Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Reward without the work

In conversations with my aunts and uncles back in my home country of China, I’ve come to understand the supposed ennui of Chinese millennials (and younger). The “lying flat” movement that’s been popular on social media (until it got taken away). Young adults of the country are dissatisfied with the high-pressure achievement culture, and therefore are instead opting out of contributing to society (and themselves) in any meaningful way. Let’s just work enough to sustain.

I now see where the dissatisfaction stems from. Retired folks like my aunts and uncle are really living the good life. Government pensions are relatively generous, and retirement age relatively low (60 for men, 50 for blue-collar women workers that my aunts belong to.) Back in the day, these people were also provided with government-sponsored housing, or were able to buy a flat when it was insanely cheap in comparison to the real estate bubble of this millennia.

Chinese retirees own there flats outright, and are drawing a healthy monthly income from the government. This legion of folks goes out to eat all the time, and travel domestically and abroad whenever they fancy. We’ve all heard of the “Chinese dama” phenomenon: middle-aged Chinese women going on a tours and wrecking havoc on the local citizenry.

The younger generation see this with great envy. Principally because the price of a home - as it is anywhere in the first world - is astronomically unaffordable in China. And honestly, who doesn’t want to eat out at restaurants all the time? Traveling is also best done when you still have some youth and vigor. (That’s why I don’t regret spending a ton of money on travel this past decade of my late 20s and early 30s.)

You can see the problem: Chinese millennials want to skip right to what their parents have - without putting in any of the (long) time and work. This is the same reason people gamble on the stock market by throwing it all in on GameStop. The slow and steady growth is too boring and not fast enough. Now is a good time, not tomorrow. Social media showing the highlight reels of everyone else certainly doesn’t help the situation.

But monetary physics doesn’t allow for instant, overnight wealth generation. So in the face of an immovable object, it’s the easy way out to instead hate what you want. Who needs to own a home? That’s stupid. Working long hours to climb a corporate ladder for wealth? That’s just some societal bullshit. Travel? The home is where it’s at. A smartphone with an unlimited cellular plan is all that’s needed.

That’s lying flat in a nutshell.

It's housing, stupid

It seems my place of employment is not the only education system in dire financial straits. The San Francisco United School District (SFSUD) is facing a budget cliff as well. There’s been talks of school closures this year, but election season sort of put a kibosh on that. Now that the election is over, and the math remains terrible, I don’t see how they can avoid contracting the number of campuses.

SFUSD has the same problem as SFSU: a massive decline in enrollment. Funding from California is tied to pupil count, so less students, less operating budget. Hard decisions will have to be made. San Francisco State will be laying off lecturers and cutting courses come the Spring semester. I can tell you the atmosphere on campus is rather bleak these days.

I think this issue ties back to housing, or the lack thereof. How can you expect a thriving K-12 student population when the working-class cannot afford to live in San Francisco? It’s financially difficult to start a family here if you’re not of the upper crust working in tech or finance. People of those means are more likely to send their children to private school, exacerbating the enrollment problem. Public education needs a robust working-class to support it. San Francisco must build way more housing, driving down home and rental prices, to sustain said working-class.

Until that happens, SFSU must build way more student housing so students can actually afford to attend. The university isn’t renowned for anything in particular, so San Francisco becomes the de-facto draw. Tuition is expensive enough as is; it’s a tough ask to then add on one of the highest cost of living in the country. Never mind the retail crime, homelessness, and fentanyl crisis that gets shown on television.

I believe solving the cost of putting a roof over your head is the main lever to pull here.

Can't return a house

Not that I could ever afford to buy a house here in the San Francisco Bay Area. But, if I were hypothetically able to, it’s kind of a crap shoot, isn’t it? I’m talking about one thing you cannot change after you’ve bought a house: bad neighbors.

Buying a house in a supposedly “good neighborhood” is no guarantee of good neighbors either. Sure you may not have to content with the constant loud music and occasional robbery shooting. But maybe your new neighbor next door runs a wood-working shop out of his garage. Good luck concentrating with that ruckus whilst trying to work from home. Because you do work from home, right? Who can afford a house around here without a remote software engineering job anyways.

That’s why I am a fan of renting (and not just because I can’t afford a house). The longest I would be ever stuck with a crappy situation is one year. Heck, if it’s truly unbearable, I’d have no problem paying to break the lease and get out of there. You simply cannot do that with a 30-year mortgage! Call up the bank and be like: “Yeah, I would like to return this house…”

It’s too bad you can’t test-live a home. Move in for a month, and if your neighbors happens to be from hell, you have an escape clause.

I actually like the idea of homeowner associations. There’s a clear set of agreeable rules that every homeowner in that subdivision has to abide by. If Jacob next door likes to practice guitar late into the morning, a polite email to the HOA will take care of that quickly. HOA takes care of any potential bad neighbors anxiety because the rules are typically what a civilized society should be: don’t intrude on others.

A tall crane

My neighborhood is the residential type with homes no taller than three stories. The tallest thing nearby is San Francisco State University, of which the highest building on campus is nine stories. The university is in the middle of constructing a new science building. Consequently, a giant crane have been erected for that purpose. This thing absolutely dominates the skyline, and honestly, a bit of an eye sore.

