$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by gesman » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

Why don’t allow employees to WFH full time and only come to office as necessary?

Why don’t government stimulate and encourage corps who promote full time (not 1 day a week for good behavior) WFH policies?

There is absolutely no need for 2/3 of all high tech employees in Bay Area to drag their physical bodies into their statically assigned corporate chairs. Lots of meetings, conf calls and work can be done remotely.

That’s the solution that doesn’t require $1B and will take very little to implement and could have REAL impact.

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

#322

Post by BubRoss » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #209

caymanjim wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't need to move. They just need to expand elsewhere. Amazon is opening HQ2 because Seattle is "full", and there are lots of smart people elsewhere that they could employ. All the FAANGs should spread out more.

Very NIMBY of you. They just have to be not in my back yard and go away somewhere else. "No more immigrants in mountain view!" As far as expand elsewhere goes, google has many staff in many countries and cities all over the world.

That's not at all what he said. He was talking about the company confronting high cost of living near their headquarters.

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

#323

Post by dev_dull » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

Eventually people will wake up and realize the Bay Area is the way it is because there’s vested political, financial, and ecological interest in keeping it broken.

The reason there’s no affordable low income housing isn’t because that specific type of housing isn’t being built, it’s because they’ve made it nearly impossible to build anything BUT luxury.

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

#324

Post by jefftk » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

shados wrote: post #313

jefftk wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it My experience of Somerville has been very different from yours: I've never been woken up by noise coming in from the street, and I've lived in two very typical wood-frame houses (first a triple-decker in East Somerville, now a two-family near Davis). But it's also worth separating "what should you build a h…

I mean, just the noise from the events in Davis Square can be heard from half a mile away, so most decibel meters would flag that as "pretty loud".

I'm within a half mile of Davis and don't remember ever hearing an event there from my house? Maybe Honk?

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

#325

Post by sxates » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

compiler-guy wrote: post #288

achenatx wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is because in the case of a goog share you arent telling someone else what they can do with their share. No one is telling a SFH owner that they have to do anything. Instead, SFH are being allowed to have more options for what to do with their property. In fact giving more options for property actually increases the value of that property.

Actually, this does tell a SFH owner that they have to do something: Live in a place substantially different than when they bought there. This may be worth it broadly, but it absolutely enforces our preferences onto the SFH owner.

The SFH has domain over their property - and that's where it should reasonably end. Giving them domain over what gets built on everyone else's property is where we get into trouble.

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

#326

Post by TulliusCicero » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #238

TulliusCicero wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The citation I linked to was right in line with my argument. No. The wider argument we were having was about whether Hollywood is the center of the world for American movies. It definitely is, showing where movies are physically shot doesn't change that. > And, I know for a fact that you can not only get into “cloud computing” without going anywhere near Seattle, AWS hires SAs, TAMs, etc in many major cities and mo…

That’s just what I’m saying about your other example, most of the money spent on “cloud computing” from a consulting and implementation side is nowhere near Seattle. It’s spread out all over the US. In fact I would think that Seattle would be the last place you would want to be even if you are working for Amazon as an SA since the pay is the same everywhere, most of your face to face interactions are with clients, an…

> That’s just what I’m saying about your other example, most of the money spent on “cloud computing” from a consulting and implementation side is nowhere near Seattle.

Okay, and most money people spend on movies is nowhere near LA. That has nothing to do with whether LA is a hub for movie development, though.

A huge proportion of cutting-edge cloud platform development for the big cloud companies happens in the SF bay area and Seattle. That's the big thing that makes them cloud tech hubs. Not where consulting and implementation of going to the cloud happens. Like consumers spending on movies, that just happens where the customers are.

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

#327

Post by jandrese » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

timgilbert wrote: post #204

malnourish wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question - how much (if any) of those laws were made with respect to earthquakes? Perhaps they are from a time when resistant high rises weren't tenable.

While I don't have specific knowledge about earthquakes effecting zoning laws, there was a very real cultural resistance to building dense housing in the 60's and 70's, when the the term of art in the Bay Area was "Manhattanization," and which was almost certainly more of a factor than earthquake-proofing the buildings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanization

Imagine if the Bay Area had a subway system to rival Manhattan and actual dense housing? How many fewer gigatons of CO2 would be in the atmosphere if everybody didn't have to drive in all the way from the suburbs? Imagine if it wasn't necessary to own a car? Rents would still be high, but maybe not impossibly so.

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

#328

Post by TaylorAlexander » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

PascLeRasc wrote: post #222

kens wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting article on why the mid-rise apartment style is so popular now: "Why America's New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri... The quick summary is that the 2000 Building Code allowed inexpensive construction of 5-floor wood buildings over a concrete base. This "5 over 1" construction gives "near-high-rise densities at a wood-frame price", so i…

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.

It’s funny. In some places they build nice homes even for the poor. It’s possible. But we’d rather make the cheapest thing possible. The result is people feeling disconnected from the space around them.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/beautiful-public-housing-red-...

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

#329

Post by waynecochran » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:19 PM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #245

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, and that requires changing peoples' minds. For the people who own property, they are choosing laws that best help their finances. You can appeal to some sense of greater good but history would show such a plan unlikely to work.

Yes. This is the tricky part. Good luck w that:

     In the coming months, we’ll continue to work with 
     local municipalities to support plans that allow 
     residential developers to build quickly and
     economically.

What is Google going to say that is new?

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

#330

Post by linuxftw » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

pertymcpert wrote: post #218

linuxftw wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally against zoning restrictions. But, there's only so much a city's infrastructure can take. Let's say they build another 100k 3 bedroom units, where is all the waste going to go? Is there a good reason for all of these people to live in one little area? No, I don't think there's a really good reason. Everyone wants to take advantage of what the city has to offer, but nobody actually wants to pay fair marke…

Where did those people live before? How did the Bay Area grow to its current size if people kept saying the same thing? "We only have one bus route and a school, how can we grow this place? It's too crowded". Complete BS.

How many is too many then? Clearly any given area has a maximum support capacity for humans. Is it good for the environment or quality of life to keep packing people into mega-cities?