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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#111

Post by dredmorbius »

falsedan wrote: post #14
davidw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software development isn't an industry like oil refining. Imagine if all the architects or civil engineers were located in a small handful of cities!

Oil workers go to where the oil is. Which is both concentrated and distributed.

Software is dematerialised, which means, perversely, it tends to concentrate to a far greater extent. Much as local and regional entertainment, constrained by material proximiy to audience, gave way to Hollywood.

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

#112

Post by kansface »

lowdose wrote: post #38
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.

Houses literally built on sand next to the fault?

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

#113

Post by ikeboy »

ketzo wrote: post #65
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.

I don't know offhand - is commercial space more valuable?

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

#114

Post by jriot »

munificent wrote: post #86
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.

Also, in Seattle, it provides access to all of the other desireable aspects of living in a thriving metropolis: - Good schools - Lots of like-minded people to befriend - Lots of places to eat, activities, venues, etc. - Several higher and continuing education opportunities - Good (well, better than almost all mid-sized cities, at least) public transit options I definitely understand the appeal of living out in the co…

When you live in a rural area none of these are needed, zoo, aquarium, bike trail, running path as they are provided naturally from the environment.

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

#115

Post by onemoresoop »

atwebb wrote: post #89
onemoresoop wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is expanding a bit and the housing prices are having ripple effects throughout second/third tier cities. Housing in some areas such as Nashville has more than doubled over the past decade, some areas have seen 5x price growth in less than 10 years and Amazon's not really even there yet.

I think it should expand in more and more areas. I wish 5x turn into 2x and spread over more evenly.

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

#116

Post by icebraining »

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.

Yeah, and instead we're stuck in cars commuting. Remote working frees up more time to spend with other people.

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

#117

Post by danans »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #56

Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. So much so, that local politicians even brag about how much housing developments they've stopped. Why fight such a huge uphill battle in trying to get housing in the Bay area? Wouldn't it be easier to start from a city or town outside of CA? or at least outside the bay area? Maybe somewhere in the mi…

> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land

The terrain in that area would make it quite difficult to build dense housing there - it's even steeper than the very hilly area that Woodside itself is built on. It's not that it can't be done, but it is far more expensive (think about the cost of adding infrastructure like water, sewer, etc), compared to building housing in an already developed area, like infill development on land previously zoned only for commercial purposes.

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

#118

Post by keerthiko »

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…

People are happy and healthy in a place for all kinds of reasons. That doesn't make them a desirable settlement destination for others.

Maybe a town is incredibly racist and who lives there is all from the same longstanding community and they are all extremely close and have good personal relationships with each other and feel a strong sense of belonging to the place and the people. Maybe the town is perfectly suited to being students, young and single and there's a lot of things that cater to them. Maybe the town is better suited to families, couples, people who own dogs. Such people will gravitate there. This could mean they are all happy and healthy, but it would not mean that if I, some random bloke from a different state/culture/language/country moved there and tried to settle in and live my life, I would be particularly happy or healthy.

So yes, a place can be the happiest place in the world for the people who already live there, and still be undesirable for the "looking for a nice place to settle" population at large. However, having a highly employable, high income industry, lots of motivated hard workers, a vibrant art scene, and good weather makes a place a lot more universally desirable, and it takes a helluva lot of negatives to offset that desirability (which the bay area is trying really hard to do).

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

#119

Post by ikeboy »

ketzo wrote: post #65
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.

>First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families.

This doubles their investment if the average home price net of costs is 100k. It seems likely the number will be way above that, just glancing at median home prices.

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

#120

Post by davidw »

icebraining wrote: post #116
andrew311 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, and instead we're stuck in cars commuting. Remote working frees up more time to spend with other people.

If only we had the knowledge to plan cities so that it's possible to live near where you work. Perhaps it sounds crazy, but we could even stack dwelling units on top of one another.
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