8 ms·

The Homeless in Silicon Valley

89 points by subnaught 11y ago

nickthemagicman 11y ago
This is really sad. Not to change the subject, but I'm wondering how difficult it would be to live in a Van in SV and work as a Software Dev? The temperature seems right, how hard would it be doing a stealth van situation and showering at the gym?
- fancy_pantser 11y ago
  It has happened a few times. This one is the most recent I've heard of: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/21/one-google-engineers-humble-abode-is-a-box-truck-parked-at-company-headquarters/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/2...
- austenallred 11y ago
  I lived in my Honda Civic in Palo Alto for a while. It was a little stressful, but my total burn was ~$300/month. Shower: YMCA on Ross Road Food: non-perishable stuff Work: Hacker Dojo. I slept in a Mormon church parking lot most nights
  - Animats 11y ago
    Hacker Dojo and TechShop had to crack down on people sleeping there.
    - austenallred 11y ago
      I never slept in the Hacker Dojo, I slept in my car
  - therobot24 11y ago
    Lived next to a mormon church for a few years in Pittsburgh, it was always my go to for parking. Never a single problem as long as the car wasn't there sunday morning.
    - txru 11y ago
      Huh, there's a Mormon church in Oakland. TIL.
      - austenallred 11y ago
        There's a Mormon temple in Oakland, as well as several Mormon churches https://www.google.com/search?q=oakland+temple&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS648US648&oq=oakland+temple&aqs=chrome..69i57j0j5j0.7949j0j4&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8&hl=en-US#imgrc=_ https://www.google.com/search?q=oakland+temple&rlz=1CDGOYI_e...
        therobot24 11y ago
        you're confusing Oakland, California with Oakland in Pittsburgh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_(Pittsburgh) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_(Pittsburgh))
  - nickthemagicman 11y ago
    Thanks for the tips.
- vskarine 11y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10735863&goto=item%3Fid%3D10732914 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10735863&goto=item%3Fi...
SeoxyS 11y ago
I feel somewhat terrible for thinking this… but, to me this story seems like a sad example of why responsible financial planning is important. It seems like they had plenty of opportunity to build equity into their house over time. Taking out multiple mortgages and refinancing seems like dangerous behavior. Also, why is living in a van preferable to moving somewhere where they can afford the housing?
- andreasklinger 11y ago
  While this might be true in this individual case. We also dont know all the factors. If there is a factor of luck or context somewhere involved in their last X years it would mean statistically mean that there are people in similar situations who did everything right on their end.
- scurvy 11y ago
  Unexpected, high medical bills and crappy insurance coverage would probably bankrupt most Americans. A really unfortunate hospital stay can ruin many people's lives.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    Even when your insurance is 'top of the line', if it's cheaper to hire lawyers than to treat you, then they might just hire lawyers. Insurance has a big incentive to not provide it's service when the cost is high. And this can happen to anyone with the right kind of car accident.
- whichfawkes 11y ago
  Living in a van is probably cheaper, and probably saves time. I'd rather save 90% of my income and have a 10 minute commute than save less money and have a longer commute. If you don't particularly need a large space, why not?
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    Van living can waste time too. You need to repark to find parking, you need to go to a gym to have a shower, you need to go to a laundry service to do your laundry, etc, etc.
vanthrowaway 11y ago
I live in a van in SF and I'm a software engineer. I park in the Sunset and ride a bike to work. I have a gym membership with towel service at a major gym chain. I have two comped meals a day at the office. I make more than $150K, but less than $200K. I go out drinking every night and wind up at a bar in the Sunset with clean bathrooms. On weekends I drive out of town and camp somewhere scenic. I'm saving 80% of my take home pay. I have been doing this for six months. I date regularly. On the first date I state that my place is a no-go. Camping is a good second or third date. If they are special, I explain that I live in a van. My van was towed once when I was out of town and construction notices were placed after a few days. That stung. Otherwise, it has been fine. If everything in the van was stolen I'd be out $1,000.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bitwize 11y ago
  "I am 35 years old, I work as a software engineer at a startup that just got $20 mil in venture capital, and I live in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER." Sign of the times.
  - aaronem 11y ago
    In fairness, it sounds a lot less like an inability to find more permanent housing, and a lot more like an optimization to maximize savings. Still, though.
  - HaloZero 11y ago
    Honestly this person could afford a place in San Francisco with that salary, they just choose not to.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      Even assuming you can find housing, the hassles of hunting (and places snapped up) make it daunting. Which suggests the market's more fucked up than I care to think -- insane and all-but-unaffordable rents and still oversubscription.
