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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#191

Post by jofer »

enraged_camel wrote: post #166
jofer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there. Welcome to Houston! Seriously, the typical model for growth here has been for a major employer to make a new campus out in the middle of nowhere away from town, then things spring up around it. As a result, we have lots of urban clusters with skyscrapers a long way from downtown. The energy corridor and the med center sta…

Houston also famously has no zoning laws, which massively exacerbates problems associated with sprawl.

That's a bit of a misnomer. Most cities inside/near Houston are zoned, and Houston itself is effectively zoned. Almost all of the sprawl is zoned. (E.g. Katy, Sugarland, Spring, etc all have zoning laws.)

Land usage inside Houston city limits is mostly controlled through deed restrictions. E.g. I'm technically breaking the law by working from home as my deed is explicitly noncommercial. It's completely inflexible, as it was all set around 1900, but it is a form of zoning, nonetheless. Commercially-deeded lots are in planned areas that made sense at the time the property lines were drawn. There are also deeds that forbid residental development (often due to flooding, but again, it's inflexible).

The key differences are that there aren't any real restrictions beyond commercial / non-commercial. As a result, you'll often see a shipping yard in the middle of a residential district or similarly impractical commercial developments in unlikely areas.

Most of the examples people will dig up of flooding during Harvey that could have been prevented by zoning are actually in cities that _are_ zoned. The real issue is that developers get to dictate what the zoning laws are and get to develop however they want. For example, there's currently yet another development going up _inside_ the reservoirs on the west side of town. It's in a city that's zoned. They changed the zoning to allow the development there literally inside the reservoir, 10 ft vertically below the top of the dam.

I'm not saying that zoning is bad, or that Houston doesn't have problems, but I am saying that zoning here wouldn't help. Developers have infinite political sway and get to change zoning at will. That's the real issue.

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

#192

Post by danans »

jriot wrote: post #114
munificent wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> When you live in a rural area none of these are needed, zoo, aquarium

Perhaps if you live adjacent to a major national park or forest, or marine preserve, but most easily habitable rural areas are not that, and instead are industrially farmed or extracted from - essentially factories. Sure, there are exceptions, but not enough to accommodate the number of people that it would take to make a difference in cost of living in urban areas, not without ruining the access to wildlife viewing that makes those places unique in the first place.

> bike trail, running path

The environment doesn't provide either of these. They are created by many people either re-using the same route routinely, or by some institution building and maintaining them.

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

#193

Post by s3r3nity »

ivalm wrote: post #163
s3r3nity wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would people move to Detroit for lower salaries to live in Google provided housing? They would just find other jobs in the bay.

Because a rational labor market participant would consider that $1 purchasing power in SF $1 purchasing power in [Any other city / state].

Hypothetically if you were planning this as Google you wouldn't make the 1-1 scaling of lower salaries, but if you as employee would pay 80% less rent, could buy a massive home after working for <1 year, and still have more left over than you would ever have working in the bay, the trade-off would at least look somewhat appealing.

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

#194

Post by rndmize »

As usual when big tech talks housing, "Bay Area" actually means "Peninsula and west SJ". The other two-thirds of the Bay, bedroom communities and cheaper areas - who cares about those? Perhaps there's something about say, the tri-valley area that makes it unacceptable for office buildings that I don't know?

Dublin has doubled in population in the last 20 years. That sounds like an area that is pro-growth, where a company could have a useful impact without getting shot down by NIMBYs every step of the way.

I'd dig up stats on the biggest employers in Dublin, but can't seem to find any, so we'll go with Pleasanton as a proxy - Kaiser, Safeway and Oracle. Wew. We got one. Too bad most of tech doesn't even know the East Bay (much less the parts of it past the hills) even exists.

There are options to deal with the housing problems, even staying within the bay. Companies simply aren't pursuing them.

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

#195

Post by kens »

rconti wrote: post #92
caymanjim wrote: post #75

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…

Have you seen the absolute explosion of skyscrapers/mid-rise condo buildings in San Jose, Redwood City.. Hell, even San Carlos and Menlo Park have quite a few higher density units going in. I'm glad there's more density, and it's near transit, for the most part. Of course, it will still increase traffic, but by going with density and near transit, it'll reduce the impact vs building more single family homes.

An interesting article on why the mid-rise apartment style is so popular now: "Why America's New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri...

The quick summary is that the 2000 Building Code allowed inexpensive construction of 5-floor wood buildings over a concrete base. This "5 over 1" construction gives "near-high-rise densities at a wood-frame price", so it has become very popular in the US.

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

#196

Post by charlesju »

caymanjim wrote: post #75

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…

I also believe another option, where we can throw massive amounts of money at the problem, is to completely fix our transportation system.

If you have been to any major city in Asia, they have WAYYY more people and are able to commute from much further distances because the public transportation is clean, safe, fast, reliable.

We have tons of land under utilized in the bay area, especially in the east bay, if we were to allow those people to reach their offices under 1 hour, then I think a lot of issues are going to be solved.

I also believe we should build more taller buildings, but that's happening already. I grew up in Cupertino and everywhere you go there are apartment buildings going up right now. Likewise with Mountain View where my parents work.

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

#197

Post by Vraxx »

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.

This is true and explains some of it, but it doesn't change the fact that currently wanting to live in a desirable area and wanting to live in an area because of a job are conflated with no options that could effectively separate or distinguish between the two sources of demand. It's not like everybody would get up and leave the Bay Area, but it would allow those who only want the job to leave the market for housing in the Bay Area and lowering demand overall. At worst, the drop in demand would be supplanted with people who wouldn't move to the Bay Area at the current price (and thus the price wouldn't see much of a drop), but at least you wouldn't be crowded out by people who would leave the Bay Area given the choice.

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

#198

Post by scarface74 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #186
scarface74 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”Hubs" for various industries pop up all the time. Hollywood for movies I think you just argued against your point. A lot of blockbuster movies and popular TV shows are being shot in other places because other places are cheaper and they offer better incentives.

And there are already a lot of programmers who aren't in the bay area. That's fine. That there are cheaper options available that many take advantage of doesn't change the fact that LA is still the center of the movie world (at least for American movies), and SF/SV is the center of the software/internet world, with many choosing to locate in those places despite the higher absolute costs.

https://www.lamag.com/askchris/percentage-movies-filmed-in-l...

Last year a scant 7 percent of the 100 top-grossing live-action movies were shot here,

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

#199

Post by 0xEFF »

DataWorker wrote: post #68
runevault wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ready Player One is the shipping containers.

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

#200

Post by alexhutcheson »

charlesju wrote: post #196
caymanjim wrote: post #75

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…

I also believe another option, where we can throw massive amounts of money at the problem, is to completely fix our transportation system. If you have been to any major city in Asia, they have WAYYY more people and are able to commute from much further distances because the public transportation is clean, safe, fast, reliable. We have tons of land under utilized in the bay area, especially in the east bay, if we were…

You need much more density around the train stations than currently exists for it to be sustainable to operate those trains on a frequent schedule. So yes, you're correct that better transportation is needed, but greater density is needed to make that transportation system possible.
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