Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 547 posts

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

#291

Post by driverdan »

bluedino wrote: post #47
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company. ...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord. If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.

$2,000 house payment vs a $3,000 apartment rental is only $12,000 a year in difference.

I want to downvote you for your ridiculous show of privilege in that statement but won't since that's not what downvotes are for. $12,000 a year is a lot of money, especially when added up over time. The US median income is just over $61,000, meaning "only" $12,000 represents 20%. That's just crazy to consider that a small amount.

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

#292

Post by AceJohnny2 »

hangonhn wrote: post #274
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…

Lumping Mountain View in there with Palo Alto and others is really unfair. MV is doing the best it can but it can't carry all the weight of Bay Area growth. 1/5 housing starts in Santa Clara county was in MV. MV issued more permits than ALL its neighboring cities COMBINED. MV issued more permits than even San Jose. https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/09/28/mountain-view-leads... Unless the whole of Santa Clara county…

That's weird. I was driving around MV and Sunnyvale this weekend and was surprised by how much more residential (apartment complexes/townhoses) building seemed to be happening in Sunnyvale (along Evelyn Ave) than MV.

Could it be that these Sunnyvale developments were just issued permits earlier (2016 or 2017), and we're just seeing it further down the pipeline?

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

#293

Post by omegaworks »

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…

>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.

This attitude is exactly why people are uncomfortable with processes like this. It ignores existing inequities of property ownership that have impacted wealth distribution.

If where you decide to build the station is like most of the bay, the people living in these homes aren't the owners. Especially if they're presently black or latino-majority neighborhoods, American housing policy over the last 50 years has purposefully kept these communities from gaining ownership equity by explicitly redlining them or locking them out of the credit market.

They won't profit from selling the property, they will simply be displaced.

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

#295

Post by jefftk »

shados wrote: post #236
jefftk wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Somerville MA, which is has about 18k people per square mile, compared to the ~2-6k I see in the South Bay. It gets that density through many two and three family houses placed closely together, and it's not smelly or noisy. Here's a representative street view example: https://goo.gl/maps/ggwHETDomuRUQAB89 You can be much denser than the Bay Area while still having trees and feeling "residential".

> and it's not smelly or noisy Yes, yes it is. Somerville mades me go to NYC when I want a quiet vacation. The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, but the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it. When houses are built in cardboard with no space between the walls and the sidewalk, and someone walks home drunk, you'll get woken up something quick.

> The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it

My experience of Somerville has been very different from yours: I've never been woken up by noise coming in from the street, and I've lived in two very typical wood-frame houses (first a triple-decker in East Somerville, now a two-family near Davis).

But it's also worth separating "what should you build a house out of to avoid noise infiltration" and "what sort of neighborhood densities can you have with low levels of ambient outdoor noise".

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

#296

Post by rsync »

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 people living there don't want that, though, so the laws prohibit it."

... which is the definition of democracy.

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

#297

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by rubicon33 »

michaelt wrote: post #281
rubicon33 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Sure, so they're solving THEIR problem, not the housing crisis problem.

That's all I'm saying. Just like the OP said, more private companies building on their lots isn't really going to budge the needle.

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

#299

Post by trhway »

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.

>That is because in the case of a goog share you arent telling someone else what they can do with their share.

The same way with the proposed city stock shares - nobody is going to tell you what you can do with it.

>Instead, SFH are being allowed to have more options for what to do with their property.

no. It is a rich&powerful well-connected developer who is getting zoning changes and only to his properties (similar to the situation when only the major shareholder would get additional stock/dividend issued for free) at the cost to all the other residents and property owners. Privatization of profits with socialization of costs - the main reason for the NIMBY.

>In fact giving more options for property actually increases the value of that property.

Nobody is giving more options. Uniform re-zoning never practically happens. It is always a targeted action for the benefit of specific powerful developer who has already at least got an option on those targeted properties. At least the common stock schema i propose would allow to spread some of those gains toward all the others who also bear the costs, ie. the whole city.

Post reply on HN