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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#71

Post by dmead »

calvinbhai wrote: post #45
quelsolaar wrote: post #26

Here is a buisnes idea Ive been thinking about lately for SF, Hong Kong, NY and other expensive places. Buy a smaller cruise ships and rent a pier to dock it. I found a newly renovated ship with 72 cabins for 5.8 million. With the average rent in SF that ship has paid for itself in 2 years (yes there will be additional costs, but back of a napkin, its a good start). Then buy more ships and stack them. Renovate/remode…

Bottle neck: commute between ship and land. How do you factor for that?

they'd be docked or anchored in the bay. daily ferries to the south bay and SF. duh.

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

#72

Post by Zenbit_UX »

newsoul2019 wrote: post #29
davidw wrote: post #3

You'd think they could spend a bit to "buy" someone like Senator Atkins, who effectively killed SB50. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-single-fa...

Why can't they "grow their own" powerful politicians? Find somebody young, put them in all the right places with all the right people, and have them say all the right things. Shouldn't be hard with unlimited resources.

Sounds like the plot to the departed.

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

#73

Post by ketzo »

twblalock wrote: post #24
brianwawok wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The only way transit will be built is if a strain develops. Otherwise what problem would be solved by building it?

Man, sometimes it's fun to imagine having a gigantic autocratic government like China that could just... build empty cities, or huge railroads that 11 people ride every day, knowing people would fill them up eventually. But then I guess you'd get everything else that comes with a gigantic autocratic government.

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

#74

Post by BurningFrog »

twblalock wrote: post #40
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, they pay what they need to pay to get the hire.

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

#75

Post by caymanjim »

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help.

The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the Valley. Towns like Mountain View and Palo Alto ought to be vastly denser, with apartment buildings, duplexes, and other multi-tenant dwellings. The people living there don't want that, though, so the laws prohibit it.

I don't blame people for wanting to keep their quiet neighborhoods and single-unit homes, or low-rises in SF, but until those objections are overcome, the problem is only going to get worse. So while I say that there's a simple cause, there's no simple solution.

The only solution is changing the zoning laws, and that requires changing peoples' minds. Once that's done, the money will flow in directly from tenants, and will ease pressure all around. If Google wants to build more housing, they need to spend that billion dollars on political efforts.

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

#76

Post by davidw »

Tade0 wrote: post #46
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. For what purpose specifically?

Let's see - software development can take different forms.

On one end you have work where someone gives you well defined specs and the tools you need, and you just go crank out some code on your own. That works well for remote work.

On the other end there are plenty of software positions that require people who can understand and develop requirements, possibly by talking with disparate groups like customer support, finance, sales, marketing, and so on who are not at all technical. These people may not understand the costs of different options so subsequent conversations about costs/benefits for different groups are needed. Sometimes these discussions might be contentious, as resources are finite. Sometimes there's a lot of back and forth involved, as the software person tries to understand the business - and vice versa.

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

#77

Post by minwcnt5 »

Tade0 wrote: post #46
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. For what purpose specifically?

Decision making.

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

#78

Post by the-dude »

quelsolaar wrote: post #26

Here is a buisnes idea Ive been thinking about lately for SF, Hong Kong, NY and other expensive places. Buy a smaller cruise ships and rent a pier to dock it. I found a newly renovated ship with 72 cabins for 5.8 million. With the average rent in SF that ship has paid for itself in 2 years (yes there will be additional costs, but back of a napkin, its a good start). Then buy more ships and stack them. Renovate/remode…

This is already being done in Groningen(NL) to accommodate influxes of students to our university.

edit: but I should mention, we have waterways reaching into the city. Being old Europe.

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

#79

Post by bcp2384 »

It's sad how many times I walk around in SF and see basically crumbling buildings or empty parking lots and wonder why new housing has not been built there yet? And more importantly who would actually oppose development on crumbling or wasted land?

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

#80

Post by csmattryder »

newsoul2019 wrote: post #29
davidw wrote: post #3

You'd think they could spend a bit to "buy" someone like Senator Atkins, who effectively killed SB50. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-single-fa...

Why can't they "grow their own" powerful politicians? Find somebody young, put them in all the right places with all the right people, and have them say all the right things. Shouldn't be hard with unlimited resources.

The problem with humans is that Free Will stuff. Eventually the human says or does something unpopular and your investment is written off, along with the politician.

Maybe this young upstart has already tweeted something in their more free-spirited days, just waiting to be scrolled onto.

Much more effective to pump money into the political parties directly. They're going nowhere.

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