Generation Excess

A close look at Kibu.com, the teen Web site -- backed by Silicon Valley's elite -- that vaporized $15 million in a matter of months

A A A Comments By Matt Smith Wednesday, Dec 6 2000

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Readers may be thinking what I'm thinking: Does this mean the yearlong political fuss over dot-commies and nonprofit evictions and no-growth ballot propositions was for naught? Consider the vacancy rate for the grungiest "Class C" office space. Before dot-com companies decreed that sleazy buildings with a few million dollars' worth of industrial-chic enhancements amounted to primo office digs, this sort of space was terra patria for low-rent-loving nonprofit organizations, artists' collectives, and the like.

CoStar, the real estate listings service, currently shows that San Francisco has 882,000 square feet of empty, downtown-area, Class C space, which represents a vacancy rate of nearly 12 percent. Now, I'm told that this figure represents a very rough estimate, given that realtors often fail to purge their electronic files of rented-out space in a timely fashion. Just the same, this is poignant news given the bitter no-growth political battle we all recently suffered. Just as was the case in 1986, when anti-growth Proposition M was followed by a decade-long real estate recession, our summer and fall growth/no growth political turmoil may prove to have been pointless, at least in the near term.

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