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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#271

Post by pacetherace »

summerlight wrote: post #215

There's a bunch of people saying "why not going out of the Bay?" This doesn't work because for most of the foreign workers with H1B visa job security matters more to them. With H1B visa, you gotta find another job in 60 days when there's a trouble with your employer. Otherwise you'll be kicked out. Also note that Chinese and Indian people are typically stuck at H1B for 5~10 years and they're the majority of SWE H1B h…

Exactly and going out of the Bay doesn't solve the Bay Area's problems. It only tries to plug the premise that all the housing problems are happening because of the influx of people into the Bay Area. A lot of people who want better-housing options are millennials who Bay Area or nearby locals or people who have already been living in the Bay for more than 5-10 years.

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

#272

Post by rubicon33 »

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…

Agreed. 20,000 homes isn't going to budge the needle even 1% when it comes to housing affordability in the state, let alone in the bay area.

Not sure why they feel like this is a good billion well spent...

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

#273

Post by aiisjustanif »

shados wrote: post #232
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…

> and that requires changing peoples' minds Yup, and that is straightforward, if time and money consuming. Changing zoning isn't enough: making an area denser without appropriate matching infrastructure investment isn't going to go well. If you want the next Tokyo or Paris (or even something significantly smaller), you need Tokyo or Paris' infra. Then the next problem is that people can't stand each other. People don…

Interesting, I haven't had this issue really in a dense US city, even near enough to an airport to also hear every plane. Neighbors aren't bad, guess it just depends on the city.

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

#274

Post by hangonhn »

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 and San Mateo county work together instead of playing chicken with each other, we will make no progress on this problem. MV has been willing to do more but it would be unfair for MV to carry the weight while all the other cities limit housing to maintain the "character" of their towns.

The tech boom is a huge blessing that any city, state, or even country would be lucky to have. However, people wanting it all and NIMBYism are turning an opportunity into a problem.

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

#275

Post by Fins »

sidlls wrote: post #210
Fins wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That very much depends on the area. E.g. Chicago suburbs may not be quite as cheap as "get an acre of land" but you can absolutely have significantly better access to cultural, educational, academic, etc. opportunities than anywhere around SF for significantly less money. Pretty good career-wise, too, and the difference in salaries is less than the difference in cost of living.

Chicago might be on par with the Bay Area in terms of culture, or even marginally better in some ways. In just about any other measure, especially education, job opportunities and salary adjusted for CoL, Chicago compares poorly.

I am not sure if I agree. Culture-wise (IMHO, of coursde and all the disclaimers) it is lightyears ahead of the Bay Area.

In education, both schools and universities, Chicagoland would compare very favorably with Bay Area (stepkid went to schools in both; entirely unimpressed with BA schools).

In job opportunities at FAANG-type companies Bay Area obviously comes out ahead,but for the vast majority of people both in and out of high tech Chicago both has jobs and is actually affordable and salaries are lower by a far lesser amount than the cost of living, at least if you believe all of the comparison sites like Numbeo. In my personal experience I've had much more money left over in Chicago, working for as Chicago company than working for one in Sunnyvale, and that's even before adding up intangibles of better (well, for the USA, anyway) public transit, better museums, theaters, etc. etc.

On climate BA might win on paper, but personally I like to have actual seasons.

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

#276

Post by notahacker »

beambot wrote: post #183
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…

> The only solution is changing the zoning laws What about pulling a HongKong / Singapore: Create a special economic zone that is a stand-alone municipality with extremely lax zoning laws to spur housing & transportation growth? Google is kinda-sorta doing this. To avoid Mountain View NIMBYism, just carve out the Google land for this purpose.

Singapore is the opposite of lax zoning: not only do they centrally plan everything but the government owns 75% of the land and develops the majority of the residential property. The difference was the lack of low-rise, high-value property owners to try to block the high density zoning.

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

#277

Post by pickle-wizard »

SilasX wrote: post #237
PascLeRasc wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something about that style of construction that feels like "Amazon Basics", like what you get when you don't care about craftmanship or longevity and just want the least expensive option. Those 5-story apartment buildings just have such a soulless cheap feeling to them, like they're made to have the illusion of being taller than they are. I really don't understand why they're so popular.

Amen. I think I live in such a building (in Austin) now, and the cheapness of the construction shows. I have 15 foot ceilings and I can hear conversations of people above me ... through the side walls.

After 10 years of living in an apartments and hearing all of my neighbors I got tired of it. So I bought a single family house. I have a small yard, only 1/8th acre, but it is enough of an air gap that I don't hear my neighbors.

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

#278

Post by driverdan »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #123

Personally this class of things really highlights an imbalance for me. Consider that Google runs its own own bus service for employees, and now is building housing for the same. Traditionally, successful businesses in a region paid taxes, and those taxes were used by the local governments to invest in infrastructure like public transport and urban development. So in this regard Google usurps the mandate of the commun…

Adding housing is adding housing. It doesn't matter who it's for or who builds it, it adds to the total number of dwellings and reduces occupancy of other units.

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

#279

Post by logfromblammo »

0xEFF wrote: post #199
DataWorker wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, don’t they live in shipping containers in snowcrash. A few years back I heard there was a movement in Oakland to build shipping container villages. Nothing new since the 90s except for Facebook.

Ready Player One is the shipping containers.

Ready Player One is stacked manufactured homes.

Snow Crash is storage units.

I am not aware of any sci-fi story that predicted people living in ISO shipping containers prior to its real-world occurrence.

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

#280

Post by shereadsthenews »

nostrademons wrote: post #160
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…

That's one of the accomplishments of this program: they got Mountain View to change the zoning for North Bayshore (where the Google campus is) to support highrises with up to 10,000 housing units.

Very little of the Bayshore plan permits "high rise" building. I believe there is exactly one 15-story building in the plan. Everything else is 5 or less (sticks over garage style construction). The vast majority of the _land_ in the Bayshore plan is dedicated to open space.
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