By Roland Li : sfchronicle – excerpt

Some of San Francisco’s largest apartment owners are in agreement: The city is still struggling from a pandemic hangover that is dampening pricing, and free rent concessions are widespread.

AvalonBay, which owns 12,133 Bay Area apartments, saw demand soften in the past month, in part because of continued remote work.

“San Francisco — just to pick on it since everyone seems to like to lately — there’s a number of different headwinds there as I think we’re all well aware of,” said Sean Breslin, AvalonBay’s chief operating officer, on an earnings call last week. “Probably not the best time of the year to be seeing some elevated demand there — it’s just not the case. And there’s not really a great reason for people to be coming back to the office at this point still…(more)

You may concllude that the demand is down, but, I can think of over a dozen reasons why people are not moving. Rents are only one of those reasons. People are picky about where and how they live. Just because the Sacramento politiicans want to force cities to build tiny units in towers, without parking, opening windows, sun or view, does not mean that people will live in them. When there are over 40K (we have heard as high as 60K) unoccupied units in the city that no one is clamoring to move into, it hardly makes since to build more of those unpopular units, but, our state representatives think they are smarer than we are, so they will continue to build their idea of the city we should live in until we vote for new leaders to correct their mistakes. Perhaps the landlords should stop labeling communities as a “class A or B”. It sounds a bit like a caste system and no one wants that in America do they?