It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help.
The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the Valley. Towns like Mountain View and Palo Alto ought to be vastly denser, with apartment buildings, duplexes, and other multi-tenant dwellings. The people living there don't want that, though, so the laws prohibit it.
I don't blame people for wanting to keep their quiet neighborhoods and single-unit homes, or low-rises in SF, but until those objections are overcome, the problem is only going to get worse. So while I say that there's a simple cause, there's no simple solution.
The only solution is changing the zoning laws, and that requires changing peoples' minds. Once that's done, the money will flow in directly from tenants, and will ease pressure all around. If Google wants to build more housing, they need to spend that billion dollars on political efforts.
Lumping Mountain View in there with Palo Alto and others is really unfair. MV is doing the best it can but it can't carry all the weight of Bay Area growth. 1/5 housing starts in Santa Clara county was in MV. MV issued more permits than ALL its neighboring cities COMBINED. MV issued more permits than even San Jose.
Unless the whole of Santa Clara county and San Mateo county work together instead of playing chicken with each other, we will make no progress on this problem. MV has been willing to do more but it would be unfair for MV to carry the weight while all the other cities limit housing to maintain the "character" of their towns.
The tech boom is a huge blessing that any city, state, or even country would be lucky to have. However, people wanting it all and NIMBYism are turning an opportunity into a problem.
The fact that it's perceived as a sacrifice to build housing is one of the core problems.
And one of the main reasons for this perception is that, for the city, it is true. Due to Prop 13, CITIES LOSE MONEY BY HAVING RESIDENTS. As long as that is true, don't expect much to change around housing in California.
> The fact that it's perceived as a sacrifice to build housing is one of the core problems.
In the short term, increased housing will decrease property values. This has to be the case because rentals are a direct competitor to real estate ownership.
In the long term, increased housing should increase property values; however, few people are willing to place much value on something even 2 years in the future, much less 20.
> Due to Prop 13, CITIES LOSE MONEY BY HAVING RESIDENTS.
I'm not sure how much I buy this. I'm not super familiar with California, so I'm not going to say it's false, but there should be a number of other methods (sales tax comes to mind) for cities to raise revenue from residents.
>> In the short term, increased housing will decrease property values.
> How?
If you keep demand constant and increase supply, you will decrease price. This is one of the most basic tenants of microeconomics.
If that's too abstract, just imagine you're a landlord in SF who's used to increasing your rent by 10% per year (no idea what the actual number is) because there are 1% vacancies in the city. Now imagine that all of a sudden more housing came on line so that there are now 20% vacancies in the city. You probably wouldn't be able to increase your price and may have to drop it.
Now imagine that the number of bedrooms in SF increased by a factor of 10 overnight. The price of real estate would crater.
In the long term, the price of real estate will go up with density. All you have to do is look at places like Manhattan, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc. This is because cities tend to draw in new citizens from the surrounding area until it is too expensive or too uncomfortable to live there. However, it takes time for those people to move to the city and fill vacancies.
Prop 13 cut the tax rate below the cost of services the city provides residents. Building more housing, especially cheap housing makes the cities financial situation worse. One of the ways cities try to make up for this is by charging fees for new construction. Which also drives up the cost of housing.
Also doesn't help that prop 13 limits property tax increases for commercial property. And corporations live forever.
In the Bay Area, commercial property is often owned by shell companies. When commercial property is purchased or sold, the shell company is sold instead of the actual property so the property value is never reassessed for tax purposes.
That's weird. I was driving around MV and Sunnyvale this weekend and was surprised by how much more residential (apartment complexes/townhoses) building seemed to be happening in Sunnyvale (along Evelyn Ave) than MV.
Could it be that these Sunnyvale developments were just issued permits earlier (2016 or 2017), and we're just seeing it further down the pipeline?
I think that's largely it. MV was radically anti-housing until there was a big shake-up in the city council in 2014 (IIRC 4 grey-haired NIMBYs lost their seats in favor of 20- and 30-something techies and progressive activists). The flood of permits followed after that, and construction lags permitting by several years.
Sunnyvale has been reliably pro-housing since about 2010, which means that a lot of new supply came on the market in 2015 and 2016, which has alleviated the housing supply issue significantly. I left MTV in 2014 after having my rent double in 3 years, from $1400 to $2800; my rent in Sunnyvale has gone up by about $30/month total in the 5 years since, and the 2 BR townhome I'm in now currently rents for less than the 1BR in MTV that I used to live in.
Sunnyvale and Mountain View aren't really different rental markets, though, so I'd be surprised if the difference in rent increases you saw between the two are related to differences in new housing permits.
Put another way, restricting housing supply in Mountain View likely impacts rents its socioeconomically similar neighbor, Sunnyvale.
They are, though. I wouldn't have expected it, but I was just looking at Craigslist now and rents in Mountain View seem to go for about $700/month over roughly equivalent housing in Sunnyvale. I'm in a pretty old 2BR right next to the Mountain View border for $2600; the equivalent would be a 2BR in the California/Escuela area, which rents for about $3300/month. Perhaps it's just my neighborhood (rents in new construction near the downtown areas are about $4500 for a 2BR in both places), but there's a similar differential among 1BRs north of Central: $2500-$2800 in MTV, $2000 in Sunnyvale.
Among likely differentiators: 1.) Traffic. If you're traveling to Google or Facebook Sunnyvale adds an extra 15-20 minutes to your commute. 2.) Schools. They're better in Mountain View, at least for now, though both regions are rapidly gentrifying. 3.) Cachet. Mountain View has the name because of Google. Sunnyvale doesn't really, and also feels like more of a sterile suburb than a lively community. 4.) Shuttle stops. I don't know exactly where they are now, but that'd explain why the downtown areas go for relatively equal expensive rents, while my neighborhood (which AFAICT has no tech shuttle stops anywhere near it) rents for a lot less than other neighborhoods in the area.
Those factors do make sense, although I'd think Sunnyvale would have a shorter commute to employers like Apple.
I definitely don't have a nuanced enough understanding of the difference in civic liveliness of the two cities - and resulting desirability - they both always felt pretty suburban to me. But I've never lived in either one.
They definitely are - two years ago I left a previous place that had jacked up my rent for a 1 bed/1 bath place to a little over $2600, and was frustrated by the housing market in Mountain View. Most places were charging over $3k, with some going even over $5k. I ended up settling in Sunnyvale for a 2 bed/2 bath place for $2700.
Mountain View has permitted a large amount of housing development west of 101 along San Antonio Road for what feels like 15 years (these were all one-two story businesses or Sears/Montgomery Ward open mall, now mixed used with four story apartment/condos, new Facebook offices), also a lot of development along Rengstorff and some right on El Camino during the same time. Friends who left and came to visit recently said it was tremendously different than they remembered.
San Antonio Center opened in IIRC 2012, 7 years ago. The area was all desolate parking lots around Walmart/Sears/Shockley when I first moved here 10 years ago.
MV is issuing permits mostly for townhouses, IIRC. In my neighborhood alone a number of townhouse communities have gone up. One single family home is being replaced by a 4 unit townhouse. So I wonder if that explains the difference. I also think that higher density housing is where we need to go. We don't need to go to high rises just yet but townhouses is much more efficient use of the limit space.
It probably doesn't matter long term. Any growing city serious about affordable housing long term need to figure out how to develop new areas essentially indefinitely. Whether you look like Boston, Vancouver or Hong Kong is in reality less of an issue.
I leave in MV for a few years: in my opinion there has been many development of dense complex in the recent years (not to say that it is enough): especially alongside El Camino and also in the San Antonio area.
I guess another way to look at it is how much office space has Mountain View approved to be developed? If they're super happy to have a Googleplex expansion that will fit another 5,000 Googlers, but only approve 1,000 more units... how do you reconcile that?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you - every single place should want to build more housing! But when has MV said "You know what? take your fancy office complex and move it somewhere else."?
Quick Edit: My point is mainly that all of these Bay Area governments are more than happy to get more lucrative office space built that employs thousands of employees, but suddenly hem and haw about "neighborhood character" when it comes to housing that lucrative workforce.
This is the most important part of the equation but it is very intentionally omitted. Another factor is financial mismanagement on the part of municipalities like the debacle with San Jose’s fire chief pensions and police salaries. People want to simplify the issue to nimby old people versus the rest of decent society but the reality is that it’s a problem of unsustainable population growth and myopic and incompetent governance.
Yup, and that is straightforward, if time and money consuming. Changing zoning isn't enough: making an area denser without appropriate matching infrastructure investment isn't going to go well. If you want the next Tokyo or Paris (or even something significantly smaller), you need Tokyo or Paris' infra.
Then the next problem is that people can't stand each other. People don't want neighbors because neighbors are a pain. It's a problem everywhere, but in the west, the US has it particularly bad. I don't know about Cali, but in a lot of cities the building code is a total joke, and Americans are known to be LOUD. City rules are rarely enforced properly, either. So the only option you have is to prevent neighbors from moving in in the first place. That's easily fixed: better construction quality and clearer, enforced rules that make coexisting easier and nicer, alongside investments to keep the area from going down the shitter.
Do that for a while, and people just won't mind. Having moved from a dense city in another country to a medium sized American metro made me "appreciate" why NIMBYs are such a problem here. Living near people can become a nightmare real quick if you're not lucky.
I cannot agree with this enough. The building code is wildly out of whack with reality.
Noise: All of my neighbors should be able to have active, stomping, marching band in each of their units, and I not hear a single peep. Contrast with reality: In every apartment I've ever lived in normal /quiet/ walking, sink use, and even bathroom fans were audible in other units.
Air quality: Smokers, "Marry Jane" users I think all who don't smoke can agree with; but I also dislike vaping, perfumes, and dryer scents. They make it hard for me to breath and irritate me (I think in both the medical and psychological sense). Scrubbed, negative draw exhausts are required for all of those things. Have a designated smoking room. Also have designated clean air intakes that supply positive pressure to the hallways and units (in that order) and proper door seals.
Also, yes, build a TOKYO grade subway that connects to parking silos in the outskirts. Then go ahead and ban (most) cars from the city. But ONLY in that order. Don't ban the cars first.
Lots of people agreeing, so I just want to say this: if people don't want neighbors, then they should buy the land surrounding them for the FMV. Abusing various laws to get the benefits of purchasing the property/land without having done so is a complete jerk move. And there's no debating that.
Source: from the Midwest in a very rural area. Someone moved in right next to my parents. They aren't happy, but nothing they could do about it (while remaining a responsible human, a productive member of society, and not a worthless mooch) - they didn't have the money to buy the lot, so it is what it is.
Before people start talking about strip clubs next to schools or factories dumping waste into the aquifers. These neighbors are well within their by-right zoning regulations. They just have a house, and they just happened to buy the lot right next to my parents'. In California, it would have been perfectly acceptable for my parents to tie that development up for 20+ years with all sorts of ridiculousness. But in by-right zoning states, you just get housing built and move on because that's how the real world works.
> People don't want neighbors because neighbors are a pain.
> LOUD
Sound is very much the problem. I don't want a huge amount of land, I don't want lawn, I don't want landscaping, I definitely don't want a neighborhood association, but what I do want is good soundproofing and no shared walls (or worse, floors/ceilings). In practice, there's no soundproofing that can substitute for an air gap.
In practice there are a lot of soundproofings that can substitute for an air-gap, but the cheapest soundproofing to meet code (resilient channels) is useless:
Resilient channels basically work by fixing horizontal metal strips to the studs, and then hanging the drywall on the strips with clips. Because there is purposefully play in the connection, vibrations cannot easily transfer from drywall to stud to drywall.
Why doesn't it work? As soon as anyone nails or screws or otherwise attaches something into the stud through the drywall (say a shelf), the drywall is now mechanically connected to the stud again.
The proper fix is to have a separate frame for each dwelling unit, preferably with fiberglass insulation. This essentially doubles the cost of inter-unit walls, so it is less popular. My parents live in a townhouse constructed in this manner, and if they dial up the volumes on the movie to 11, the subwoofer can cause pictures to rattle on the neighbor's walls, but audible sound is nearly zero.
> In practice there are a lot of soundproofings that can substitute for an air-gap
To clarify, I did indeed mean "no soundproofing in widespread common use", rather than "no physically possible soundproofing". And thanks for the great explanation!
> The proper fix is to have a separate frame for each dwelling unit, preferably with fiberglass insulation. This essentially doubles the cost of inter-unit walls, so it is less popular. My parents live in a townhouse constructed in this manner, and if they dial up the volumes on the movie to 11, the subwoofer can cause pictures to rattle on the neighbor's walls, but audible sound is nearly zero.
That does indeed sound like the correct fix. How would you know if a potential apartment has such construction? How would it be advertised? What would it take to promote a standard/certification for that?
I think that level of soundproofing would make a substantial difference in people's willingness to live in anything more efficient than a standalone building.
No clue how that would be advertised. My parents own rather than rent, and they specifically checked for that before purchasing.
There are standards for sound-proofing, but they are construction standards, they require a particular amount of sound isolation, and resilient channel passes the current standards (since it gives "okay" levels of soundproofing at construction time, even though later modifications are almost certain to nullify that).
Sounds like those standards need to be improved, then. What would it take to do that, in a major geographical area, for new construction? I think that would make a major difference in the acceptability of new high-density housing.
One thing that has bugged me is why don't they use concrete construction in US, like we have in India and most of Europe? Concrete construction would definitely eliminate the noisy neighbor problem to a very high degree (unless they are drilling into the concrete wall, you cannot hear them).
I disagree on "unless they are drilling into the concrete wall you cannot hear them" A solid concrete wall better than drywall/stud/drywall for sound but still conducts sound relatively well.
Now usually a fascia of some sort is applied to the concrete and what is used affects the sound transmission. If you plaster over the concrete, for example, you get much better sound insulation than if you just paint the bare concrete.
Sometimes drywall is placed over furring strips to leave room for electrical work and this even better.
Another child comment mentioned brick, and all of the above is true for brick as well, though I believe mortared brick conducts sound better than poured masonry, and AAC conducts sound better than either.
As a further hiccup, I live in california, and the earthquake regulations greatly slow the innovation in building. In order for a new construction technique to be approved, someone has to pay the money to demonstrate that it is seismically sound.
Or good old bricks. But the answer is simply because the industry is set up to build two very distinct kinds of building in the US. Big, multi-story, high-margin, safe skyscraper stuff (high rises, or other big commercial buildings, with fancy pre/post stressed concrete, full of artisanal rebar - I mean really, some column specialist civil engineer calculated the stuff) and the complete opposite, which is relatively low-cost low-margin single-family houses.
Sure, there are others, it's always a continuum. But this is probably a significant factor.
> If you want the next Tokyo or Paris (or even something significantly smaller), you need Tokyo or Paris' infra.
But for that infra to make sense, you also need the zoning. Running a subway line through predominately single-family home neighborhoods makes no sense.
Realistically though, you don't need a lot of new infra for going from SFH-only zoning to moderate density housing like fourplexes and townhomes. Better options for walking and biking, maybe more bus routes (bus-only lanes?) would suffice.
