Google Plans Large New York City Expansion • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#351

Post by nsnick » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #241

nsnick wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MAX is not that handicapped by being at grade because it has dedicated roads/lanes everywhere it goes. Portland will eventually ban cars downtown anyway (they are close). Zoning laws are changing and have changed to allow infill. Plus, there is an urban growth boundary which will force higher density. The bottlenecks in Portland are the bridges and there is at least one bridge that cars can't drive on, only busses an…

> MAX is not that handicapped by being at grade Yes it is. It limits how long the train can be, because it can't block traffic downtown, which limits its capacity. It also limits how fast it can travel. Having its own lanes is better than not, of course, but not as good as being completely physically separated. For an example of this that I'm particularly familiar with, a big part of Caltrain's unreliability comes fr…

MAX doesn't have the Caltrain problem because it is not at grade outside of downtown.

You are comparing Portland to European cities which is not a fair comparison. Compared to any city in California, Portland is miles ahead.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#352

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

chupasaurus wrote: post #114

nostrademons wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Things that can happen that could break this cycle include" Also: universities, new natural resource discoveries, natural disasters, different regulatory environments, developments in transportation. I have a hunch that the North Coast of Canada is going to become a huge boom town within my lifetime, but it's likely to take a couple decades, and I don't yet know where the major cities will be. Am tempted to take a N…

I live at 55°N for 25 years and counting, as well as some time in a comparable climate (St. Petersburg), the wombo combo of very low temperatures in winter and constantly high humidity (temperatures are feeling way colder than with <50% humidity) with addition of low sunshine hours is not attractive one.

I'm just assuming that global warming is going to be as bad or worse than current predictions and that the effect will be felt even more severely at high latitudes. If the arctic sea ice all melts the Arctic Circle may be the new Northern Europe. 20,000 years ago New England was all under glaciers, while now it's a pretty reasonable place to live.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#353

Post by taurath » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

I think you’re conflating current cultural preference with actual economic ability. Where do towns like Palo Alto, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale fit into this?

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#354

Post by TulliusCicero » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

joey-bob wrote: post #300

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…

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 a…

* You also have to factor in that people with suburban preferences are going to be less likely to be willing to move. It's a less accessible demographic.

* The nature of "suburbs" is that they don't scale well. They're not meant to, suburbs are supposed to be the thing on the outside, not the thing everyone comes to. And while costs may be lower in some ways, they may be higher in others: like how Google has to run its own fleet of shuttles to go to Mountain View, because transit is inadequate. They don't do that in NYC.

* Google has a cultural preference for being environmentally friendly. Suburban style living and working is more energy intensive and less environmentally friendly than its urban counterpart.

* There's a large contingent of people that are united in their support for companies like Google to open an office in a more suburban city, somewhere, but I suspect that if you actually tried to pick a particular city, suddenly that support would fracture into a million pieces.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#355

Post by saalweachter » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

sumeno wrote: post #348

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, never have a family People, Americans particularly, overestimate the space a human being needs to thrive. I know several families who are healthy and happy in two- and three-bedroom apartments. They pay reasonable rents uptown or a forty minute subway ride out of Manhattan in Jersey or Queens. That’s much better than almost any metropolis, where sprawl makes the density gradient gentler and thus commute times…

The thread has been about buying one bedroom/studio places for only $400k. If you are planning on starting a family that seems like a really bad idea.

I mean, maybe?

Firstly, to be perfectly frank, you can get 2, 3 years into your first kid before a studio makes a practical difference over a 2-bedroom apartment. For the first chunk, keeping the crib in your bedroom for ease of care is pretty normal, and once the kid is mobile chances are they're going to be sneaking into your bed to sleep at every opportunity anyway.

Secondly, the average length of ownership of a house in the US is like 7.5 years. A lot of people never make it through their 30 year mortgage because they either move for work, their circumstances change and they need more or less house or their income changes and they can/can't afford a nicer, bigger house than they could before.

So living in a studio well into baby #1 before deciding to trade up to a larger place when it's time to look for the "good" schools or baby #2 is on the way is kind of a perfectly normal way to go about things?

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#356

Post by zjaffee » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

alexhutcheson wrote: post #194

zjaffee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to point out about the NYC metro area is that there is a ton of land surrounding it with reasonably priced homes in safe areas with less than a 45 minute commute by public transit, where in the Bay Area and Seattle, the waterways are far larger, and transportation options more restricted. Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and…

No one I know who commutes from outside NYC/Hoboken/Jersey City into NYC has a door-to-door 45 minute commute. 45 minutes might get you to the train station (if the train is running on time), but unless you work right next to Penn Station or Grand Central, it takes at least another 10-15 minutes to get to your desk.

