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Facebook Paying Employees to Move Closer to Work
- raincom 11y agoHow much will Apple pay to move closer once they build the spaceship in Cupertino?
- avitzurel 11y agoI hope they don't. Even if they don't it will drive prices and make finding places to rent harder, if they do, well, that would be a real mess.
- STRiDEX 11y agoHad a family friend sell a house 5-6 min from the future spaceship for 1.2 million. It's a tiny box and they had 8 offers over their 800k asking price on the first weekend. The highest bidder was quoted saying "It's close to work(apple)". That area is already expensive for the schools.
- avitzurel 11y agoIn the bay area, "asking price" is just the start of the communication on the low end. I have a friend that was in the market for a house, most houses went for 150K avg over the asking price.
- raincom 11y agoAlternative min tax (AMT) is also driving high wage earners to buy expensive homes, too. I hope SV companies allow remote work. Otherwise, I can't afford to rent a place with less than 30 mins commute.
- r00fus 11y agoI've never heard of anyone from Apple getting perks to move closer. Seriously I do hope they work to improve mass transit instead - even if it's just for employees, that's less people on the roads.
- avitzurel 11y agoAnd so... Prices in the streets in that radius will go up another notch. As if Fremont and parts of Menlo Parks hasn't gone up because of them already. Acknowledge it or not, instead of paying 15,000$, Facebook could have been more remote friendly and people can live wherever they want. For a company the size of Facebook/Apple/Google they can also have micro-offices in cities further away from the valley. Employees won't have to relocate, housing prices will settle and the damn traffic on the bridge and the 280 will be less horrible perhaps. Every time I commute I think to myself, what if suddenly most companies realize that they can have 15-25% of the workforce work remotely without damaging the productivity, how many cars in front of me would just vanish?
- pbreit 11y agoI think the idea is to optimize, not accomodate.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> Every time I commute I think to myself, what if suddenly most companies realize that they can have 15-25% of the workforce work remotely without damaging the productivity, how many cars in front of me would just vanish? Increase road tolls, use it to incentivize companies to allow remote work.
- avitzurel 11y agoEveryone is working on solution for cleaner energy, electric cars and others, no one really makes an effort trying to solve how many of us just waste 2 hours of our lives on the road every day.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoBecause its a political/human problem unfortunately, not a tech problem. Remote work clearly works, you just need to incentivize companies to put it in place. Otherwise, they will continue to extract those hours a day of commuting from workers, the money workers put into public transit or their cars, etc. Externalities people!
- AlexWest 11y agoThis is great news for all of us in San Francisco
- martinald 11y agoThere is literally a railroad next to their campus. FB should be offering to pay to modernise it and build stations along it with Caltrain. Trains are absolutely the solution to Bay Areas traffic problems. Even better, with WiFi/LTE and decent seating/tables (add first class if required for people willing to pay so you get a seat) you can get a lot of work done on the train to and from work.
- pc86 11y ago> FB should be offering to pay to modernise it and build stations I'm sure Facebook pays taxes, why should they be building train stations on top of that?
- Zikes 11y agoGoogle builds internet balloons and self-driving cars, a few train stations wouldn't be too terribly absurd for a big tech company. I don't think anyone is saying Facebook et al. should be expected or required to undertake municipal improvement programs, but in certain cases it really could be in their own best interest to do so.
- beambot 11y agoCalifornia's high speed rail project is estimated to cost $70B. That's like 15% of Google's entire market cap... I'm not sure trains (esp. in the Bay Area) are within the capability of even the largest internet companies. Plus: You'd probably require some level of imminent domain to seize land -- which would be wildly unpopular and generate a lot of bad PR.
- Zikes 11y agoI'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The original commenter's suggestion was to "modernize" a train route that runs near their campus. My assumption is that the route is currently functional, only missing the required stations and amenities necessary for relatively short-term passenger transport. I don't think high speed is called for in that situation, just anything capable of making a commute more bearable and less costly, therefore a conventional passenger train would likely suffice. Additionally, it would still be a primarily municipal project, for which Facebook (and perhaps other interested private parties) would only partially contribute to in monetary terms.
- Apocryphon 11y agoIt is high time for all of the tech companies of Silicon Valley and San Francisco to come together and lobby the hell out of municipal and county governments to push for more housing and better transit. It is absolutely insane that there is so much wealth being generated by these companies, yet they seemingly have no political will to influence the very localities they are based in, never mind their federal adventures into H1-B skullduggery and patent power-plays. And the local communities themselves need to accept that tech is a huge tax base and the reason for their affluence, and stop their rampant NIMBYism and obstruction to urban progress. Note: I'm referring more to past actions by wealthy communities in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties who did things such as impede the growth of BART. Or when rich liberals in San Francisco decry housing construction by citing a fear of "losing the character of the city." Gentrification of indigent areas such as East Palo Alto, the Mission, and so on is another story.
- Kalium 11y agoIt's often less that there's no political will and more that the people in the cities have more votes to block that political will. Why stop being a NIMBY when it's great for you?