Electric buses and bus lanes are probably able to solve 90% of the problems with public transportation. Bus stops/routes are easy to plop down, and move if demand is changing.
Lot of people complain about crazy people on buses, but this might be a US thing, but anyhow, it's not like it's impossible to introduce a simple way to manage this problem. (From simple disturbance fines to simply giving the right to the driver to suspend anyone from travel. Of course watch out for overzealous/racist/anti-whatever drivers.)
> the right to the driver to suspend anyone from travel
That wouldn't fly in the US. The moment you ban someone from anything, someone will find a way to push why it was wrong to do. But yeah, I haven't that issue in other countries.
Another issue with buses are cities with streets that are too small. In some US cities, drivers already have to do miracles to get buses through.
I lived in an apartment in London and couldn't hear my neighbours if I shut my windows. It was all steel and concrete, though, not the flimsy shit that passes for American new build.
Yup absolutely. My dinky shitty rent controlled poor neighborhood apartment in Canada was better built (by a LOT) than my expensive new construction in the US. Im so sick of being involved in all my neighbors private conversations.
Interesting, I haven't had this issue really in a dense US city, even near enough to an airport to also hear every plane. Neighbors aren't bad, guess it just depends on the city.
It will depend on what you're used to, but AFAIK, virtually every city in the US has a noise complain/non-emergency police number/311/whatever where these type of complains are some of the most reported issues.
FTA:
"In Mountain View, we’ve already worked with the city to change zoning in the North Bayshore area to free up land for housing, and we’re currently in productive conversations with Sunnyvale and San Jose."
It should be noted these are the three cities that come to mind where Google has bought multiple billions of dollars worth of real estate just in the last 5-10 years.
When you spend that kind of money, in additional to otherwise having a large economic presence in a city, the Government tends to listen. Moreso than to individual developers.
Have you seen the absolute explosion of skyscrapers/mid-rise condo buildings in San Jose, Redwood City.. Hell, even San Carlos and Menlo Park have quite a few higher density units going in.
I'm glad there's more density, and it's near transit, for the most part. Of course, it will still increase traffic, but by going with density and near transit, it'll reduce the impact vs building more single family homes.
The quick summary is that the 2000 Building Code allowed inexpensive construction of 5-floor wood buildings over a concrete base. This "5 over 1" construction gives "near-high-rise densities at a wood-frame price", so it has become very popular in the US.
There's something about that style of construction that feels like "Amazon Basics", like what you get when you don't care about craftmanship or longevity and just want the least expensive option. Those 5-story apartment buildings just have such a soulless cheap feeling to them, like they're made to have the illusion of being taller than they are. I really don't understand why they're so popular.
They are cheap to build and you can ask for enormous rents, like whatever the top of the market might be you can ask for that, because chances are you are the only apartment in town with fresh smelling paint, new carpet, faux granite, and bundled internet.
That's about the only perk of these places. Sometimes they have nice things like a pool, but with how cheap the buildings are, you are going to hear your neighbors above, to the sides, and below you all day. Toured a place like this and noped the fuck out when I heard some dog bark in another unit and it sounded like he was yapping from the bedroom.
Some people don't have the luxury of living in bespoke housing, and legitimately do want a roof over their head for the minimum price possible. Some others are not architecture aficionados, and would prefer to save, even if they could afford "nicer."
If building codes were increased to force these nicer buildings how much of an increase of rent tenets would see.
My understanding is most of the price of housing in West coast cities comes from the value of land, the building permits, and the low supply. How much does construction cost really factor into rent?
> like what you get when you don't care about craftmanship or longevity and just want the least expensive option.
You answered your own question. The fund manager of an REIT or developer is looking to maximize ROI, and in the absence of higher quality alternatives, they can afford to build to the lowest specs possible that will still rent.
Via 401k(s) and defined benefit pension fund investments, we all are responsible for maximizing for ROI.
It’s funny. In some places they build nice homes even for the poor. It’s possible. But we’d rather make the cheapest thing possible. The result is people feeling disconnected from the space around them.
Amen. I think I live in such a building (in Austin) now, and the cheapness of the construction shows. I have 15 foot ceilings and I can hear conversations of people above me ... through the side walls.
After 10 years of living in an apartments and hearing all of my neighbors I got tired of it. So I bought a single family house. I have a small yard, only 1/8th acre, but it is enough of an air gap that I don't hear my neighbors.
I live in a concrete/glass/steel luxury high-rise in downtown San Diego. My neighbors can have raging parties into the early morning and I can't hear a thing unless I wander into the hallway.
The construction quality of multi-family homes in SV pretty poor.
I've lived in apartment buildings in at least four cities (mostly in the midwest) where I could hear my neighbors doing normal things (i.e., not throwing ragers). It seems be a widespread problem not confined to SV.
My first post college apartment in the Chicago burbs was awful. Paper thin walls/floors/ceilings. My neighbor below me would file noise complainta against me for watching TV at a volume at which I could barely make out dialog. And, I heard every footstep of the unit above and TV of the neighbors above and below. I dont think anyone was intentionally being loud, was just shoddy construction.
It's pretty much a thing that happened in the last decades, when building materials and standards became advanced enough that noise became a serious issue.
Nowadays codes and trends - at least in parts of Europe - caught up, and soundproofing has became important through the process. (For architects/engineers, developers/builders and buyers/renters.)
For sure, I’ve lived in places like that in SD during and after college.
My point is that properties above entry level apartment grade are scarce in the valley despite the fact that rents can support it better than just about anywhere. It actually kept me from moving up there
I'm not talking about college town apartments. Maybe I had bad luck, but two of the "luxury" apartment complexes I lived at in Kansas City were really emblematic of what I'm trying to describe. During the initial showing, I was impressed with the granite counters, flat-top range, amenities, ceiling heights, etc. But within days of moving in you noticed it's all so cheaply built.
Yeah, mine is a "luxury" apartment too (definitely by price and the furnishings you mention). Fortunately, it's not as bad as hearing people cough, but (as above) conversations from people above can transmit through the side walls. Plus, from one point in the kitchen, you can hear people urinate.
We can do better, and yes, I'm willing to sacrifice the superficial stuff and pay a bit more for quality construction.
I live in such a building in San Francisco. At most I can faintly perceive a baseline. I think the difference is mid-rise vs. high-rise, probably having to do with the use of wood vs. steel and concrete.
I also run a box fan almost all the time, so quieter sounds from neighbors are below the noise floor and not perceptible.
It’s like the McMansion craze of the late 90s / early 2000s: fancy looking boxes with no architectural chops, built as cheaply and flimsily as possible, faux-everything, windows and landscaping only in front, and random roof gables everywhere. Pure phony, surface-deep and designed to appeal to buyers who only care about looks. Basically the Instagram version of housing.
I see them being built all over Atlanta. The tell tale concrete base with the wood frames on top. I'm not a city planner or anything but over the last 10 years it seems that a lot of cool neighborhoods with character are being transformed into the same feel with these mid-rises.
This is unfortunately the free market at play when it comes to housing. Build as cheap as possible for the best ROI, even if the end result is something garbage for residents. Especially because people often don't have as much choice over housing when it comes to finding a job or relocating.
We desperately need to tighten up some of our regulatory codes and force better soundproofing.
Blaming the free market does not seem to make sense here.
Soundproofing simply was left out of the code because the buildings of old were sturdy and massive enough to implicitly take care of most of the noise problems. Now new materials and standards are lean enough to conduct sound very well. Oops.
Buyers also got wise in the last decade. Now anyone buys or rents the first thing - after location, location, location - is checking how noisy it is.
If all housing would have been built by committee, it's just as likely that it'd have taken a lot of time for the committee to change its ways.
Putting the "explosion" in context, Redwood City built new housing at an annual growth rate of 0.8% between 2010 and 2017, the latest available data. This is far below the historical rate of new housing starts. At no time between 1958 and 2008 did the USA fail to start building at least 10 million dwellings per year, even when the population was much smaller. For example when the US population was half what it is today we started typically 1.5 million new homes per month. Current "explosion" of home construction is pathetic shadow of historical rate.
I'm looking at US Census American Community Survey B25001 "Housing Units" which is all-inclusive. This figure stood at 30,898 in 2017 and 29,247 in 2010. These estimates are consistent with the ABAG report which says that Redwood City permitted only 891 units 2014-2017. According to ABAG's GIS, Redwood City did not permit _any_ multifamily dwellings in 2017. 100% of permitting activity was secondary units of detached houses.
South San Francisco and Brisbane are also pushing higher density residential housing, with most new residential development in South SF near BART. If places like Palo Alto and Belmont did their part as well, housing inventory would be better. Palo Alto went as far as taking steps to proactively limit their local economy in order to preserve the status quo, and even forcing Stanford to expand into Redwood City instead of at home.
These little steps help, but NIMBYism is still holding back potential housing inventory.
There's no more space for more single family homes anyway there, so that's not even an option.
What IS an option is changing mandatory single family home areas to allow for "missing middle" housing, thereby reducing economic segregation currently present on most of the residential land. A lot of people prefer the current level of segregation, though, so it's a hard sell.
One of my faint hope in this project is in the fact that most of the development will happen in Google's real estate (if I understand correctly), which is proposed to be combinations of (relatively more) dense residential and commercial area with a more "urban" style planning.
Of course, the zoning law is clearly the root of all housing evil in the Bay area. But in order to fight against it, we need a clear demonstration which can rebut their FUD against a more dense zoning law. I guess Google is trying take that role here.
> SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes.
Pretty much. When I lived in SF I received fliers in the mail urging residents to oppose new apartment construction literally on the basis that it was too tall.
If you want to see how difficult it is to build there, check out this story[1] of a laundromat owner who spent almost 5 years and $1.4 million attempting to convert to an apartment building.
This is even though it was already zoned for housing, didn't have any units above it (wouldn't displace anyone) and eligible for streamlined approval since it was close to public transit. And yet...
I also believe another option, where we can throw massive amounts of money at the problem, is to completely fix our transportation system.
If you have been to any major city in Asia, they have WAYYY more people and are able to commute from much further distances because the public transportation is clean, safe, fast, reliable.
We have tons of land under utilized in the bay area, especially in the east bay, if we were to allow those people to reach their offices under 1 hour, then I think a lot of issues are going to be solved.
I also believe we should build more taller buildings, but that's happening already. I grew up in Cupertino and everywhere you go there are apartment buildings going up right now. Likewise with Mountain View where my parents work.
You need much more density around the train stations than currently exists for it to be sustainable to operate those trains on a frequent schedule. So yes, you're correct that better transportation is needed, but greater density is needed to make that transportation system possible.
> be sustainable to operate those trains on a frequent schedule
CalTrain during rush hour is operating many trains at 120+% capacity. As a ride, that number feels way too low given how many people are often without a seat. I type this on a ride where I didn't get a seat for the front half of the ride. Riderships what growing by 5k daily riders YoY, though I think it's finally topped out due to train capacity. Bikers get bumped on a regular basis due to space, and riders on rare occasion. My understanding is that CalTrain is also running essentially as many trains as they can during rush hours. (They have to allow a certain following distance between trains, and that's the constraining factor. Electrification will have locomotives that have better acceleration, and thus stopping distances, and thus will allow packing more trains — and thus capacity onto the tracks. I worry however that this will be too little too late.)
Yeah, the key phrase here is “during rush hour”. For CalTrain, it’s hard to justify buying more rolling stock and employing more staff if that additional capacity is going to sit mostly unused for 90% of the day. It’s analogous to paying for extra racks of servers to handle peak QPS that you only really need to handle on weekday mornings. This blog post has a more analytical take on what makes peak service so expensive: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/01/22/base-train-ser...
If the areas around the stations were denser and had a more diverse mix of destinations (offices, retail, schools, etc.) then there would be be enough all day demand to justify running trains all day on a frequent schedule, potentially even on 5-10 minute frequencies like the RER and S Bahn systems, which would also alleviate congestion at the peak.
If that post is accurate… holy moly those cars are expensive. It doesn't even seem to make sense in rush hour according to those numbers?
He nicely has the exact per-car figure for the newer Caltrain cars ($5.7M / car…); he puts a $2.5M car at ~$162k/yr in depreciation, and $100k/yr in maintenance. If we double the depreciation to account for CalTrain's apparently expensive purchase, that's $325k + $100k / yr per car, or $2.55M/yr for a six-car train. (But: I don't get these depreciation numbers? This figure adds up to ~$13M over the life of the train assuming the 40 yr life in the article, which seems appropriate given that the gallery equipment is nearly 50 IIRC; why would depreciation be more than 100% of the vehicle cost, or is this a "it depreciates faster in earlier years but becomes more cost effective later"? This could greatly make most of the numbers I'm getting here make no sense.)
The passengers, meanwhile, assuming they pay the same price as I do for a Zone 3 pass (and Zone 3 is fairly popular, though some people will travel further to SJ which will cost more…) we get ~$1.6M/yr assuming 100% capacity (570 passengers, n.b. this is less than the current 722 per 6-car gallery, and IDK what Bombadiers have; also I kinda doubt that 100% load will happen in rush, that is, it'll still be >100%) and that they don't raise prices (I also doubt this.) Still, that's a huge funding gap, but should the passengers pay 100% of the required fees, or is some of it expected to come from taxpayers? (There's still a gap of ~$0.9M/yr … per train)
I don't live in the area, so I have no idea what the costs are. I looked it up... A 3 zone monthly pass costs $231. With that you can go from Sunnyvale to San Francisco. That's 40 miles as the crow flies, apparently. Compare that to London. I was having trouble finding a normal commute city that's 40 miles away, but let's say from Woking to London -- and since you'll get travel within Zone 1, it's probably comparable. The monthly fare is £321.50 or just over $400 US. So the London train fare is nearly double. I live in Japan and the fares are pretty similar here as they are in the UK. As you imply, I think this is the real reason that public transit in North America never really takes off. There is an assumption that it has to be very cheap, which results in systems that are severely limited.
The order of: announce train station, wait a bit, start building project and change zoning (with that "wait a bit" gap being critical) makes things work a lot better. Property value skyrockets for a while, and people who arent happy with it can sell and go live somewhere else with the money if they don't like it.
The worse situations is when a zoning change happens and goes into effects quickly and construction projects start without people having had time to get the hell out. Selling near those projects is hard (no one wants to deal with it), and the people who live there are stuck.
I bought a place near a construction project that was almost done, and right around the time it ended, the city issued special permits for other big projects across the street that no one really expected, and now we're a bit stuck (People in our building cant find buyers without losing large amounts of money, and until they do, have to deal with the unexpected construction).
That doesn't work so well either. You have to commit to spend a lot of money to build the transit line, and then when you try to make the zoning changes, NIMBYs will still find a way of blocking them.
Where I live, the transit agency has been building a $2B light rail extension with the understanding that areas around the stations would be rezoned for high density.
But so far, it looks like the city will cave in to pressure from homeowners for lower-density zoning, leaving a very expensive transit investment with far fewer people riding it than anticipated.
