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Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

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Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#291

Post by TulliusCicero »

ardy42 wrote: post #287
TulliusCicero wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not wrong, but I'm not saying this is the sole factor in city attractiveness here. It's just one factor. Other things equal, I think it's easier to attract top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs. I focused on it in my original comment mostly just because it's an area I'm particularly familiar with, and it's an area where the cities that are supposedly…

> You are not wrong, but I'm not saying this is the sole factor in city attractiveness here. It's just one factor. Other things equal, I think it's easier to attract top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs. I wonder if the real situation is that it's easier to attract young "top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like gi…

People who with more settled lifestyles are often already settled, though. So even if you wanted them, you don't have as much access.

> older "top talent."

Older top talent often has the resources to actually buy houses even in expensive areas, anyway.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#292

Post by malmsteen »

mac01021 wrote: post #141
closeparen wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a kid stay in the same area after leaving school? That was categorically out of the question for my graduating classes.

To remain near family? To help shape the future of the community that rasied them? What was deal with your class? You lived in the middle of knowhere and the only option would have been farming or mining coal or something?

Sense of adventure / lower familial pressure.

You can always come back to "shape the community" (so american ^^) later

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#293

Post by hnmcQIOoQUDv »

abalos wrote: post #158
claydavisss wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95% of Googlers in NYC will be lifetime renters just like they are in the Bay Area. Hardly the gilded class

My plan right now is to rent in the city, buy a cabin or getaway house upstate for 200k and move there when I get older. Hard part is just finding somewhere that doesn't suck.

Bearsville, Woodstock, Saugerties. The Rondout in Kingston has a certain charm but may be impacted by flooding.

Downside is you need a car or take one of the Peter Pan buses. Could Amtrak to Rhinecliff and taxi.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#294

Post by hoaw »

tjr225 wrote: post #275
TulliusCicero wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I mean by having lots of high-paying jobs. Speaking in the abstract, that means economic success. You're not wrong that high cost of living can often cancel much of that out at the individual level though. > quality of living is considerably lower. See my other nearby comment for why this is a "it depends" thing. A lot of people would consider living in Kansas City to have lower "quality of life" than NYC even i…

I have lived in West Michigan (Insanely Cheap), Kansas City (Kinda Cheap), and Seattle (Pretty Expensive). Thing is, renting a 900 sq foot apartment in any reasonably urban area has gotten pretty expensive anywhere. It was about 1000-1500$ in KC when I left. It's about 1600-2200 in Seattle. My salary jump from KC to Seattle more than makes up for the difference in rent. Other things may be slightly more expensive, bu…

Ultimately affordable housing isn't a factor of price as such. There have always been very expensive parts of town. It is how abruptly the city ends. Once these smaller cities get expensive there it nowhere to go, the rest is suburb. 10 000 new people in NYC is almost a rounding error, while even 1000 people in a smaller city (with a small core) could be significant.

This is also what San Francisco suffers from. It goes from city to essentially suburb extremely quick. While cities like New York, Paris and Tokyo just go on and on. Of course we only talk about those examples because they have developed that way over decades.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#295

Post by Alex3917 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #127
taurath wrote: post #4

This coupled with the Amazon news is starting to get distressing. With the amount of companies that copycat them it’s like the rich are getting richer and the economic benefits are still going to be concentrated only in the most affluent cities. The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a busines…

> The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them No they don't. Tax breaks aren't enough. One of the big reasons a lot of people really like NYC is that it's one of the few cities in the US that actually feels like a city. NYC is urbanist in a way that relatively few American cities are (and most of the other cities in this category are al…

NYC literally has an app where anyone can press a button if they're standing somewhere where they feel like a tree should be planted, and if you press the button a couple hours later a group of guys will show up and start digging a hole and plant the tree. For all of its problems, it's the only city that works at least somewhat like a city should.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#296

Post by specialp »

chickenfries wrote: post #253
redblacktree wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have kids yet? Genuinely curious.

1200 sqft is plenty of room for a 4 person family. I mostly grew up in the city, in a small apartment, but for a while we did live in the Midwest, in a big house. The only problem with apartment living was that we had too much furniture we didn’t need from when we lived in the Midwest.

The average American home was around 1500 feet 30-40 years ago and people raised families in them just fine. Instead of 4br 400sq ft each with en suite bathrooms, you had 120sq ft bedrooms for kids. It wasn't until the excesses of the mid 2000's that 3-4k sq ft homes became somewhat common, and outside the realm of mansions. Now the trend for home size is decreasing.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#297

Post by ruddct »

amyjess wrote: post #281
TulliusCicero wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them No they don't. Tax breaks aren't enough. One of the big reasons a lot of people really like NYC is that it's one of the few cities in the US that actually feels like a city. NYC is urbanist in a way that relatively few American cities are (and most of the other cities in this category are al…

So, I just got back from a week-long vacation to NYC, and it's reinforced what I've always felt about it: NYC is a wonderful place to visit, but I'd never want to live there. I had a lot of fun, and I wish I could've stayed another week, but actually living and working there? No thank you. I actively do not want to fight through crowds and run to catch connecting trains just to get to and from work every day. I don't…

The great thing about NYC (and a thing that is lost on most people visiting the city, including myself before I moved here), is how many options you have for your living situation.

