39% of SF’s New Condos Owned by Non-Residents
Peter Lawrence Kane
The Bold Italic
September 29, 2014
Over the summer, New York Magazine conjectured that there is a wide swath of Manhattan’s Midtown East where most apartments remained uninhabited for upwards of 10 months out of the year. The largely-foreign owners principally resided elsewhere, maintaining a pied-à-terre in NYC for tax purposes or the odd jaunt through town. Not coincidentally, this is the same neighborhood where most of the next wave of glassy, skyline-altering supertalls is set to go up.
If New York has a housing crisis, San Francisco has a housing emergency – and it turns out the same deadening trend is afoot here. The inimitable 48 Hills did a herculean amount of grunt work at the Tax Assessor’s office and determined that, of 5,212 market-rate condos in 23 buildings (nearly all in SoMa/South Beach and constructed after 2000), absentee owners control 39%. For some buildings, it’s even worse: at the St. Regis, at 188 Minna St., 63% of the owners don’t actually get their mail there.
Just because someone maintains a San Francisco address as their second (or third, or fourth) home doesn’t mean the space necessarily languishes; it’s entirely possible some of these units are investment properties that get rented out (at exorbitant rates, of course). But when a condo is owned by a winery or a software company as an executive aerie, it’s not very likely to contribute much, and ghost neighborhoods with no one in them will start to wither like those oxygen-free dead zones in the Pacific. By proving that barely half of market-rate housing houses actual San Franciscans, the 48 Hills story is thus a direct hit on Mayor Lee’s strategy of “build housing, any housing, to alleviate the shortage.” It’s not working.
....
Investigation: New condos aren’t owned by San Francisco residents
By Darwin Bond Graham and Tim Redmond
48hillsonline.org
September 29, 2014
...
According to supply and demand theory, projects like The Brannan and Millennium Tower add to the total stock of housing, and should help to ease prices across the overall housing market by satiating the demand of high-income San Franciscans for space in the city.
But rather than satisfy some demand for housing at the top of the market and alleviating the city’s affordability crisis, San Francisco’s luxury condos instead are being purchased by wealthy buyers who have a virtually bottomless appetite for super-exclusive real estate. Many of these buyers don’t live in San Francisco; their city condos are second, or third homes, a 48 hills analysis of property records shows.
We reviewed Assessor’s Office records for 5,212 condos in 23 buildings, most built after the year 2000, all of them market-rate residences. We found that absentee owners control approximately 2,034 of these condos – about 39 percent of the total. (We identified absentee owners as having a listed address that is different than the condo residence.)
In some buildings, the number of absentee owners is above 60 percent.
Many of these condo owners are wealthy Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, Marin County lawyers and doctors, and East Bay executives with sprawling multi-million dollar houses in ritzy zip codes like Los Altos Hills, Sausalito, and Lafayette. Some live as far away as New York City, Hawaii, and Hong Kong. It’s unclear how much time they spend in their San Francisco condo homes, or if the properties sit empty much of the year.
Some might be rented out to full time residents, but San Francisco doesn’t keep records sufficient to identify rental units.
We did find some units from the buildings we examined listed on Airbnb and VRBO – for as much as $6,000 a night. Which doesn’t do a whole lot for the city’s affordable housing crisis.
....
“This data points to the irony that when discussing the eviction crisis in San Francisco, so many, including so many in tech, are quick to assert that development is the solution,” said Erin McElroy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. New development for absentee owners does not solve the housing shortage, especially for poor and working-class residents.”
....
But gains in wealth and income for the top one percent aren’t trickling down to the majority of San Franciscans. Instead stagnation of wages and spiking home prices and rents are fueling a housing crisis. San Francisco continues to see an exodus of households earning less than $100,000 a year.
And based on the data we’ve compiled, it’s hard to argue that Mayor Ed Lee’s policy – which calls for building unlimited market-rate housing – is going to do much for the affordability crisis. “This is critically important information, and it makes the trickle-down argument for housing absolutely absurd,” longtime activist Calvin Welch told us. “For Ed Lee to talk about a city for the 100 percent is an easy and stupid formulation, since he’s building housing only for the 1 percent.”
....
Prev
Linear Mode