>Property value skyrockets for a while, and people who arent happy with it can sell and go live somewhere else with the money if they don't like it.
This attitude is exactly why people are uncomfortable with processes like this. It ignores existing inequities of property ownership that have impacted wealth distribution.
If where you decide to build the station is like most of the bay, the people living in these homes aren't the owners. Especially if they're presently black or latino-majority neighborhoods, American housing policy over the last 50 years has purposefully kept these communities from gaining ownership equity by explicitly redlining them or locking them out of the credit market.
They won't profit from selling the property, they will simply be displaced.
When talking about NIMBYs who block these initiatives, what everyone tells me is that they're rich affluent white majorities, so my post was very much about how to handle those. No one ever talks about ethnic to minorities pushing back and being NIMBYs.
But yes, if you're trying to dump a subway station in the middle an area as you describe, your point is totally correct.
My thought is why I wouldn't want a skyscrapper popping in my backyard: because I can't easily get the hell out once the news drop.
Yes, 100% agreed. I'm just saying it's kind of pointless to invest a lot in more train systems without already having an agreement to densify those areas, because there just wouldn't be enough riders to justify frequent service at current levels of density.
The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism ... The only solution
In the real world, nothing has one simple cause or one "only" solution. The housing problem in California, and elsewhere is complex. This is akin to people who say, "The problem with homelessness there has one simple cause..." and then insert their favorite boogeyman.
There are many factors involved, other than NIMBYs, and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). There is corporate greed, geographic restrictions, land use issues, transportation issues, tax issues, and the list goes on and on...
The loudest among those on HN seem to be BEASTs (Build Everything to Achieve Skyscraper Town). That's not healthy, either.
BEAST seems to work though. NYC is amazingly affordable given its population size and economic success. By building skyscrapers everywhere in Manhattan they seem to have made nearby places like New Jersey eminently affordable.
Even Manhattan does not have skyscrapers everywhere. There's a cluster in downtown and a cluster in midtown, but the other three-quarters of the island has relatively short (but still high-density) buildings.
Skyscrapers should be built where they are economically viable, i.e. where the cost of land is extraordinarily high to offset the much higher per-unit cost of construction. They shouldn't be pursued in places where they don't make sense.
> This is akin to people who say, "The problem with homelessness there has one simple cause..." and then insert their favorite boogeyman.
It's pretty obvious that the housing shortage problem is caused by those who oppose building additional houses although demand is skyrocketting. There is no way around it.
That's one of the accomplishments of this program: they got Mountain View to change the zoning for North Bayshore (where the Google campus is) to support highrises with up to 10,000 housing units.
Very little of the Bayshore plan permits "high rise" building. I believe there is exactly one 15-story building in the plan. Everything else is 5 or less (sticks over garage style construction). The vast majority of the _land_ in the Bayshore plan is dedicated to open space.
> If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help.
Depends on definition of "possible". There is space, physically. But getting all the paperwork, lining up the money, placating all the NIMBYs and the special interests and politicians may be non-trivial. For Google it may be easier than for other developers, and Google may be more motivated to do it, since galloping housing prices means more salary expenses from Google.
> The people living there don't want that, though, so the laws prohibit it.
In San Jose, there are many multi-tenant developments. Prices are still crazy (compared to any other place outside Silicon Valley).
And there's also a question of infrastructure. Did you ever drive on 101, 85, 87 or 280 in traffic hours? Did you ever drive on adjacent connecting streets? Now imagine there's 3x or 5x people living in the same space. You'd have to start you commute previous day to get to the office by the morning.
I don't think it's as obvious as you think. If you know where major employer campuses are located (Google, Apple, etc.) you can see it's not likely there would be a lot of housing within walking distance of it. And public transit... best not to speak about it, it's too sad.
So far they couldn't even pull off something as obvious as getting BART (or something like it) down to San Jose. Imagining that they can figure out full proper coverage of Silicon Valley with public transit adequate for getting so many people at least to work and back (not counting all other needs) is pretty much hopeless.
I would argue that the causes in SF are more complex than you portray. For example, race relations and racism are a factor, which is why NIMBYism is so strong in the Mission. There's even a "no-fault eviction map" that is depicted on a mural there:
I'd also recommend looking at Janet Delaney's photos of SoMa from when it was a predominantly black neighbourhood. 3rd, 4th and 5th Streets have been rebuilt, but at the expense of pushing out the people of color that used to call that neighbourhood home. Delaney's work has been on exhibit at the SFMOMA, and studying local art in SF can help one understand the factors that lead to local opposition to housing development.
This announcement isn't going to affect the overall narrative around housing in SF. It's just "let's build some houses next to one of our south bay campuses", which Facebook already did a few years back.
Google's has also previously submitted plans to the city of mountain view that include houses on its land (not sure if any of these count towards the 20k number):
Just because the current residents don't want it doesn't make their opinion right. If the current residents said "well we don't want anyone of [race]", we wouldn't just go, "oh well it's their neighborhood, guess they get to decide!"
There's a housing crisis, and yes, many residents are using democracy to stand in the way of fixing the problem. That's bad!
> If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help.
I only took a quick glance at the article, but seems like Google help may do quite a bit.
> First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes
They are going to repurpose their own lands, which means there will be more space to build housing. They make it possible.
I don't know where are theses $750 millions of land, but that's still more space.
That's not the only solution. The other solution is don't live in the valley, don't live in these places where there's no affordable housing.
Should we make cities denser? Should we force people shoulder to shoulder? I don't know if we should and I never see the "wisdom" of the denser city questioned.
Instead Google and other groups should give money to residents who would be amenable to living elsewhere. $1 billion for freedom of choice instead of perpetuating that everyone must live in the same few square miles.
Have you visited South Florida lately? It sucks here now cause of the amount of people that keep moving into this area. The traffic is horrible, the stores are crowded and people's attitude in general is becoming increasing hostile.
The world doesn't need to be denser, we need some elbow room, we need SPACE. Thanos was right.
The only applies for the 50 or so miles next to the Everglades conservation area, everything north of that is sprawl; I think Jacksonville literally ranks #1 as the largest US city by land area
What about pulling a HongKong / Singapore: Create a special economic zone that is a stand-alone municipality with extremely lax zoning laws to spur housing & transportation growth?
Google is kinda-sorta doing this. To avoid Mountain View NIMBYism, just carve out the Google land for this purpose.
Singapore is the opposite of lax zoning: not only do they centrally plan everything but the government owns 75% of the land and develops the majority of the residential property. The difference was the lack of low-rise, high-value property owners to try to block the high density zoning.
Houston still has minimum parking requirements, plus local/state road development patterns incentivized car-friendly buildings.
It's harder to build denser if you have very little good public transit (or walk/bike infra) to speak of. Density doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I mean, Houston is the principal city of a metro area of 7 million people, and has no subway, no mass transit that's separated grade whatsoever. That's not a setup that's going to easily support higher population densities.
Meanwhile, you look at a city like Munich that's in a smaller metro area, and it has several subway lines, plus several hybrid commuter/mass transit lines that are separated-grade at least within the city proper. They're steadily building yet more, and Munich residents don't even consider their transit to be all that great! (lots of complaints about the S-Bahn, for sure)
Really, if you're talking about new cities/neighborhoods, it should be done in parallel.
If you wait until things are very dense to actually start planning good transit, that means you'll have many years where it's too dense for just cars and so things are borked, plus by then building tunnels or acquiring right of way will be much more expensive.
Here's a solution: have tech companies settle in other regions.
I know the benefits for being in the bay are substantial, but this problem is entirely brought about by tech companies, not the resident. Employers need to setup shop in less populated places and grow there.
Jesus Christ, what is it with people acting like companies having lots of high-paying jobs is some kind of economic pox? Don't we want companies to be successful and pay their employees well? Why get in the way of that, instead of supporting that and helping as many people share in the success as possible?
Maybe you don't realize this but there's a homelessness crisis happening right now, partially due to massive gentrification brought on by successful tech companies.
You shouldn't pretend that there aren't negative side-effects from the collection of success and wealth in Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area.
Decentralizing the workforce would help decentralize the problem.
So companies being successful and paying well is a bad thing?
Of course there are bad side effects, but only because we've collectively decided to not solve the housing problem. It's not some obscure issue, we know how to fix it. We just choose not to.
> Decentralizing the workforce would help decentralize the problem.
If it was that simple, they'd have already done it because it would save them money.
Organizationally, there are advantages to physical colocation that you're just ignoring here. It's the triumph of the city.
The resources needed to solve homeless & poverty are also collecting there. Tax them. Either the tax rates drive people away and you achieve decentralization, or they solve the problem and decentralization isn’t needed.
Are you really advocating that we raise taxes with the intention of driving people away?
I find that mentality vehemently disgusting. The government is expensive and wasteful, acts in bad faith, disrespects our rights, and steals from us every day. Why people idolize that, I have no idea.
wow, that is super uninformed and sad. The problem isn't high paying jobs, the problem is only a portion of the community has high paying jobs and the people that do critical jobs like cleaning and service jobs can't afford to live anywhere near where they are required. It's fantastic that people have high paying jobs. But if we are being honest those high paying jobs are only high paying when compared to jobs outside of the region. For example I live is a less saturated and less high paying market and make maybe 2/3 of what I'd make in the bay but I have twice the buying power. Concentrating all those jobs in such a small area is throwing money away.
Yes, and the reason housing prices are so high is that the residents have chosen not to solve the problem. It has nothing to do with the tech companies.
We can look at successful models like Tokyo or Vienna, but instead of doing that people just throw up their arms and go, "what could possibly be done??" as if this was some novel, inscrutable problem.
The problem is it's scary to live in a city that only has one employer offering jobs in your field. My wife and I moved to a new city last year, and while we considered a lot of smaller cities, it ultimately wasn't worth the risk to live someplace that only had a couple prospective employers.
That sounds more like a rural town, what kind of city only has a single employer? I grew up and lived in one of ~400,000 (there are 47 US cities over this size) people which is small for a city and there were many potential employers. Not as many as larger cities of course and many were on the more boutique side of the spectrum, but there were enough opportunities and the lower pay was a better deal when adjusted for cost of living.
Not single employer in general, single employer in a person's field. That's not an unreasonable concern when a person's field is tech related, and we're talking about less populated areas.
You make a really great point, and I myself have been victim of losing a tech job that brought me two-thousand miles from home. Thankfully my company gave me a large enough severance to move myself and my belongings back to my home state.
Here's a solution: have tech companies settle in other regions.
There's a reason why companies have large offices in the Bay Area and are willing to pay the exorbitant salaries and rent there.
If they could reasonably relocate to middle America where land and salaries are cheap, they would - they all know how expensive it is to operate in the bay area, yet they choose to do so.
> The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism.
I'm not a fan of the idea of living & working for a corporate overlord in a company town, but I suppose one option to break the back of entrenched NIMBYism is to own all the backyards. Buy up all the things, flatten them, and go vertical.
The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism
It's definitely simple-sounding, as a single cause -- but unfortunately that doesn't make it so.
Any sober analysis of the current housing crisis points to a convergence of multiple, and in some cases highly nuanced factors -- ranging from shifting crime rates and the collapse of urban industrial base; to shifts in government policy (including the near-abandonment of federal support for new public housing initiatives); and a whole bunch of others. And yes there's something known as "zoning" which plays a part also.
But the idea that NIMBYism is the sole important factor - or even the most important factor - just doesn't hold water.
If you're skeptical of this, just ask yourself: "What causes NIMBYism?"
There's various reasons for why people are NIMBYs, sure. But that's still the single biggest proximate cause of the housing crisis, by far.
I mean, you could also say, "those tech companies created too many high-paying jobs!!" but last I checked, that's generally what we wanted companies to do, so getting mad at them for it seems pretty weird.
It doesn't dodge the question at all. Of course it's a proximate contributing factor, in the same way that voting was a proximate contributing factor to Trump being the chief executive of the United States. That doesn't mean voting is a bad general idea.
I'm pointing out that even though lots of high paying jobs is obviously an input into the housing crisis, 'blaming' companies for that is clearly stupid, because we want and encourage them to do exactly that, and higher housing prices is a predictable side effect of housing supply being constrained, not some out of nowhere surprise that the tech sector foisted onto an unsuspecting public.
I’m struggling to find a citation for this, so I’ll caveat that this is from memory, but I’m pretty sure SF had had about as many housing starts as the rest of the Bay Area over the last ten years. It’s not nearly enough units, and it’s basically all in SoMa and Mission Bay, but nevertheless the city is doing more than most of the bay.
Interesting to note that Mountain View is also trying to pull its weight, per a sibling comment.
I think the easiest solution here would be at the state, rather than local level. Start tying state budgets to housing supply: ie. figure out approximately how much housing need there is in the region and require each city to permit a proportional share of that per year or lose state funding for roads, schools, etc.
Will not matter if zoning laws do change, though I to agree they need to and posted something similar.
What will happen is in many of these same areas they will force rent control upon builders and existing landlords which will do the same work that zoning and political games did before.
California will require a state wide referendum to fix their government created housing problem.
A statewide referendum (Prop 13) underlies the housing problems and is a huge enabler of Bay Area NIMBYism. Multi-decade homeowners can bask in a $5M house values and agitate for inefficient land use while paying taxes off a $30K purchase price.
>The only solution is changing the zoning laws, and that requires changing peoples' minds.
For the people who own property, they are choosing laws that best help their finances. You can appeal to some sense of greater good but history would show such a plan unlikely to work.
In the coming months, we’ll continue to work with
local municipalities to support plans that allow
residential developers to build quickly and
economically.
There is always eminent domain, but that requires politicians who actually have their constituents' interests and well-being in mind, and who aren't corrupted by kick-back schemes and the other ills of local government.
So that next time someone says "down with tech bros gentrifying the bay area" or they get hauled up in front of the local government who sat the same thing, Google can say "we invested a billion dollars and built more homes than San Francisco added in the last seven years, we're doing our part."
And it sounds like they're 'investing' rather than 'spending' the $1 billion - if you take $750m of land and build flats and sell most of them at market rate, presumably you recoup a fair portion of your $750m - they might even make a profit.
It sound like they're using land that Google already owns for this: "First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018)."
What about traffic? Adding this many new homes without an increase in transportation infrastructure is going to make things much worse for people already living in the bay area.
Honest question - how much (if any) of those laws were made with respect to earthquakes? Perhaps they are from a time when resistant high rises weren't tenable.
While I don't have specific knowledge about earthquakes effecting zoning laws, there was a very real cultural resistance to building dense housing in the 60's and 70's, when the the term of art in the Bay Area was "Manhattanization," and which was almost certainly more of a factor than earthquake-proofing the buildings.
Imagine if the Bay Area had a subway system to rival Manhattan and actual dense housing? How many fewer gigatons of CO2 would be in the atmosphere if everybody didn't have to drive in all the way from the suburbs? Imagine if it wasn't necessary to own a car? Rents would still be high, but maybe not impossibly so.
