homesmillbrae.com

It’s no secret that Bay Area living is expensive, so much so that many people are leaving or coming up with some very creative solutions. If you’ve ever searched for a new apartment online, you’ve undoubtedly come across a place where the images make your jaw drop at the photos and price – and NOT in a good way. Even as rent has hit a historic decline in San Francisco, I’m here to remind you that the median two-bedroom rent is still more than double the national average. Welcome to the series we’re calling, “Guess how much this rents for in San Francisco.”

This three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment just steps from Lands End in San Francisco is for rent on Craigslist.

Article source: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/slideshow/3-bedroom-apartment-Lands-End-rent-san-francisco-224081.php

How appropriate would it be if the Giants (or maybe the A’s), 49ers and Warriors all win championships, back-to-back-to-back? The Super Bowl and NBA Finals will be in 2022, but for our purposes here, 2021 would get credit for the achievement.

Why would such a sweep be appropriate? The Warriors, Giants, A’s and 49ers all represent game-changing innovation, here in the world capital of creativity and forward thinking, so a three-ring year would be no fluke.

It won’t be easy. Each of the Bay teams has a window of opportunity, and in the modern sports world, windows open and shut like the hatches in Whac-A-Mole. So our teams will have to be quick on their feet, reactive and hyper-aware of the opportunity. Like hungry leopards stalking their prey.

The Sharks, by the way, are welcome to join the party. Oddsmakers believe the Sharks will be bottom feeders, down in the bottom third of the league. But those are the same oddsmakers who are about to make a lot of faithful Giants fans very wealthy.

Breaking it down:

Giants: This is the poster team for the current world climate, when nothing (including the climate) makes any sense. The Giants are the Winchester Mystery Team (they do hold territorial rights to San Jose).

The Giants also are legitimately good. They’ve had plenty of injury problems, yet they refuse to go away. Farhan Zaidi was a disappointment to fans who wanted the Giants to hire a microwave chef. Zaidi is a slow-cook guy, maddeningly patient, taking days to bring that rack of ribs to perfection.

Zaidi and his bosses and aides might not have anticipated the Giants would lead MLB at the midway point, but they’re smart enough to know that this has become an opportunity season, not a building year.

Approaching the trading deadline, the Giants are looking for a starting pitcher and a hitter who can play left field (aka: a hitter). They won’t give away all their prospects, but they will be aggressive.

If the Giants pull it off, the world will have to recognize that Zaidi has created a master blend of new-school analytics and old-school hardball instinct. And that in Gabe Kapler, the Giants have found a guy who can translate that exotic blend to the dugout.

A bonus: At a time when billionaire owners are shaking down cities for massive subsidies for ballparks, the Giants would be beating everyone in a park they built with their own damn money.

A’s: We can’t sleep on the A’s. For one thing, we’re praising innovation here, and the A’s did pioneer what is now mainstream, analytics-driven baseball. And they’re still pretty good at that game, though not good enough to excuse their skinflint payroll.

How Billy Beane and David Forst use their “Moneyball” skills in the next couple of weeks will be telling. The A’s need bullpen help, which they tend to be really good at getting.

Then it’s just a matter of fate. With Elvis Andrus and Matt Chapman now hitting, and Mark Canha returning to his leadoff role, this is a dangerous team.

Added reason for optimism: Team ownership is trying to swing a massive real-estate deal. They need all the public support/sympathy they can get, and nothing captures the hearts of fans and politicians like winning a championship, or at least getting close. The 49ers built Levi’s Stadium by riding the momentum of the Jim Harbaugh kick-ass era. The Warriors don’t build Chase Center without the crazy success of Steph and the fellas.

If the A’s do decide to move, a run to the World Series would do wonders for John Fisher’s bargaining position with the rubes — I mean, the aggressive business leaders and politicians — in Las Vegas.

So Fisher, the Super Cheap, might pry open his wallet a little more than usual this trading deadline, be a little more go-for-broke-ish.

Meanwhile, more than 9,500 locally employed workers and full-time residents in Truckee and North Tahoe have “unmet housing needs,” which means a household is either cost-burdened, overcrowded, or living in poor or inadequate conditions, according to a new study by Mountain Housing Council of Tahoe Truckee, a group that advocates for housing solutions in the area. 

