Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart by 3s933x7dpsh on Thursday July 21, 2016 @06:16PM (#12140460)

+1. If the problem is that absent foreign investors are buying up all the housing stock, maybe we should make a 100 story tower on some parking lot in SOMA and sell each floor as a $5M luxurious penthouse unit with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country. Boom, we just took a bunch of those foreign investors out of the market without increasing traffic and decreased the annual US trade deficit by 1% to boot.

Fundamentally, if people outside the country want to buy our housing, we should be happy about that, and create jobs by building housing to meet the demand. Imagine if our reaction to Chinese demand for Buicks was to limit car manufacturing and complain that foreign investors are making Buicks unaffordable.

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Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart by WildUtah on Thursday July 21, 2016 @08:14PM (#12140954)

"with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country."

If we could prevent them from getting a visa to come at all, we could do the same thing and we wouldn't even have to build the building. Just allocate a few address numbers on ritzy street corners and sell the "buildings" to investors stashing Russian or Chinese black market cash.

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Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart by int_19h on Thursday July 21, 2016 @08:40PM (#12141038)

Think about all the future and derivative opportunities, too...

Heck, we could do high-frequency house trading!

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Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart by 3s933x7dpsh on Thursday July 21, 2016 @08:47PM (#12141054)

Of course it's an absurd analogy, there would not be much value if there is no underlying property you can make use of. But I think it illustrates the point well: if the high prices were caused by absent foreign investors, 101 would not be jammed.

More realistically, investors rent out the properties they buy. So a market with tons of foreign investors spending irrationally would have an undersupply of homes to buy and corresponding oversupply of homes for rent. Renters would get a great deal and buyers would get bad ROI.

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Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart by brc on Friday July 22, 2016 @12:01AM (#12141625)

You could actually do that. If you sold options in an approved development with a five years delay in start time, you'd probably get in plenty of cash and not actually have any new residents. You could get a healthy market going in just the right to own an apartment in the future.

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Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart by seanp2k2 on Friday July 22, 2016 @02:53PM (#12145824)

China already had a big problem with empty housing and cities of empty housing http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/business/international/...

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