What Does the Future Hold for San Francisco?

how Dy it's Kyle talking about the future of San Francisco there are many major issues you've probably heard about that are affecting the city incredibly High housing costs lack of affordable housing a rising homeless population and many people moving from the city because of these reasons and more and as a result has been much discussion as to what might happen to this great City everything from apocalyptic scenarios like it'll become a Rust Belt type City kind of like Detroit was and its darkest days or people saying well so that's going to get back to normal eventually this is just a bump in the road so the reality is somewhere probably in the middle so here I want to discuss a lot of different scenarios that might happen in San Francisco based on the way things are going so let's take a look at what might be the future of San Francisco I have a previous video entitled San Francisco a city profile where I go over more of the details about the city including its neighborhood layout and walkability and things like that this video is going to be a little less formal but first a few basic stats about the city at the 2010 census the city had a population of eight hundred and five thousand at the 2020 census it was 874 000 and that's a growth of about 8.5 percent through the 2010s but since the 2020 census just in the past three years the city has lost about 7.5 percent of its population and is now estimated at eight hundred and eight thousand so essentially in just the past three years the city has lost its entire population growth of the 2010s and I wonder how many of these are the same people like folks that moved out there in the 2010s got kind of disillusioned with it and now since moved out but no matter how you look at it to lose over seven percent of your population in just three years that's really bad I think the initial thinking after 2020 and 21 was that many of these people that left to work remotely will come back eventually but what has actually happened is that many of these companies allow their people to work from home remotely wherever they were just move their company to somewhere else now they can just stay where they're at so here's essentially the number one problem why San Francisco is losing so much population at the time of me doing the editing this is the cheapest place I could find in the city however all the ones in the 400 000 range and lower are part of an income program you have to make less than a certain income to be qualified for this mortgage this is the cheapest one that I could find that was market rate 575 is really expensive but a big price cut and this is a lot less than this would have been two years ago this is the cheapest single family detached home I could find in the city that wasn't in a really rough neighborhood and despite how high this looks for people that don't live on the coast in California this actually is really cheap almost suspiciously cheap and here you have a one bedroom kind of fashionable place for 800 really expensive but you can tell by the looks of this one this geared more towards a luxury single person and here's one that would have been 1.2 1.3 million a couple years ago and this is another one that really isn't that much more than you would get in Seattle or Boston and look at this thing this thing is a beauty you would never have gotten this thing for under 1.5 million a couple years ago so this is the house price profile for one of the homes that I've shown and you can see that ridiculous spike in prices right after the pandemic but look how much it's crashed since all right well San Francisco was a young person kind of town so what about rent for rent all the ones I'm looking at are in pretty decent neighborhoods and this is the cheapest studio I could find this is the cheapest one bedroom I could find this is the cheapest ones I could find that was a duplex where you have your own little tiny yard this is the cheapest two bedroom two bathroom I could find so if you have a roommate this is nice you can each have your own bathroom I think what's going on right now is essentially people are in a bargaining war with some of these landlords and homeowners so where would be a stabilization price for homes there because if you could get home like this for four hundred thousand dollars in San Francisco there'll be a waiting list 10 miles long to get it but I know Economist I'm no real estate expert but there will be a price point that things kind of settle down and that people are willing to pay to live there but based on the most recent population numbers the housing prices are still too high people still are not willing to pay it okay so now let's talk about some of the specific scenarios that might happen to the city the first one I want to address is one that's basically impossible and that's the one that the haters want to see happen and that's basically an apocalypse hitting the city and the reason why this will never happen is because of what I was just saying if houses come down to a point where there's 300 400 000 there will be a huge rush on buying them so I'm going to flip through some listings in Detroit and I will always be willing to defend Detroit but to compare San Francisco to Detroit is a bit ridiculous you will never find listings like this in San Francisco and even with these being the prices you can buy a home in Detroit they are still not selling so the idea that San Francisco will become just one giant Wasteland is completely silly okay so what about the other extremes everything will be perfect one where nobody can afford to live there just the upper middle class and up and they might seem on the surface well San Francisco might just become kind of the rich neighborhood within the Bay Area however that wouldn't work because you would always need low-wage workers you have to have a full range of society in each City you can't just have upper middle class and rich people I doubt low-wage workers are going to commute 45 minutes one way to work in the city so forget the perfect Utopia everybody Rich San Francisco nor poor people and forget that it's going to be worse than Detroit 1975 apocalypse so it's not going to be one of those two what might happen I don't necessarily support all of these ideas these are just some I think are plausible one is just simply keep the status quo in perpetuity another option might be to do what I'm going to start calling toronifying and this is simply building a large number of really tall high rises that are basically nothing but housing but this brings us to the number one problem in terms of housing in San Francisco and that's space so you look at some of these images here and you can see that the ground is basically covered the entire way there's