I'm generally against zoning restrictions. But, there's only so much a city's infrastructure can take. Let's say they build another 100k 3 bedroom units, where is all the waste going to go?
Is there a good reason for all of these people to live in one little area? No, I don't think there's a really good reason. Everyone wants to take advantage of what the city has to offer, but nobody actually wants to pay fair market value.
How many is too many then? Clearly any given area has a maximum support capacity for humans. Is it good for the environment or quality of life to keep packing people into mega-cities?
I would suppose that packing people into high density housing is great for efficient distribution of goods, and seeing as dense megacities support great public transit I would wager that this is clearly better for the environment than the alternative.
It's much better for the environment to pack the people into a dense urban area where they area easily served by transit (or can walk to where they want to go), goods delivery, etc than to have people commuting 60 miles from Tracy where they live in a 3000 sq foot house on a half acre of land.
Yes. Urbanisation into massive cities is vastly more efficient in terms of environmental impact than sprawl.
Those people still need to live somewhere, but bringing everyone closer together increases efficiencies by enormous amounts. Cities are the thing helping to save the environment.
> The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism.
It's true that there is one simple cause, but it's not NIMBYism, it's overpopulation, and it's a planet-wide problem. There are just too many people. They can't all live in the nice places because if they do, the nice places won't be nice places any more.
The current caloric surplus and population is largely supported by a truly outstanding amounts of petrochemicals being used since the start of the "green" revolution.
>The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism.
when people don't want to give away (for free or below market price) their share of GOOG nobody calls that NIMBYism. When people don't want to give away their share in a city (drastically increasing density/population does in many ways take away from existing residents without any just compensation) - that is suddenly becomes NIMBYism.
The issue can practically be solved simply - city is to be like a corporation with stock, and any new resident/development has to buy the stock on the secondary market. Density/population increase (i.e. zoning changes) is by issueing new stock to be distributed proportionally like dividends to existing shareholders(residents). That way NIMBYism would just disappear the same way like it doesn't exist when it comes to GOOG. That also would make gentrification into a buyout where people who create a city desirable to live in would materially benefit from it instead of being just kicked out being as poor as when they moved in.
The SFH has domain over their property - and that's where it should reasonably end. Giving them domain over what gets built on everyone else's property is where we get into trouble.
Except that they don't exercise the preference over what happens over everyone else's property in isolation. The SFH owners collectively vote for their town councils and governments and what not. And those governments in turn make the zoning rules.
If we choose to overturn those collective preferences, we need to have principled discussions as to why our preferences should rule over the other groups'.
You have to ask what’s special about geographical clustering. Homeowners have all the power because they are arranged in big, continuous, municipal-government-sized blobs. Renters have none because they are dispersed across little pockets of each jurisdiction. If all the renters moved to one suburb they could easily get zoning power there, but they can’t, because that suburb would never allow 51% rental housing. The next best thing is to push zoning power up to a more aggregated level, where the scattered renters can form a more significant bloc.
Geometry is an arbitrary basis for power, not a principled one. There’s no deep reason why the block is too small to decide and the state is too big to decide and the City of Sunnyvale is just right.
>That is because in the case of a goog share you arent telling someone else what they can do with their share.
The same way with the proposed city stock shares - nobody is going to tell you what you can do with it.
>Instead, SFH are being allowed to have more options for what to do with their property.
no. It is a rich&powerful well-connected developer who is getting zoning changes and only to his properties (similar to the situation when only the major shareholder would get additional stock/dividend issued for free) at the cost to all the other residents and property owners. Privatization of profits with socialization of costs - the main reason for the NIMBY.
>In fact giving more options for property actually increases the value of that property.
Nobody is giving more options. Uniform re-zoning never practically happens. It is always a targeted action for the benefit of specific powerful developer who has already at least got an option on those targeted properties. At least the common stock schema i propose would allow to spread some of those gains toward all the others who also bear the costs, ie. the whole city.
Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. So much so, that local politicians even brag about how much housing developments they've stopped.
Why fight such a huge uphill battle in trying to get housing in the Bay area? Wouldn't it be easier to start from a city or town outside of CA? or at least outside the bay area? Maybe somewhere in the middle of no-where (there's still so much unused land immediately outside the Bay area - even within -> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land), where NIMBYs have no jurisdiction. Then create a high speed train or subway system connecting it to the rest of the world. Since out there land should cost very little, it would be a lot cheaper to create a highly effective transportation system then spending 1.5 million dollars per lot!
I know in the past new towns have failed, but that's because they didn't put employers there first. If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there.
> If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there.
Welcome to Houston!
Seriously, the typical model for growth here has been for a major employer to make a new campus out in the middle of nowhere away from town, then things spring up around it. As a result, we have lots of urban clusters with skyscrapers a long way from downtown. The energy corridor and the med center started out that way. Ditto for NASA and League City. Currently we have Exxon in Spring, Igloo out west of Katy, all of the Woodlands (weird place), etc.
It's not exactly good or bad, but it is a recipe for sprawl.
That's a bit of a misnomer. Most cities inside/near Houston are zoned, and Houston itself is effectively zoned. Almost all of the sprawl is zoned. (E.g. Katy, Sugarland, Spring, etc all have zoning laws.)
Land usage inside Houston city limits is mostly controlled through deed restrictions. E.g. I'm technically breaking the law by working from home as my deed is explicitly noncommercial. It's completely inflexible, as it was all set around 1900, but it is a form of zoning, nonetheless. Commercially-deeded lots are in planned areas that made sense at the time the property lines were drawn. There are also deeds that forbid residental development (often due to flooding, but again, it's inflexible).
The key differences are that there aren't any real restrictions beyond commercial / non-commercial. As a result, you'll often see a shipping yard in the middle of a residential district or similarly impractical commercial developments in unlikely areas.
Most of the examples people will dig up of flooding during Harvey that could have been prevented by zoning are actually in cities that _are_ zoned. The real issue is that developers get to dictate what the zoning laws are and get to develop however they want. For example, there's currently yet another development going up _inside_ the reservoirs on the west side of town. It's in a city that's zoned. They changed the zoning to allow the development there literally inside the reservoir, 10 ft vertically below the top of the dam.
I'm not saying that zoning is bad, or that Houston doesn't have problems, but I am saying that zoning here wouldn't help. Developers have infinite political sway and get to change zoning at will. That's the real issue.
Houston also famously has no zoning laws, which massively exacerbates problems associated with sprawl.
In my experience the opposite is true. With relaxed zoning it's easier to live closer to work, and more likely that common destinations like grocery stores will be conveniently nearby.
"Houston" 100% has some sprawl issues, but that's why it's a metroplex now, Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land, and the Woodlands and Sugar Land are zoned for lower density.
Every time we get heavy rains which seems to occur more often these days, there are several slides in the open space above Woodside and some roads are unpassable for weeks or years in the case of the last slides on Skyline Drive and West Old La Honda. Evidence of how slide prone the area is is abundant on even gentle trails in every park along the ridge as well. Most of the housing currently there all the way to the coast subsists on well water and cisterns and use septic tanks for sewage until the flat areas, in the drought last year many wells ran dry. None of this scales up. It's not like the Oakland Hills where the East Bay water district supports the area. Crystal Springs reservoir and the basin that drains into it visible along 280 all the way to Woodside is reserved for the city of San Francisco water company which may not be obvious to a casual observer.
That’s not entirely correct - Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir supplies much of the coast: City of Half Moon Bay and a part of the unincorporated area of San Mateo County including Miramar, Princeton By The Sea and El Granada.
Unfortunately, no new connections are currently available, but the already sold connections are not all 100% utilized and some are just assigned to parcels without use.
SB-50 would have just led to displacement and more homeless people, exacerbating how much it sucks to live in the city. We need better quality bills than Weiner's.
>> Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth.
I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I first moved to SF in 1998, and in my experience it's San Franciscans who moved to the city to work in tech who don't want to see growth. The people who moved there for the culture of art, music, and radical self expression saw the writing on the way pretty early, and have been advocating for affordable, high density housing for decades now.
> ...it would be a lot cheaper to create a highly effective transportation system then spending 1.5 million dollars per lot!
wait. why would that be? looking back at cost overruns on transportation projects from LA's metro red line to the Bay Bridge rebuild to California's high speed railway, i don't feel confident at all that an effective transportation system would be a lot cheaper. that has to come out of government budgets and go to government employees and union scale labor. that's expensive. and it might require new taxes. IDK -- are you talking about a bus line on a two lane road or something?
> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land
The terrain in that area would make it quite difficult to build dense housing there - it's even steeper than the very hilly area that Woodside itself is built on. It's not that it can't be done, but it is far more expensive (think about the cost of adding infrastructure like water, sewer, etc), compared to building housing in an already developed area, like infill development on land previously zoned only for commercial purposes.
That land is also protected so good luck. There is a lot of land on the coast too, but good luck getting anywhere. The East bay may be a better option. Build a Google multiplex over there and then a push for transbay Bart or something.
>just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land
And there are good reasons it's "completely undeveloped." Those include:
* No public sewer. So you'll need septic tanks. And the county regs that took effect a few years ago made it more difficult to install a new septic tank even for a single-family home, let alone whatever high density project you're envisioning.
* No public water. CalWater's Bear Gulch district (aka municipal water) extends only to the town boundaries on the east side of the hill. Skylonda Mutual on the west side of the hill keeps issuing boil-water notices when their (limited) water supply gets contaminated and out of compliance with state law. La Honda was trucking in water, or came close to it, during the recent drought.
* No DSL or cable Internet. Even inside town limits there are some areas that don't have Comcast (low population density, hilly terrain) or AT&T DSL (too far from switch, but you can get POTS). Hope you enjoy wireless!
* Limited access in the winter due to roads carved out of the hills over 100 years ago, not up to modern construction standards, that are prone to landslides. Skyline around route 9 was still one lane control last I checked because of last year's collapse, which was different from the previous collapse.
* Prone to wildfires in the summer--there was a wildfire off of Bear Gulch Road a year or two ago.
* No public transport.
* Distance from employers. I can't think of any large employers west of I-280, so you'd have to cross the peninsula on gridlocked surface streets or join I-280 gridlock north or south. Probably an hour drive to Google or almost that to Facebook.
* NIMBYites among the locals, who already say it's too congested.
* Subject to excessive zoning restrictions if inside town limits. This is only inside Portola Valley, Woodside, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, etc., and it's true that most of the land is county, but some of those town boundaries stretch to Skyline. If you're inside town limits, you'll need something like 5-acre to 15-acre parcels for a single family home. This is the very definition of low-density housing.
* Prone to landslides. The San Andreas fault runs along the base of the hill, and the Pilarcitos Fault and others spiderweb through the hills. This can be solved with the application of funds, but it raises building costs.
* The big one, if they can find a way to screw with you, is the California Coastal Commission, which views every act as illegal "development." And it has a bigger budget than you. You will not win. State law is not on your side. https://pacificlegal.org/commission-creep-rule-dis-functiona...
> Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth.
That's silly, there are more than two sides to this discussion. Development without allocations for affordable and public housing is just throwing money at developers and hoping for the best.
San Diego is about 5-10 degrees warmer year-round than San Francisco. I’m sure many people prefer that (particularly the beach/pool crowd), but not me. 60-65 is perfect for me, and 75 is too hot. Especially San Diego’s muggy 75.
And as a side point, I don’t think people need to travel the world to have a good idea whether they prefer humid 75 degree summers or non-humid 70 degree summers.
it depends on where you live. the (san fernando) valley and inland are ridiculously hot, the coastal cities not so much.
the 10-15 really hot days we have center around august, with some spillover into july and september. but it's nothing compared to texas heat, for example.
Oh yeah, nothing like Texas heat, or even the Missouri heat I grew up with. I could definitely enjoy Santa Monica weather year-round, but I still prefer the slightly cooler San Francisco weather.
Bay area weather is not that great. The air quality suffers from smog or worse, forest fires (last year was quite bad). Infrequent rain means everything outside is covered in a thin layer of dust, and nothing grows except those silly geometrical 'xeriscaped' succulent gardens. For some people, low humidity is not great for their skin or hair. Longer term, increasing severity of drought will impact water supply (already PSA campaigns shame you for flushing the toilet), and ruin the surrounding natural environment.
There's a bunch of people saying "why not going out of the Bay?" This doesn't work because for most of the foreign workers with H1B visa job security matters more to them. With H1B visa, you gotta find another job in 60 days when there's a trouble with your employer. Otherwise you'll be kicked out. Also note that Chinese and Indian people are typically stuck at H1B for 5~10 years and they're the majority of SWE H1B holders.
If you're in the Valley (or at least a big city), the solution is pretty simple; take a day off, go to interviews and get a job. You don't have to move out and will have a good chance to get a job relevant to your career. The same thing doesn't apply to most of the other areas. The risk is so high that it can effectively end your career, those people with H1B just tend to pay more for living in the Bay.
So in order to have another big campus out of those big cities, there must be a pre-established, significant SWE ecosystem that can guarantee a level of job opportunity. Unfortunately, this cannot be done by a single company.
Exactly and going out of the Bay doesn't solve the Bay Area's problems. It only tries to plug the premise that all the housing problems are happening because of the influx of people into the Bay Area. A lot of people who want better-housing options are millennials who Bay Area or nearby locals or people who have already been living in the Bay for more than 5-10 years.
If I understand correctly, H1-B visas are actually tied to a particular location, so the employer would have to file additional paperwork for an employee to transfer to another state.
but you can go pretty far in a day. for example, a one day round trip from LA to San Jose, including time for a full work day, is within reach. people do that routinely.
Personally this class of things really highlights an imbalance for me. Consider that Google runs its own own bus service for employees, and now is building housing for the same.
Traditionally, successful businesses in a region paid taxes, and those taxes were used by the local governments to invest in infrastructure like public transport and urban development.
So in this regard Google usurps the mandate of the community government in favor of using their excess profits to invest in the community that only benefits them (well peripherally it benefits others as Google employees would otherwise burden city services)
What is wrong with that picture is of course that the people without advocates are literally left out in the cold. From the article Google is investing $1B in better housing for their employees and putting $18+3+1.5 ($22.5M toward homelessness which is 2.25% of a billion dollar investment. Contrast that with if Google paid $1B in taxes to the bay area communities where it has facilities, would those governments have the same priorities for those funds?
The problem is that the local governments are not doing their jobs so private industry is stepping in to address the gap (with obviously a biased interest towards their customers, shareholders, and employees).
Literally every Bay area government has regulations (zoning, community review, etc.) that prevent housing to be put in place. On the transit side, we have multiple transit organizations (Muni, BART, Caltrain, etc.) that do not coordinate and operate as one entity; contrast this with NYC where the transit orgs have a common leadership.
What is happening in the Bay is that we are having an infrastructure crisis because a Nimby philosophy is preventing investment in critical areas like housing, transport, etc.
I agree that private industry won't solve this problem correctly because of its self interest, but frankly the problem is that the policy makers have no interest in solving the issue. Their loyalty is to their wealthy vocal residents who have no interest in creating housing or transit. They definitely do not care if underserved and disadvantaged people are suffering.