andreasklinger 11y ago
There are 35k homeless people in the Bay Area [1] 7-15k of them in SF. There are ~7M people living here. While those numbers sound at first high. It's not such a crazy high amount of people. (from what i know cities like Vienna or London also have at least a forth of that number (couldnt find stats)) The "homelessness situation" is next to cost of living the #1 thing i hear from people who don't want to relocate here. And tbh it's also the reason why i dont plan to stay in SF for longer term. I know there is no easy answer to the problem of homelessness in the bay area - but it doesnt sound unsolvable. [1]: http://www.myphilanthropedia.org/top-nonprofits/bay-area/homelessness/2009 http://www.myphilanthropedia.org/top-nonprofits/bay-area/hom...
- beatpanda 11y ago
  The "homeless situation" is roughly the same in San Francisco as in every major city, where a near-constant 1% of the population are homeless. There a variety of reasons why homeless people are more visible in San Francisco than in other places, but there aren't more of them.
  - lstamour 11y ago
    Ran a few random figures: It's actually 0.2% in Toronto (where I am), or ~5200 of 2.6 million. In NYC it's 59,568 or 0.7% of 8.4 million. In SF, it's 7539 compared to a population of 837442. That's 0.9%, or 4x higher than Toronto's, per capita, but only 28% higher than in NYC per capita. Perhaps because of the weather, Canada's homelessness per capita is quite low: http://homelesshub.ca/resource/which-city-canada-has-most-homeless-people-capita-and-why http://homelesshub.ca/resource/which-city-canada-has-most-ho... It's harder to find a similar analysis by city for the U.S., perhaps because there are so many more cities to consider. I'm also not sure I would count "employed homeless" or perhaps "homeless by choice" the same way as I would those struggling to find work or have other issues.
  - mwfunk 11y ago
    If the 35k figure is correct for SF, that means it's over 4% of the population.
yggydrasily 11y ago
> That homelessness persists in Silicon Valley has puzzled me. The reason is (as the paragraphs just below this line indicate) in fact the same reason for a great deal of issues in the Bay Area: lack of regional planning. Planning in the Bay Area is far too localized. Cities constantly pawn off problems on each other. There are cities that approve thousands of new units of office space but zero housing. Transit systems don't connect to each other. Sports stadiums are constructed with no thought as to how people will arrive. Freeways have lanes that appear and disappear at various county boundaries, causing dangerous congestion. On and on. It's also why so many cities don't have enough shelters and just seem to expect (as the article states) that other nearby cities will pick up the slack. What is needed is for the disparate cities of the Bay Area to stop passing the buck and come together as a region and plan together. Continuing to hope someone else does the hard work of solving problems will continue to result in them not getting solved.
- tedivm 11y ago
  The real question is how do we push for that to happen. Most of the tech people I know move around- they rent one place for a few years, then end up in another part of the bay shortly after that. There's no real incentive for the politicians on the local level to give up power, and the state doesn't seem to care. Regional governance seems to be the answer, but making that happen seems like an impossible task.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    The New York Metro Area might be a helpful model of regional cooperation. It has its own growth problems but the New York Metropolitan Area is home to 20.1 million people as opposed to the 7 million who live in the Bay Area and involves governments across four states.
  - abfan1127 11y ago
    you could de-regulate the planning all together and the the market decide the best way to allocate resources...
    - 11y ago
scurvy 11y ago
Palo Alto, Mountain View, and other peninsula communities don't spend money on homeless shelters for two big reasons: 1) San Francisco spends a ton of money on the homeless. Over $40k per homeless person per year. "If big SF spends so much on the homeless, why should little ol' us?" 2) The weather in the Bay Area is not particularly harsh. Yeah, it might get cold 1-3 days a year, but it's not really bad. You're not going to die from exposure to the elements like you would in Cleveland, Detroit, or even Dallas. "No one will die sleeping outside here" is a common thought. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with these thoughts, but this is what peninsula planners think.
- beatpanda 11y ago
  Citation needed for "$40k per homeless person per year". I used to work directly with homeless people and that doesn't sound even remotely true. And even if you have the top line figure correct I suspect there's some missing context.
  - scurvy 11y ago
    $189M in the city's budget goes directly to homeless services. That's roughly $25k per homeless person in direct spending. The city estimates it spends another $20k per homeless person in indirect city services (health, police, fire). The "frequent fliers" cost the city more than $100k per year. In many ways, $40k per person is a low-end figure.
    - masonicb00m 11y ago
      Mayor just committed to $250MM/yr (http://www.sfmayor.org/index.aspx?recordid=1017&page=846 http://www.sfmayor.org/index.aspx?recordid=1017&page=846)
  - vskarine 11y ago