Some 3,500 of those households are commuters, many of whom are driving an hour or more on Interstate 80, Highway 50 or Mount Rose Highway to get to work. This cohort would much rather skip the commute and live in Truckee or Tahoe, if only they could find a place they could afford. 

Another 4,700 households say they currently live in Tahoe, but the homes they are living in are inadequate, meaning they are too expensive to afford on their wages, so they’re scraping by. Or they’re splitting the cost of living with other families to the point of overcrowding. A lot of Tahoe’s lower income housing is also outdated, built in the 1970s during a boom in construction. 

Add to that another 1,275 seasonal workers, approximately, who are in need of places to live for Tahoe’s winters or summers.

The Mountain Housing Council study is among the first locally driven, data-backed looks, building on overwhelming anecdotal evidence, at how Lake Tahoe communities have morphed into “Zoom towns” full of remote workers since the pandemic — and how dire the housing crisis truly is for locally employed residents and the economy. 

The findings were presented at an emergency meeting in late June called by the Mountain Housing Council. Between 50-60 elected officials, government leaders, housing experts, nonprofit groups and business owners attended.

The council’s Housing Needs Assessment inventoried 34,191 units in the study area, the vast majority of which are single family homes. It’s an update to a similar assessment that was done in 2016. In the past five years, the problem has only grown: The”unmet need” for housing among local residents in North Tahoe and Truckee increased by 12%, or approximately a thousand additional households. Tara Zuardo, project director at Mountain Housing Council, thinks the increase in demand happened, for the most part, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The numbers aren’t surprising. It’s long been easy to see how Truckee and Tahoe have changed in the past five years — let alone in 2020 — in ways that go far beyond the numbers of tourists who are driving up for the weekend. But now we have some numbers to back up that anecdotal evidence. 

Added up, Tahoe’s housing crisis is compounding its hiring crisis, posing a threat to the economy at large.

“We’re still in the beginning stages of it,” Zuardo said. “But I think we could be headed for some serious repercussions. I think it hasn’t been felt yet, but once it is, you’re going to get locals who’ve been here awhile a lot more concerned.”

Streets lined by second homes once emptied in the spring and fall; before the pandemic, 65% of homes in Tahoe were empty more than half the year, according to Mountain Housing Council. Now, many of those second homes have driveways full of cars and are occupied full time. 

“Some of those folks have either moved into those second homes, or they’ve sold them,” Zuardo said.

For locals, housing has been expensive and hard to find in Tahoe for many years. Now, with median prices of homes hitting seven figures and a nonexistent rental market, it’s seemingly impossible for local workers to live here unless they bought their house in the 1990s or early aughts, when housing in Tahoe was a little bit more realistic for the community. Some 70% of people who own their homes in Tahoe and live in them full time have stayed in the same place for at least 10 years, according to the survey.

Houses that once were rented to locals have either been sold and purchased by a new wave of part-time residents or turned into vacation rentals. Landing Locals, which helps local renters find long-term rentals, told SFGATE earlier this year that rents have increased between 25% and 50% since the pandemic began.

Because housing is so hard to find, the region’s workforce is packing up and moving away, while a new wave of residents, including many who make their money in the Bay Area, moves in. Coffee shops are full of people working remotely, yet “Help wanted” signs are displayed on almost every business window and storefront in downtown Truckee and Tahoe City’s main street. 

And still, almost every day, a post appears on a Facebook group for Tahoe locals pleading for help with a familiar story: An out-of-town landlord gave their tenant the boot and now that tenant is desperate to find a new place to live. 

“Now we’re really moving into emergency solutions,” Zuardo said. “What can we do in the next six months to house people?”

At the meeting, participants divided into breakout sessions to study different short-term solutions. Some employers are considering ways to pool their money and set up co-op housing for their employees. 

Another team is looking into partnering with the state and federal land management agencies, hoping to find places for employees to park their RV, van or at least camp in Tahoe. 

Regulatory steps, like temporary rent control or making way for tiny homes, are on the table. Housing leaders and experts are also weighing an emergency declaration or whether to take action under urgency clauses that could expedite future housing projects in the area. For now, Zuardo said that there are worthwhile steps local jurisdictions can take without making an emergency declaration and that Mountain Housing Council is continuing this conversation with locally elected leaders and officials. 

