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.
It’s far bigger than the mayor, of course. This is what happens when the global economy caters to the whims of the 0.01%: incredible pressure on actual residents, even the garden-variety rich, while construction skews towards ultra-luxury projects that idle for want of use. Like New York, London, Hong Kong and other meccas of the global elite, San Francisco is now a player at the top levels. But with one-tenth of the population, we feel it harder.