361–370 of 547 posts
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Is it common where you are for new grads to buy homes right out of school?
It is common where I am for people who make 200%+ median income to be able to own a place to live, yes. This is true regardless of their age or education level.
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I think that's largely it. MV was radically anti-housing until there was a big shake-up in the city council in 2014 (IIRC 4 grey-haired NIMBYs lost their seats in favor of 20- and 30-something techies and progressive activists). The flood of permits followed after that, and construction lags permitting by several years. Sunnyvale has been reliably pro-housing since about 2010, which means that a lot of new supply cam…
Sunnyvale and Mountain View aren't really different rental markets, though, so I'd be surprised if the difference in rent increases you saw between the two are related to differences in new housing permits. Put another way, restricting housing supply in Mountain View likely impacts rents its socioeconomically similar neighbor, Sunnyvale.
Among likely differentiators: 1.) Traffic. If you're traveling to Google or Facebook Sunnyvale adds an extra 15-20 minutes to your commute. 2.) Schools. They're better in Mountain View, at least for now, though both regions are rapidly gentrifying. 3.) Cachet. Mountain View has the name because of Google. Sunnyvale doesn't really, and also feels like more of a sterile suburb than a lively community. 4.) Shuttle stops. I don't know exactly where they are now, but that'd explain why the downtown areas go for relatively equal expensive rents, while my neighborhood (which AFAICT has no tech shuttle stops anywhere near it) rents for a lot less than other neighborhoods in the area.
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> 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.
Resilient channels basically work by fixing horizontal metal strips to the studs, and then hanging the drywall on the strips with clips. Because there is purposefully play in the connection, vibrations cannot easily transfer from drywall to stud to drywall.
Why doesn't it work? As soon as anyone nails or screws or otherwise attaches something into the stud through the drywall (say a shelf), the drywall is now mechanically connected to the stud again.
The proper fix is to have a separate frame for each dwelling unit, preferably with fiberglass insulation. This essentially doubles the cost of inter-unit walls, so it is less popular. My parents live in a townhouse constructed in this manner, and if they dial up the volumes on the movie to 11, the subwoofer can cause pictures to rattle on the neighbor's walls, but audible sound is nearly zero.
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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'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…
In the real world, nothing has one simple cause or one "only" solution. The housing problem in California, and elsewhere is complex. This is akin to people who say, "The problem with homelessness there has one simple cause..." and then insert their favorite boogeyman.
There are many factors involved, other than NIMBYs, and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). There is corporate greed, geographic restrictions, land use issues, transportation issues, tax issues, and the list goes on and on...
The loudest among those on HN seem to be BEASTs (Build Everything to Achieve Skyscraper Town). That's not healthy, either.
† Amusing field guide to various types of NIMBYs: https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2015/08/19/a-field-guide...
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> That’s just what I’m saying about your other example, most of the money spent on “cloud computing” from a consulting and implementation side is nowhere near Seattle. Okay, and most money people spend on movies is nowhere near LA. That has nothing to do with whether LA is a hub for movie development, though. A huge proportion of cutting-edge cloud platform development for the big cloud companies happens in the SF ba…
The whole theory of going to a”hub” is being around other smart people that makes it easier for companies to find people and funding and make it easier for people to find a job and being in the ecosystem. But if you are in the “cloud industry” you don’t need to be anywhere near Seattle to either find a job, find funding, or find “smart people”. I don’t know the movie industry but I do know the cloud industry from the…
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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?
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 visited South Florida lately? It sucks here now cause of the amount of people that keep moving into this area. The traffic is horrible, the stores are crowded and people's attitude in general is becoming increasing hostile. The world doesn't need to be denser, we need some elbow room, we need SPACE. Thanos was right.
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Yeah, and instead we're stuck in cars commuting. Remote working frees up more time to spend with other people.
If only we had the knowledge to plan cities so that it's possible to live near where you work. Perhaps it sounds crazy, but we could even stack dwelling units on top of one another.