A significant part of the demand for housing in Tahoe comes from a group that experts call “the missing middle,” that is, people who work locally and want to live here, too, yet make too much money to qualify for government-sponsored affordable housing programs, but not enough to actually afford the high cost of living in Lake Tahoe. In the housing assessment, demand for unmet housing needs among Tahoe’s “resident workforce cohort” spiked, with need for another 600 units compared with 2016. 

Meanwhile, the town of Truckee is continuing their long-term rental program with Landing Locals, for which residents can qualify if they make up to 150% of area median income, or $97,050 for an individual in Truckee. The program is designed to provide incentives to second homeowners to rent out their empty houses to long-term renters. Zuardo also said housing officials are looking to implement a similar long-term rental program in eastern Placer County, covering North Tahoe.

Mountain Housing Council intends to do this survey every year to closely monitor the need for housing in Truckee and North Tahoe. For now, a lot of people in Tahoe are wondering what the fall may bring, when a lot of those tech companies begin to call their employees back to the office.

“[Housing] was a problem before the pandemic,” Zuardo said. “Then we had the pandemic. We live in a beautiful area where everyone wants to live.”

- 6.0 magnitude quake is biggest of earthquake cluster near Tahoe

- Bay Area teenager drowns in tragic accident on Lake Tahoe

- I spent the Fourth in the thick of Tahoe’s chaos. It got weird.

- [Affiliate] The best hiking boots and shoes for women

For weekly updates, interviews and profiles from a Tahoe insider, sign up for our Tahoe newsletter here.

The more than 11,000 square feet feature stunning views of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and include a 5,000-bottle wine cellar.

The buyer is the mysterious NARF NAS LLC, a company newly registered in February 2021, a common practice when buying homes of this price point. 

Built in 1931, 2920 Broadway sold off-market for $39 million in 2018 — the first time it set a record for the most expensive home sold in San Francisco. 

The historic home was once owned by Reuben and Ingrid Hills, the heirs to the Hills Bros. Coffee fortune. The couple actually tried to sell the home for $45 million in 2003 before lowering the price to $35 million. When it finally sold in 2005, it was at a big discount of $29.9 million.

Despite the pandemic, the San Francisco luxury real estate market hasn’t been hurting. Luxury house sales — those listed for $3 million and up — hit their highest sales volume ever in spring 2021, with a 70% increase from the previous peak in 2019, according to a recent report from Compass. 

A year after the pandemic canceled its signature tech and arts conference, SXSW, the city has gone from a harbinger of the crisis to one of its biggest winners, according to local businesses and economic data.

Austin has regained 97% of its lost jobs from spring 2020, according to the Austin Chamber of Commerce. Unemployment was a seasonally adjusted 4.6% in May, down from a pandemic peak of around 12% in April 2020. Company relocations added 12,421 new jobs last year, a record high. The housing market is one of the hottest in the country, with demand soaring from out-of-state arrivals. Studies show there wasn’t a California exodus to Texas, but Austin has benefited from company expansions and tech migration.

As Austin gained, the Bay Area lost. LinkedIn user data shows Austin had the highest net inflow of tech workers of any major U.S. city between May 2020 and April 2021, gaining 217 people for every 10,000 users. The Bay Area saw the biggest drop, losing 80 tech workers for every 10,000 users.

“I didn’t think it could have grown any faster. And then somehow it did,” said Joshua Baer, CEO of Austin tech incubator Capitol Factory. “COVID-19 broke a dam that was holding back thousands of even more people who were thinking about moving but held back by their job or other obligations.”

“There were some big winners and some big losers in the COVID migration, and Austin was the biggest winner,” he said.

Capital Factory works with around 120 new startups each year, and more than 20% of them are founded by ex-Californians, a percentage that’s growing, Baer said.

As they did in the Bay Area, tech giants are transforming Austin’s cityscape. Google leased a giant sail-shaped tower under construction on the banks of the Colorado River, designed by the same architect as Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. Apple is building a second campus in north Austin. After sparring with Alameda County health officials during the pandemic, Tesla announced its next Gigafactory east of Austin with 5,000 workers, which is rising swiftly.

Veterans of California tech are finding success in Austin. Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe Herd moved from Southern California to Austin in 2014 and launched the female-focused dating app Bumble, which went public in February, and is now valued at $6.8 billion.

One of the pandemic’s biggest relocations came last December, when Silicon Valley stalwart Oracle, moved its headquarters from Redwood City to a new campus in Austin after 44 years in the Bay Area. Following a year of deserted streets and quiet offices across San Francisco and Silicon Valley, it was seen as another sign of the region’s slipping tech dominance.

