201–210 of 257 posts
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Additionally, unlike other buildings in NYC with similar floor space, 111 8th Ave is not a skyscraper, which makes it more practical and useful, and much cheaper in maintenance.
Plus you can get around all day just taking the stairs, which frequently saves time.
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>The real answer is for cities to be built up so much that even a Google-sized company is a drop in the bucket. That's a repulsive suggestion to many people who live in Boulder. Living in a city of <250k people is a feature, not a bug. Boulder is not cheap, if people wanted density they could already move to Denver for the same price and climate.
Boulder can't have it both ways: you can't ask for blockbuster skyline employers and low density; or, you can, but as you can see from SFBA, the result is inhumane. If Boulder wants to be Ann Arbor of the Mountains, that's fine. But I suspect that's not what Boulder really wants; people who live in Boulder want to have a competitive employment market with multiple options for where to work and little risk of being fo…
So it's not a case of wanting things both ways, it's a case of the city choosing economic expansion over the subset of people that want to keep things affordable and uncrowded.
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> Chelsea Market is an amazing place with great offerings of food etc. It really isn't. It's a tourist trap, especially with the completion of the High Line. The food isn't good and it's overpriced to take advantage of the tourists. > As long as this transaction does not ruin the ecosystem of CM then New Yorkers are OK with this transaction. Like new yorkers' opinions matters in manhattan. The only thing that matters…
Oh stop the gatekeeping. I don't think anyone really believes Chelsea Market is a culinary wonder, or that it's catering to the True(tm) New Yorker. It's pretty, it's in a fairly nice area, there's no entry fee, and it's easy to have fun there if you take it for what it is.
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>I'd like to know what we're doing to destroy communities and how we can prevent that. Stop moving into small cities with workers paid significantly above the average of the existing residents. Restaurants open that they can't afford, the limited housing stock gets bid up quickly, good schools get overcrowded, etc. It's not a pleasant answer, but realistically that's ultimately what upsets a good chunk of the people…
What if, instead, these cities relax zoning laws, and allow supply to meet demand in the housing market? For every 1k Googlers who move to the city, the city should make damn sure that at least 1k apartments are built by developers.
There is no solution to bringing a ton of people into a small area of land that preserves each person renting the same place for the same price. If you could turn Boulder into Tokyo overnight, it's still going to screw everyone who was there for single family homes and low density.
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That's a really silly response. They're paying 4% above average (and that's the 2016 average - prices may be higher in 2018). The average likely includes a range far greater than 4% depending on the properties involved. Google is clearly not paying anything remotely describable as "shockingly high".
I’ll get more downvotes for this, but 4% when billions are involved is a shocking amount of money. In this case, that’s roughly $80 million - enough for Eric Schmidt to buy another G650.
Please edit bits like that out of your comments here, since they break the site guidelines.
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But many will want to, and that's enough to impact the market there significantly. No Googlers are forced to live in Mountain View either. That doesn't change the fact that Google employees fight for houses in Mountain View. People with means who do not like commutes will buy closer housing. And guess what, most people don't like commutes.
sounds like a real reason to build more housing nearby...
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Speaking of, I passed the Google building recently, and most of the windows have two protuding panels mounted horizontally. Can be seen here [1]. Anyone know what it is? Just solar shades? Or solar panels? I don't think I've seen this before. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7407095,-74.0017999,3a,75y,3...
Just solar shades, likely – they look exactly like what my high school installed on the classroom windows many years ago, and those were purely for keeping the rooms from heating up too much in the high summer noon sun. Solar panels wouldn't make much sense, they aren't angled toward the sun's average position at all and would just shade each other out for most of the day.
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I appreciate you trying to make OP's case, and I'm genuinely interested in changing my mind about this. What do you think should be done? Should growing companies be prevented from expanding because it might 'erode the character of the city'? I'm not in favor of the city subsidizing a company's growth, even if it does stimulate the economy in the long-run, but I just can't get behind any policy that would prevent a g…
What should be done is that cities should relax zoning laws, and allow more housing to be built in high demand areas. That way the city can fit everyone, cheaply.
There is a difference between 'fitting people' somewhere and them being happy.
Living in something dense like Tokyo/NYC is not desirable to people who seek cities like Boulder.
The other option is to keep expanding outward with single family home lots, but prices in the desirable close areas still shoot way up and traffic gets miserable (see LA).
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>If adding 1.5k employees and a new building is "largely ruining Boulder" in your eyes you should see a doctor. Put some effort into understanding perspectives before resorting to derision. Bringing thousands of highly paid employees into a smaller city is often not good for many who already lives there unless they own property. The majority of the new jobs will not go to existing residents, rents will increase, rest…
Note 1: This is interestingly isomorphic to the immigration debate. I'm not taking sides on this point, I just find the parallels interesting. Note 2: Thousands of highly paid employees will cause real estate prices to rise, certainly. But they'll spend on more than just real estate, so the economy as a whole will grow with a lot of incoming money to be spent. As these incoming people are already working for 1 compan…
A bunch of rich people showing up does not really help most people.
At what point does it become cheaper to buy real estate in cheaper cities and use the excess money to attract talent there?
Depends on just what drives the desirability, I think. Google is covering their bases in terms of both "suburban areas" (Mountain View) and "dense cities." So they can attract people who prefer either style of living. If there's a significant subset that prefers "cheap" directly, then they're missing out on that group. Otherwise, it might be more cost effective to simply keep offering higher wages in the high-cost ar…
I know people in multiple states who like to shoot rifles (AR-15 style) and shotguns in their yards. One hunts pigs in his backyard. A different one can hunt turkey.
I can't really imagine that in Mountain View or San Francisco or Manhattan.
And yes, those people are tech talent.