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...

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.

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?

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.

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...

> 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.

* 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.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2111-Hyde-St-401-San-Fran...

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!

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.

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?

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...).

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.

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.

Converting office space into affordable housing is a win for everyone, except the landlords, but I won't shed a tear for them ;-)

She's now retired, lives on a social security check, and is living independently at age 86 because she's an abuela in her community. 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.

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.

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?

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.