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

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

#481

Post by skoocda » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

khazhou wrote: post #478

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

I do wonder if you're joking when you say "some" controversy.

A quick check of property values shows that these are estates in the $5M - $20M range:

https://www.zillow.com/homes/Atherton-CA_rb/

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

#482

Post by Johnny555 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:10 AM 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?

It's much better for the environment to pack the people into a dense urban area where they area easily served by transit (or can walk to where they want to go), goods delivery, etc than to have people commuting 60 miles from Tracy where they live in a 3000 sq foot house on a half acre of land.

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

#483

Post by Johnny555 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:19 AM UTC

crowbahr wrote: post #457

lisper wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. It's true that there is one simple cause, but it's not NIMBYism, it's overpopulation, and it's a planet-wide problem. There are just too many people. They can't all live in the nice places because if they do, the nice places won't be nice places any more.

>There are too many people There really aren't. The fact of the matter is that NYC is a nice place to live (typing this from Brooklyn) and it's 1000x SF's density. The world produces a caloric surplus (based on a 2k calorie diet) per capita. We're not overpopulated. What you're saying is that you want your in demand area to remain exclusive and separate. It's not overpopulation: it's self interest. Preservation of so…

It's not 1000X.

NYC's population density is 27,000 people per sq mile, SF is 18,000.

The entire NY MSA has a density of 1700/sq mi, compared to 1100 for the SF MSA.

If you look only at Brooklyn, it has a density of 36,000/sq mi.

Worldwide, Manila has the highest density, at 100,000/sq mi

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

#484

Post by barry-cotter » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:19 AM UTC

abeppu wrote: post #470

hunter23 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the local governments are not doing their jobs so private industry is stepping in to address the gap (with obviously a biased interest towards their customers, shareholders, and employees). Literally every Bay area government has regulations (zoning, community review, etc.) that prevent housing to be put in place. On the transit side, we have multiple transit organizations (Muni, BART, Caltrain, e…

Property owners have no interest in creating housing; scarcity keeps their property values high. However, I don't get why it is that renters seem ineffective as a block in advocating for more construction. There are lots of renters, many with more roommates than they'd like, and they're all vaguely aware that their landlords could decide to evict everyone and sell, so they should be motivated to try to build the stoc…

Can you imagine how much more valuable property in Queens would be if it was zoned so you could build at Manhattan densities? You can create value just by increasing density, by making building more housing legal where it isn’t. In the very long run this may not be an obvious win for all property owners, as a group. But they’re not a group, and if you can be one of the first people to build a lot of housing in a supply constrained market you’ll make a lot of money.

If building more housing in the Bay Area was legal there’d be more housing. If they built enough housing prices would even fall eventually.

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

#485

Post by deathanatos » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:32 AM UTC

alexhutcheson wrote: post #455

deathanatos wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> be sustainable to operate those trains on a frequent schedule CalTrain during rush hour is operating many trains at 120+% capacity. As a ride, that number feels way too low given how many people are often without a seat. I type this on a ride where I didn't get a seat for the front half of the ride. Riderships what growing by 5k daily riders YoY, though I think it's finally topped out due to train capacity. Bikers…

Yeah, the key phrase here is “during rush hour”. For CalTrain, it’s hard to justify buying more rolling stock and employing more staff if that additional capacity is going to sit mostly unused for 90% of the day. It’s analogous to paying for extra racks of servers to handle peak QPS that you only really need to handle on weekday mornings. This blog post has a more analytical take on what makes peak service so expensi…

If that post is accurate… holy moly those cars are expensive. It doesn't even seem to make sense in rush hour according to those numbers?

He nicely has the exact per-car figure for the newer Caltrain cars ($5.7M / car…); he puts a $2.5M car at ~$162k/yr in depreciation, and $100k/yr in maintenance. If we double the depreciation to account for CalTrain's apparently expensive purchase, that's $325k + $100k / yr per car, or $2.55M/yr for a six-car train. (But: I don't get these depreciation numbers? This figure adds up to ~$13M over the life of the train assuming the 40 yr life in the article, which seems appropriate given that the gallery equipment is nearly 50 IIRC; why would depreciation be more than 100% of the vehicle cost, or is this a "it depreciates faster in earlier years but becomes more cost effective later"? This could greatly make most of the numbers I'm getting here make no sense.)