    http://www.businessinsider.com/greg-gopman-solving-homelessness-in-san-francisco-2015-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/greg-gopman-solving-homelessn... "It costs the city $61,000 per year between ER’s, jail, and support services per homeless person living on the streets."
jmspring 11y ago
I'm mixed on the issue. I've got roots going back multiple generations in the bay area. The only immediate family member besides myself still living in the "bay area" (monterey to Santa Rosa) is one of my Aunts. Both parents born/raised in the Bay Area, my sister and I as well. Choices made, people moved. There is a golden rule - "if you sell your house and move out of California, it is hard to move back". My parents found this out in spades. They live in WA now and I'm supporting them a bit. Old friends of my family still own a house in Campbell. Retired now, even with ups and downs, their mentality is "we aren't splitting up, because we can't afford to go anywhere". The build out of the Bay Area, lack of planning, etc. is taking a toll and making it hard on current and retired blue collar workers. That said, I live in Santa Cruz and have very little pity on the "I should be allowed to live where I want". Mostly because over here, our "3000+ homeless" are 2/3 (according to a UCSC/Civinomics survey) didn't reside here before becoming homeless. We have way too many services, few rules, and a lot of "compassion" -- to the point of people being publicly called out if you publicly ask about "compassion". The Bay Area is expensive, yes one would like to stay where their friends are, but one should also be open to where they can afford. For instance, locally, we keep being lectured about needing "safe places for RVs to park", yet these RVs aren't local, and a simple search of CL, a trailer park in Modesto has spaces (including utilities) for $15/day.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
leetrout 11y ago
OT to the article but following up on some other comments about van living. I don't think it will be long before one of the big tech companies opens a dorm. There's no way it hasn't been discussed somewhere already. There was an article last month on "dorms for grownups" http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/coliving.. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/coliving.... and the big tech companies already offer so many perks would access to a company dorm actually hurt at this point? Of course this is common place in China already for the factory workforce...
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  I paid $100/mo for my corporate dorm in Japan. It was pretty dingy, but there were better, well designed studio and 1BR arrangements for $150 that would open up after a year or so that you could move into. I'd roughly estimate that this was 1/5 the cost of market housing. I had to move out because the particular one I was in was too close to industrial smog, but I have friends who still live in a $150/mo corporate dorm after 6 years working there. Not a bad arrangement at all since many of us went home exclusively to sleep anyways.
gnarbarian 11y ago
This is a pretty easy optimization problem and I think it's hilarious that SV can't seem to solve it. If this was a network you would just push the resources further out closer to the edge to alleviate the load in one place. What you have is people from all over the world swarming SV because you can't get that job in Cork or Boise. Everything doesn't need to be in silicon valley. If someone is willing to live in their car for a job, with all the social baggage, sneaking around and unhygienic side effects that entails, surely they would be willing to move to a less crowded place like Portland to do the same job. If the nexus for every single tech company must remain in SV then these companies could set up satellite offices around the country or allow people to telecommute with robust teleconferencing setups that turn a monitor into a window. Then just hang it up on the wall in your office and turn it off when you're not working. Seriously people. You don't have to live like animals. I have a decent software job where I live. I pay $700 rent and look what I get to do every weekend http://imgur.com/a/d5BkF http://imgur.com/a/d5BkF http://imgur.com/a/iFN9Z http://imgur.com/a/iFN9Z http://imgur.com/a/ow47m http://imgur.com/a/ow47m
- G650 11y ago
  "Praise The Sun!" Nice!
  - gnarbarian 11y ago
    It was funny because I had to explain it to my buddy who took the picture afterward and I'm pretty sure he didn't get it. We literally climbed in a shadow for 6 hours before getting into the sun. It was ridiculously invigorating.
HappyTypist 11y ago
It's time to index everything to an area's cost of living. $1 in SV is not the same as $1 in {somewhere else). It's time to stop pretending that you can set a federal poverty line, or set a federal social security pension.
peterburkimsher 11y ago
Two things irritate me. 1. A food bank should never ask for a person's home address. If you need to use a food bank, chances are you're homeless. 2. Homeowners should not worry so much about their property value. It's all going to be destroyed by an earthquake. I wager that the homeless are better prepared, and more likely to survive the Big One.
kqr2 11y ago
For those without a car or van, life can be even worse on Hotel 22 -- the only bus in Santa Clara county which runs 24 hours a day. People will ride it back and forth all night. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/opinion/hotel-22.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/opinion/hotel-22.html?_r=0

