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Rethinking office space

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Re: Rethinking office space

#101

Post by slantedview »

pc86 wrote: post #70
jasonkester wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, MTV doesn't mean Mountain View to anybody who doesn't live or work in Mountain View. To everybody else it means MTV, making the things you say very confusing.

For what it’s worth, I live on the east coast, am not particularly keyed in to the Silicon Valley world like most HN readers, and knew (assumed) immediately that MTV = Mountain View based on the context of the article and the comment. I think it’s pretty obvious given the overall context here.

Agree. Lived in Mountain View (mtnv?) for a few years. Never saw the MTV acronym. Maybe it's a google thing?

Re: Rethinking office space

#102

Post by jacalata »

pearjuice wrote: post #79
nostrademons wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move to Mountain View? For the 5 years I was at Google, I never lived more than 2 miles away, my commute was 15 minutes by bicycle, and for half that, rent was only about $1400/month (it started rising rapidly in the last few years). But wait, it's not SF? Well, neither is Kansas, and as far as urban life & young people go, Mountain View is a lot better than Kansas.

>only about $1400/month Interesting how you refer to that as "only". That's like 40% of the average American salary. But if you work at Google and you indicate $1400 with "only" I cannot help but assume Google employees are far above the average national income.

You don't have to assume that, the data is pretty freely available. Google tells me that the average national wage is $26k, google entry-level average = $128k.

Re: Rethinking office space

#103

Post by bluthru »

jarjoura wrote: post #39
mankyd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, a long commute is one of the most highly correlated factors with regards to people's happiness: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/06/perils-commu... You may be happier living at work than you realize, (yes, I joke, but not as much as you'd think).

So you're saying if Google really wants happy employees they should open more offices in downtown SF? :)

Yes. That would be the greenest thing possible.

Unfortunately, the higher ups really like a short commute from their suburban homes.

At least Amazon and Twitter are urban.

Re: Rethinking office space

#104

Post by bluthru »

dsl wrote: post #19

I'm reminded of the San Francisco Federal Building. It was designed with many of the same goals to "bridge the indoors and outdoors" and do away with traditional concepts in favor of being green and environmental. It won many design awards, but later required massive retrofits to install traditional HVAC and ultimately was a complete failure.

Do you have a link that talks about the Federal Building installing AC?

Re: Rethinking office space

#105

Post by skybrian »

kqr2 wrote: post #96
scholia wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live at work. In the industrial revolution, it wasn't uncommon for major industrialists to build "model villages" [1] to house workers. The best examples include Bournville (Cadbury's chocolate), Saltaire (wool) and Port Sunlight (Lever Bros soap etc). They were attractive places to live, compared with Victorian slums. You got a healthi…

Google has tried to build housing in Mountain View multiple times but their plans have been rejected: http://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2012/07/13/google-housin... In general, it's much easier to build office space than housing. Cities like it because it generates revenue but they don't have to provide additional support services such as schools, police officers, etc.

This changed with the last election. Three pro-housing candidates were elected to the Mountain View city council.

Re: Rethinking office space

#106

Post by bluthru »

Animats wrote: post #61

Facebook's new building is a big open-plan office space, with some stuff to break up the visual sight lines. Since they're currently open-plan, that probably won't affect productivity much one way or the other. There's the anti-edifice complex company - Intel. Intel built their own office buildings to their own design, which was to have acre-sized floors with bullpens.[1] Grey bullpens. Grey walls. Grey carpet. It's…

Apple's profit last quarter was $18 billion. The new building will cost $5 billion. They'll be fine.

Re: Rethinking office space

#107

Post by chubot »

Animats wrote: post #61

Facebook's new building is a big open-plan office space, with some stuff to break up the visual sight lines. Since they're currently open-plan, that probably won't affect productivity much one way or the other. There's the anti-edifice complex company - Intel. Intel built their own office buildings to their own design, which was to have acre-sized floors with bullpens.[1] Grey bullpens. Grey walls. Grey carpet. It's…

The city of Mountain View insisted that Google put 5,000 housing units into their plan. That should help.

Citation? I'm seeing conflicting reports. One article says Google wants to build them; One has a councilman suggesting it. I don't think it's required -- that would be weird.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/google-hq/#Vd7nAQ:64H

"“It needs to be a neighborhood in Mountain View,” the video above says. That’s a contentious point, as Google has long wanted to build north of 5,000 housing units in the area, which the city council has resisted. The inability to co-locate or build housing in line with the company’s growth has put pressure on cities to the north like San Francisco."

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/26/google-taps-heat...

Google’s plan to redesign the city’s North Bayshore area will bring even more workers to this suburban city. Mountain View city councilman Leonard Siegel said he wants to add 5,000 new housing units to the plan.

Re: Rethinking office space

#108

Post by timothya »

fraserharris wrote: post #91
jasonkester wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, MTV doesn't mean Mountain View to anybody who doesn't live or work in Mountain View. To everybody else it means MTV, making the things you say very confusing.

Some common abbreviations (i've seen) used for Silicon Valley / Bay Area cities: MP - Menlo Park (Facebook) PA - Palo Alto MTV - Mountain View (Google) SJ - San Jose SF - San Francisco

MPK is also a common abbreviation for Menlo Park.

Re: Rethinking office space

#109

Post by bluthru »

lwhalen wrote: post #65

The concept looks super cool, but that Radcliffe guy needs to fix his bad habit of ending most every sentence with a question? It's very distracting to the overall flow and feel of the video? I wonder how long it'll take for the first buildings to come to fruition?

The indirectness in silicon valley speak is grating.

Starting sentences with "So..." and ending with questions is annoying indeed.

Re: Rethinking office space

#110

Post by vonmoltke »

smokinn wrote: post #64
toast0 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, how does prop 13 increase the cost of living?

Prop 13 limits property tax to the value of the house when you bought it unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value. So what happens in other locations is that demand for locations starts going up, housing prices go up, taxes go up and people who can't pay those taxes get displaced. Developers buy those houses, raze them in favor of apartment complexes and eventually you get density. If people…

dragonwriter covered most of the details, but they key one he missed in Prop 13 is that every other homestead law I am aware of has an owner occupancy requirement that Prop 13 lacks. In Florida, which has a very generous homestead law, the ad valorem tax limits apply to the owner-occupied primary residence. You move and rent the place, your valuation spikes up to market rate. Own two houses? Pick one, because the other is getting taxed at market rate. It also does not apply to commercial property whatsoever.

Because of California's lenient qualifications, someone who bought that $30k house can move to North Carolina and collect massive rent checks without seeing their property taxes jump to reflect reality. The owners of apartment complexes have a vested interest in keeping their properties as they are, since a major renovation or addition would trigger a revaluation. Same for owners of office and retail space who aren't big enough to cut tax deals with the various levels of municipal government.

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