So while I agree that private industry will not tailor their solution to the disadvantaged (due to self interest), I don't think policy makers will either (due to self interest). Proposition 13 is a perfect example of how the voting population does not care about infrastructure for the poor. Prop 13 was marketed as a relief provision for the elderly, but the bulk of the measure is essentially a tax break for largely white wealthy landowners.
Property owners have no interest in creating housing; scarcity keeps their property values high. However, I don't get why it is that renters seem ineffective as a block in advocating for more construction. There are lots of renters, many with more roommates than they'd like, and they're all vaguely aware that their landlords could decide to evict everyone and sell, so they should be motivated to try to build the stock of alternatives.
Can you imagine how much more valuable property in Queens would be if it was zoned so you could build at Manhattan densities? You can create value just by increasing density, by making building more housing legal where it isn’t. In the very long run this may not be an obvious win for all property owners, as a group. But they’re not a group, and if you can be one of the first people to build a lot of housing in a supply constrained market you’ll make a lot of money.
If building more housing in the Bay Area was legal there’d be more housing. If they built enough housing prices would even fall eventually.
>Contrast that with if Google paid $1B in taxes to the bay area communities where it has facilities, would those governments have the same priorities for those funds?
Of course not, because the goal of local Bay Area governments is to make land more expensive, not less.
Adding housing is adding housing. It doesn't matter who it's for or who builds it, it adds to the total number of dwellings and reduces occupancy of other units.
So far in my quick bit of research since this story came up I have not found a law that would prevent it. There are laws about discrimination based on race, religion, Etc. but not about employee / non-employee. I have yet to find either a California law or Sunnyvale city ordinance that would disallow an owner from preferentially selling or leasing a house to someone who was employed by a specific entity, even if that entity was themselves.
Interesting looks like there is a specific permitting process for Employee Housing Programs (http://www.hcd.ca.gov/building-standards/employee-housing/in...). I hope that any zoning decisions are made with a written declaration of intent to / not to apply for such a permit.
That is super awesome, thank you! It isn't clear to me reading section 17005.5 [1] how exactly you trigger this law. For example section (b) which says you have to have at least 200 homes in a single community to be considered. That seems like a pretty big loophole to drive through. Now I have to motivate myself to walk over to the reference section of the library to see if there is any case law associated with this stuff that will add insight.
They're pitching this as being a benevolent gesture, but
(a) It sounds like they're just becoming a larger real-estate developer? They didn't say "we're donating all this land plus some capital to a housing non-profit"; they're going to receive revenue from their investments. Are we supposed to say thanks?
(b) How does 20k units compare to their impact on Bay Area housing to date?
This is not my area, and I'm not aware of any region that has this requirement, but here's an idea: In the same way that we require large physical development projects to do an environmental impact study, and actively make mitigating affordances (e.g. setting aside land) to offset those impacts .... should employers who intend to hire large numbers of employees from out of the area (sending recruiters to schools across the nation, etc) be required to do housing impact studies, and actively participate in building the housing stock for the new residents they're pulling to an area?
How quickly would the Bay Area housing situation change if the ability of tech companies to grow headcount was tied to their ability to proportionally build housing?
Local governments love adding corporations. They pay taxes while using few resources. So corporate campuses get approved super easily - sometimes even with tax breaks!
New housing on the other hand is fought against tooth and nail because it brings new residents that require roads, services, and schools. Worse, if all the land has been used up, it requires larger buildings to be built where there used to be smaller houses and commercial strips which upsets local residents with voting power. Local governments sometimes even make residential developers pay extra taxes or make mandatory donations to the community.
It's these local city governments like Palo Alto and Mountain View that allowed Google to massively expand without also allowing developers to build housing to support the employees for that expansion. Hence, why Google is spending its own capital just to get some units built.
> It's these local city governments like Palo Alto and Mountain View that allowed Google to massively expand without also allowing developers to build housing to support the employees for that expansion.
There's probably plenty of blame to go all around. IMO companies like Google (disclosure: I work there) caught on to the magnitude of the problem too late, and when they did, they ran into the local political resistance.
Why were they so late to catch on? Well I only have theories, including that it's only in the last few years that the cost of housing has made life difficult even for well paid employees, and those employees have voiced their frustrations.
In some ways I don't think that Google (and other companies that might follow them) deserve so much praise for finally attacking this by the horns at this late stage.
Blaming or praising Google is irrelevant. This is simply a response to a broken political system where regional housing supply is wildly inadequate relative to demand.
It isn’t the job of a company to provide housing for its employees. In the absence of constraints real estate developers will naturally build to satisfy this demand. However local governments have control over how and if housing is built and have systematically prevented building to meet this demand for decades. The blame is theirs since they are the only entities can and do constrain new housing. This is the part of the system that needs to change.
> This is simply a response to a broken political system where regional housing supply is wildly inadequate relative to demand
Which is why, IMO, the praise for Google on this matter is unwarranted. And it's not the political system that is broken, it's the regressive views of the elected officials and the people who have tended to vote in local elections.
> In the absence of constraints real estate developers will naturally build to satisfy this demand.
We don't need a policy that is absent restraints. We need housing policy with sane restraints, i.e. incremental upzoning planned at the regional level to allow more housing density and building employment centers accessible via transit instead of only cars and private bus systems.
Even public agencies like BART have had to fight at the state level to be allowed to develop housing on their own property.
This isn't really an issue of restraints vs no restraints but rather what the restraints optimize for, and currently they optimize for increasing property values and not providing sufficient housing supply.
That makes it sound like local governments should just fight harder against companies growing more?
At present, companies adopt strategies which require them to undergo rapid growth, including headcount, without planning for or making affordances for the other effects of bringing those people to the area.
Why is unreasonable to suggest that companies should be required to plan for and mitigate those effects at the outset, rather than one or two companies making feeble gestures several years later?
This sounds a lot like Trump's rhetoric, America for Americans, San Francisco for San Franciscans.
It's unreasonable because industry has already paid for it in taxes, and fairly high ones at that. It's not industry's fault that it's being squandered by local and state government.
Haha, having to do onerous amounts of environmental impact studies and various community impact studies/hearings, is exactly why we're in this situation to begin with.
We already have plenty of people that want to build, that's not the problem. Problem is local regulation and policies that don't align with regional interests.
The California housing crisis is a political choice and fixing the politics that caused it might be more effective long term than stop gap patches like this.
Why can't they "grow their own" powerful politicians? Find somebody young, put them in all the right places with all the right people, and have them say all the right things. Shouldn't be hard with unlimited resources.
The problem with humans is that Free Will stuff. Eventually the human says or does something unpopular and your investment is written off, along with the politician.
Maybe this young upstart has already tweeted something in their more free-spirited days, just waiting to be scrolled onto.
Much more effective to pump money into the political parties directly. They're going nowhere.
As a thought experiment, lets say Google owns a significant percentage of the housing market in the areas they operate in. They thereby receive both rent from their own employees, and others in the area. Lets see how this gives them leverage:
* Want to fully choke out competition on salaries, while leveraged against it by taking in the rent money those salaries provide for?
* Why not invest in housing, when you're the company that is vastly increasing the home values? It seems like you'd end up actually make a killing since you then control the market
Maybe someone more clever than I can come up with more things - it feels like a neo company town model, where you don't own everything, but you have all the control and all the levers.
It feels like a vertical integration ala a Zaibatsu. If they move heavily into education next they'll have control of their own knowledge worker supply chain.
It's sad how many times I walk around in SF and see basically crumbling buildings or empty parking lots and wonder why new housing has not been built there yet? And more importantly who would actually oppose development on crumbling or wasted land?
It's pretty easy to understand locals' opposition. More people => more congestion. More housing supply => lower property values (at least at first). It doesn't matter if the housing is on what used to be a parking lot it's still more people and housing supply. (You can argue that NIMBYism is selfish and short-sighted but that doesn't mean it's irrational in the economist sense.)
Here is a buisnes idea Ive been thinking about lately for SF, Hong Kong, NY and other expensive places. Buy a smaller cruise ships and rent a pier to dock it. I found a newly renovated ship with 72 cabins for 5.8 million. With the average rent in SF that ship has paid for itself in 2 years (yes there will be additional costs, but back of a napkin, its a good start). Then buy more ships and stack them. Renovate/remodel in cheep places, then sail them to the bay. This could create housing in months not years, without the need for planing and building. If i had the money I would do it in a heart beat. It would be so much faster and cheaper then what google is planing.
You would run into the same issues which are used to sabotage any new development. I gave a list below, it really isn't meant to be in jest but it sadly does happen.
The only way to get the issue fixed is with a state amendment and even then it would be years in court. It really comes down to two real reasons, they do not want those people in their city and second it makes so much money for all involved the longer nothing changes.
1) you would have to set aside a good number of units for low income residents
2) all work would have to be done by union member organizations
3) you would need to have multiple environmental impact studies to include traffic to and from the location
4) you would also have to appease groups concerned with the affect such a ship would have on naturally occurring views; this has been used against new construction as well as shadows cast
5) Plus a litany of politically associated special interest groups would have to be appeased, this is the primary method of wealth building among the political class.
1 is required only for developers seeking zoning changes. Low-income housing allowances aren't required if a development falls within existing site zoning, which is something that LA developers have used to great effect.
2) This is completely false, anti-union FUD.
3) This wasn't true before CA law was changed to simplify the approval process. You only need 1 comprehensive environmental impact study, and if you're close enough to another planned development (generally within 1 block), you can incorporate parts of their EIS into your own.
4) Views are not protected in CA...Appeasement not required.
5) Both cynical, false, and also misunderstands where the political class gets its wealth from (lobbying, not real estate).
In addition to all the other problems, you may need to be a US-flagged and US-built vessel depending on how exactly your dock based cruise interacts with the 1920 Jones Act's restrictions on cabotage. Requiring a US built ship may significantly increase your costs.
And then once the ship city state has developed enough independence it can quietly slip out to sea beyond national borders and become its own seastead mini-nation of Google.
Here is a buisnes idea Ive been thinking about lately for SF, Hong Kong, NY and other expensive places. Buy a smaller cruise ships and rent a pier to dock it.
Why don’t allow employees to WFH full time and only come to office as necessary?
Why don’t government stimulate and encourage corps who promote full time (not 1 day a week for good behavior) WFH policies?
There is absolutely no need for 2/3 of all high tech employees in Bay Area to drag their physical bodies into their statically assigned corporate chairs. Lots of meetings, conf calls and work can be done remotely.
That’s the solution that doesn’t require $1B and will take very little to implement and could have REAL impact.
this is already happening and a big part of the problem.
when you separate work location from living location, that opens up people to live farther away from work. so you end up with more people living in places with less housing because its "cooler". like san francisco. even though tons of people work at businesses outside the city.
Google should take a couple billion dollars, build a company town in South Dakota, and simultaneously get a House seat and maybe even some Senators out of it.
Most major tech companies want to hire onsite, when there are plenty of places in this country where you can buy a lot of real estate for much cheaper than the Bay Area.
I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle.
Investing $1B into housing in the Bay Area seems nice at the surface, but maybe if we stopped demanding everyone be willing to relocate to one of a handful of cities to work in our industry, we'll solve the root cause of the problem.
People respond to this agglomeration factor with the argument we should “hire remote cuz the internet thing”. But the other factor to consider is how we are less tied by our jobs to physical location and that allows more choice in where people decide to live too. A lot of people want to live in the Bay Area and other coastal cities. They don’t want to live where housing is cheap in the Midwest.
So you may have a liberating force in the way jobs have changed, but that works both ways.
People are moving to the big coastal cities. The big coastal cities (and states) are doing a piss poor job of accommodating this - actually they’ve taken active measures to worsen the housing problem with zoning and tax rules.
I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit.
> I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit.
Hah - see my comment elsewhere.
Local politicians are definitely the choke point that doesn't allow the market to function properly.
Why is it not easy? The internet is global just like the products these companies create. There's not much, if any, reason they need to be so consolidated in a single region or city.
An alternative way of looking at it: whether or not face to face is important for the specifics of the job, it might be important for emotional connection between humans, fulfilling a common human desire to connect with peers and be happy on the job and _outside_ the job. In other words, we might want to be around peers for social (non-job) reasons.
Exactly. I wouldn't even say that's a non-job function - I've worked at companies with low morale and social cohesion before, and it directly impacted the quality and amount of work that people could do. We're smart primates that are still heavily dependent on social cues and a feeling of inclusion.
If only we had the knowledge to plan cities so that it's possible to live near where you work. Perhaps it sounds crazy, but we could even stack dwelling units on top of one another.
Seriously though: It'd be great if apartments were better sound-proofed. My only gripe with apartment living was inadequate privacy and being woken up at 3 AM by a lead-footed upstairs resident.
In places like Europe where more people live in them, they tend to do a bit better job of privacy, because they're not just 'cheap housing for people without the means to live in a "real" house'.
Yeah right, next thing you'll be telling me there's a better way to move large quantities of people than each one sitting on the highway in their own personal metal box
This is a really good argument. It is the same reason why authors instead of staying in their homes by themselves writing all day, will go to public places to be around other authors/people. We are social animals.
I agree wholeheartedly. This is important and will provide balance. That said, often people have some sort of passion, their job might be a manifestation of that passion, and they want to connect with peers.
I was actually doing research a couple of days ago to support more remote workers for my company and... unfortunately almost all of the research I found was backing co-location. There are degrees of remote work, but it seems that for most teams and most products being co-located provides the most productivity.
There are a lot of shades of gray there, like, if someone commutes for 2 hours through stressful SF traffic to get to a campus where they jump on a Google Hangout since their team members are spread across 3 buildings... yeah, I don't think productivity is going to get much of a boost. However, our team is in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio where you can live within 30 miles, get here in 30 minutes and have dirt-cheap housing. I'm having a hard time coming up with collateral to support my "modern" viewpoint on the benefits of remote workers.
my theory is that if you try to convert a co-located workforce to remote you are going to struggle because you have a mix of people that are able and unable to properly function that way. However if you start a company with that model from day one, over time you select for people that can handle the remote aspect. It becomes a core cultural value.
Southwest is the fun airline. What would american airlines have to do to become a fun airline? They would have to fire 2/3 of their staff.
> It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.
[citation needed]
It's clearly important enough for Amazon, Facebook, and Google to invest heavily in already established tech hubs where it's incredibly expensive to build, so they can have their engineers working in the same physical location(s).
Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."
I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed.
These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet face-to-face. Emotion is particularly poorly conveyed over email or VC, and sometimes to convince somebody of something, meeting them in person is the best way to do that.
Okay that's a more reasonable argument than what I thought you were making.
I'd contend that you're not considering the impact of sunk cost fallacies on business decision-making. Or if you have considered it, you've probably discounted it far more than is warranted.
