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Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

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Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#261

Post by TulliusCicero »

dionidium wrote: post #242
TulliusCicero wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be sure, an actually thorough analysis would require firsthand experience (and I have visited Portland at least multiple times). It's just that most US cities are so very terrible at urbanism that it's easy to spot many of the massive flaws from Google Maps.

Most Midwestern cities are indeed sprawling, pedestrian-hostile, car-philic wastelands and that's what you're going to see on Google Maps. But, thankfully, they didn't destroy all of their pre-war housing and infrastructure and so most of them have at least a couple interesting, walkable neighborhoods. If you're moving to NYC, then you can throw a dart at the map and you'll land in a walkable neighborhood. If you're…

> But, thankfully, they didn't destroy all of their pre-war housing and infrastructure and so most of them have at least a couple interesting, walkable neighborhoods.

Sure, but how useful is that, really? Huntsville has a New Urbanist neighborhood that looks nice and cute, but the rest of Huntsville (which I have lived in before) fucking sucks for anything that's not a car. As soon as you need to go anywhere else, you gotta go back into driving, and only driving.

> If you're moving to St. Louis or Cincinnati, then you'll need to do some research. The dart is a bad strategy.

I don't dispute that you can mitigate the effects somewhat via careful selection. But:

* That only works for those particular neighborhoods. You're probably not gonna always stay in those, so you're still going to need to at least own a car, and probably make at least somewhat frequent use of it if you want to go to other places in the area.

* You're probably also looking at other things you want in a neighborhood: crime rate, school quality, restaurants, other points of interest, etc. Having to only look at a few neighborhoods as viable urbanist-friendly locations greatly constrains your options when it comes time to look at the other dimensions.

> I think people underestimate the extent to which that's going on

Maybe other people do, but I'm a dorky-ass urbanism nerd who reads blogs on this shit all the time, so I don't. I'm well aware of what's going on. But I also travel enough to know that these cities are so woefully behind most of the rest of the developed world, it would take literal CENTURIES to catch up at the current snail's pace of improvement. Changes that happen after I'm dead are of no use to me.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#262

Post by dfxm12 »

Itaxpica wrote: post #246
jasonlotito wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, gotta admit here, Philly has done a good job. The public transit is good. I live an hour outside Philly, and taking the train in is a real option here because the trains are good and getting around once in city has never been an issue. Couple that with easy access to NYC itself, and it's even nicer. It's not perfect, but then neither is NYC.

I dunno, I love Philly, but “good” isn’t exactly the word I’d pick to describe SEPTA.

JW, do you use a lot of other public trans? It's easy to be impacted by an issue and think that SEPTA is incompetent, forgetting that public transit is hard and not realizing how bad other people are doing. After all, Septa isn't famous for catching on fire all the time[0][1].

0 - https://twitter.com/ismetroonfire?lang 1 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/washington-d-c-s-metro-...

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#263

Post by lotsofpulp »

wholien wrote: post #250
MikeKusold wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently live in Denver and spend almost every weekend in the mountains. To me, the depressing part of NYC is the complete lack of fresh air, outdoor activities, and solitude. Different strokes for different people.

there are a lot of outdoors stuff 1-3 hours outside of NYC. NYC itself does have a lot of parks too, of which Central Park is the largest example.

If you have experienced west coast/Rocky mountain outdoors, the east coast likely won't satisfy you anymore.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#264

Post by redblacktree »

netheril96 wrote: post #175
dblock wrote: post #169

New York, especially Manhattan and nice parts of Brooklyn also have a great public school system. It’s very, very big with dozens of schools. This is critical for any parent obviously. My kids go to PS11, which is excellent, just a few blocks from Google HQ (I don’t work at Goog) with some real diversity in the classroom, literally kids of all possible colors from around the world. Interestingly, none of the other pa…

> I wouldn’t mind if that number ... doubled. Pardon me if I misunderstand, but isn't double "none" still none?

I wondered the same thing and assumed it was a joke. Then I wondered why they didn't say "halved." Oh well. I probably thought about this too much already.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#265

Post by [deleted] »

justtopost wrote: post #154
nostrademons wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, when I was 24 my dream was to move to a small house in the woods of Vermont, and I was sure I'd never leave New England (I grew up in a small town between Lexington and Concord). Moved to Silicon Valley because I also wanted to found a startup and the Bay Area is realistically the only place for that, and besides, Google had just offered me a job and was paying for my relocation. Don't underestimate how much yo…

Did you just explain why his feelings and culture are wrong with 'you can change'?

[deleted]

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#266

Post by redblacktree »

chickenfries wrote: post #253
redblacktree wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have kids yet? Genuinely curious.

1200 sqft is plenty of room for a 4 person family. I mostly grew up in the city, in a small apartment, but for a while we did live in the Midwest, in a big house. The only problem with apartment living was that we had too much furniture we didn’t need from when we lived in the Midwest.