I get it now: I can see why NIMBYs all over protest against tall, dense housing. It’s not very nice to have your horizon of pure sky suddenly get obstructed with some monstrosity. What NIMBYs have to do is admit that is the real reason for their opposition - in additional to lowering the values of their home, of course. They chose to buy in a suburban area, and indeed it would suck to have that changed from under them.

Saves us the "we don’t want luxury apartments and developers to get rich” bullshit.

Just because I understand NIMBYs, doesn’t mean I am with them. San Francisco need to build more housing, full stop. And it cannot all be concentrated in the north east part of the city. Our nearby Stonestown mall is planning to develop addition apartments and shop areas to surround the existing mall. It’ll be interesting to see if it gets approval, because the skyline of our neighborhood will be changing with it.

Who knows if I’ll even be around to see that come to fruition. Not because I’d be dead, but because I might have moved away. Major constructions in this country - unless it’s a stadium/arena for a sports team - takes a long time. That aforementioned science building at San Francisco State won’t be complete for another four years!

I get it now

A few nights ago I found myself in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Arguably the roughest neighborhood in the whole city, it has everything the naysayers warn about. Massive amounts of loitering, likely drug deals, homeless population living on the streets, littering everywhere, and a general cloud of loud noises. Paradoxically, sprinkled in between all of this are new condos, the symbol of gentrification.

Honestly though, who would want this status quo? It’s nice to see some signs of improving the situation. I understand why NIMBYs get up in arms whenever there are talks of low-income housing or housing for the homeless getting build in their neighborhood. For better or worse, the Tenderloin shows that looks like, and people are afraid that if such housing gets built in their proverbial backyard, the negative externalities get brought along as well.

No one wants to live near loud noises, drug use, and loitering. I grew up in the poorer parts of San Francisco so I’m familiar with all those things. Moving to the west side of the city was in part to get away from those public nuisances. It’s probably dubious to equate low-income/homeless housing to having those negative qualities, but that’s the perception! That’s what I grew up with, that’s what everyone see when visiting the Tenderloin (excellent Vietnamese food there).

This isn’t a defense of outright NIMBY-ism. Surely there’s a non insignificant amount of NIMBYs whose fears are exactly as I described above. The character of the neighborhood they want is quiet, clean, and unobstructed. You can argue those fears are irrational, but how can you see what’s going on in the Tenderloin and not draw some similar thoughts and conclusions?

I couldn’t.

A house for you

It’s crazy to see that amidst this unprecedentedly hot housing market, both my close friend and my cousin have closed on houses recently. Houses in San Francisco. I think if you go back and asked us in high school if we think we would ever pay over a million dollars for a house, we would say that is impossible. In our mind, million-dollar homes are the province of the rich and wealthy, of which we are decidedly not.

And yet that’s the entry price for a decent house here in San Francisco. I feel overwhelming joy for my friend. He’s going to get married soon, and buying a house was definitely on the checklist to do before settling down onto the next phase of life. I just didn’t think he would make the move during this housing madness. There are way more buyers than houses for sale, and with interest rates at historic lows, the scale is tipped heavily towards sellers.

But sometimes you have to make the move, even if the conditions aren’t ideal. So what if people are overbidding each other? For a home to presumably live in for a huge chunk of the rest of your life, a few hundred-thousand can be amortized nice and long. The crucial thing is my friend gets to stay in the city he grew up in, and live close to his family. I say that’s money well spent, even if it is seven-figures for not really a lot of house.

Plus there’s the remodeling.

It is slightly jarring to see my cousin and friend getting married and buying homes. Meanwhile, I’ve barely started embarking on proper bachelorhood and living on my own. I guess I shouldn’t expect the people around me to all be at the same stage of life. Some will for sure move faster, like my other friend who’s already got two young kids. Perhaps I’ll feel some pang of missing out when everybody else joins in on the fray, but thankfully that day won’t come for awhile.

Independence finally?

With most people that have the privilege of work-from-home are currently working from home, the conventional wisdom that’s been going around is that this drastic change in the way we work going to cause a mini paradigm shift in how companies operate going forward, especially in the tech sector. If this somewhat coerced exercise proves that it’s possible for a company to operate just fine with a remote workforce, then it makes no logical sense to continue to rent real estate simply so that everyone can be in the same room. Especially so in the San Francisco Bay Area, where rent is utterly astronomical.

It’s being theorized the shift to working from home permanently will have further downstream affects, namely workers moving away from ultra expensive city centers and towards other parts of the country where a dollar goes way farther. Much like it doesn’t make sense for companies to keep paying rent, there’s no reason for employees to live in areas where four-figure rents would only net you a single room, if they are able to literally be anywhere in the world with an Internet connection and still work. Smart folk are predicting there will be an exodus of sorts of workers moving to the cheaper parts of the country.

And that is quite okay with me, speaking as a native San Franciscan. The downward pressure on housing demand, should the prediction of masses of people leaving the area comes true, means I’ll finally be able to comfortably afford the rent in the city I grew up in. It would be a lovely thing indeed to finally be able to move out of my parents place and attempt the independent life for the very first time. I did not skip town for university, so I lack the momentary emancipation that most of my peers experienced during our college days. I think the time is right for such a move.

If me and my family are lucky to make it out to the other side of this coronavirus mess healthy and employed, I’ll take a serious look at moving out of the house. The externalities of the virus have perversely created a situation where it actually make sense now. We shall see!