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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#281

Post by michaelt »

rubicon33 wrote: post #272
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…

Agreed. 20,000 homes isn't going to budge the needle even 1% when it comes to housing affordability in the state, let alone in the bay area. Not sure why they feel like this is a good billion well spent...

So that next time someone says "down with tech bros gentrifying the bay area" or they get hauled up in front of the local government who sat the same thing, Google can say "we invested a billion dollars and built more homes than San Francisco added in the last seven years, we're doing our part."

And it sounds like they're 'investing' rather than 'spending' the $1 billion - if you take $750m of land and build flats and sell most of them at market rate, presumably you recoup a fair portion of your $750m - they might even make a profit.

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

#282

Post by achenatx »

xauronx wrote: post #107
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

my theory is that if you try to convert a co-located workforce to remote you are going to struggle because you have a mix of people that are able and unable to properly function that way. However if you start a company with that model from day one, over time you select for people that can handle the remote aspect. It becomes a core cultural value.

Southwest is the fun airline. What would american airlines have to do to become a fun airline? They would have to fire 2/3 of their staff.

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

#283

Post by dgzl »

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…

Here's a solution: have tech companies settle in other regions.

I know the benefits for being in the bay are substantial, but this problem is entirely brought about by tech companies, not the resident. Employers need to setup shop in less populated places and grow there.

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

#284

Post by driverdan »

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.

I downvoted you because face-to-face communication is not very important to most online jobs. As you pointed out elsewhere it may be important for other reasons but those needs can be fulfilled elsewhere.

Even if face-to-face is important for specific positions it's even more rarely a daily requirement. Most of the country is so much less expensive than the Bay Area that you could fly someone in one day a week and it would still cost less.

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

#285

Post by shereadsthenews »

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.

Putting the "explosion" in context, Redwood City built new housing at an annual growth rate of 0.8% between 2010 and 2017, the latest available data. This is far below the historical rate of new housing starts. At no time between 1958 and 2008 did the USA fail to start building at least 10 million dwellings per year, even when the population was much smaller. For example when the US population was half what it is today we started typically 1.5 million new homes per month. Current "explosion" of home construction is pathetic shadow of historical rate.

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

#286

Post by lotsofpulp »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #222
kens wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

There's something about that style of construction that feels like "Amazon Basics", like what you get when you don't care about craftmanship or longevity and just want the least expensive option. Those 5-story apartment buildings just have such a soulless cheap feeling to them, like they're made to have the illusion of being taller than they are. I really don't understand why they're so popular.

> like what you get when you don't care about craftmanship or longevity and just want the least expensive option.

You answered your own question. The fund manager of an REIT or developer is looking to maximize ROI, and in the absence of higher quality alternatives, they can afford to build to the lowest specs possible that will still rent.

Via 401k(s) and defined benefit pension fund investments, we all are responsible for maximizing for ROI.

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

#287

Post by klipt »

pickle-wizard wrote: post #277
SilasX wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. I think I live in such a building (in Austin) now, and the cheapness of the construction shows. I have 15 foot ceilings and I can hear conversations of people above me ... through the side walls.

After 10 years of living in an apartments and hearing all of my neighbors I got tired of it. So I bought a single family house. I have a small yard, only 1/8th acre, but it is enough of an air gap that I don't hear my neighbors.

Even condo buildings tend to have way better sound proofing than apartments.

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

#288

Post by compiler-guy »

achenatx wrote: post #270
trhway wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 prac…

That is because in the case of a goog share you arent telling someone else what they can do with their share. No one is telling a SFH owner that they have to do anything. Instead, SFH are being allowed to have more options for what to do with their property. In fact giving more options for property actually increases the value of that property.

Actually, this does tell a SFH owner that they have to do something: Live in a place substantially different than when they bought there.

This may be worth it broadly, but it absolutely enforces our preferences onto the SFH owner.

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

#289

Post by danans »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #240
danans wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> $12000 doesn't mean the same thing when you consider the cost of living difference between the urban and rural areas. We actually agree here. I think we're speaking past each other. I'm arguing that "only $12,000" is dismissive of how impactful a difference that makes to the lives of people who don't live in a big city.

> I'm arguing that "only $12,000" is dismissive of how impactful a difference that makes to the lives of people who don't live in a big city.

But the $12k in question isn't a fungible $12k. It's specifically the difference in housing costs between urban and rural in the example given earlier.

If the point is that many people in rural areas are economically struggling, then yes we agree, just as many poorer urban dwellers are (and to whom a random $12k received would also be hugely impactful), but that has nothing to do with example proposed.

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

#290

Post by jonas21 »

shados wrote: post #243
alexhutcheson wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The order of: announce train station, wait a bit, start building project and change zoning (with that "wait a bit" gap being critical) makes things work a lot better. Property value skyrockets for a while, and people who arent happy with it can sell and go live somewhere else with the money if they don't like it. The worse situations is when a zoning change happens and goes into effects quickly and construction proje…

That doesn't work so well either. You have to commit to spend a lot of money to build the transit line, and then when you try to make the zoning changes, NIMBYs will still find a way of blocking them.

Where I live, the transit agency has been building a $2B light rail extension with the understanding that areas around the stations would be rezoned for high density.

But so far, it looks like the city will cave in to pressure from homeowners for lower-density zoning, leaving a very expensive transit investment with far fewer people riding it than anticipated.

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