89 points by subnaught 11y ago

This is really sad. Not to change the subject, but I'm wondering how difficult it would be to live in a Van in SV and work as a Software Dev? The temperature seems right, how hard would it be doing a stealth van situation and showering at the gym?

fancy_pantser 11y ago
It has happened a few times. This one is the most recent I've heard of: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/21/one-google-engineers-humble-abode-is-a-box-truck-parked-at-company-headquarters/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/2...
austenallred 11y ago
I lived in my Honda Civic in Palo Alto for a while. It was a little stressful, but my total burn was ~$300/month. Shower: YMCA on Ross Road Food: non-perishable stuff Work: Hacker Dojo. I slept in a Mormon church parking lot most nights
- Animats 11y ago
  Hacker Dojo and TechShop had to crack down on people sleeping there.
  - austenallred 11y ago
    I never slept in the Hacker Dojo, I slept in my car
- therobot24 11y ago
  Lived next to a mormon church for a few years in Pittsburgh, it was always my go to for parking. Never a single problem as long as the car wasn't there sunday morning.
  - txru 11y ago
    Huh, there's a Mormon church in Oakland. TIL.
    - austenallred 11y ago
      There's a Mormon temple in Oakland, as well as several Mormon churches https://www.google.com/search?q=oakland+temple&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS648US648&oq=oakland+temple&aqs=chrome..69i57j0j5j0.7949j0j4&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8&hl=en-US#imgrc=_ https://www.google.com/search?q=oakland+temple&rlz=1CDGOYI_e...
      - therobot24 11y ago
        you're confusing Oakland, California with Oakland in Pittsburgh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_(Pittsburgh) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_(Pittsburgh))
- nickthemagicman 11y ago
  Thanks for the tips.
vskarine 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10735863&goto=item%3Fid%3D10732914 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10735863&goto=item%3Fi...

