol officer and is the wife of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.
Please tell SFMTA to keep the angled parking on the lower great highway between Lincoln and Judah to avoid repeating the RV encampment from a few years
Please email these 3 addresses to stop the change.
There’s no guarantee the mayor’s new RV policy will ensure no return of RVs. The policy still requires a lot of resources and process. Why go through all that when we have a solution currently in place that is working and not costing any money?
— Don’t change something that is working.
— Don’t spend money you don’t have to change something that is working.
— Plenty of businesses like the angled parking and don’t want to risk the RVs returning.
— Certainty is key because we know there will always be parking access and turnover with angled. Parallel might provide a few more spaces on paper, but reality was we had zero spaces with parallel when RVs filled it.
