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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#211

Post by minwcnt5 »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #82
minwcnt5 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the fact that humans are social animals needs a citation. Most people are healthier and happier spending their time in social groups. Even as a highly introverted person, I'd much rather interact with live people every day than work remotely and only interact electronically. Of course there are exceptions, but I would guess that building a company, or even parts of it, from the exceptions is a lot of tr…

> I don't think the fact that humans are social animals needs a citation. Humans can (and should) get their social needs met anywhere, not only at their place of employment. I've worked both onsite and remote throughout my career. I'd never advocate for forced remote work (because some people want to get their social needs met through their employer). Rather, I'd argue that it should be considered as an option.

For me it's not just about having social needs met, it's also that for a lot of engineering work in-person collaboration is crucial. Serendipitous interactions are important. Passionate discussions involving emotion and empathy are important. Being able to easily grab a co-worker's attention for a minute to show them something on your screen or sketch an idea out on a whiteboard is important. You can technically make some of these things to happen remotely using technology, but in practice, there's just too much friction, and these sorts of interactions don't happen.

I agree that not all roles require this sort of thing. There are employees who can come to the office, work 8 hours, and go home, all without speaking a word to another person. There are probably thousands of employees at Google who could probably be just as effective working remotely. That said, having worked there, I think that's not true for the vast majority of SWE work.

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

#212

Post by trhway »

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…

>The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism.

when people don't want to give away (for free or below market price) their share of GOOG nobody calls that NIMBYism. When people don't want to give away their share in a city (drastically increasing density/population does in many ways take away from existing residents without any just compensation) - that is suddenly becomes NIMBYism.

The issue can practically be solved simply - city is to be like a corporation with stock, and any new resident/development has to buy the stock on the secondary market. Density/population increase (i.e. zoning changes) is by issueing new stock to be distributed proportionally like dividends to existing shareholders(residents). That way NIMBYism would just disappear the same way like it doesn't exist when it comes to GOOG. That also would make gentrification into a buyout where people who create a city desirable to live in would materially benefit from it instead of being just kicked out being as poor as when they moved in.

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

#213

Post by hindsightbias »

ch4s3 wrote: post #143
ProAm wrote: post #104

> 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.

Move them where? Is there some mystical place somewhere in the US that has laws amenable to running a tech business, decent weather, good universities, infrastructure (roads, fiber, transit, etc.), and is agreeable to at least another company so you can get some agglomeration effects? And then how do you convince tens of thousands of employees to move? How do you no just end up with the same problems, or crazy sprawl…

Where did IBM, HP, DEC, Dell, etc build back in the day? For IBM, it was the boonies of Austin, SJ, Boulder, Rochester, Burlington, Poughkeepsie, Hursley, Toronto, Somers, White Plains... companies, services and people moved to them. Do FAANGs have no gravitas? They can’t do better?

Yes, in 20 years, you end up with sprawl, but thats better than crashing someone elses hood and wanting it to morph into Manhattan.

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

#214

Post by runevault »

0xEFF wrote: post #199
DataWorker wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually I'm pretty sure Hiro also lived in a shipping container at least at one point during the book. Though it's been years since I read it (something I need to correct).

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

#215

Post by summerlight »

There's a bunch of people saying "why not going out of the Bay?" This doesn't work because for most of the foreign workers with H1B visa job security matters more to them. With H1B visa, you gotta find another job in 60 days when there's a trouble with your employer. Otherwise you'll be kicked out. Also note that Chinese and Indian people are typically stuck at H1B for 5~10 years and they're the majority of SWE H1B holders.

If you're in the Valley (or at least a big city), the solution is pretty simple; take a day off, go to interviews and get a job. You don't have to move out and will have a good chance to get a job relevant to your career. The same thing doesn't apply to most of the other areas. The risk is so high that it can effectively end your career, those people with H1B just tend to pay more for living in the Bay.

So in order to have another big campus out of those big cities, there must be a pre-established, significant SWE ecosystem that can guarantee a level of job opportunity. Unfortunately, this cannot be done by a single company.

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

#216

Post by scarface74 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #201
scarface74 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,

There's much more to movies than just where they were physically shot. Guess where Warner Bros is HQ'd, Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, Universal Studios, etc. What you've linked to is the equivalent of arguing that the bay area and Seattle aren't that big for cloud computing because hey, there aren't that many big datacenters there.

Seeing that the post you responded to said “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.”

The citation I linked to was right in line with my argument.

And, I know for a fact that you can not only get into “cloud computing” without going anywhere near Seattle, AWS hires SAs, TAMs, etc in many major cities and most of the third party Amazon Partners aren’t anywhere near Seattle....

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

#217

Post by danans »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #184
danans wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference housing cost as a percentage of the small tech city salary is an irrelevant statistic. The relevant statistic to compare is actual housing cost vs actual compensation in both types of places. For many types of tech jobs, the number still favors big cities, if not in percentage terms, then in absolute numbers. And when it comes down to a real life decision, there are plenty of other factors (financial o…

My point was "only $12,000" sounds very ivory tower and tone-deaf to people for which $12,000 is an awful lot of money .

It's not an ivory tower thing at all.

$12000 doesn't mean the same thing when you consider the cost of living difference between the urban and rural areas.

$12k goes way farther towards purchasing goods and services in the rural area, so naturally it seems like an awful lot of money there, but it purchases far fewer goods and services in a big city. This is similar to how household incomes between different countries aren't directly comparable until you adjust for Purchasing Power Parity [1].

That doesn't mean that all big city dwellers are better off. Some undoubtedly are, and some are definitely not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

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

#218

Post by pertymcpert »

linuxftw wrote: post #170
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'm generally against zoning restrictions. But, there's only so much a city's infrastructure can take. Let's say they build another 100k 3 bedroom units, where is all the waste going to go? Is there a good reason for all of these people to live in one little area? No, I don't think there's a really good reason. Everyone wants to take advantage of what the city has to offer, but nobody actually wants to pay fair marke…

Where did those people live before? How did the Bay Area grow to its current size if people kept saying the same thing?

"We only have one bus route and a school, how can we grow this place? It's too crowded". Complete BS.

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

#219

Post by pertymcpert »

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.

No it doesn't.

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

#220

Post by yep_thats_right »

As someone who lives in a single-family home, I'm totally for public transit, having fewer cars on the streets, more walkability, etc.

But until cities solve the issues of smell and noise, I'm not interested in living in a dense area. Keep it clean and quiet. Invest in urban forestry. Then it starts to look appealing.

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