SeoxyS 11y ago

I feel somewhat terrible for thinking this… but, to me this story seems like a sad example of why responsible financial planning is important. It seems like they had plenty of opportunity to build equity into their house over time. Taking out multiple mortgages and refinancing seems like dangerous behavior. Also, why is living in a van preferable to moving somewhere where they can afford the housing?

andreasklinger 11y ago
While this might be true in this individual case. We also dont know all the factors. If there is a factor of luck or context somewhere involved in their last X years it would mean statistically mean that there are people in similar situations who did everything right on their end.
scurvy 11y ago
Unexpected, high medical bills and crappy insurance coverage would probably bankrupt most Americans. A really unfortunate hospital stay can ruin many people's lives.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  Even when your insurance is 'top of the line', if it's cheaper to hire lawyers than to treat you, then they might just hire lawyers. Insurance has a big incentive to not provide it's service when the cost is high. And this can happen to anyone with the right kind of car accident.
whichfawkes 11y ago
Living in a van is probably cheaper, and probably saves time. I'd rather save 90% of my income and have a 10 minute commute than save less money and have a longer commute. If you don't particularly need a large space, why not?
- mahyarm 11y ago
  Van living can waste time too. You need to repark to find parking, you need to go to a gym to have a shower, you need to go to a laundry service to do your laundry, etc, etc.

vanthrowaway 11y ago

I live in a van in SF and I'm a software engineer. I park in the Sunset and ride a bike to work. I have a gym membership with towel service at a major gym chain. I have two comped meals a day at the office. I make more than $150K, but less than $200K. I go out drinking every night and wind up at a bar in the Sunset with clean bathrooms. On weekends I drive out of town and camp somewhere scenic. I'm saving 80% of my take home pay. I have been doing this for six months. I date regularly. On the first date I state that my place is a no-go. Camping is a good second or third date. If they are special, I explain that I live in a van. My van was towed once when I was out of town and construction notices were placed after a few days. That stung. Otherwise, it has been fine. If everything in the van was stolen I'd be out $1,000.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 11y ago
"I am 35 years old, I work as a software engineer at a startup that just got $20 mil in venture capital, and I live in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER." Sign of the times.
- aaronem 11y ago
  In fairness, it sounds a lot less like an inability to find more permanent housing, and a lot more like an optimization to maximize savings. Still, though.
- HaloZero 11y ago
  Honestly this person could afford a place in San Francisco with that salary, they just choose not to.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Even assuming you can find housing, the hassles of hunting (and places snapped up) make it daunting. Which suggests the market's more fucked up than I care to think -- insane and all-but-unaffordable rents and still oversubscription.

andreasklinger 11y ago

There are 35k homeless people in the Bay Area [1] 7-15k of them in SF. There are ~7M people living here. While those numbers sound at first high. It's not such a crazy high amount of people. (from what i know cities like Vienna or London also have at least a forth of that number (couldnt find stats)) The "homelessness situation" is next to cost of living the #1 thing i hear from people who don't want to relocate here. And tbh it's also the reason why i dont plan to stay in SF for longer term. I know there is no easy answer to the problem of homelessness in the bay area - but it doesnt sound unsolvable. [1]: http://www.myphilanthropedia.org/top-nonprofits/bay-area/homelessness/2009 http://www.myphilanthropedia.org/top-nonprofits/bay-area/hom...

beatpanda 11y ago
The "homeless situation" is roughly the same in San Francisco as in every major city, where a near-constant 1% of the population are homeless. There a variety of reasons why homeless people are more visible in San Francisco than in other places, but there aren't more of them.
- lstamour 11y ago
  Ran a few random figures: It's actually 0.2% in Toronto (where I am), or ~5200 of 2.6 million. In NYC it's 59,568 or 0.7% of 8.4 million. In SF, it's 7539 compared to a population of 837442. That's 0.9%, or 4x higher than Toronto's, per capita, but only 28% higher than in NYC per capita. Perhaps because of the weather, Canada's homelessness per capita is quite low: http://homelesshub.ca/resource/which-city-canada-has-most-homeless-people-capita-and-why http://homelesshub.ca/resource/which-city-canada-has-most-ho... It's harder to find a similar analysis by city for the U.S., perhaps because there are so many more cities to consider. I'm also not sure I would count "employed homeless" or perhaps "homeless by choice" the same way as I would those struggling to find work or have other issues.
- mwfunk 11y ago
  If the 35k figure is correct for SF, that means it's over 4% of the population.