very high ground level density in the city although most of the buildings aren't very tall a good majority of the buildings in the city were built prior to 1950 back when there weren't quite the same engineering techniques for earthquake protection so many of the buildings are just two three or four stories but with it being so tightly packed at ground level you can't really infill with a lot of homes so if you're from the city or very familiar with it let me know if I'm wrong on this but I don't think there's anywhere in the entire Western half of the city where you can really fit much new housing all right so what about the northeastern quadrant of the city well the northeastern quadrant is probably the most well-known part of the city this is the downtown the financial district Chinatown North Beach Fisherman's Wharf it's also Market Street tenderloin and some of the really high homeless population areas and there's a little bit of space here but basically everything in the northeastern quadrant is filled in too you can squeeze in a few high rises here and there and they wouldn't look too weird because there are so many other high rises but this is not the part of town where you could toronify and then that brings us to the Southeastern quadrant of the city now San Francisco is very well known for having high property crime a lot of car break-ins and shoplifting but it is below average for a violent crime but with that being said the Southeastern part of the city is the part where you do have the highest violent crime rates and the poorest neighborhoods but it's also where you have the most space and if you really want to go all in on high density Toronto fine a lot of high-rise new housing you have to basically go to this part of town and that means the Big G so is San Francisco prepared to make its entire Bayshore basically like the lakefront in Toronto just high rises all down the Embarcadero all around the Giants baseball stadium the basketball arena all the way down to Hunter's Point you could do it and it would look pretty cool but you'd be forcing out a lot of poor people in that Southeastern part of the city but if the city does build say 30 new high-rises each one with a ton of housing that would create a big number of supply and would probably bring the prices down okay so here's the next scenario so many companies are leaving the financial district and some of these Offices Downtown why not repurpose all those empty offices into housing some of these Financial offices and Tech offices are pretty nice built well and it probably wouldn't take a whole lot to convert them into Apartments but in that scenario if all these companies were leaving then what would people that are moving there be doing and so perhaps another scenario is what I'm calling go back to the old San Francisco so say all these high six-figure jobs are leaving and City all these high-tech jobs all these Charles Schwab Wells Fargo financial jobs and if there aren't all these high wage Tech and financial workers and the cost of things won't be going up so rapidly and maybe some of Old San Francisco can afford to move back and when I say old San Francisco I mean the type of people that made San Francisco famous that were often the first people priced out when a tech wave came I'm talking all the musicians and artists and hippies and just all the weird people that made San Francisco this city that it is I can see the red hat make San Francisco weird again the next scenario is the one that I think is the best solution to the housing crisis and that is San Mateo County build some housing this county is notoriously NIMBY and it's really unfortunate because it's the bridge County between the two main anchors of this metro area and I've always said with the geography of San Francisco with it being surrounded by water on three sides and suburbs on the fourth at the onus of building new housing shouldn't just be on the city there really isn't that much room there but there's plenty of room in San Mateo County but if this County would build a lot more housing you would ease a lot of this pressure on San Francisco many of the folks that work in San Francisco don't really want to live there maybe they want to have a bigger house and a more Suburban type setting but there really aren't any options so if San Mateo County built houses and people that work in this hoodie could live in San Mateo because they don't want to live in the city anyway but I'm not sure how likely this is to occur it's not like the people in these counties are going to start voting for pro-growth candidates and besides San Francisco can't really rely on other counties to do things they do got to take care of themselves but it would be nice if some of these Suburban counties would actually build houses all right so now let's talk about the major homeless problem in the city I'm not going to dwell on this you've seen all the images you've seen all the sensationalist coverage by the media but nonetheless there is still a massive homeless problem in the city the bright red on the map is the tenderloin district and this is the part of town where you see the cameras show up the most where the most sensationalist journalism goes on I don't really know what percentage of the homeless are homeless because they can't afford rent or if they're people that would be homeless anyway even if housing was more affordable many other folks who are mentally ill or mentally challenged probably still wouldn't be able to get into a home if they were cheap but I'm sure if housing were cheaper it would get at least some of the homeless off the street if not a lot but I think even the bigger concern for San Francisco is the population loss so overall if I were a betting man and I'm not but I would put money on San Francisco's housing prices and rents to be continuing to come down for the next couple of years before people feel like the prices are reasonable to move back people are willing to pay a premium to live there but right now the premium is just too high I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give me a thumbs up to let me know that you approve And subscribe to this channel if you're interested in learning more about geography from a nerdy perspective but yeah thanks for watching geography King signing out I'd like to give a special thanks to my Superior patrons for their support if you're interested in purchasing a pin for the viewer wall map or just to support the Channel please check out my patreon page the link is in the description and as always thank you very much

Channel: Geography King

Views: 263,517

Keywords: geography, geography king, california, san francisco, homeless, housing, gentrification

Id: X5bkfxgX9Ho

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023