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Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

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Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#551

Post by solaxun »

beatpanda wrote: post #289
nimbius wrote: post #16

Most of the bay area employees are divided into 3 categories from anecdotal experience: young rockstars that are willing to live in relative squalor for a chance to prove themselves, vested and moneyed elites (CEO's, presidents, VC funded overlords) who are so out of touch with the average employee its best they not show up to the office that frequently, and H1B visa recipients that endure the soul-crushing San Jose…

> Rising levels of increasingly aggressive homeless Citation needed. The most recent data on this disagrees with you.

Ask all you want for citations, I live here and see it every day. It is definitely getting worse, I have coworkers who have been punched walking to the BART for no reason.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#552

Post by throw2016 »

This has a roll on effect as business with increased real estate costs pass it on to consumers. So you are not only directly paying higher rent or purchase but also for products and services.

What's supposed to happen is inflated prices take up an unjustifiable portion of income and make things like families impossible forcing people to move.

Wages are supposed to keep rising to keep pace rendering some business unprofitable, making others expensive and forcing others to move altogether, all adding up to cause a correction in prices.

But in the real world its not really working that way. While wages are rising there is also large import of labour keeping wages in check with people resorting to more and more desperate measures like sharing rooms.

Without that perhaps the labour crisis would become unmanageable forcing businesses and government to rethink some policies. At the moment its the financial and real estate sectors making out while the average person faces the brunt. This is replicated worldwide in most major cities.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#553

Post by lisper »

damnyou wrote: post #455
lisper wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> undeveloped land is not very useful I love hiking in redwood forests. I love peace and quiet. I love not having to deal with traffic. So I think undeveloped land is very useful.

You are free to buy the redwood forests, pay a yearly land value tax on them (which goes up as demand increases, unlike Prop 13) and then restrict access as you wish. But redwood forests are a distraction. The main problem is SFH which can and would be replaced with duplexes and fourplexes if the market were allowed to work.

> You are free to buy the redwood forests

Much of the forest land on the peninsula is privately owned, not by individuals, but by conservation organizations.

> The main problem is SFH

Except that people like their yards and pools.

All else being equal, denser housing is better. But all else is rarely equal. Almost invariably, increased density comes with increased population. The SFH it replaces doesn't get turned back into open space, it remains SFH. Or it turns into more MFH, so now you have N times as many people living in the same space. That is the problem.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#554

Post by davidw »

lisper wrote: post #363
Gargoyle wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people tell themselves in order to make their suffering tolerable. But the best places to live even just in California are amazingly underpopulated.

The best places to live are the best in no small measure because they are underpopulated. The SF peninsula is one of the most desirable (and expensive) areas in the greater bay area in no small measure because very few people live there, so we have less traffic, hiking trails, horse properties, peace and quiet.

> The best places to live are the best in no small measure because they are underpopulated.

I don't really get that. Where I lived in Italy had about 300,000 people in roughly the same size area as Bend (less than 100K), and I thought it was a pretty nice place in a lot of ways. We didn't have a yard for the kids, so we went down to the local park with them, where they saw their friends and we'd get to chat with parents. Because most people live in towns, they're able to protect some natural areas close to the town that I could ride my bike to.

I get that some people really want the 'country' experience, but then you shouldn't live in the middle of millions of people (the bay area). There are shit-tons of small towns with lots of cheap-ish land outside them that are nice in their own way.

By letting cities be cities, we get to protect more land, which I think many of us support.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#555

Post by [deleted] »

grzm wrote: post #550
Mz wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your comment. I mean that sincerely. But, here is the rut I can't find any way out of that I tried to avoid commenting on because it seems like a great way to put out the fire with gasoline, but I am a woman. So when I came to Hacker News, if men talked to me at all, I either got shitty condescending pat on the head encouragement ("You should do a website on X topic" by someone who obviously had not look…

Sorry you're having a sucktastic week. As you know there's little I personally can do in an HN comment to make that better. I also know you think deeply about a lot of things, so I'm quite certain there's little I can say that you haven't thought of or come across before. One concrete thing I'm doing that helps me is find someone to meet with on a regular basis to talk about progress on things we individually find im…

[deleted]

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#556

Post by davidw »

lisper wrote: post #549
linkregister wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are nice, cheap places all over NorCal, but the expensive part is where the jobs are. Fort Bragg and Redding are absolutely gorgeous but they do not have a dense tech job market.

Fort Bragg and Redding are cold and foggy much of the time. Silicon Valley is in an ideal location. There are low-lying hills that keep the fog away, but it still gets enough ocean influence that it doesn't get too hot.

> Fort Bragg and Redding are cold and foggy much of the time

Fort Bragg is on the coast, and Redding is inland - they have wildly different climates. Redding is pretty damn hot, actually, and supposedly very sunny:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redding,_California#Climate

The politics are probably not something most SF people would like, though (nor I, really).

There are a ton of beautiful places around there, though, and in southern Oregon as well. The oak/madrone/pine forests in that area are extremely beautiful in my opinion.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#557

Post by lisper »

davidw wrote: post #240
lisper wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> California's housing crisis has repercussions all up and down the west coast. You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not that the situation in California has wider repercussions, it's that there is a wider problem whose symptoms happen to manifest themselves earliest in California because it's one of the nicer places to live: there are simply too many people and not enough space for them all to live in the nice p…

> there are simply too many people and not enough space for them all to live in the nice places. Tokyo added more housing than the entire state of California: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-... And as someone who lived in Europe for a while, I think we've had the technology to house a fair number of people in desirable area for several hundred years. It's the political will that's lacking…

> Tokyo added more housing than the entire state of California:

And anyone who wants to live in a 250 square foot apartment and get stuffed (literally!) into a subway every day to get to work is free to move there. But the people who find SV desirable move there in no small measure because it's not like Tokyo.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#558

Post by acchow »

nimbius wrote: post #16

Most of the bay area employees are divided into 3 categories from anecdotal experience: young rockstars that are willing to live in relative squalor for a chance to prove themselves, vested and moneyed elites (CEO's, presidents, VC funded overlords) who are so out of touch with the average employee its best they not show up to the office that frequently, and H1B visa recipients that endure the soul-crushing San Jose…

Anecdotally, I'm a software engineer in SF and know many other software engineers in SF that don't fall in any of those 3 categories. We are mostly from other countries, some of us on H1b, and are very happy here.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#559

Post by acchow »

chis wrote: post #21
nimbius wrote: post #16

Most of the bay area employees are divided into 3 categories from anecdotal experience: young rockstars that are willing to live in relative squalor for a chance to prove themselves, vested and moneyed elites (CEO's, presidents, VC funded overlords) who are so out of touch with the average employee its best they not show up to the office that frequently, and H1B visa recipients that endure the soul-crushing San Jose…

Is it worthwhile to work there for a few years as a 20-year old though? I'm thinking it's a unique experience even if monetarily it's a poor choice.

Absolutely. Yes. Do this.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#560

Post by GFischer »

ghaff wrote: post #499
WalterSear wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commuting to collaborate with other people face-to-face for half the day. How is this inefficient, unsustainable? It provides the combination of private work and group interactions that are parcel of most white collar jobs. The vehicles will be electric, and many will probably spending any idle time at solar farms, to save on energy distribution costs, if they aren't being used as private offices. It is going to allo…

It sounds as if it would make a lot more sense for people to agree on 2 days per week to be in the office and work remotely the other three or something along those lines.

That's what they do at the company I work for (I'm at a remote location so I'm 100% remote for them).

I think it's the kind of setup that works best, for some kinds of software projects.

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