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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#31

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

GuiA wrote: post #27
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #2

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 d…

> 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.

> 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.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#32

Post by dymk »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #19
dymk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Face-to-face communication has not been supplanted with online tools yet, and face-to-face communication is very important to this job.

> and face-to-face communication is very important to this job [citation needed] It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.

> 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).

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#33

Post by toomuchtodo »

dymk wrote: post #18
manigandham wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Face-to-face communication has not been supplanted with online tools yet, and face-to-face communication is very important to this job.

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.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#34

Post by runevault »

albertshin wrote: post #28

Welcome to Googleville. 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. Your move, We.

I'd put this more on Snow Crash than Cryptonomicon.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#35

Post by koboll »

brianwawok wrote: post #7
georgeecollins wrote: post #4

I think this is good and should be encouraged. The Bay Area needs more housing desperately.

My only question, is will these houses have access to public transit or will they drive? If driving, can your roads handle the increased traffic? Housing, transit, schooling.. these all seem interconnected. Just increasing supply of one just strains the rest of the system, no?

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.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#36

Post by onemoresoop »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #15

That's $50K/home. Is that even remotely realistic in the Bay Area?

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..

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#37

Post by davidw »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #33
dymk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Face-to-face communication has not been supplanted with online tools yet, and face-to-face communication is very important to this job.

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…

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.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#38

Post by lowdose »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #2

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 d…

We read a lot about the SF real estate market, wonder if it would be possible to dredge up a couple of Islands like the palm island in Dubai.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#39

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

dymk wrote: post #32
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and face-to-face communication is very important to this job [citation needed] It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.

> 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).

Do I understand your argument correctly?

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)."

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#40

Post by twblalock »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #31
GuiA wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

> If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay

Why would they do that? They only pay as much as they do in Silicon Valley to offset the cost of living.

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