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Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

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Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#141

Post by gwillen »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #138
ghaff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a few of the towns in the South Bay have walkable cores: Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Mateo... You also have smaller cities all over the country. Now, you get into truly small towns in places like New England and there really isn't a lot in the town center and it's unlikely you'll be living walking distance from it.

Come on, Mountain View’s downtown degrades into there-is-not-even-trees-to-shade-you after like two blocks sideways, and no grocery store. Palo Alto is better, but unless you live in downtown south you won’t be walking distance from a grocery store, and you can basically not walk for more than 20 minutes without being in boring ass McMansion suburbia.

> no grocery store

I can't tell if you forgot about Ava's, or if you've never actually _been_ to downtown Mountain View, or if you only consider chain supermarkets to count.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#142

Post by rabidrat »

wtracy wrote: post #140
shajznnckfke wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re used to receiving BigCo pay and bought a mansion in a remote vacation hotspot, you could be in for a rude awakening if you find other remote jobs pay half as much and your employer knows that and stops giving you refreshes.

This. The FAANG crowd is used to pulling down $100k-$150k. Developer jobs that are advertised as remote from day one tend to be closer to $50k-$70k. (These numbers are based on a combination of rumors and job board postings, so no, I don't have a source to cite.)

Erm, in my experience (20 years, good but not a superstar) the numbers are 2x that. My last BigCo offer was $300k total comp and jobs with smaller companies (all remote) were around $120-150k. One startup offered me $190k to work remote (but I would have been the only remote worker).

That said, I agree that your average non-FAANG job pays about half of FAANG. Although this is true regardless of remote-ness.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#143

Post by stephenhuey »

war1025 wrote: post #134
davidw wrote: post #105

I am really curious about this trend myself. I live in a town - Bend, Oregon - that already had a lot of remote workers. It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse. I'm also curious about the "non-zoom" towns and what the dynamics might look like there. Bend was already fairly well-known, but there are tons of former mining/logging/ranch towns throughout the west that have access to a l…

> A town of 100K people I know it doesn't really mean anything, but it always just seems peculiar to me when people refer to places with tens or hundreds of thousands of residents as "towns" I guess mainly because the general consensus is that a "town" is smaller than a "city". The "town" I grew up in had about 3k residents. To us, the place a half hour away with the big box stores where we'd do our shopping was the…

I was born in a town of similar size and have always been fascinated by my friends who grew up their entire lives in Houston who have no relatives in such small places and really have no concept of how different it can feel an hour outside of the city.

Recently I was surprised to read that at the time of the Revolutionary War, Philadelphia was the nation’s largest city with only 20,000 residents!

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#144

Post by epistasis »

pbourke wrote: post #75
epistasis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The picture of a house they show nestled in the trees is incredibly dangerous, incredibly resource intrnsive, and just ecologically unsound. We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. Instead we lock down any new construction in cities, which requires the least amount of infrastructure and environmental damage, and instead let pretty much a…

> We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. All else being equal, Americans will choose to live in a detached house on a 1/2 acre lot with an SUV or pickup in the driveway.

This is simply untrue. Some people will, but this sort of “everybody who doesn’t want what I want is lying to themselves” is elitism that destroys people’s chances to live th way they prefer.

The higher cost of living in cities is pretty strong evidence that city living is under supplied compared to suburban living.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#145

Post by ryandrake »

refurb wrote: post #111
205guy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tahoe for example. If you can’t work from home, it’s unlikely you’ll find another job locally. That’s the situation now, but after 1000 remote tech workers move there and 500 decide not to go back to the city, 100 might pivot to lifestyle startups that employ 100-200 more. And now you have a little incubator that wasn’t there before and might grow a nice little self-sustaining eco-system. And once it gets going, it…

That’s where i was heading with my question. I’m wondering if these folks have a plan B if asked to go back to the office. If so, that’s great and we could see some pretty interesting changes to the demographics of small cities. If they don’t have a plan B, well... that’s not good.

I’m in exactly this situation. Wife and I talk daily about whether we should roll the dice and move to a less inexpensive rural or vacation town and just hope my employer decides to continue WFH. So far we are too chicken to pull the trigger but we have the down payment all ready to spend if I ever grow a pair.

