E-Bikes

On Tuesday, October 27, 2020 at 7:22:30 PM UTC-7, sms wrote:
On 10/27/2020 7:04 AM, jbeattie wrote:

snip
The exodus of renters from the Bay Area is driving down rents. But
for-sale housing is still doing very well, and a lot of those former
renters are buying houses in outlying areas because they are able to
work remotely and many companies have said that they can continue to do
so even after the pandemic is over. It's a big saving in commercial
office space rent as well. The MTC (Metropolitan Transportation
Commission) for the Bay Area counties recently said that they want to
require 60% remote-working. This caused the mayors of San Francisco and
San Jose to go non-linear
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/mayors-of-sf-sj-push-back-on-parts-of-bay-area-climate-plan/2380797/.

Probably pushed by Blackstone or CBRE Group. I'd be pretty worried if I were in commercial office real estate in SF. One of my riding buddies is the CFO of a San Francisco based consumer product company that just walked away from a lease of very expensive space downtown because management learned that everyone could work from home. One of my insurance company clients is closing two business-park office buildings at different locations in California. It just calculated the rent penalty, paid and walked from five or ten year leases. Retail is suffering because of shut-downs, but it will come back -- one hopes. Office space is going to get cheaper. We have a full floor of an office tower and don't need it now, but we're locked in and the new owners aren't interested in negotiating -- which doesn't make sense since they're flipping the building and should want to avoid vacancies. https://www.wellsfargocenterportland.com/
Exactly.

The changes brought on by Covid-19 are not going to be temporary, they
are going to result in long-term changes to the way we live, work, play,
shop, and travel.

When someone says, “I can’t wait until Covid-19 is over and we can all
go back to exactly the way things were before,� they are not
understanding that there is going to be a new normal and things are not
going to return to the way things were.

The long-term effects of Covid-19 on housing, commercial office, and
transportation are something that commercial real estate owners, rental
apartment complex owners, public transit agencies, and YIMBYs are in
denial about, but they can't control market forces to the extent that
they'd like to believe.

It's amazing to listen to some clueless politicians who believe that
people want to rent apartments in tall apartment buildings forever and
take a public bus to work.

But the reality is the following:

1. Families, especially families with children, prefer to not live in
high-density housing, they like the suburbs and they'll endure long
commutes to own a home.
2. People don't really want to live right next to where they work.
3. People are unlikely to ride a public bus to work, it's too slow and
too inconvenient not to mention the health risks.
4. Remote-working is not going away.
5. Personal mobility is the future, whether it's electric cars, electric
bicycles, or on-demand driver-less shuttles.

Long term, the banks will have to foreclose on a lot of newer commercial
real estate and sell it at a loss to new owners who will be able to rent
at lower rates. Apartment complexes, other than new ones, are in better
shape since even with lower rents they will still be profitable.

Even before Covid-19, rents were falling and there was a glut of
unaffordable market-rate rental housing and developers were refusing to
build projects that were already approved by cities.

We were literally begging one huge developer to construct their approved
project but they said that they were not moving forward due to the
housing glut, labor costs, material costs, mitigation fees (which
legally cannot be set higher than the costs incurred by a city), the
cost of community benefits, inclusionary affordable housing
requirements, etc.. But even when we offered to look at helping them
with what we could, they said that it would still not cause them to
start construction.
If you try to force your way of thinking on others you are going to spend an appreciable amount of the rest of your life in prison. But that's OK with me. You can tell us about your rides while behind bars.