yggydrasily 11y ago

> That homelessness persists in Silicon Valley has puzzled me. The reason is (as the paragraphs just below this line indicate) in fact the same reason for a great deal of issues in the Bay Area: lack of regional planning. Planning in the Bay Area is far too localized. Cities constantly pawn off problems on each other. There are cities that approve thousands of new units of office space but zero housing. Transit systems don't connect to each other. Sports stadiums are constructed with no thought as to how people will arrive. Freeways have lanes that appear and disappear at various county boundaries, causing dangerous congestion. On and on. It's also why so many cities don't have enough shelters and just seem to expect (as the article states) that other nearby cities will pick up the slack. What is needed is for the disparate cities of the Bay Area to stop passing the buck and come together as a region and plan together. Continuing to hope someone else does the hard work of solving problems will continue to result in them not getting solved.

tedivm 11y ago
The real question is how do we push for that to happen. Most of the tech people I know move around- they rent one place for a few years, then end up in another part of the bay shortly after that. There's no real incentive for the politicians on the local level to give up power, and the state doesn't seem to care. Regional governance seems to be the answer, but making that happen seems like an impossible task.
- danharaj 11y ago
  The New York Metro Area might be a helpful model of regional cooperation. It has its own growth problems but the New York Metropolitan Area is home to 20.1 million people as opposed to the 7 million who live in the Bay Area and involves governments across four states.
- abfan1127 11y ago
  you could de-regulate the planning all together and the the market decide the best way to allocate resources...
  - 11y ago

scurvy 11y ago

Palo Alto, Mountain View, and other peninsula communities don't spend money on homeless shelters for two big reasons: 1) San Francisco spends a ton of money on the homeless. Over $40k per homeless person per year. "If big SF spends so much on the homeless, why should little ol' us?" 2) The weather in the Bay Area is not particularly harsh. Yeah, it might get cold 1-3 days a year, but it's not really bad. You're not going to die from exposure to the elements like you would in Cleveland, Detroit, or even Dallas. "No one will die sleeping outside here" is a common thought. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with these thoughts, but this is what peninsula planners think.

beatpanda 11y ago
Citation needed for "$40k per homeless person per year". I used to work directly with homeless people and that doesn't sound even remotely true. And even if you have the top line figure correct I suspect there's some missing context.
- scurvy 11y ago
  $189M in the city's budget goes directly to homeless services. That's roughly $25k per homeless person in direct spending. The city estimates it spends another $20k per homeless person in indirect city services (health, police, fire). The "frequent fliers" cost the city more than $100k per year. In many ways, $40k per person is a low-end figure.
  - masonicb00m 11y ago
    Mayor just committed to $250MM/yr (http://www.sfmayor.org/index.aspx?recordid=1017&page=846 http://www.sfmayor.org/index.aspx?recordid=1017&page=846)
- vskarine 11y ago
  http://www.businessinsider.com/greg-gopman-solving-homelessness-in-san-francisco-2015-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/greg-gopman-solving-homelessn... "It costs the city $61,000 per year between ER’s, jail, and support services per homeless person living on the streets."

