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Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

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Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#51

Post by ben_w »

malms wrote: post #34
mochomocha wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No space? Yet I'm driving on 280 every morning and all I see are green fields. Yet 75% of San Francisco land has zoning rules that prevent buildings of more than 2 stories. What you really meant is: no space for you, I got mine

Still not the point.. the world is big why on earth would you obsess on SV to the point of impacting your living condition ?

Because, for some strange reason, the densest and richest tech hub in the world — one which regularly promotes remote working, video calling, VR and AR, Seasteads, self-driving vehicles, and things like O'Neill cylinders — has enough employers who don’t want remote working that the local real estate market has gone mad.

Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#52

Post by onemoresoop »

esoterica wrote: post #32
falcolas wrote: post #29

A lot of sentiment here around "housing is the root of all these problems", but isn't it also the problem of these companies creating offices in communities that can't support them? Given there are a lot of places that offices could be built that could support the employees, I think some of this responsibility lies with the companies who consciously keep their offices in locations that may cause their employees (not…

Companies put their offices in expensive cities because that’s where most of the people who work for them want to live. If Google decided to move their HQ to rural Kansas tomorrow, most of the company would quit overnight.

But why wouldn't they have a smaller branch in Kansas? (maybe not Kansas but there are a lot of places in the US other than NY and CALI). And smaller offices all over the US?? It would be cheaper too, employees would maybe consider moving to a smaller hub where they could actually buy a home, local economies would benefit as well, etc..

Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#53

Post by [deleted] »

docker_up wrote: post #48

To all those that say "build more housing" will solve all our problems, I don't think they've actually been looking at the housing markets. All of the new housing in the Bay Area is at a premium price. All of it. There are tens of thousands of condos slated to be built in SF. They are all top of the end condos. They haven't and they won't dent the prices. Building more homes will just let more rich people move to the…

[deleted]

Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#54

Post by chrisdhoover »

mochomocha wrote: post #16
malms wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only people would move to other places when there's no space somewhere. Oh well.

No space? Yet I'm driving on 280 every morning and all I see are green fields. Yet 75% of San Francisco land has zoning rules that prevent buildings of more than 2 stories. What you really meant is: no space for you, I got mine

The solution is not to pave over the rightfully protected wild lands but to add a little density to the built suburban tracts. Allowing duplexes, triplexes and 4 plexes would be a good start

Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#55

Post by esoterica »

onemoresoop wrote: post #52
esoterica wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies put their offices in expensive cities because that’s where most of the people who work for them want to live. If Google decided to move their HQ to rural Kansas tomorrow, most of the company would quit overnight.

But why wouldn't they have a smaller branch in Kansas? (maybe not Kansas but there are a lot of places in the US other than NY and CALI). And smaller offices all over the US?? It would be cheaper too, employees would maybe consider moving to a smaller hub where they could actually buy a home, local economies would benefit as well, etc..

Big companies do have satellite offices all over the place.

Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#56

Post by jerkstate »

blotter_paper wrote: post #43
jerkstate wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I’m disrupting zoning laws. Paradigm shift!

Twist: rather than rent out the spaces, just post the parked RVs on Airbnb! Can we divide an RV into a duplex? As long as it still has wheels, how big can an RV get before it's legally an apartment building?

Hey, how about instead of parking, they’re self-driving and they just drive themselves around the block all night? I think we just solved the housing crisis!

Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#57

Post by hedora »

falcolas wrote: post #29

A lot of sentiment here around "housing is the root of all these problems", but isn't it also the problem of these companies creating offices in communities that can't support them? Given there are a lot of places that offices could be built that could support the employees, I think some of this responsibility lies with the companies who consciously keep their offices in locations that may cause their employees (not…

The irony is that they put their campus where it could be supported by the local city, but the city refuses to do so, then complains.

Two regional train systems have a major station a mile or so from google hq. Three freeways intersect near there as well. There is also a bus system that should be able to service local trips.

Google HQ was built by SGI in the 90s so Mountain View has had 20 years to increase the capacity (car and mass transit/bus) of the stretches of road between downtown and the amphitheater, but have repeatedly chosen not to.

Similarly, there is no sane freeway connector between the Dumbarton and Palo Alto / Mountain View, and the need for that has been obvious for at least a decade as well.

Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#58

Post by galfarragem »

mochomocha wrote: post #50
rhacker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you filled every damn square inch of that space with 5 story apartments, your commute would go from 3 hours to 45 days.

Right, the "oh we need better infrastructure first" chicken and egg problem. Of course infrastructure projects don't happen either. It took 20 years to rebuild half of the Bay Bridge. The shiny SF TransBay terminal was barely opened last year and got closed right away. SF has been debating for 10 years whether or not to turn a car lane into bus only on Geary Blvd... Because NIMBY also opposes transportation projects…

The best leadership solution - in open source at least - seems to be a BDFL..

Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#59

Post by jedberg »

A big part of this is prop 13 and tax policy. My anecdote is not unique: My mom inherited my grandfather's condo when he died. Because of Prop 13 (and it's follow ups) she gets to keep his original tax rate from his original home, which was set in 1978. She makes about $500/mo profit on the condo only because her tax rate is about $500 less per month than if it were purchased new. If we didn't have Prop 13, it wouldn't make a ton of sense to keep that condo, and instead we would probably sell it.

And for a lot of people, they're making a whole lot more on that arbitrage.

On my street is my house and three others that are all basically the same (4 bedroom, 3 bath, about 1750sq ft, give or take). My neighbor, who has been here for 40+ years, pays X in property taxes, my other neighbor pays 2X, I pay 10X and the last house pays 20X. All of our houses would sell for about the same amount. So basically the city is starved of resources for transit and subsidized housing. Things that would actually make this place affordable for people who make less than $150,000 a year.

And then to make matters worse, a local developer is trying to tear down our old mall and build "more housing" on it, but if you look closely, what they're really building is a huge office park with the bare minimum of housing to call it a housing project. They want to put in space for 15,000 workers and 4,000 people to live. That will not solve any housing problems. The city is trying to stop them, but they are using the CA state law that was supposed to fix this problem to get around the city. But the law was so poorly written that they will be able to create a housing deficit using a housing bill!

We need to get rid of Prop 13 and figure out a better way to stop the elderly from being priced out of their homes (which was the original purpose) and we need to move to a Japanese zoning model, where someone could buy (or tear down their own) single family home and replace it with a fourplex. Yeah, my neighborhood would loose it's "character" if a couple of these houses were replaced with quads, but at least some servers and maids and city employees and construction workers and teachers and .... could live here.

Re: Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

#60

Post by ebog »

falcolas wrote: post #42
ebog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather people, jobs, and an economic powerhouse of an industry move away or just build more housing? It's not like the software industry is a monolith, it's a collection of people and companies who have decided the network effect of moving to a high cost place with a lot of engineering talent is better than the alternatives. It's hard to move that inertia somewhere else. Then there's the serious question of…

If the city can't (or won't) support the company, yes, the company should move. The city can make decisions from there, instead of assuming that the companies will be there regardless of the city's actions. There's a lot of cities throughout the US (even a few within easy driving distance of SF) who would love to house Google.

Presumably Google still has a massive Bay Area presence because it's more profitable for them to stay there than move, at least that's what is implied. Maybe they should be pushing hard for the city to build more housing. But it seems like the current residents in that area are holding their hands to their ears, closing their eyes and shouting away any evidence that more people require more housing, or things will get worse. I can see your point that Google should probably move if that's the case, but the costs involved probably make it super unrealistic for that to happen, at least in the near future.

Where would you move Google, at this point, if you were in charge? There's not a single city -- in the US, at least -- that I can think of that would be prepared, with the right infrastructure or ready to build out a lot more. That probably factors into Google's decision making process as well.

Maybe we should be going back to the idea of company towns. Or possibly have urban planners building new cities from the ground up with proper infrastructure, housing, transportation, etc. that have the ability to expand for new residents and companies. Certainly the big cities in the US don't have that capability due to our car based infrastructure and our attraction to 30 year mortgages on suburban houses.

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