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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#471

Post by orangecat »

slavapestov wrote: post #451
minwcnt5 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I worked at an open office in Google, a good fraction of the people had headphones on most of the day. While there was some serendipitous discussion, much of the time we'd book meeting rooms, specifically to avoid distracting those around us.

Open plan offices are indeed terrible, but that doesn't contradict the benefit of face-to-face communication. For me the best environment has been a large team office with 4-8 people, where everyone has a decent amount of personal space and spontaneous discussions are more likely to be relevant.

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

#472

Post by burlesona »

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 struggling to find a citation for this, so I’ll caveat that this is from memory, but I’m pretty sure SF had had about as many housing starts as the rest of the Bay Area over the last ten years. It’s not nearly enough units, and it’s basically all in SoMa and Mission Bay, but nevertheless the city is doing more than most of the bay.

Interesting to note that Mountain View is also trying to pull its weight, per a sibling comment.

I think the easiest solution here would be at the state, rather than local level. Start tying state budgets to housing supply: ie. figure out approximately how much housing need there is in the region and require each city to permit a proportional share of that per year or lose state funding for roads, schools, etc.

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

#473

Post by allochthon »

s3r3nity wrote: post #193
ivalm wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would people move to Detroit for lower salaries to live in Google provided housing? They would just find other jobs in the bay.

Because a rational labor market participant would consider that $1 purchasing power in SF $1 purchasing power in [Any other city / state]. Hypothetically if you were planning this as Google you wouldn't make the 1-1 scaling of lower salaries, but if you as employee would pay 80% less rent, could buy a massive home after working for <1 year, and still have more left over than you would ever have working in the bay, th…

Having lived in Oakland for years, as well as smaller cities around the country, I can add that there's an additional appeal to living in out-of-the-way places. It's definitely a different thing from living in the heart of where everything is happening, like in the middle of San Francisco. But places off the beaten path have their own kind of allure.

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

#474

Post by zephyrnh »

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…

It sound like they're using land that Google already owns for this: "First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018)."

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

#475

Post by SubiculumCode »

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…

Sounds like a call to build a new town out among the hills somewhere.

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

#476

Post by SomeOldThrow »

gradys wrote: post #424
SomeOldThrow wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SB-50 would have just led to displacement and more homeless people, exacerbating how much it sucks to live in the city. We need better quality bills than Weiner's.

Why would it lead to those things? Building more housing seems like it would lead to fewer homeless people in the long run.

> Building more housing seems like it would lead to fewer homeless people in the long run.

This implies a bad investment.

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

#477

Post by andromeduck »

abeppu wrote: post #440
derekdahmer wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the right idea but the wrong enemy here. Local governments love adding corporations. They pay taxes while using few resources. So corporate campuses get approved super easily - sometimes even with tax breaks! New housing on the other hand is fought against tooth and nail because it brings new residents that require roads, services, and schools. Worse, if all the land has been used up, it requires larger buil…

That makes it sound like local governments should just fight harder against companies growing more? At present, companies adopt strategies which require them to undergo rapid growth, including headcount, without planning for or making affordances for the other effects of bringing those people to the area. Why is unreasonable to suggest that companies should be required to plan for and mitigate those effects at the ou…

This sounds a lot like Trump's rhetoric, America for Americans, San Francisco for San Franciscans.

It's unreasonable because industry has already paid for it in taxes, and fairly high ones at that. It's not industry's fault that it's being squandered by local and state government.

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

#478

Post by khazhou »

There's a very large area of land directly south of Redwood City with an extremely low housing density, that could be torn down (with some controversy, no doubt) to make way for the new Google housing.

You can easily see the underutilized density on the satellite view, by how green it is compared to surrounding cities:

https://goo.gl/maps/K3i32Rj4yoQ9gcUD6

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

#479

Post by Johnny555 »

dgzl wrote: post #283
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.

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

There's a reason why companies have large offices in the Bay Area and are willing to pay the exorbitant salaries and rent there.

If they could reasonably relocate to middle America where land and salaries are cheap, they would - they all know how expensive it is to operate in the bay area, yet they choose to do so.

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

#480

Post by khazhou »

nova22033 wrote: post #132

>This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018) This nails the root cause of the housing "crisis" in the bay area.

That's not the only root cause. It is also trivially easy for Google and other BigCo's to hire from outside the Bay Area (college recruits, etc) and those people move here without a plan of where to live. They arrive and set up in a small apartment and soon discover there's no other housing option, but the job is too lucrative and interesting to leave. Another 1000 follow the next week.
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