$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by smus » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #314

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…

> If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. Depends on definition of "possible". There is space, physically. But getting all the paperwork, lining up the money, placating all the NIMBYs and the special interests and politicians may be non-trivial. For Google it may be easier than for other developers, and Google may be more motivated to do it, s…

>You'd have to start you commute previous day to get to the office by the morning.

Or, you know, build actual public transit

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

#352

Post by shereadsthenews » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #342

shereadsthenews wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tod…

Are you sure you aren't looking only at single family housing? RWC built a ton of downtown apartment/condo buildings.

I'm looking at US Census American Community Survey B25001 "Housing Units" which is all-inclusive. This figure stood at 30,898 in 2017 and 29,247 in 2010. These estimates are consistent with the ABAG report which says that Redwood City permitted only 891 units 2014-2017. According to ABAG's GIS, Redwood City did not permit _any_ multifamily dwellings in 2017. 100% of permitting activity was secondary units of detached houses.

http://housing.abag.ca.gov/map

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

#353

Post by JoshTriplett » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

shados wrote: post #232

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…

> and that requires changing peoples' minds Yup, and that is straightforward, if time and money consuming. Changing zoning isn't enough: making an area denser without appropriate matching infrastructure investment isn't going to go well. If you want the next Tokyo or Paris (or even something significantly smaller), you need Tokyo or Paris' infra. Then the next problem is that people can't stand each other. People don…

> People don't want neighbors because neighbors are a pain.

> LOUD

Sound is very much the problem. I don't want a huge amount of land, I don't want lawn, I don't want landscaping, I definitely don't want a neighborhood association, but what I do want is good soundproofing and no shared walls (or worse, floors/ceilings). In practice, there's no soundproofing that can substitute for an air gap.

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

#354

Post by aiisjustanif » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

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.

"Houston" 100% has some sprawl issues, but that's why it's a metroplex now, Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land, and the Woodlands and Sugar Land are zoned for lower density.

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

#355

Post by greglindahl » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

alexhutcheson wrote: post #200

charlesju wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... and the area we're talking about is both building better transportation and agreed to prioritize building dense at train stations.

It's certainly the case that more can be done for both of these.

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

#356

Post by wbronitsky » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

dannykwells wrote: post #168

This is awesome. I hope they follow through on actually making this affordable and not only for Google employees (which I agree, would likely be illegal). Pols in the bay area suck. All of them. They are against affordable housing and against families. But, they love money more than they hate families. So way this approach will help and pave the way for the other major companies to do the same.

“Ah yes, all of them. Every politician in a place where millions live is bad, none of them are working to build housing and schools, transit and infrastructure.”

That’s a horrible argument that has no basis in fact. Multiple cities, like Mountain View, Oakland, San Jose and Foster City, just to name a few off the top of my head, are putting in affordable housing. Alameda County Transit has vastly expanded their bus fleet, something the tax payers chose on the ballot!

You might hate your elected officials, but not all of us do.

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

#357

Post by aiisjustanif » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #254

As a thought experiment, lets say Google owns a significant percentage of the housing market in the areas they operate in. They thereby receive both rent from their own employees, and others in the area. Lets see how this gives them leverage: * Want to fully choke out competition on salaries, while leveraged against it by taking in the rent money those salaries provide for? * Why not invest in housing, when you're th…

Welcome to the less extreme version of Seoul.

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

#358

Post by stevenwoo » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #292

hangonhn wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mountain View has permitted a large amount of housing development west of 101 along San Antonio Road for what feels like 15 years (these were all one-two story businesses or Sears/Montgomery Ward open mall, now mixed used with four story apartment/condos, new Facebook offices), also a lot of development along Rengstorff and some right on El Camino during the same time. Friends who left and came to visit recently said it was tremendously different than they remembered.

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

#359

Post by spaced-out » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #123

Personally 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…

>Contrast that with if Google paid $1B in taxes to the bay area communities where it has facilities, would those governments have the same priorities for those funds?

Of course not, because the goal of local Bay Area governments is to make land more expensive, not less.

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

#360

Post by smus » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #330

pertymcpert wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many is too many then? Clearly any given area has a maximum support capacity for humans. Is it good for the environment or quality of life to keep packing people into mega-cities?

I would suppose that packing people into high density housing is great for efficient distribution of goods, and seeing as dense megacities support great public transit I would wager that this is clearly better for the environment than the alternative.