It could be the case that, out of all the people currently employed by these companies, the majority believe they thrive in an onsite role rather than a remote one. Years of self-selection (especially if exacerbated by a lack of diversity in their employment experience, since these companies tend to hire out of colleges) could lead to a feedback loop.
Just because they're smart people doesn't mean they're impervious to human cognitive distortions.
How many of these companies have even trialed 100% remote positions, even if only for a year?
I don't think the fact that humans are social animals needs a citation. Most people are healthier and happier spending their time in social groups. Even as a highly introverted person, I'd much rather interact with live people every day than work remotely and only interact electronically. Of course there are exceptions, but I would guess that building a company, or even parts of it, from the exceptions is a lot of trouble.
> I don't think the fact that humans are social animals needs a citation.
Humans can (and should) get their social needs met anywhere, not only at their place of employment.
I've worked both onsite and remote throughout my career. I'd never advocate for forced remote work (because some people want to get their social needs met through their employer).
Rather, I'd argue that it should be considered as an option.
For me it's not just about having social needs met, it's also that for a lot of engineering work in-person collaboration is crucial. Serendipitous interactions are important. Passionate discussions involving emotion and empathy are important. Being able to easily grab a co-worker's attention for a minute to show them something on your screen or sketch an idea out on a whiteboard is important. You can technically make some of these things to happen remotely using technology, but in practice, there's just too much friction, and these sorts of interactions don't happen.
I agree that not all roles require this sort of thing. There are employees who can come to the office, work 8 hours, and go home, all without speaking a word to another person. There are probably thousands of employees at Google who could probably be just as effective working remotely. That said, having worked there, I think that's not true for the vast majority of SWE work.
When I worked at an open office in Google, a good fraction of the people had headphones on most of the day. While there was some serendipitous discussion, much of the time we'd book meeting rooms, specifically to avoid distracting those around us.
Open plan offices are indeed terrible, but that doesn't contradict the benefit of face-to-face communication. For me the best environment has been a large team office with 4-8 people, where everyone has a decent amount of personal space and spontaneous discussions are more likely to be relevant.
It's quite literally how nearly every successful business currently operates. Digital communication suffers from lag and resolution. There simply isn't the requisite bandwidth and speed to communicate the same information that humans get from all of our five senses.
And yet, there are fully remote companies (bootstrapped, lifestyle, and startups) collectively worth over a billion dollars that are fully remote. I don't buy this argument at all having worked for one of them. Face to face communication is only necessary if your collaboration tools and business/workplace processes are not up to par, and that's a business problem, not a social interaction problem.
To echo the refrain others have said in this thread, "Hire remote, hire remote, hire remote."
I would love to see HN's monthly Who's Hiring prioritize/bubble up fully remote jobs to the top of the list first. Give an advantage to those who are helping the situation. This is no different than roads. You can't just keep building roads forever. You have to destroy demand for local habitation once it reaches a point beyond which equilibrium can ever be reached, and the Bay Area is beyond that point. Let people work from places where they can afford to live better lives.
EDIT: @aerophilic: Agree entirely with your comment.
In my personal experience managing and being part of different teams (remote, onsite, hybrids).
I have found that what is in general most effective is that EVERYONE on the team is remote, or everyone is co-located. You can do hybrids, remote work with an on site team if the remote folks are strong communicators and/or people that are more task oriented (Assuming you have someone to manage them) but there is a tax on doing so, and often they won’t feel as connected.
Even in the above hybrid example, there are specific things you need to “plan in” to be effective (things like an office buddy, regular sync up times, clear responsibilities/action lists, etc).
This is a great observation: my observation is that there's a tipping point. Get enough people in the office, and side conversations are much easier to do face to face, and you end up skipping the collaboration tools.
Those companies are pretty cool and I think we'll see more in the future. That said, while they're better than the alternative of not existing at all, it's not a given that they're not inferior to a company operating out of one office where it's easier to communicate.
They work better than closed offices, in my experience, for the roles I've worked in (software engineering).
I'm way more likely to ask a co-worker over to my desk to show them something or have a discussion if they're a few feet away within sight and earshot. In an open office I also overhear a lot of pertinent information -- I'm aware of issues that might be relevant to me as they develop, I don't have to wait hours or days for someone to communicate them in an email, issue tracker, or meeting.
There's a cost in terms of readily available heads-down concentration time to be sure, but if I want to mess around with math formulas or something I pop on the headphones, go to a quiet room, or do it at home. It's much harder to replicate the benefits of an open office environment in a closed one than the reverse.
So an open floor plan full of distractions for the occasional time you call someone else over audibly and immediately, while possible interrupting them and others? And when you want to work, wear headphones or go to an entirely different place?
Why does it make sense to optimize for the former instead of the latter? The benefits must be studied in context of how overall productivity and bottomline is affected, not just easy it is to start talking to someone.
Effective and efficient communication is very important for a large number of job functions. Video conferencing has yet to supplant the efficiencies enabled by co-location.
Let's see - software development can take different forms.
On one end you have work where someone gives you well defined specs and the tools you need, and you just go crank out some code on your own. That works well for remote work.
On the other end there are plenty of software positions that require people who can understand and develop requirements, possibly by talking with disparate groups like customer support, finance, sales, marketing, and so on who are not at all technical. These people may not understand the costs of different options so subsequent conversations about costs/benefits for different groups are needed. Sometimes these discussions might be contentious, as resources are finite. Sometimes there's a lot of back and forth involved, as the software person tries to understand the business - and vice versa.
Cleanly isolated work that can be shipped anywhere in the world is like making plastic widgets, it's a race to the bottom in terms of wages. So as a general rule it's the messy, on-site, highly iterative and negotiated work that pays the kind of money no one is willing to believe on HN.
To me, it has always seemed like face-to-face is very useful to get to know people and get the process started, but after that, following up via messaging and video conferencing is fine. But a similar timezone remains pretty important.
I downvoted you because face-to-face communication is not very important to most online jobs. As you pointed out elsewhere it may be important for other reasons but those needs can be fulfilled elsewhere.
Even if face-to-face is important for specific positions it's even more rarely a daily requirement. Most of the country is so much less expensive than the Bay Area that you could fly someone in one day a week and it would still cost less.
My point was only about extreme consolidation. They can have multiple smaller offices in various cities. It doesn't need to be thousands of people all working from home.
I've worked remote, and it's ok, but it's not the same thing as being in the office. It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from. Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers. And then there's stuff like high quality universities, and of course venture capital.
> It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from.
What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions?
> Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers.
Same question for that perspective, except I do have a few ideas of a cynical answer to that question from the company's perspective.
>What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions?
The advantage is that on the path in-between now and the perfect future where all companies are remote-first( that we are not sure will ever happen), you will not be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to job prospects. I don't think that many people would be willing to heavily limit their job prospects (not even taking into account all the other advantages that come with living in a densely populated coastal city) while waiting for that "bright all-remote future" that may never come.
California recently passed several laws to make it easier for the market to provide housing.
However, local governments are still the ultimate deciders and many of them are opposed to new housing, such as in the SF Peninsula.
Other parts of CA are less resistant to new housing. In LA's downtown, for example, almost 50,000 units of new housing are being brought online between 2016-2021. In both Korea Town and Hollywood, more than 5,000 new units have come online in the past 3 years (and they're already the densest neighborhoods). In Marina Del Rey and Playa Del Rey, roughly 2500 new units have opened/will open up in 2018 and 2019. Along the Metro Expo Line, more than 25,000 residential units within 4 blocks of a station are planned or already under construction. Inglewood will see somewhere between 500 and 2500 new apartments in the neighborhood around the Sofi Stadium, not including other residential development. Even Santa Monica will see roughly 2000 new apartments over the next 2 years.
Edit: these are just the developments that I'm aware of. There are plenty more. If you're interested in following LA-area development, there are several Facebook groups devoted to this subject.
Given that "About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born," I think that if a group of FAANG+Friends agreed to open campuses in some other state at the same time, they could easily build a new tech community.
I don’t know what the point of this fact is. Architects and engineers mostly work from offices, which are usually located so that there is a good pool of potential employees around.
Oil workers go to where the oil is. Which is both concentrated and distributed.
Software is dematerialised, which means, perversely, it tends to concentrate to a far greater extent. Much as local and regional entertainment, constrained by material proximiy to audience, gave way to Hollywood.
Sure. Most of that desire is "I want a high paying job". With that goal, they sacrifice things like affordable housing, good schools, crime, congestion, etc.
Don't forget housing is stupid expense in NJ as well. I wouldn't call NJ "desirable".
This is true and explains some of it, but it doesn't change the fact that currently wanting to live in a desirable area and wanting to live in an area because of a job are conflated with no options that could effectively separate or distinguish between the two sources of demand. It's not like everybody would get up and leave the Bay Area, but it would allow those who only want the job to leave the market for housing in the Bay Area and lowering demand overall. At worst, the drop in demand would be supplanted with people who wouldn't move to the Bay Area at the current price (and thus the price wouldn't see much of a drop), but at least you wouldn't be crowded out by people who would leave the Bay Area given the choice.
People are happy and healthy in a place for all kinds of reasons. That doesn't make them a desirable settlement destination for others.
Maybe a town is incredibly racist and who lives there is all from the same longstanding community and they are all extremely close and have good personal relationships with each other and feel a strong sense of belonging to the place and the people. Maybe the town is perfectly suited to being students, young and single and there's a lot of things that cater to them. Maybe the town is better suited to families, couples, people who own dogs. Such people will gravitate there. This could mean they are all happy and healthy, but it would not mean that if I, some random bloke from a different state/culture/language/country moved there and tried to settle in and live my life, I would be particularly happy or healthy.
So yes, a place can be the happiest place in the world for the people who already live there, and still be undesirable for the "looking for a nice place to settle" population at large. However, having a highly employable, high income industry, lots of motivated hard workers, a vibrant art scene, and good weather makes a place a lot more universally desirable, and it takes a helluva lot of negatives to offset that desirability (which the bay area is trying really hard to do).
Yes, cheaper places exist. If you're offering up your geriatric, white, sleeper country club town as a superior place for tech workers, I'm not sure what to say.
Being the happiest and healthiest city doesn't really affect what's counted as desirable or valuable in the housing market. This doesn't really follow.
> I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle.
That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company.
The large house with an acre of land gives you other opportunities, but if that one specific dimension is what you care about then it falls short.
Also, in Seattle, it provides access to all of the other desireable aspects of living in a thriving metropolis:
- Good schools
- Lots of like-minded people to befriend
- Lots of places to eat, activities, venues, etc.
- Several higher and continuing education opportunities
- Good (well, better than almost all mid-sized cities, at least) public transit options
I definitely understand the appeal of living out in the country, but, for reasons I don't entirely understand, on many threads like this, people seem to completely overlook all of the myriad ways that living in a city is actually great.
It's not all grim concrete jungle hellscape. If I lived out in the sticks, I could afford a couple of acres and a +2,000 square foot home. But I couldn't afford a zoo, aquarium, bike trail, running path, music venue, movie theater, personal chef, playground, and coffee house to go with it.
The fundamental tenet of urban density is that by giving up some personal space, we all get access to a much greater variety of shared spaces.
> When you live in a rural area none of these are needed, zoo, aquarium
Perhaps if you live adjacent to a major national park or forest, or marine preserve, but most easily habitable rural areas are not that, and instead are industrially farmed or extracted from - essentially factories. Sure, there are exceptions, but not enough to accommodate the number of people that it would take to make a difference in cost of living in urban areas, not without ruining the access to wildlife viewing that makes those places unique in the first place.
> bike trail, running path
The environment doesn't provide either of these. They are created by many people either re-using the same route routinely, or by some institution building and maintaining them.
> That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company.
...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord.
If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.
The difference housing cost as a percentage of the small tech city salary is an irrelevant statistic.
The relevant statistic to compare is actual housing cost vs actual compensation in both types of places. For many types of tech jobs, the number still favors big cities, if not in percentage terms, then in absolute numbers.
And when it comes down to a real life decision, there are plenty of other factors (financial or otherwise) besides that one statistic.
$12000 doesn't mean the same thing when you consider the cost of living difference between the urban and rural areas.
$12k goes way farther towards purchasing goods and services in the rural area, so naturally it seems like an awful lot of money there, but it purchases far fewer goods and services in a big city. This is similar to how household incomes between different countries aren't directly comparable until you adjust for Purchasing Power Parity [1].
That doesn't mean that all big city dwellers are better off. Some undoubtedly are, and some are definitely not.
> I'm arguing that "only $12,000" is dismissive of how impactful a difference that makes to the lives of people who don't live in a big city.
But the $12k in question isn't a fungible $12k. It's specifically the difference in housing costs between urban and rural in the example given earlier.
If the point is that many people in rural areas are economically struggling, then yes we agree, just as many poorer urban dwellers are (and to whom a random $12k received would also be hugely impactful), but that has nothing to do with example proposed.
I don't understand. Is your entire point in this discussion to somehow justify talking down to other people?
> If the point is that many people in rural areas are economically struggling, then yes we agree, just as many poorer urban dwellers are (and to whom a random $12k received would also be hugely impactful), but that has nothing to do with example proposed.
My point was that the OP's use of the phrase "only $12,000" is offensive, classist language in the context it was written in. That point is unrelated to the rest of the discussion.
I don't get why anyone would want to double down on defending this language, especially since you weren't the person who used it. But here we are.
> I don't understand. Is your entire point in this discussion to somehow justify talking down to other people?
> My point was that the OP's use of the phrase "only $12,000" is offensive, classist language
OP wasn't talking down. They used "only" to compare the difference in housing cost to the much higher difference in wages between rural and urban areas, as in $12K housing cost increase < $40k salary increase, not to imply that $12K is inconsequential in an absolute sense.
$12K out of most people's pockets is a lot of money (including if it were out of mine), but the OP wasn't implying that it isn't.
They were making a simple observation that:
big city salary - big city housing costs > rural salary - rural housing costs
Looks like they even responded below stating precisely that.
There's real classism out there, often expressed across the rural/urban divide, but this isn't an example of it.
I didn't mean it like that - I meant that if you're making $100k in a suburb somewhere in a flyover state, you would probably make $140k (for instance) in a place with a higher rent but it woul;dn't really matter to your bottom line
But also: Everyone has higher rents, not just you. This will generally be reflected in the cost of living (i.e. not just for your rent will go up, but so will other expenses).
It's not trivial to do this calculation. Some things will surprise you:
You can get cheaper electricity bills in Seattle than where I live (Naples, FL), but you don't need air conditioning in Seattle. Living in Florida without AC is ill-advised.
I want to downvote you for your ridiculous show of privilege in that statement but won't since that's not what downvotes are for. $12,000 a year is a lot of money, especially when added up over time. The US median income is just over $61,000, meaning "only" $12,000 represents 20%. That's just crazy to consider that a small amount.
I think you missed the point. The point is that compensation in the Bay is much much more than $12k/year higher than other low-COL cities, and therefore the trade-off is worth it.
It also affords living an area with substantially better quality of life in many areas: diversity and opportunity (career, entrepreneurial, academic) being two important ones. Most places with an acre of land as you describe are rural and in areas with poor services, education, and other quality of life concerns.