jmspring 11y ago

I'm mixed on the issue. I've got roots going back multiple generations in the bay area. The only immediate family member besides myself still living in the "bay area" (monterey to Santa Rosa) is one of my Aunts. Both parents born/raised in the Bay Area, my sister and I as well. Choices made, people moved. There is a golden rule - "if you sell your house and move out of California, it is hard to move back". My parents found this out in spades. They live in WA now and I'm supporting them a bit. Old friends of my family still own a house in Campbell. Retired now, even with ups and downs, their mentality is "we aren't splitting up, because we can't afford to go anywhere". The build out of the Bay Area, lack of planning, etc. is taking a toll and making it hard on current and retired blue collar workers. That said, I live in Santa Cruz and have very little pity on the "I should be allowed to live where I want". Mostly because over here, our "3000+ homeless" are 2/3 (according to a UCSC/Civinomics survey) didn't reside here before becoming homeless. We have way too many services, few rules, and a lot of "compassion" -- to the point of people being publicly called out if you publicly ask about "compassion". The Bay Area is expensive, yes one would like to stay where their friends are, but one should also be open to where they can afford. For instance, locally, we keep being lectured about needing "safe places for RVs to park", yet these RVs aren't local, and a simple search of CL, a trailer park in Modesto has spaces (including utilities) for $15/day.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

leetrout 11y ago

OT to the article but following up on some other comments about van living. I don't think it will be long before one of the big tech companies opens a dorm. There's no way it hasn't been discussed somewhere already. There was an article last month on "dorms for grownups" http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/coliving.. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/coliving.... and the big tech companies already offer so many perks would access to a company dorm actually hurt at this point? Of course this is common place in China already for the factory workforce...

hkmurakami 11y ago
I paid $100/mo for my corporate dorm in Japan. It was pretty dingy, but there were better, well designed studio and 1BR arrangements for $150 that would open up after a year or so that you could move into. I'd roughly estimate that this was 1/5 the cost of market housing. I had to move out because the particular one I was in was too close to industrial smog, but I have friends who still live in a $150/mo corporate dorm after 6 years working there. Not a bad arrangement at all since many of us went home exclusively to sleep anyways.

gnarbarian 11y ago

This is a pretty easy optimization problem and I think it's hilarious that SV can't seem to solve it. If this was a network you would just push the resources further out closer to the edge to alleviate the load in one place. What you have is people from all over the world swarming SV because you can't get that job in Cork or Boise. Everything doesn't need to be in silicon valley. If someone is willing to live in their car for a job, with all the social baggage, sneaking around and unhygienic side effects that entails, surely they would be willing to move to a less crowded place like Portland to do the same job. If the nexus for every single tech company must remain in SV then these companies could set up satellite offices around the country or allow people to telecommute with robust teleconferencing setups that turn a monitor into a window. Then just hang it up on the wall in your office and turn it off when you're not working. Seriously people. You don't have to live like animals. I have a decent software job where I live. I pay $700 rent and look what I get to do every weekend http://imgur.com/a/d5BkF http://imgur.com/a/d5BkF http://imgur.com/a/iFN9Z http://imgur.com/a/iFN9Z http://imgur.com/a/ow47m http://imgur.com/a/ow47m

G650 11y ago
"Praise The Sun!" Nice!
- gnarbarian 11y ago
  It was funny because I had to explain it to my buddy who took the picture afterward and I'm pretty sure he didn't get it. We literally climbed in a shadow for 6 hours before getting into the sun. It was ridiculously invigorating.

HappyTypist 11y ago

It's time to index everything to an area's cost of living. $1 in SV is not the same as $1 in {somewhere else). It's time to stop pretending that you can set a federal poverty line, or set a federal social security pension.

peterburkimsher 11y ago

Two things irritate me. 1. A food bank should never ask for a person's home address. If you need to use a food bank, chances are you're homeless. 2. Homeowners should not worry so much about their property value. It's all going to be destroyed by an earthquake. I wager that the homeless are better prepared, and more likely to survive the Big One.

kqr2 11y ago

For those without a car or van, life can be even worse on Hotel 22 -- the only bus in Santa Clara county which runs 24 hours a day. People will ride it back and forth all night. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/opinion/hotel-22.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/opinion/hotel-22.html?_r=0