[AKN #111] Three Fun Facts To Wow Your Friends
LAUGH: The Reaction Video To Falling Dominoes That You Didn’t Know You Needed To See, LOVE: San Francisco Commercial Real Estate Is A Disaster
Sup homies?
I’m not feeling spectacular today.
You see, I had my bachelor party in Vegas this last weekend and Vegas is a lot of things, but “good for your health” is not one of those things.
However, I had the best time ever. 10/10 would do it all exactly the same way all over again.
Absolutely no complaints. And that’s a real compliment when you consider who I am.
Like it’s rare for a white guy to have no complaints. Like even in the absence of real struggles, we tend to conjure them up from thin air.
Like a white friend of mine this weekend was complaining about how he couldn’t believe he would have to wipe his ass with toilet paper because the AirBnB didn’t have a bidet.
He legit asked me how I get by wiping my ass with toilet paper as opposed to using a bidet.
How do I get by not power washing my asshole?
I don’t know, man. I guess I just take it day by day.
But in all seriousness, it was a weekend where you are reminded of how amazing life is and all the amazing people in it.
I’m super stoked on life.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Three Fun Facts To Wow Your Friends
Something to help you live better
One of the most effective ways to build strong friendships in today’s society is to be armed with an assload of fun facts.
People like people who know random stuff.
This is just how the world works.
So to aid you in your quest for world domination, here are three fun facts from the PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE which you can use to wow your friends in the coming days:
PAST: A Dog Once Challenged A Man To A Duel…And Won
PRESENT: Single Use Plastic Bags Are Much More “Green” Than Tote Bags
Suck on that data, entire staff at Trader Joe’s.
FUTURE: In The Near Future, Diabetics Will Have Tattoos Which Change Color When They Have Elevated Glucose Levels
The tattoos will also be able to alert you about someone’s pH levels, which I imagine is useful for helping identify basic bitches.
LAUGH: The Reaction Video To Falling Dominoes That You Didn’t Know You Needed To See
Something to help you laugh harder
LOVE: San Francisco Commercial Real Estate Is A Disaster
Something I loved because I thought it was really well done
We are in a recession.
And while everyone is bracing for impact, some industries are bracing WAY harder than others.
Like there has arguably never been a worse time to be in the commercial real estate business — an industry which took an ass whooping during the pandemic.
But even more specifically, there has NEVER been a worse time to be in the San Francisco commercial real estate business.
As can be seen in the following article about San Francisco commercial real estate, we appear to be in for a bumpy ride.
San Francisco is an extremely tech heavy city — meaning that everyone who works here possesses the ability to work at home often.
How often do they work from home?
data from key card company Kastle Systems indicat(es) that SF’s downtown offices are only about 30% full.
Yikes…this obviously isn’t very good for an industry where the entire model is selling people space to work that is not their home.
This absolutely matches my lived experience as a San Francisco resident. Never before has the downtown been more empty.
And the hollowing out is projected to get worse:
Citing data from real estate firm JLL, SF’s chief economist Ted Egan tagged future vacancies, in a worst case scenario, as high as 53% in the Jackson Square area and 43% in the mid-Market area in 2024 as the clock runs out on office leases.
Quite frankly, it’s hard to imagine a more empty center of the city than right now.
SF used to have a bustling downtown full of lively action and productive human activity, but now the area is either a ghost town or filled with homeless people doing drugs. That is not a Fox News hot take, it is reality.
(FWIW the other parts of the city where people actually live are still pretty fucking dank.)
Now this is obviously concerning from a shear “aw shucks no one lives here anymore” perspective, however it gets much worse when you pop open the hood and think about how cities actually make money.
Cities collect taxes. Very simplistically, taxes are proportional to the value of real estate. Thus, when your commercial real estate property values crash, the money you expect to collect also crashes.
And, uh, boy are they projected to crash in SF.
So what does this mean in terms of tangible money that the SF government is about to lose? Well, according to our completely inept municipal government:
The city’s budget office expects property tax revenues to continue to grow.
But if you were to ask an actual person who can do math, you would get a much different answer:
Howard Chernick, an economics professor at Hunter College and co-author of the report that forecast an up to 43% decline in SF’s property values, paints a much worse picture: His team sees a decline of up to 15% in property tax collections amounting to a roughly 4% drop in total revenues.
Based on the most recent numbers, that would mean a decline of roughly $240 million annually. And because tax revenues on average increased steadily each year since the Great Recession, any drop could be painful for a city that banks on growth to pay for an array of services and a workforce of roughly 35,000.
So now we get to the “why does it matter that you don’t have people working in Downtown SF.”
It matters because all the infrastructure and every service we rely on in the city depends on that money.
Like think about it. What does SF — a city which already has a very underwhelming public transit system, cleanliness standards, and ability to deal with the growing homeless population — look like when you remove $240 million annually?
I really like San Francisco and I am rooting for its comeback, but I do think the next few years might be a bit…rocky.
CLOSING TIME
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Seriously. How fun were those facts?
K.Rapp