That very much depends on the area. E.g. Chicago suburbs may not be quite as cheap as "get an acre of land" but you can absolutely have significantly better access to cultural, educational, academic, etc. opportunities than anywhere around SF for significantly less money. Pretty good career-wise, too, and the difference in salaries is less than the difference in cost of living.
Chicago might be on par with the Bay Area in terms of culture, or even marginally better in some ways. In just about any other measure, especially education, job opportunities and salary adjusted for CoL, Chicago compares poorly.
I am not sure if I agree. Culture-wise (IMHO, of coursde and all the disclaimers) it is lightyears ahead of the Bay Area.
In education, both schools and universities, Chicagoland would compare very favorably with Bay Area (stepkid went to schools in both; entirely unimpressed with BA schools).
In job opportunities at FAANG-type companies Bay Area obviously comes out ahead,but for the vast majority of people both in and out of high tech Chicago both has jobs and is actually affordable and salaries are lower by a far lesser amount than the cost of living, at least if you believe all of the comparison sites like Numbeo. In my personal experience I've had much more money left over in Chicago, working for as Chicago company than working for one in Sunnyvale, and that's even before adding up intangibles of better (well, for the USA, anyway) public transit, better museums, theaters, etc. etc.
On climate BA might win on paper, but personally I like to have actual seasons.
>On climate BA might win on paper, but personally I like to have actual seasons.
Nice, I've lived in both and Chicago winters made me want to kill myself. If all else was equal I'd pay significant sums to live in the Bay Area simply because the weather.
Certainly an understandable choice. Myself, after a year I got bored of looking in the window in the morning and not knowing if it is June or January.
Of course if I had the same living conditions in Chicago as in Bay Area and had to dig the car out every morning, I'd think differently, too. But of course in Chicago one can afford a nice place with a garage in a hot area for less money than a cardboard box in SV.
> ...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord.
Unfortunately I haven't seen many roles in, say, Dallas or Atlanta where the pay is only 20-25K or so less than my current, total-comp wise. It'd be a bigger drop, usually. The rent gap is steep, but the comp gap can be larger.
Yea, that's a sucky side-effect. But it means access to lots of great people, ideas, and jobs. I've lived on a farm myself, but living in an expensive, but small city is appealing to me right now; a decent trade-off.
It's been a while since I've read cyberpunk novels like Cryptonomican, but I feel like the reality of corporations becoming villages and societal entities is slowly getting there anyways.
Yes, but Google isn't the one that created this problem. You should be drawing the opposite conclusion: that the problem is so bad, even a company town would be an improvement!
Yup, corporate development isn't a substitute for cohesive publicly funded policies, particularly with issues like housing. Companies will do just enough to keep people from guillotining the execs (or just raising taxes), meanwhile eroding the public services we do have. Company towns are definitely going to be making a comeback.
Right, don’t they live in shipping containers in snowcrash. A few years back I heard there was a movement in Oakland to build shipping container villages. Nothing new since the 90s except for Facebook.
Actually I'm pretty sure Hiro also lived in a shipping container at least at one point during the book. Though it's been years since I read it (something I need to correct).
Man, sometimes it's fun to imagine having a gigantic autocratic government like China that could just... build empty cities, or huge railroads that 11 people ride every day, knowing people would fill them up eventually. But then I guess you'd get everything else that comes with a gigantic autocratic government.
Right now the point of most strain is at housing availability, so easing that would be a step in the right direction, even if it relocates the point of most strain to other forms of infrastructure. You can't solve every problem all at once.
One of the trick here is a significant portion of this development will be placed near Googleplex and they will only provide parking units enough for less than half of them. This incentivizes not having a car at all (yes, there's a number of young new grad without a car even now) and implicitly give more benefits to their employees and TVCs.
This is not necessarily a bad thing as a decent number of those high salary Google employees will not participate to the housing market thus reduce the upward pressure.
This is awesome. I hope they follow through on actually making this affordable and not only for Google employees (which I agree, would likely be illegal).
Pols in the bay area suck. All of them. They are against affordable housing and against families. But, they love money more than they hate families. So way this approach will help and pave the way for the other major companies to do the same.
“Ah yes, all of them. Every politician in a place where millions live is bad, none of them are working to build housing and schools, transit and infrastructure.”
That’s a horrible argument that has no basis in fact. Multiple cities, like Mountain View, Oakland, San Jose and Foster City, just to name a few off the top of my head, are putting in affordable housing. Alameda County Transit has vastly expanded their bus fleet, something the tax payers chose on the ballot!
You might hate your elected officials, but not all of us do.
George Pullman made a town outside of Chicago for workers to build his railcars. It didn't end well:
"the town and its design were... a paternalistic system that took away men's rights as citizens, including the right to control their own domestic environment"
Happy that google is making this investment; it's worth a shot even if it is far the ideal way to build housing. Hopefully the NIMBYism that defines this area won't kill it.
>This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018)
This nails the root cause of the housing "crisis" in the bay area.
That's not the only root cause. It is also trivially easy for Google and other BigCo's to hire from outside the Bay Area (college recruits, etc) and those people move here without a plan of where to live. They arrive and set up in a small apartment and soon discover there's no other housing option, but the job is too lucrative and interesting to leave. Another 1000 follow the next week.
Politics is a huge factor in the lack of affordable housing. Both legislation and concerns by citizen about how new housing will "change" a neighbor make it next to impossible to build higher density housing.
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
However, if the political consensus could be developed there are possibilities, e.g. "Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days"
22 units, four stories, four days.
> This new 22-unit project from local developer Patrick Kennedy (Panoramic Interests) is the first in the nation to be constructed of prefabricated all-steel modular units made in China.
> Kennedy notes that the cost of trucking to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong.
> But the savings haven’t been as great as expected, he said. “Sixty-five to seventy-five-percent of the construction costs are still incurred on the site. In addition to the usual trades, we have crane operators, flagmen, truckers and special inspectors.”
(Reminds me of Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion House. Factory built prefab homes that were to be delivered by helicopter, installed onto masts built onsite and containing the power/comms/water/sewage hookups.)
Nice of google to do this. People who complain about this also complain about google being one of the causes, but there is only so much one can do. Glad that google is setting a good example for other companies to follow!
There's a very large area of land directly south of Redwood City with an extremely low housing density, that could be torn down (with some controversy, no doubt) to make way for the new Google housing.
You can easily see the underutilized density on the satellite view, by how green it is compared to surrounding cities:
To be less facetious about it, there is some irony in this project being promoted by Google executives, who live in chateaus and mansions in Atherton, Los Altos Hills, Woodside, etc, with an acre of land to their name, when this investment is of course to house the labor that got them those mansions to begin with. The execs who sponsor the housing projects obviously won't sell or give up their own land to make room for the new apartments.
I think Big Tech has enough clout to make a dent in the housing woes of large coastal cities. The cost of moving away from California is too high for Google, using it's political capital to advocate for housing is a great way to force change. NIMBYs are gonna NIMBY, but if half these NIMBYs work for companies that are lobbying for rezoning of land they own and providing grants.. who wins out?
As usual when big tech talks housing, "Bay Area" actually means "Peninsula and west SJ". The other two-thirds of the Bay, bedroom communities and cheaper areas - who cares about those? Perhaps there's something about say, the tri-valley area that makes it unacceptable for office buildings that I don't know?
Dublin has doubled in population in the last 20 years. That sounds like an area that is pro-growth, where a company could have a useful impact without getting shot down by NIMBYs every step of the way.
I'd dig up stats on the biggest employers in Dublin, but can't seem to find any, so we'll go with Pleasanton as a proxy - Kaiser, Safeway and Oracle. Wew. We got one. Too bad most of tech doesn't even know the East Bay (much less the parts of it past the hills) even exists.
There are options to deal with the housing problems, even staying within the bay. Companies simply aren't pursuing them.
As someone who lives in a single-family home, I'm totally for public transit, having fewer cars on the streets, more walkability, etc.
But until cities solve the issues of smell and noise, I'm not interested in living in a dense area. Keep it clean and quiet. Invest in urban forestry. Then it starts to look appealing.
I live in Somerville MA, which is has about 18k people per square mile, compared to the ~2-6k I see in the South Bay. It gets that density through many two and three family houses placed closely together, and it's not smelly or noisy. Here's a representative street view example: https://goo.gl/maps/ggwHETDomuRUQAB89
You can be much denser than the Bay Area while still having trees and feeling "residential".
Yes, yes it is. Somerville mades me go to NYC when I want a quiet vacation. The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, but the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it. When houses are built in cardboard with no space between the walls and the sidewalk, and someone walks home drunk, you'll get woken up something quick.
> The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it
My experience of Somerville has been very different from yours: I've never been woken up by noise coming in from the street, and I've lived in two very typical wood-frame houses (first a triple-decker in East Somerville, now a two-family near Davis).
But it's also worth separating "what should you build a house out of to avoid noise infiltration" and "what sort of neighborhood densities can you have with low levels of ambient outdoor noise".
Just the typical music events (not the small solo musicians but when there is an actual show) they hold every now and then, or when the flea market gets pretty crazy can definitely make it hard to watch TV even with windows closed in my experience.
Welcome to Atlanta! If you walk about 5 blocks from Peachtree in Midtown, you're in single family home territory; It turns from a bustling city to hearing mostly birds; from traffic to few cars (because there are no through streets from Piedmont to Monroe x 10th to Ponce, or Monroe to Highland x MorningSide to Ponce.
Are we entering a new age of Feudalism? Corporations will provide housing, food, salary and company stores. This is so incredibly dystopian it's crazy.
I feel like I'm going crazy here: why is absolutely no one talking about the fact that $1B is no where near enough money for 20,000 homes? That's only a budget of $50,000 per home. In an area where the average cost to build a home is over $250,000, they're clearly only investing around 1/5 of the required cost, but seem to be taking the credit for all the work.
Eventually people will wake up and realize the Bay Area is the way it is because there’s vested political, financial, and ecological interest in keeping it broken.
The reason there’s no affordable low income housing isn’t because that specific type of housing isn’t being built, it’s because they’ve made it nearly impossible to build anything BUT luxury.
This looping discussion, the same observations raised over and over, with similar responses, threatens to completely kill people's drive to get to the actual issues. Oh it's that same thread about nimbyism and the general hopelessness surrounding bay area politics.
Quick Question: Will Google be using this project, once built out, to test all its future "Home" products? Clearly it will have the leverage to do so and will greatly benefit the company over the long term. If so, great strategic thinking.
Sorry, off the topic. Firefox and Opera browsers report this page as Insecure Connection!
"The owner of blog.google has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website."!!
No it's not a better solution, it can help but the you have a ghost town that is the Bay Area it makes sense to make it denser and more like European cities.
I think in this case, this money is not going to be used for building the homes themselves but rather developing the land in partnership with private developers who will then do the actual portion of making buildings.
I don’t understand why all the growth need to happen in this place and this place alone. Wouldn’t it be nice if “good” jobs overflow SV and appear in other places? (kind of happening to Austin, Boulder, NY, etc.)
And people who already live in the area should absolutely have a right to direct it’s future.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted - it's the argument from NIMBY's that keeps getting pushed aside and needs to be properly addressed if this issue will ever get resolved.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating: you don't have to live in California.
For $1B, you could probably build enough houses for every single Google employee in a place like Detroit, or most other states (Arizona? Nevada? Colorado? etc. etc.) and then have those employees live there on campus. In fact, with the savings on cost of living and the like, which would mean those workers don't need as high wages, you could probably do the math that this would _save_ you money in the long run.
(...then again someone probably _did_ do the math and determined that the investment in these 20k homes, with current market rates increasing at a crazy pace, would probably be a higher return, but I digress.)
People can complain about NIMBY's / supply side all they want, but the fact that the demand side (the labor market) refuses to correct itself more strongly (there is _some_ growth in places like Austin, Boulder, Chicago, Boston, etc., but not enough) is bonkers to me. And if I owned a home in the Valley, my incentive would be to never change that market dynamic.
> it's the argument from NIMBY's that keeps getting pushed aside
It gets pushed aside because it's a bad argument, and it's often asked in bad faith.
"Hubs" for various industries pop up all the time. Hollywood for movies, NYC for finance, etc. There are very real advantages to the strong ecosystems created by gathering so many specialists in a single area, both for companies AND for workers; working for Google making a Google salary in a small office in Topeka instead of SF sounds great until you think about whatever happens if you lose your job somehow, and suddenly you have no local options for jobs of that tier.
Plus, most of the NIMBYs are trying to avoid density to preserve suburban sprawl-type neighborhoods, which themselves are anti-environment and classist. Pushing people out to metros where they'll contribute to yet more sprawl is A Bad Thing.
I wouldn't call it a bad argument, as it's rooted in rational economics - which is also why it's unfair to call it "bad faith."
The ecosystem of tech is partly built upon the idea of decentralization - as long as you can connect to the internet, you should be able to do what you need to do from anywhere. Otherwise tools like "video conferencing software" would tank quickly, as we might as well just fly to visit everyone we need to meet, right?
If you as an employee want to price in the substitutability of your job search as the demand side of the market, fine - as a homeowner, I would recognize that inelasticity and price my rent accordingly. There is no "bad faith" there - just rational economics, where one market understands that the other refuses to correct itself.
A "Google Salary" doesn't mean anything if you take home a small fraction of it, and what's left is eaten up by higher prices of the same goods; anywhere else, you can take home more, and those remaining $dollars can get you more. It's at the point now where I recommend to my employees / friends / colleagues that they shouldn't move to the valley unless they're getting 2.5x their salary, as that _might_ get you the same standard of living vs. our current spot.
Now I don't live in the Valley, but I somewhat empathize with the homeowners argument to _some_ extent: It's not necessarily classist or anti-environment for homeowners in a community, who _own_ the land, to band together and dictate what should go on in that community: how it should look, what would be the best for their investment, etc. And the point that talks past them is "this pushes people out to metros." The easy response is: it only pushes those out to metros _who feel like they have to live there._ Otherwise you price that into your decision to move there along with all the other factors at play.
> which is also why it's unfair to call it "bad faith."
It doesn't have to be bad faith, sure. It's just been my experience with the people putting the argument forth that they're making it in bad faith. Or maybe intellectually lazy is a better descriptor: they give the impression that it's a serious suggestion, but upon questioning it becomes clear that they haven't applied the least thought to it; it was just a reflexive "I don't want them here" masquerading as a policy proposal.
> as a homeowner, I would recognize that inelasticity and price my rent accordingly. There is no "bad faith" there - just rational economics, where one market understands that the other refuses to correct itself.
No idea what you're talking about here. Nobody's disputing that if demand is high and supply is low, it makes sense to charge high rent prices. At least, I'm certainly not arguing that.
> A "Google Salary" doesn't mean anything if you take home a small fraction of it, and what's left is eaten up by higher prices of the same goods; anywhere else, you can take home more, and those remaining $dollars can get you more.