Want the crowds, the city life and the noise? Live downtown. Old-school New York? The upper west side. Brownstones on quiet, beautiful streets? Any number of Brooklyn neighborhoods. A quaint New England-y fishing village? City Island. Conservative-leaning, leafy suburbs? Staten Island. The ethnic enclave of your choice? Peppered throughout the city. Cheapo cool kid artist communities? Bushwick/Ridgewood. Want to own a boat and live on the water? The Rockaways. The list goes on and on, and that's not even touching Jersey, Westchester or Long Island.

The beauty of the city is that all of these places are unquestionably, culturally 'New York'. They're also, for the most part, quite well connected to the city core on affordable public transit, and in many cases quite affordable by big American city standards.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#298

Post by amyjess »

rayiner wrote: post #103
CydeWeys wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about NYC in comparison to the Bay Area is that we're not afraid of building more housing here, so supply increases every year and has a dampening effect on rent increases. Also, mass transit is much better, so if you live even 30 minutes away on a subway line the rents will be much lower. If you're willing to commute an hour each way (which is still less than a lot of people who drive every day on I-1…

The burbs are wsy better too. You can still find a great family home in a good school district within a reasonable commute on NJ transit, lirr, or metro north, well under a million.

I actually just came back from a week-long trip to NYC where I stayed with my cousin in Harrison (Westchester) and took Metro-North into and out of the city every day I was there. I had a lot of fun, but I would never ever want to actually commute like that day in and day out.

The train ride from Harrison to Grand Central alone is somewhere around 45 minutes. And unless you work right at Grand Central, you're looking at rushing to make connecting trains. Doing this for a week while exploring the city was fine, but the idea of having to do this every single day until I retire just to make a living would make me want to blow my brains out.

I don't know how my cousin does it. She works in the financial district and takes a 6am train into the city every day. When she gets home, she has just enough time to put her kids to bed before passing out. Now I understand why her husband has a WFH job.

And about that "great family home" thing... the housing stock is so old that every house, even the nice ones, is going to be a fixer-upper. Not long before I got there, they had a plumbing joint break in one of the upstairs bathrooms. Within a few minutes, it wrecked the fixtures in that bathroom, obliterated the ceiling of the kitchen it was above, and did a number on the kitchen counters.

I'm also generally not a fan of how the suburbs are laid out either. Houses are spaced so far apart that it feels like you're living in the country even though you're close to the city (I went trick-or-treating with their kids, and I had to force myself to not brag that my hauls when I was their age were twice as big as theirs because I got to visit twice as many houses in the same amount of time :), and the street layout is twisty nonsense where even the major roads only have two lanes.

No thank you.

I'll gladly visit NYC again (and I'm sad my trip was only one week and not two), but I never want to live there. I'm happy living in Dallas, though I'm considering a move to Las Vegas for political reasons. Either way, both of those are polar opposites of the NYC suburbs.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#299

Post by bagacrap »

kyrieeschaton wrote: post #183

Meanwhile, the executive team openly laughed at the idea of investing in offices any distance from the coast.

Let's be real, what non coastal city has the current talent pool or the cultural draw for the highly educated, politically progressive workforce Google is after? Spoken as someone born, raised, and currently living in the interior of the US. Google invests in proportion to the talent pool, with decently sized and growing offices in Waterloo, Pittsburgh, and Boulder. If tens of thousands of qualifed tech workers were clamoring to work in these locations, I'm sure Google would invest accordingly. But it would be ridiculous to think of Pittsburgh and NY as equals.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#300

Post by joey-bob »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #279
joey-bob wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, your fundamental assumption about what "techies" want is at least partially flawed. Not that no one in tech wants bike Lanes, public transit, and authentic South Indian cuisine. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of people who work at FAANG consider these things important in their life. But there is still a large portion that truly don't care for all that. They live in the bay because if…

You are not wrong, but I'm not saying this is the sole factor in city attractiveness here. It's just one factor. Other things equal, I think it's easier to attract top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs. I focused on it in my original comment mostly just because it's an area I'm particularly familiar with, and it's an area where the cities that are supposedly…

I suppose I forgot to state my original point. Let's hold all else equal, and look at the labor pool divided into two categories, urbanism and ruralism. Suburbs lie on the ruralism side for this comparison. The labor pool is of course not evenly divided in terms of preference, say maybe 3/4 of protential Google employees prefer urbanism. If a given employee prefers urbanism, and lives in one of the cities mentioned above (NYC, Yay Area, Boston), their resulting employee satisfaction (what the company cares about in this scenario) is improved. However, if a given employee prefers ruralism, their resulting employee satisfaction is worsened. Vice versa for a more suburban, smaller city.

Of course there is some cost to not collocating employees. Google has decided new offices are worth this cost, and thus Google can decide to allocate building/location resources based on employee preference alone (let's assume the other factors are somehwat insignificant, which could be valid taking into account the high proportion of labor cost).

If every additional dollar spent on a given location buys the same amount of office space and equipment in both the urban and suburban areas, then it would make sense to divide the budget for offices according to the proportions of the labor pool preferences. Now of course, a dollar in SF buys a lot less office space than a dollar in Lexington, so that should be a accounted for in budgeting decisions, as well as overhead costs involved in opening a new location.

If we look at Google's actions under this framework, it doesn't make much sense for Google to devote as much of their office budget to highly urban areas as they do, unless the proportion of current and potential employees that prefer ruralism is very low. I would find that difficult to believe. Of course there are other factors to consider, but the trend is what I mean to highlight.

That being said, the true proportion would have to be discovered, and company culture may not allow people to express their true desires. This would apply to many tech giants.

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