“Anyone who doesn’t believe that this latest departure isn’t a threat to California’s economy is a business climate denier,” Jim Wunderman, CEO of the Bay Area Council, a business group, said in a statement last December. “California for too long has willfully ignored our awful business climate, even as we’ve enjoyed incredible success and prosperity.”

As downtown San Francisco hopes for recovery, partying is back in Austin. About half of office workers have returned in buildings managed by security firm Kastle Systems, compared to around a fifth in San Francisco, and they’re filling bars and barbecue joints. At the start of summer, live music was blasting and young residents zipping around on scooters — another California import from startups like Lime and Bird.

Austin is also dangling tax incentives to lure growth. Companies like Tesla, Apple and Samsung have packages from the city and Travis County worth up to tens of millions of dollars in property and payroll tax reimbursements. In contrast, the Bay Area rarely offers tax breaks to major projects and often adds additional fees to fund nearby transportation and affordable housing.

Veronica Briseño, Austin’s economic development director, said the deals are structured to push companies to give community benefits. The city offers more incentive points for companies that adopt policies like paid sick leave and working with minority-owned and women-owned vendors. Briseño also noted that the city has fewer incentive agreements compared to other Texas cities.

The City Council, which signs off on deals, doesn’t “just offer anything to any company. They want to make sure if the company is embracing our community values,” she said.

For all of Austin’s wins, few think it will eclipse Silicon Valley. “It’s not a zero-sum game, at least not for us,” Baer said. “Silicon Valley is not going to go away, either.”

California’s economy has defied the doomsday scenarios at the beginning of the pandemic. A projected $54 billion budget deficit in May 2020 has flipped into a $75.7 billion surplus and another $27 billion in federal aid to spend.

A key part has been the boom of the tech industry, which has seen Silicon Valley’s biggest tech giants top $1 trillion market capitalization. Blockbuster IPOs from San Francisco’s Airbnb and DoorDash also swelled the state’s coffers.

Even as tech giants like Google and Apple expand with new Austin campuses, they’re investing more on the West Coast, too. Google plans to invest $1 billion in California real estate this year, and Apple signed the biggest Bay Area lease of the pandemic in May with a Sunnyvale expansion.

As investors hunt for the next unicorn, Austin lagged behind seven other regions for venture capital deals in 2020. Deal activity totaled $2.3 billion compared to the Bay Area’s top spot of $61.5 billion and Los Angeles’s $19.3 billion, according to PitchBook, a research firm.

But for someone trying to start a new company, Austin is becoming more and more attractive, said Ryan Broderick, an early executive at DoorDash. He left the Bay Area for Austin in 2018, becoming co-founder of real estate startup Darwin Homes, which focuses on single-family rental housing. The move made sense geographically, since the company wanted to focus on more affordable housing markets.

Back in 2018, hiring was a challenge in Austin.

“In the early days, it was not on par with the Bay Area, to be very honest. But I think that is now quickly changing.” he said. “There’s more talent moving every day.”

The widespread adoption of remote work has also enabled Darwin to hire more broadly. Around a third of the company’s 60 employees are in Austin, while the others are remote.

In the past six months, about 10 of Broderick’s former DoorDash colleagues have also moved to Austin. The lack of state income tax was a plus, but the vibrant startup culture was also a big draw, Broderick said.

The advantage of being in Silicon Valley near venture capital firms is also fading, he said.

“Almost all of our capital has come from the Bay Area. We just tapped our network. They didn’t really care where we were starting our business or where we were,” he said.

“I can imagine if you were starting a business in Austin with no network two years ago, it might have been a little more challenging, but today I don’t see that as an issue at all,” he said. “I think a lot of deals are getting done here by West Coast firms.”

Previously, Broderick had resisted leaving California because he believed it would limit his opportunities.

“I always thought there was a trade off on my career. And I was never willing to make that, so I was tied to the Bay Area,” he said. “I don’t feel like those trade-offs exist now. And that’s the biggest thing that’s unlocking these other places. I can still pursue the same career path. And I don’t need to be tied to the Bay Area. That has changed the calculus. And I think Austin is the number one benefiter of that kind of change.”

“I would not say that someone’s going to replace the Bay Area,” he said. “I think you’re just going to see more and more success stories coming out of new cities.”

Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf