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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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

#91

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

dymk wrote: post #53
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I understand your argument correctly? Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."

You're not understanding my argument correctly. I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed. These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet fa…

Okay that's a more reasonable argument than what I thought you were making.

I'd contend that you're not considering the impact of sunk cost fallacies on business decision-making. Or if you have considered it, you've probably discounted it far more than is warranted.

It could be the case that, out of all the people currently employed by these companies, the majority believe they thrive in an onsite role rather than a remote one. Years of self-selection (especially if exacerbated by a lack of diversity in their employment experience, since these companies tend to hire out of colleges) could lead to a feedback loop.

Just because they're smart people doesn't mean they're impervious to human cognitive distortions.

How many of these companies have even trialed 100% remote positions, even if only for a year?

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

#92

Post by rconti »

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…

Have you seen the absolute explosion of skyscrapers/mid-rise condo buildings in San Jose, Redwood City.. Hell, even San Carlos and Menlo Park have quite a few higher density units going in.

I'm glad there's more density, and it's near transit, for the most part. Of course, it will still increase traffic, but by going with density and near transit, it'll reduce the impact vs building more single family homes.

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

#93

Post by jofer »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #56

Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. So much so, that local politicians even brag about how much housing developments they've stopped. Why fight such a huge uphill battle in trying to get housing in the Bay area? Wouldn't it be easier to start from a city or town outside of CA? or at least outside the bay area? Maybe somewhere in the mi…

> If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there.

Welcome to Houston!

Seriously, the typical model for growth here has been for a major employer to make a new campus out in the middle of nowhere away from town, then things spring up around it. As a result, we have lots of urban clusters with skyscrapers a long way from downtown. The energy corridor and the med center started out that way. Ditto for NASA and League City. Currently we have Exxon in Spring, Igloo out west of Katy, all of the Woodlands (weird place), etc.

It's not exactly good or bad, but it is a recipe for sprawl.

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

#94

Post by chucksmash »

nugget wrote: post #23
bufferoverflow wrote: post #15

That's $50K/home. Is that even remotely realistic in the Bay Area?

The headline is misleading. In the article it says Google is rezoning $750 million worth of land (+ $250m in subsidies) from commercial to residential use, and making it available for private development. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest problems for Google was retention of young talent driven primarily by prohibitively high housing costs. In that way there is an incentive for them to bring down housing…

> It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest problems for Google was retention of young talent driven primarily by prohibitively high housing costs.

Well, it would surprise me :-)

According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in.

Next tier, still not senior, clears $250k/year. That's more than $20k/mo pre-tax. Even at an outrageous $5k rent on a single income and with no roommates, you're still talking about $6k or so >>monthly<< surplus for living your life and saving.

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

#95

Post by sfotm »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #61
malcolmgreaves wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people want to live in deaireable areas. There's a reason why your home is cheap.

> There's a reason why your home is cheap. https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happ... Swing and a miss. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida > Naples is one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, with the sixth-highest per capita income in the country in 2012, and the second-highest proportion of millionaires per capita in the US. In short, your passive aggressive quip does…

Being the happiest and healthiest city doesn't really affect what's counted as desirable or valuable in the housing market. This doesn't really follow.

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

#96

Post by codemac »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #61
malcolmgreaves wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people want to live in deaireable areas. There's a reason why your home is cheap.

> There's a reason why your home is cheap. https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happ... Swing and a miss. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida > Naples is one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, with the sixth-highest per capita income in the country in 2012, and the second-highest proportion of millionaires per capita in the US. In short, your passive aggressive quip does…

You know those are paid for and marketed by your local city's real estate industry, right?

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

#97

Post by rawrmaan »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #42
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #2

Most major tech companies want to hire onsite, when there are plenty of places in this country where you can buy a lot of real estate for much cheaper than the Bay Area. I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle. Investing $1B into housing in the Bay Area seems nice at the surface, but maybe if we stopped d…

Many people want to live in deaireable areas. There's a reason why your home is cheap.

As someone who lived in South Bay for 5 years, I'd hardly call it a "desirable area".

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

#98

Post by davidw »

aerophilic wrote: post #54
toomuchtodo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, there are fully remote companies (bootstrapped, lifestyle, and startups) collectively worth over a billion dollars that are fully remote. I don't buy this argument at all having worked for one of them. Face to face communication is only necessary if your collaboration tools and business/workplace processes are not up to par, and that's a business problem, not a social interaction problem. To echo the refrain…

In my personal experience managing and being part of different teams (remote, onsite, hybrids). I have found that what is in general most effective is that EVERYONE on the team is remote, or everyone is co-located. You can do hybrids, remote work with an on site team if the remote folks are strong communicators and/or people that are more task oriented (Assuming you have someone to manage them) but there is a tax on…

This is a great observation: my observation is that there's a tipping point. Get enough people in the office, and side conversations are much easier to do face to face, and you end up skipping the collaboration tools.

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

#99

Post by option »

I don’t understand why all the growth need to happen in this place and this place alone. Wouldn’t it be nice if “good” jobs overflow SV and appear in other places? (kind of happening to Austin, Boulder, NY, etc.)

And people who already live in the area should absolutely have a right to direct it’s future.

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

#100

Post by lotsofpulp »

Tade0 wrote: post #46
dymk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Face-to-face communication has not been supplanted with online tools yet, and face-to-face communication is very important to this job.

and face-to-face communication is very important to this job. For what purpose specifically?

Off the record conversations, which may or may not result in good or bad things.
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