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. Once we had our kid, I couldn't wait to get out of our 850 sq ft. house. (which also had an 850 sq ft basement for laundry and storage)

I occassionally work from home, and I need a seperate office with a door to do that. Also, I just like having some space to get away from the rest of the family for a while.

Like you, it's what I'm used to from when I grew up, so that probably plays a big part in my preference.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#267

Post by neil_s »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #78
umeshunni wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a classic chicken and egg problem. Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent. This limits large new offices to large metro areas (5M+ people) People don't want to relocate to cities where there aren't multiple job possibilities - you lose your job/hate it and don't want to have to relocate to find a new job or you w…

> Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent This seems especially silly. There are almost limitless people who would like to get one of the FAANG co's on their CV. They'd gladly relocate and benefit from reasonable property prices for a year or three. Google or Netlix are hardly going to struggle to attract talent if the…

I relocated from the UK to California and then Zurich to work at Google. I wouldn't have taken the offer if they said - "you can only work at Google if you agree to work in Alabama". Once you're in Google, it's pretty easy to move around between offices, and yet people aren't tripping over themselves to move to small offices in small cities with a small range of projects to work in.

Don't underestimate the power of network effects and critical mass. The people good enough to get into FAANG also have the abundance of options to specify where they'd like to live and work.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#268

Post by mattkrause »

bilbo0s wrote: post #81
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent This seems especially silly. There are almost limitless people who would like to get one of the FAANG co's on their CV. They'd gladly relocate and benefit from reasonable property prices for a year or three. Google or Netlix are hardly going to struggle to attract talent if the…

I don't know man? You'd be surprised how attached people are to their spouses or partners. Doesn't matter how badly you want to work at Google, if your spouse is an IP attorney or VP at an academic hospital, as a family you just can't go moving to the middle of nowhere. It's not ALL about being able to work at Google. There's a lot more going on in making these decisions. (At least there is for the type of people tha…

This!

I’m sure Google (etc) could lure a lot of young, single folks out to the hinterlands for a year or two, but retention and recruiting further up the ladder would be awful.

Universities in the US, which—for historical reasons-are often located in rural areas, have similar problems. They solve this through “spousal hires.” This can range from merely coordinating interviews and offers across departments [0] to creating entirely new positions, or even tenure lines, for a rockstar’s spouse.

This can work relatively well for universities, but I’ve never heard of companies doing anything similar. I wonder if you could even get a set of companies to agree to preferentially hire their employees’ spouses, so there’s a more diverse set of options.

[0] The university often kicks in some money so that both departments will be happy with (say) their number three picks, instead of history hiring an unattached rockstar and chemistry getting no one.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#269

Post by jswizzy »

tokyodude wrote: post #83
CydeWeys wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about NYC in comparison to the Bay Area is that we're not afraid of building more housing here, so supply increases every year and has a dampening effect on rent increases. Also, mass transit is much better, so if you live even 30 minutes away on a subway line the rents will be much lower. If you're willing to commute an hour each way (which is still less than a lot of people who drive every day on I-1…

> and has a dampening effect on rent increase Is that really true? I don't know if this data is accurate but googling "average rent new york city" vs "average rent san francisco" brings up these 2 results as the first hits. They look almost identical. The site claims average rent for NYC is $3634 vs SF at $3735. It also claims prices increased in NYC by 9.46% over last year vs SF at 0.62% https://www.rentjungle.com/a…

Both NYC and SF are rent controlled areas. Rent control is cancer that punishes younger and newer inhabitants while making rent cheap for the rich. In fact, NYC has more vacant apartments than homeless people.

Re: Google Plans Large New York City Expansion

#270

Post by joey-bob »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #178
bsbechtel wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define economic winner....you mean top line income and area GDP? These places are the most expensive places in the country to live, and quality of living is considerably lower. Incomes may be lower in many areas of the country, but when you consider you can pay $2k/mo on a 5,000 sq ft mortgage instead of renting a 900 sq ft apartment, I don't view these places as economically successful as many perceive them to be.

Yes, I mean by having lots of high-paying jobs. Speaking in the abstract, that means economic success. You're not wrong that high cost of living can often cancel much of that out at the individual level though. > quality of living is considerably lower. See my other nearby comment for why this is a "it depends" thing. A lot of people would consider living in Kansas City to have lower "quality of life" than NYC even i…

In my experience, your fundamental assumption about what "techies" want is at least partially flawed. Not that no one in tech wants bike Lanes, public transit, and authentic South Indian cuisine. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of people who work at FAANG consider these things important in their life. But there is still a large portion that truly don't care for all that. They live in the bay because if they can find an illegal $800/mo Airbnb they will make a lot of money, if they lose their job there is another close by, and that is where their close friends are. If there were an equal paying, less congested alternative to these tech hives, they would take it. This is, of course, generated from anecdotal evidence. Fundamentally, some people like true urbanism, and others just don't.
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