The passengers, meanwhile, assuming they pay the same price as I do for a Zone 3 pass (and Zone 3 is fairly popular, though some people will travel further to SJ which will cost more…) we get ~$1.6M/yr assuming 100% capacity (570 passengers, n.b. this is less than the current 722 per 6-car gallery, and IDK what Bombadiers have; also I kinda doubt that 100% load will happen in rush, that is, it'll still be >100%) and that they don't raise prices (I also doubt this.) Still, that's a huge funding gap, but should the passengers pay 100% of the required fees, or is some of it expected to come from taxpayers? (There's still a gap of ~$0.9M/yr … per train)

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

#486

Post by andrew311 » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:41 AM UTC

slavapestov wrote: post #447

andrew311 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative way of looking at it: whether or not face to face is important for the specifics of the job, it might be important for emotional connection between humans, fulfilling a common human desire to connect with peers and be happy on the job and _outside_ the job. In other words, we might want to be around peers for social (non-job) reasons.

It's possible to have a life outside of work, and find connection with people who are not your coworkers. This is not the purpose of employment.

I agree wholeheartedly. This is important and will provide balance. That said, often people have some sort of passion, their job might be a manifestation of that passion, and they want to connect with peers.

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

#487

Post by danans » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 4:49 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #374

avocado4 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the weather sucks everywhere else.

The problem is the weather sucks everywhere else. Only if you've never been anywhere else. San Diego is the paragon of lovely weather in California, not the Bay Area. SF is enshrined in a song made famous by Sinatra with the line, "She hates California/It's cold and it's damp."

> San Diego is the paragon of lovely weather in California, not the Bay Area.

And it shows in the steep cost of real estate there, too.

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

#488

Post by danans » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:00 AM UTC

derekdahmer wrote: post #429

abeppu wrote: post #309

They're pitching this as being a benevolent gesture, but (a) It sounds like they're just becoming a larger real-estate developer? They didn't say "we're donating all this land plus some capital to a housing non-profit"; they're going to receive revenue from their investments. Are we supposed to say thanks? (b) How does 20k units compare to their impact on Bay Area housing to date? This is not my area, and I'm not awa…

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…

> It's these local city governments like Palo Alto and Mountain View that allowed Google to massively expand without also allowing developers to build housing to support the employees for that expansion.

There's probably plenty of blame to go all around. IMO companies like Google (disclosure: I work there) caught on to the magnitude of the problem too late, and when they did, they ran into the local political resistance.

Why were they so late to catch on? Well I only have theories, including that it's only in the last few years that the cost of housing has made life difficult even for well paid employees, and those employees have voiced their frustrations.

In some ways I don't think that Google (and other companies that might follow them) deserve so much praise for finally attacking this by the horns at this late stage.

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

#489

Post by vinay_ys » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:16 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #363

JoshTriplett wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In practice there are a lot of soundproofings that can substitute for an air-gap, but the cheapest soundproofing to meet code (resilient channels) is useless: 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…

One thing that has bugged me is why don't they use concrete construction in US, like we have in India and most of Europe? Concrete construction would definitely eliminate the noisy neighbor problem to a very high degree (unless they are drilling into the concrete wall, you cannot hear them).

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

#490

Post by fountainofage » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 5:22 AM UTC

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…

I guess another way to look at it is how much office space has Mountain View approved to be developed? If they're super happy to have a Googleplex expansion that will fit another 5,000 Googlers, but only approve 1,000 more units... how do you reconcile that?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you - every single place should want to build more housing! But when has MV said "You know what? take your fancy office complex and move it somewhere else."?

Quick Edit: My point is mainly that all of these Bay Area governments are more than happy to get more lucrative office space built that employs thousands of employees, but suddenly hem and haw about "neighborhood character" when it comes to housing that lucrative workforce.