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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#61

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #42
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…

Many people want to live in deaireable areas. There's a reason why your home is cheap.

> There's a reason why your home is cheap.

https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happ...

Swing and a miss.

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida

> Naples is one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, with the sixth-highest per capita income in the country in 2012, and the second-highest proportion of millionaires per capita in the US.

In short, your passive aggressive quip doesn't match reality.

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

#62

Post by joshuamorton »

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…

There are also sole proprietorships collectively worth billions. That doesn't mean that a sole proprietorship is the best way to run a company.

Perhaps I'm weird, but I'm not interested in working remote. It's isolating socially and politically, and I work slower over the medium term.

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

#63

Post by majormajor »

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.

> ...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord.

Unfortunately I haven't seen many roles in, say, Dallas or Atlanta where the pay is only 20-25K or so less than my current, total-comp wise. It'd be a bigger drop, usually. The rent gap is steep, but the comp gap can be larger.

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

#64

Post by minwcnt5 »

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.

I don't think the fact that humans are social animals needs a citation. Most people are healthier and happier spending their time in social groups. Even as a highly introverted person, I'd much rather interact with live people every day than work remotely and only interact electronically. Of course there are exceptions, but I would guess that building a company, or even parts of it, from the exceptions is a lot of trouble.

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

#65

Post by ketzo »

ikeboy wrote: post #9

I'm reading this as Google has a bunch of land and they want to cash in on sky-high prices.

Eh. If you wanna be cynical, they could've cashed in harder by building more commercial real estate. They say they're specifically rezoning a bunch of land that's currently zoned for office or commercial space, so I gotta give 'em some credit.

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

#66

Post by erentz »

davidw wrote: post #5
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…

The 'root' cause is that industries tend to concentrate, and that's not an easy problem to solve. And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing.

People respond to this agglomeration factor with the argument we should “hire remote cuz the internet thing”. But the other factor to consider is how we are less tied by our jobs to physical location and that allows more choice in where people decide to live too. A lot of people want to live in the Bay Area and other coastal cities. They don’t want to live where housing is cheap in the Midwest.

So you may have a liberating force in the way jobs have changed, but that works both ways.

People are moving to the big coastal cities. The big coastal cities (and states) are doing a piss poor job of accommodating this - actually they’ve taken active measures to worsen the housing problem with zoning and tax rules.

I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit.

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

#68

Post by DataWorker »

runevault wrote: post #34
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.

Right, don’t they live in shipping containers in snowcrash. A few years back I heard there was a movement in Oakland to build shipping container villages. Nothing new since the 90s except for Facebook.

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

#69

Post by sidlls »

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.

It also affords living an area with substantially better quality of life in many areas: diversity and opportunity (career, entrepreneurial, academic) being two important ones. Most places with an acre of land as you describe are rural and in areas with poor services, education, and other quality of life concerns.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #61
malcolmgreaves wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people want to live in deaireable areas. There's a reason why your home is cheap.

> There's a reason why your home is cheap. https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happ... Swing and a miss. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida > Naples is one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, with the sixth-highest per capita income in the country in 2012, and the second-highest proportion of millionaires per capita in the US. In short, your passive aggressive quip does…

[deleted]
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