Work has been pretty cagey about what post-pandemic is going to look like. Nobody is outright saying we’re 100% coming back to office or we’re definitely going optional WFH forever. It’s this uncertain “wait and see” that keeps us from pulling the trigger on Tahoe or Redding or somewhere else way out there and less expensive.

If they ever make a clear decision: “WFH is optional for all employees” we put our house for sale that day.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#146

Post by jseliger »

davidw wrote: post #105

I am really curious about this trend myself. I live in a town - Bend, Oregon - that already had a lot of remote workers. It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse. I'm also curious about the "non-zoom" towns and what the dynamics might look like there. Bend was already fairly well-known, but there are tons of former mining/logging/ranch towns throughout the west that have access to a l…

It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse.

This is almost certainly caused by an overly restrictive zoning regime that restricts the supply of housing and thus raises the price. The city likely bans all missing middle housing: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#147

Post by davidw »

war1025 wrote: post #134
davidw wrote: post #105

I am really curious about this trend myself. I live in a town - Bend, Oregon - that already had a lot of remote workers. It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse. I'm also curious about the "non-zoom" towns and what the dynamics might look like there. Bend was already fairly well-known, but there are tons of former mining/logging/ranch towns throughout the west that have access to a l…

> A town of 100K people I know it doesn't really mean anything, but it always just seems peculiar to me when people refer to places with tens or hundreds of thousands of residents as "towns" I guess mainly because the general consensus is that a "town" is smaller than a "city". The "town" I grew up in had about 3k residents. To us, the place a half hour away with the big box stores where we'd do our shopping was the…

Hah, ok fair enough. It's the county seat and to get to a larger city you have to drive 3 hours. It was also 30K 30 years ago, so it still conserves some 'small town feel'.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#148

Post by davidw »

jseliger wrote: post #146
davidw wrote: post #105

I am really curious about this trend myself. I live in a town - Bend, Oregon - that already had a lot of remote workers. It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse. I'm also curious about the "non-zoom" towns and what the dynamics might look like there. Bend was already fairly well-known, but there are tons of former mining/logging/ranch towns throughout the west that have access to a l…

It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse. This is almost certainly caused by an overly restrictive zoning regime that restricts the supply of housing and thus raises the price. The city likely bans all missing middle housing: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

That's part of it. Oregon passed HB 2001 last year, so that's... something, but new missing middle housing won't appear overnight. We're also working on some other stuff here: https://bendbulletin-or-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=0ee63f5f...

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#149

Post by jasonv »

epistasis wrote: post #56
jasonv wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to A model/example where this has been done well? I hear this all the time, but if you build more dense versions of the cities/towns we have now, it'll be miserable. Thin-walled apartment homes built along narrow-sidewalks without proper public spaces and reasonable bike/pedestrian zones, etc. I thin…

The resistance comes from a tiny number of people, and is not representative of the majority. Blocking the wants of the people requires subversion of democracy and subversion of the housing market by a few very wealthy and connected and powerful people. California and many other states’ governance has enabled a small number of people to veto what the majority wants. For example, all of SF’s safe streets program durin…

The people who love SF don’t seem to want it SF-ier, otherwise these proposals would pass (I’ve also lived in Cow Hollow and Bernal Heights).

I work in the city with SFers. They all complain incessantly about their apartments, the noise, the commute, etc.

People in SF, commuting by Bart or bike for 20-30 minutes, complaining to coworkers who spend 50-80 minutes on Bart commuting in from San Ramon and Walnut Creek. Singles in SF don’t seem to understand what dual income, 1-2 kids might want. It’s not SF (not school lotteries, yes to playgrounds).

If it was so great, selling more of it should be easier.

And I know about the two people blocking slow streets... not the same NIMBY story as infill housing nobody is convinced will be great.

Update: There have been a few responses to my OP. No stated examples of where infill housing plus better urban planning have yielded the improvements that the SF infill crowd are trying to sell. It needs a master plan, which doesn’t seem likely from SF governance.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#150

Post by alexbanks »

zachware wrote: post #92

This will all depend what % of employers stay with their current remote structure. It’ll be somewhere between 1% of 80/90%. The point is that we’re making long-term decisions based on short-term problems. Specifically this week JP Morgan asked its traders to return to the office. You can counter this with examples like Facebook opening an office in Austin some years ago because that’s where the talent had moved. Simi…

> whenever the virus is neutralized.

I suspect not before 2022. And even that is generous.

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