My parents commute from NJ west of the parkway and when things aline the commute is 45 minutes (of course things often don't align). The key piece is that you need to live and work right near the various stops.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

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Post by TulliusCicero » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #205

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…

> "Well, they should care more about A B C instead (because I do)." I'm guilty of this, but I think your formulation is a straw man. All I want to tell people is that they shouldn't reflexively rule out the middle of the country, because a lot of people really would be happier there. Not everybody, but some people . And the way (some people on) the coasts talk about the Midwest and the South is as though they're a co…

No, I'm not.

Firstly, I recognize this is just one factor. I focused on it because it's one I'm highly familiar with, not because it's the end-all be-all. I've already pointed this out in multiple comments. We could also talk about educational opportunities or tolerance/discrimination, but those things either aren't as clear cut or would be more contentious to discuss.

Americans saying they prefer cars when you ask makes sense when you consider the other options are usually hilariously bad wherever they live, and where they've lived in the past, too. Give them an option where walking and biking and transit actually work, and suddenly many people find those options desirable. Just look at how many American tourists say they love the transit system in, say, Tokyo, when they visit. Americans mostly "love cars" because they've been given no other serious options.

Lastly, while many people may not think of it in explicit terms, they may nonetheless enjoy some of the knock-on effects of urbanism, like a city "feeling more lively".

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#358

Post by zjaffee » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

apohn wrote: post #180

zjaffee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to point out about the NYC metro area is that there is a ton of land surrounding it with reasonably priced homes in safe areas with less than a 45 minute commute by public transit, where in the Bay Area and Seattle, the waterways are far larger, and transportation options more restricted. Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and…

>Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for Not to be a ass, but where? And please don't just point out a home with no pictures you just found on Zillow, but a place where you've actually been to which has decent property taxes, decent schools, and is safe? And actually a 45 minute commute, not 45 minutes if you ignore the 20+ minutes it takes to drive your car from home to a t…

Look, you wont find this in the towns with the absolute best schools, and it is only possible to have this sort of commute if you work on top of the lower manhattan path station or penn station. Additionally, prices could've have risen since I last checked, and property taxes in NJ will always be high. But towns ranging from Maplewood to Cranford fall in this price range. Note when I say sizable I'm talking the ~2000 sqft range also.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#359

Post by zjaffee » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:49 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #55

zjaffee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to point out about the NYC metro area is that there is a ton of land surrounding it with reasonably priced homes in safe areas with less than a 45 minute commute by public transit, where in the Bay Area and Seattle, the waterways are far larger, and transportation options more restricted. Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and…

> Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for A train which sometimes get you there in 45 minutes, sometimes in 60 minutes, sometimes gets cancelled because of (Amtrak signal problems | disabled Amtrak equipment in the Hudson tunnel | overhead wire damage | $ PROBLEM_OF_THE_DAY). He says while crammed in to an NJTransit train.

This is absolutely true, from what I've been hearing NJ transit has just been getting worse and worse since I had used it on a daily basis.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#360

Post by kevstev » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:50 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #206

tokyodude wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and has a dampening effect on rent increase Is that really true? I don't know if this data is accurate but googling "average rent new york city" vs "average rent san francisco" brings up these 2 results as the first hits. They look almost identical. The site claims average rent for NYC is $3634 vs SF at $3735. It also claims prices increased in NYC by 9.46% over last year vs SF at 0.62% https://www.rentjungle.com/a…

One thing, not immediately clear from those averages, is that apartments in Manhattan tend to be larger than those in SF. If you look at the breakdown by bedroom count: 1BR: SF -> $3303 | NY -> $2939 2BR: SF -> $4481 | NY -> $3752 This makes clear that NY inventory is biased towards larger units, which makes comparisons of overall averages deceptive.

Do you have any data to support this? I am not being argumentative, I just found that from personal experience the opposite was true- that total rent tended to be higher in SF, but the apartments tended to be larger, at least than those in Manhattan. It seemed to me that SF was slightly cheaper per sq ft, with many more houses having access to outdoor space.

The closest I could find in terms of data was this site- https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/us-average-apart... which compares SF to all of NYC, not Manhattan. The studios are somewhat bigger, the 1BRs slightly smaller, and the 2BRs are on average slightly larger- but the difference is very small.