Whether this is true depends on what those goods you want are. If you want to dump your money into international travel, seeing shows, buying cars and electronics, then high cost/salary places make more sense than low cost/salary places. If you want to own a big house with a lot of land, then the cheaper places are better.
> It's at the point now where I recommend to my employees / friends / colleagues that they shouldn't move to the valley unless they're getting 2.5x their salary, as that _might_ get you the same standard of living vs. our current spot.
It sounds like you're engaging in a common fallacy of assuming people value the same things you do, which is probably a big home, since otherwise needing 2.5x the salary wouldn't make any sense, as there are few other major goods that are impacted that hugely by cost of living (well, there's also childcare).
> It's not necessarily classist or anti-environment for homeowners in a community, who _own_ the land, to band together and dictate what should go on in that community: how it should look, what would be the best for their investment, etc.
It doesn't have to be, but it generally is, because the decisions they reach are generally anti-environment and classist.
What do you think it does when you mandate single family homes on big plots of land? Poorer people can't afford that, ergo they can't afford to live there, ergo poorer people are kept out of living in that neighborhood. And you're saying that economic segregation is not classist, because...?
Similarly, that style of zoning is also energy inefficient and results in people cutting into nature because you need more land per person. Pretty simple. But it's not anti-environment, because...? You haven't actually explained why.
> The easy response is: it only pushes those out to metros _who feel like they have to live there.
Who cares? I'm talking about the actual impact. The impact is encouraging suburban sprawl.
”Hubs" for various industries pop up all the time. Hollywood for movies
I think you just argued against your point. A lot of blockbuster movies and popular TV shows are being shot in other places because other places are cheaper and they offer better incentives.
And there are already a lot of programmers who aren't in the bay area. That's fine. That there are cheaper options available that many take advantage of doesn't change the fact that LA is still the center of the movie world (at least for American movies), and SF/SV is the center of the software/internet world, with many choosing to locate in those places despite the higher absolute costs.
There's much more to movies than just where they were physically shot. Guess where Warner Bros is HQ'd, Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, Universal Studios, etc.
What you've linked to is the equivalent of arguing that the bay area and Seattle aren't that big for cloud computing because hey, there aren't that many big datacenters there.
Seeing that the post you responded to said “A lot of blockbuster movies and popular TV shows are being shot in other places because other places are cheaper and they offer better incentives.”
The citation I linked to was right in line with my argument.
And, I know for a fact that you can not only get into “cloud computing” without going anywhere near Seattle, AWS hires SAs, TAMs, etc in many major cities and most of the third party Amazon Partners aren’t anywhere near Seattle....
> The citation I linked to was right in line with my argument.
No. The wider argument we were having was about whether Hollywood is the center of the world for American movies. It definitely is, showing where movies are physically shot doesn't change that.
> And, I know for a fact that you can not only get into “cloud computing” without going anywhere near Seattle, AWS hires SAs, TAMs, etc in many major cities and most of the third party Amazon Partners aren’t anywhere near Seattle....
Of course you can, just like there's plenty of finance outside of NYC. That doesn't change the fact that NYC is the main finance hub for America.
I don't even know what your point is here. "Hub" doesn't mean "contains literally everything related to [industry]".
That’s just what I’m saying about your other example, most of the money spent on “cloud computing” from a consulting and implementation side is nowhere near Seattle. It’s spread out all over the US. In fact I would think that Seattle would be the last place you would want to be even if you are working for Amazon as an SA since the pay is the same everywhere, most of your face to face interactions are with clients, and you can live some place much cheaper and be just as effective.
> That’s just what I’m saying about your other example, most of the money spent on “cloud computing” from a consulting and implementation side is nowhere near Seattle.
Okay, and most money people spend on movies is nowhere near LA. That has nothing to do with whether LA is a hub for movie development, though.
A huge proportion of cutting-edge cloud platform development for the big cloud companies happens in the SF bay area and Seattle. That's the big thing that makes them cloud tech hubs. Not where consulting and implementation of going to the cloud happens. Like consumers spending on movies, that just happens where the customers are.
The whole theory of going to a”hub” is being around other smart people that makes it easier for companies to find people and funding and make it easier for people to find a job and being in the ecosystem.
But if you are in the “cloud industry” you don’t need to be anywhere near Seattle to either find a job, find funding, or find “smart people”. I don’t know the movie industry but I do know the cloud industry from the consulting side. The cloud consulting industry is much larger than the development industry.
Because a rational labor market participant would consider that $1 purchasing power in SF <> $1 purchasing power in [Any other city / state].
Hypothetically if you were planning this as Google you wouldn't make the 1-1 scaling of lower salaries, but if you as employee would pay 80% less rent, could buy a massive home after working for <1 year, and still have more left over than you would ever have working in the bay, the trade-off would at least look somewhat appealing.
Having lived in Oakland for years, as well as smaller cities around the country, I can add that there's an additional appeal to living in out-of-the-way places. It's definitely a different thing from living in the heart of where everything is happening, like in the middle of San Francisco. But places off the beaten path have their own kind of allure.
You bring up a good point. Why is this happening? Because there's value in having a bunch of people of the same profession being grouped to together in a location. It's easier to share ideas, collaborate, and get things done. It was already evident from all the innovations that came when Venetian glass blowers were all forced to live & work in the same little location. Silicon Valley is no different. Maybe this will change in the near future once VR and AR and our internet speeds get much better.
The headline is misleading. In the article it says Google is rezoning $750 million worth of land (+ $250m in subsidies) from commercial to residential use, and making it available for private development. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest problems for Google was retention of young talent driven primarily by prohibitively high housing costs. In that way there is an incentive for them to bring down housing costs, although I'm not sure what impact 20k units will have unless they retained ownership and became a landlord to their own employees.
> It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest problems for Google was retention of young talent driven primarily by prohibitively high housing costs.
Well, it would surprise me :-)
According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in.
Next tier, still not senior, clears $250k/year. That's more than $20k/mo pre-tax. Even at an outrageous $5k rent on a single income and with no roommates, you're still talking about $6k or so >>monthly<< surplus for living your life and saving.
> Well, it would surprise me :-) According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in. Even at an outrageous $5k rent
Is that really enough to afford to live? Is that housing cost accurate?
A programmer at Google making $180k/yr salary brings in about $9,315.58 in after-tax income (according to PaycheckCalculator). The average house within 10 miles of Google's HQ currently costs about $1.5 million dollars according to Zillow's current month averages. (That's $9,745/month in after-tax costs per month, assuming 0% down on 30yr mortgage).
Like, maybe if you are single and live off of ramen and you pick the shittiest housing you can find, those numbers can work. But I personally couldn't afford to live in California on that salary (despite it being, under normal circumstances, an amazingly high salary).
It is common where I am for people who make 200%+ median income to be able to own a place to live, yes. This is true regardless of their age or education level.
Yes. I mean, of course it is. How is that in question even? I live in Manhattan, not the Bay Area, but the sum of my non-housing expenses are less than $4,315 (edit: your $9315 number minus my $5k lol rent) a month and I'm not exactly living that fresh-out-of-the-dorm lifestyle. Remember, this is the new grad number.
> Is that housing cost accurate?
Nope! It's high, obviously. I picked it out of thin air by picking a number we would be unwilling to pay as a two-earner household in NYC and then did a perfunctory check on Zillow to make sure there were Bay Area rentals at that price, which there are.
Yes it's "unfair" in some sense that someone earning that much money can't afford to buy property, but you're moving the goalposts. My point was that a baby Googler could certainly prosper financially, not that Bay Area housing prices were fair.
Surprised as well, for that money in the bay area it sounds more like motor-homes or something like that.
I still don't get why all this concentration is needed in the bay area in the first place and don't buy the argument that they need to be all in the same area.
There could be multiple bay area like places throughout the US. All these problems would suddenly disappear. Other areas would flourish, more people could own property at acceptable prices. I can't stop thinking that some are profiting from this bubble and want to keep it this way but it's going out of hand..
It is expanding a bit and the housing prices are having ripple effects throughout second/third tier cities. Housing in some areas such as Nashville has more than doubled over the past decade, some areas have seen 5x price growth in less than 10 years and Amazon's not really even there yet.
And unless I'm completely misinterpreting all of this, a "$1bn investment in 20k homes" that are each ultimately sold for an average of $100k (I'm assuming the average would actually be far higher) would net a $2bn return, so as much as the investment might be welcome, it's also hard-headed capitalism, not charity.
- ed
I'm busy and distracted and realised after I posted how obvious and unenlightening a post this was. Sorry!
Eh. If you wanna be cynical, they could've cashed in harder by building more commercial real estate. They say they're specifically rezoning a bunch of land that's currently zoned for office or commercial space, so I gotta give 'em some credit.
>First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families.
This doubles their investment if the average home price net of costs is 100k. It seems likely the number will be way above that, just glancing at median home prices.
Or these companies can move. If you take successful STEM related businesses and move them to better area's the talent will follow. There is more than 1 answer to this problem, most people just want to change laws because its easier for them.
No way, no how is Google or any other decent employer going to uproot all their knowledge workers and make them unproductive for the foreseeable future by forcing them to move to another region.
The diaspora from the Bay Area will keep happening the way it has been: at the economic margins. Over time, people outside of tech who aren’t subsidized by prop 13 or rent control will get priced out. There will be a perpetual underclass living in trailers and garages, and the landed aristocracy will be further entrenched.
Google doesn't need to move. They just need to expand elsewhere. Amazon is opening HQ2 because Seattle is "full", and there are lots of smart people elsewhere that they could employ. All the FAANGs should spread out more.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. If you'll scroll to the top of the comments on this page, you'll see where I stated the case that NIMBYism is the problem with housing there, and specifically that Mountain View's resistance to denser housing is part of it. I also think that Google and other large companies can expand elsewhere to alleviate some of the housing pressure, as Amazon has already started doing. Google has offices everywhere, but they are tiny compared to HQ.
For starters, lots of them just wouldn't move. When companies move headquarters or other large facilities they usually expect to lose lots of people even if they cover relocation and actively try to hold onto people. (Which may, of course, not be the case if the company actually wants to lay off people.)
None of this is to argue that big tech companies shouldn't be more distributed. They probably should and it's happening to some degree naturally as they grow. But trying to move already employed people wholesale to a new city, especially one that many will see as relatively unattractive, will cost you a significant percentage of your workforce.
It's moot because they'd lose so many employees immediately that it'd be economic suicide. Google can't instantly conjure 5,000 more high quality engineers out of nowhere in SLC.
The most you'll see is something like what Amazon (sort of) tried with creating a "second HQ".
In the long run they'd be as productive (or more, since the commute would likely be better). The problem is it would take months or years to move, and a lot of people don't want to or can't move, so they'd quit and find a new job almost instantly.
The fact that they can find a new job almost instantly is why they came here in the first place. It would take many competing employers showing up to make another labor market similarly appealing. You'd have to pay me a lot to move to the middle of nowhere, because not only am I not excited about living there, I'm still better off moving back here for the next job.
In addition to what others have said, you have to consider what your competitors might do while you're spinning up. They could capitalize on your downtime.
I want to agree that the labor market will correct at some point, but to your point, it's only at the margins for now, and is way too slow to adjust.
There are too many people who feel like they _have_ to live there (or NYC / insert overly populated city here) to have a career, that any sort of correction will take decades.
If more people want to live in an area, why should we stop them? What good comes from denying people that opportunity?
I'm asking this to find out your definition of overpopulation. Because the people that want to move here don't think that's the case, and I certainly don't think that's the case given how low population density is throughout the Bay Area.
And since high density walkable neighborhoods are healthier for people and the environment than car dependent sprawl, I think that we are actually underpopulated.
It’s not being in another region that’s the problem, it’s moving. People tend to find forced moves traumatic and will go to great lengths to avoid them.
Companies aren't going to move HQ's, because that's a terrible idea. The knowledge and skills loss would take years and years to recover from, substantially impeding productivity for a long time. It's economic suicide for a company like Google.
What you're not bothering to grapple with is: why are these companies trying to expand headcount in areas that are somewhat hostile to them, and also much more expensive? Hell, even in Europe, Google's big offices are in the most expensive cities. There's a reason for that, and it's not because they enjoy lighting money on fire.
Once you've figured out the 'why' there, you can work on coming up with a fix or workaround. Until then, just blithely saying "well they're just too lazy to do this other thing" itself just smacks of intellectual laziness. It lets you slam them without having to analyze the very real issues keeping companies in expensive tech hubs.
Having an HQ seems increasingly antiquated. Sure, there probably needs to be a designated executive center, but otherwise it seems far less risky to partition your organization into smaller units. Just look at what Amazon is doing with HQ2.
Move them where? Is there some mystical place somewhere in the US that has laws amenable to running a tech business, decent weather, good universities, infrastructure (roads, fiber, transit, etc.), and is agreeable to at least another company so you can get some agglomeration effects? And then how do you convince tens of thousands of employees to move? How do you no just end up with the same problems, or crazy sprawl like Houston which has its own problems?
Where did IBM, HP, DEC, Dell, etc build back in the day? For IBM, it was the boonies of Austin, SJ, Boulder, Rochester, Burlington, Poughkeepsie, Hursley, Toronto, Somers, White Plains... companies, services and people moved to them. Do FAANGs have no gravitas? They can’t do better?
Yes, in 20 years, you end up with sprawl, but thats better than crashing someone elses hood and wanting it to morph into Manhattan.
There are people who spent their entire career at IBM. If you're willing and able to do that, it doesn't matter so much how many competing employers are nearby. But when today's tenures are under two years, you're going to need to land twenty jobs, not just one.
People in the military move every three years. I know many who were at HP or IBM and worked at 4 or 5 sites, not settling until their kids were in HS or near retirement.
These people probably arent getting fired. They’re flighty, pursuing to dollar, self-actualization, doing good, whatever. Which is perfectly fine and reasonable until they all want to live in the same handful of zipcodes. I just dont understand why society needs to accomodate that anymore than why Jackson Hole should accomadate my need for a $250k 2-bdr condo with ski-out.
I can certainly understand spending less than two years at a job if things don't work out. But jumping from job to job with an average tenure of under two years? It's not really enough time to learn the technology and build relationships in the company. What the hell are these people actually doing?
They don't need to move. If more companies accepted more remote positions, it would lessen the need for everyone to mass in certain locations. Everything would be slightly more distributed instead of overly centralized.
The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the Valley. Towns like Mountain View and Palo Alto ought to be vastly denser, with apartment buildings, duplexes, and other multi-tenant dwellings. The people living there don't want that, though, so the laws prohibit it.
I don't blame people for wanting to keep their quiet neighborhoods and single-unit homes, or low-rises in SF, but until those objections are overcome, the problem is only going to get worse. So while I say that there's a simple cause, there's no simple solution.
The only solution is changing the zoning laws, and that requires changing peoples' minds. Once that's done, the money will flow in directly from tenants, and will ease pressure all around. If Google wants to build more housing, they need to spend that billion dollars on political efforts.