501–510 of 547 posts
It's sad how many times I walk around in SF and see basically crumbling buildings or empty parking lots and wonder why new housing has not been built there yet? And more importantly who would actually oppose development on crumbling or wasted land?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/One-housing-proj...
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…
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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…
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…
One of my faint hope in this project is in the fact that most of the development will happen in Google's real estate (if I understand correctly), which is proposed to be combinations of (relatively more) dense residential and commercial area with a more "urban" style planning. Of course, the zoning law is clearly the root of all housing evil in the Bay area. But in order to fight against it, we need a clear demonstra…
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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…
> it would be unfair for MV to carry the weight The fact that it's perceived as a sacrifice to build housing is one of the core problems. And one of the main reasons for this perception is that, for the city, it is true. Due to Prop 13, CITIES LOSE MONEY BY HAVING RESIDENTS. As long as that is true, don't expect much to change around housing in California.
You really agitate for this? Don't be an a*le.
If cities lose money it's because they spend too much and because they give their employees too much benefits. Fix that first.
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Jesus Christ, what is it with people acting like companies having lots of high-paying jobs is some kind of economic pox? Don't we want companies to be successful and pay their employees well? Why get in the way of that, instead of supporting that and helping as many people share in the success as possible?
Maybe you don't realize this but there's a homelessness crisis happening right now, partially due to massive gentrification brought on by successful tech companies. You shouldn't pretend that there aren't negative side-effects from the collection of success and wealth in Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area. Decentralizing the workforce would help decentralize the problem.
Of course there are bad side effects, but only because we've collectively decided to not solve the housing problem. It's not some obscure issue, we know how to fix it. We just choose not to.
> Decentralizing the workforce would help decentralize the problem.
If it was that simple, they'd have already done it because it would save them money.
Organizationally, there are advantages to physical colocation that you're just ignoring here. It's the triumph of the city.
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Jesus Christ, what is it with people acting like companies having lots of high-paying jobs is some kind of economic pox? Don't we want companies to be successful and pay their employees well? Why get in the way of that, instead of supporting that and helping as many people share in the success as possible?
wow, that is super uninformed and sad. The problem isn't high paying jobs, the problem is only a portion of the community has high paying jobs and the people that do critical jobs like cleaning and service jobs can't afford to live anywhere near where they are required. It's fantastic that people have high paying jobs. But if we are being honest those high paying jobs are only high paying when compared to jobs outsid…
We can look at successful models like Tokyo or Vienna, but instead of doing that people just throw up their arms and go, "what could possibly be done??" as if this was some novel, inscrutable problem.
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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…
> it would be unfair for MV to carry the weight The fact that it's perceived as a sacrifice to build housing is one of the core problems. And one of the main reasons for this perception is that, for the city, it is true. Due to Prop 13, CITIES LOSE MONEY BY HAVING RESIDENTS. As long as that is true, don't expect much to change around housing in California.
I'm not following. Prop 13 doesn't apply to new residents. It only applies to existing residents. Building new homes increases revenue.
Or an I missing something?
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/
To be less facetious about it, there is some irony in this project being promoted by Google executives, who live in chateaus and mansions in Atherton, Los Altos Hills, Woodside, etc, with an acre of land to their name, when this investment is of course to house the labor that got them those mansions to begin with. The execs who sponsor the housing projects obviously won't sell or give up their own land to make room for the new apartments.
Random Atherton listing on Trulia: https://www.trulia.com/p/ca/atherton/87-patricia-dr-atherton...
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> it would be unfair for MV to carry the weight The fact that it's perceived as a sacrifice to build housing is one of the core problems. And one of the main reasons for this perception is that, for the city, it is true. Due to Prop 13, CITIES LOSE MONEY BY HAVING RESIDENTS. As long as that is true, don't expect much to change around housing in California.
> Due to Prop 13... I'm not following. Prop 13 doesn't apply to new residents. It only applies to existing residents. Building new homes increases revenue. Or an I missing something?
Also doesn't help that prop 13 limits property tax increases for commercial property. And corporations live forever.