Its a big country with lots of space. Remote work and virtual offices work. Companies should spread out some.
$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
171–180 of 547 posts
Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
#172I don’t understand why all the growth need to happen in this place and this place alone. Wouldn’t it be nice if “good” jobs overflow SV and appear in other places? (kind of happening to Austin, Boulder, NY, etc.) And people who already live in the area should absolutely have a right to direct it’s future.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted - it's the argument from NIMBY's that keeps getting pushed aside and needs to be properly addressed if this issue will ever get resolved. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: you don't have to live in California. For $1B, you could probably build enough houses for every single Google employee in a place like Detroit, or most other states (Arizona? Nevada? Colorado? etc. e…
> it's the argument from NIMBY's that keeps getting pushed aside
It gets pushed aside because it's a bad argument, and it's often asked in bad faith.
"Hubs" for various industries pop up all the time. Hollywood for movies, NYC for finance, etc. There are very real advantages to the strong ecosystems created by gathering so many specialists in a single area, both for companies AND for workers; working for Google making a Google salary in a small office in Topeka instead of SF sounds great until you think about whatever happens if you lose your job somehow, and suddenly you have no local options for jobs of that tier.
Plus, most of the NIMBYs are trying to avoid density to preserve suburban sprawl-type neighborhoods, which themselves are anti-environment and classist. Pushing people out to metros where they'll contribute to yet more sprawl is A Bad Thing.
Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an interesting question. How much less productive would these workers be if they were moved to Salt Lake City or Henderson, NV or Syracuse, NY? If you lost 20% of the productivity but could pay 30% less that would be OK, wouldn't it?
In addition to what others have said, you have to consider what your competitors might do while you're spinning up. They could capitalize on your downtime.
And to top it all off, those competitors would have the pick of your (former) employees who didn't want to move.
Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
#174Most 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.
Given that "About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born," I think that if a group of FAANG+Friends agreed to open campuses in some other state at the same time, they could easily build a new tech community.
Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
#175Personally this class of things really highlights an imbalance for me. Consider that Google runs its own own bus service for employees, and now is building housing for the same. Traditionally, successful businesses in a region paid taxes, and those taxes were used by the local governments to invest in infrastructure like public transport and urban development. So in this regard Google usurps the mandate of the commun…
The problem is that the local governments are not doing their jobs so private industry is stepping in to address the gap (with obviously a biased interest towards their customers, shareholders, and employees).
Literally every Bay area government has regulations (zoning, community review, etc.) that prevent housing to be put in place. On the transit side, we have multiple transit organizations (Muni, BART, Caltrain, etc.) that do not coordinate and operate as one entity; contrast this with NYC where the transit orgs have a common leadership.
What is happening in the Bay is that we are having an infrastructure crisis because a Nimby philosophy is preventing investment in critical areas like housing, transport, etc.
I agree that private industry won't solve this problem correctly because of its self interest, but frankly the problem is that the policy makers have no interest in solving the issue. Their loyalty is to their wealthy vocal residents who have no interest in creating housing or transit. They definitely do not care if underserved and disadvantaged people are suffering.
So while I agree that private industry will not tailor their solution to the disadvantaged (due to self interest), I don't think policy makers will either (due to self interest). Proposition 13 is a perfect example of how the voting population does not care about infrastructure for the poor. Prop 13 was marketed as a relief provision for the elderly, but the bulk of the measure is essentially a tax break for largely white wealthy landowners.
Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
#176That's $50K/home. Is that even remotely realistic in the Bay Area?
And unless I'm completely misinterpreting all of this, a "$1bn investment in 20k homes" that are each ultimately sold for an average of $100k (I'm assuming the average would actually be far higher) would net a $2bn return, so as much as the investment might be welcome, it's also hard-headed capitalism, not charity.
- ed
I'm busy and distracted and realised after I posted how obvious and unenlightening a post this was. Sorry!
Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
#177It'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…
The only solution is changing the zoning laws, and that requires changing peoples' minds.
There is another solution - don’t locate on the west coast or build out satellite offices that aren’t on the west coast.
Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
#178> 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.
No way, no how is Google or any other decent employer going to uproot all their knowledge workers and make them unproductive for the foreseeable future by forcing them to move to another region. The diaspora from the Bay Area will keep happening the way it has been: at the economic margins. Over time, people outside of tech who aren’t subsidized by prop 13 or rent control will get priced out. There will be a perpetua…
Why would “knowledge workers” be unproductive in another region?
Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
#179> 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.
Companies aren't going to move HQ's, because that's a terrible idea. The knowledge and skills loss would take years and years to recover from, substantially impeding productivity for a long time. It's economic suicide for a company like Google. What you're not bothering to grapple with is: why are these companies trying to expand headcount in areas that are somewhat hostile to them, and also much more expensive? Hell…
Having an HQ seems increasingly antiquated. Sure, there probably needs to be a designated executive center, but otherwise it seems far less risky to partition your organization into smaller units. Just look at what Amazon is doing with HQ2.
Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
#180Earlier 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.
Given that "About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born," I think that if a group of FAANG+Friends agreed to open campuses in some other state at the same time, they could easily build a new tech community.
If they can launch a global currency, they damn sure can build a tech community in a red state.