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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#101

Post by allworknoplay »

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.

Yup, corporate development isn't a substitute for cohesive publicly funded policies, particularly with issues like housing. Companies will do just enough to keep people from guillotining the execs (or just raising taxes), meanwhile eroding the public services we do have. Company towns are definitely going to be making a comeback.

I think you might mean Snow Crash though :)

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

#102

Post by pessimizer »

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.

For that you have to know the right things, or to know someone who knows the right things. That requires a degree of empathy.

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

#103

Post by felipemnoa »

andrew311 wrote: post #49
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.

An alternative way of looking at it: whether or not face to face is important for the specifics of the job, it might be important for emotional connection between humans, fulfilling a common human desire to connect with peers and be happy on the job and _outside_ the job. In other words, we might want to be around peers for social (non-job) reasons.

This is a really good argument. It is the same reason why authors instead of staying in their homes by themselves writing all day, will go to public places to be around other authors/people. We are social animals.

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

#104

Post by ProAm »

> The only solution is changing the zoning laws

Or these companies can move. If you take successful STEM related businesses and move them to better area's the talent will follow. There is more than 1 answer to this problem, most people just want to change laws because its easier for them.

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

#105

Post by jsonne »

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…

Last time I was in the bay area I stayed on a boat with some colleagues in a marina. There are a surprising number of people that already do this.

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

#106

Post by pessimizer »

kennystone wrote: post #48

George Pullman made a town outside of Chicago for workers to build his railcars. It didn't end well: "the town and its design were... a paternalistic system that took away men's rights as citizens, including the right to control their own domestic environment" http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1030.html Happy that google is making this investment; it's worth a shot even if it is far the ideal way to bu…

It ended perfectly well for the person who built it. The object wasn't to make the workers happy, the object was to make Pullman money.

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

#107

Post by xauronx »

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 was actually doing research a couple of days ago to support more remote workers for my company and... unfortunately almost all of the research I found was backing co-location. There are degrees of remote work, but it seems that for most teams and most products being co-located provides the most productivity.

There are a lot of shades of gray there, like, if someone commutes for 2 hours through stressful SF traffic to get to a campus where they jump on a Google Hangout since their team members are spread across 3 buildings... yeah, I don't think productivity is going to get much of a boost. However, our team is in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio where you can live within 30 miles, get here in 30 minutes and have dirt-cheap housing. I'm having a hard time coming up with collateral to support my "modern" viewpoint on the benefits of remote workers.

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

#108

Post by minwcnt5 »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #41
davidw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Open offices with white noise generators don't exactly strike me as the paragon of ease of communication.

They work better than closed offices, in my experience, for the roles I've worked in (software engineering).

I'm way more likely to ask a co-worker over to my desk to show them something or have a discussion if they're a few feet away within sight and earshot. In an open office I also overhear a lot of pertinent information -- I'm aware of issues that might be relevant to me as they develop, I don't have to wait hours or days for someone to communicate them in an email, issue tracker, or meeting.

There's a cost in terms of readily available heads-down concentration time to be sure, but if I want to mess around with math formulas or something I pop on the headphones, go to a quiet room, or do it at home. It's much harder to replicate the benefits of an open office environment in a closed one than the reverse.

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

#109

Post by jriot »

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.

Face-to-face communication is not needed, it is a notion everyone says to keep the status quo.

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

#110

Post by jriot »

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.

West coast cities would be my definition of undesirable.
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