- bsder 11y ago> It is high time for all of the tech companies of Silicon Valley and San Francisco to come together and lobby the hell out of municipal and county governments to push for more housing and better transit. The problem is fractal. The reason why the companies locate in SF rather than, say, Gilroy is the same reason why the companies locate in Silicon Valley rather than Tulsa, OK, for example. The first problem here is that the executives in these companies want to live in those rich communities, so they don't locate the headquarters somewhere sensible. And lack of telecommuting is driven by the fact that executives can't telecommute as everybody now realizes that they actually don't do anything. Second, there is a recruiting advantage when your company office is in the "cool" area. If you put the Facebook HQ in Gilroy, for example, a bunch of the younger folks would choose to work for a company that is located in SF proper.
- mikeash 11y ago
- dbg31415 11y agoIn other news, rental prices near Facebook just went up $10k / year. Odd.
- JDiculous 11y agoYou don't have to pay extra to get people to work remotely. When is one of the big tech giants going to embrace telecommuting?
- a3n 11y agoWhen they believe that telecommuting works.
- trhway 11y agonice way to buy local votes - displace existing residents and replace with your employees, and the city council will in a few years become just a meeting of your PM-s :)
- rgbrgb 11y agoThis is an awesome move. When I was at Amazon in SF I had a team mate who literally commuted around 90 minutes each way from Sunnyvale. This summer at Open Listings we built a product to help people shop for homes with short commutes [0]! Here's a list of homes with short commutes to Facebook HQ: https://www.openlistings.com/near/facebook-hq https://www.openlistings.com/near/facebook-hq Pricey but maybe doable by cashing out some of that cush FB stock, going with an FHA loan, or one of those crazy new 0 down jumbo loans [1]. [0]: https://www.openlistings.com/near https://www.openlistings.com/near [1]: http://www.housingwire.com/articles/35789-san-francisco-federal-credit-union-unveils-zero-down-jumbo-mortgages http://www.housingwire.com/articles/35789-san-francisco-fede...
- webosdude 11y agoProbably that explains why the home prices in nearby areas like East bay(Newark and Fremont) are rising so much. I live in Newark and housing prices have risen by more than 15% since last year.
- mrnismo92 11y agoIncredible! I just looked up trends for Menlo & East Palo -- unbelievable.
- Apocryphon 11y agoQuoting ChuckMcM's post from a previous thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555): > I've often wondered what might happen if Apple, Google, and Facebook joined forces, bought a couple of Tunnel boring machines, and bored a pair of tunnels from Cupertino to San Francisco, right underneath El Camino. If you looked at the number of people carried by private busses between San Francisco and the south bay it would get good ridership. If you threw in access to as much dark fiber as you wanted between those two points and added big fiber drops to PAIX, MAE-EAST and SF, you could offset costs by selling this capacity up and down the peninsula. I also know if Google built the tube they could figure out how to do it for a whole lot less than the $1B/mile that these things command in the public sector.
- gnicholas 11y ago> Old hands remember a time when Facebook offered a few hundred dollars for employees who lived within a few blocks of its old offices in Palo Alto. Landlords got wind of the situation and quickly raised rents to match, they say. There's a big difference between "within a few blocks" and within 10 miles (which includes 3 separate counties). Landlords would be foolish to raise rents just because one employer is giving a housing incentive.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> Landlords would be foolish to raise rents just because one employer is giving a housing incentive. Landlords would be foolish not to capture the highest rent would-be renters are willing to pay; the subsidy increases that, so landords would be foolish not to react to it.
- orky56 11y agoSimilar to student loans and tuition prices. When the access to capital increases, increasing costs will maximize profit without the typical problems of churn.
- mrnismo92 11y agoI wonder how this is going to affect residential real-estate prices (and COL in general) in Menlo Park/E. Palo Alto...
- bkjelden 11y agoThere are 20 metro areas in the US with a population over 3 million people. What would it take to get the big players in tech, say, the 10 biggest companies by market cap or # of people employed, to open up satellite offices in all (or even half!) of those metros, employing, say, 100-500 people. These companies all have satellite offices - some of them are even growing those satellite offices. Every one of these companies has offices in the bay area, Seattle, and NYC. Some have offices in Colorado, LA, Austin, and beyond. They've proven it can work - so why not double down on that strategy, instead of incurring the exponentially growing costs of keeping talent in the bay area? This would be a huge win for all parties involved. Employees get some choice over what climates and cultures they want to live in, and don't have to worry about family or other ties that keep them in a specific geographic reason. Employers get access to talent that isn't willing to relocate to the bay area. Employers and employees benefit from employees living in cities with real estate as cheap as 1/10th the cost of the bay area. The nation as a whole benefits, because more cities get to reap some of the economic rewards these companies are producing, instead of watching it all concentrate in the wallets of landowners in California.
- Apocryphon 11y agoThis is a great idea, actually. Though at the moment it looks like most tech companies are simply doing this to Oakland, which is simply pushing existing Bay Area urban issues across a bridge. I wonder which of any of these other metro areas are in the running to be the next SV/Seattle: http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/cities/best-places-tech-jobs-2015/ http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/cities/best-places-tech-jobs-...
- sjg007 11y agoEPA and Oakland and the East Bay will all gentrify.
- rhino369 11y agoI wonder when companies will flat out start offering dorms. My office already has futon.
- nickalekhine 11y agoI mean...they (apple, amazon, etc.) already do offer corporate housing for interns and co-ops. It's certainly possible for these benefits to extend to full-time hires.
- tzs 11y agoHow often do people who live in San Francisco but work 30-60 miles away actually have time to do things that take advantage of living in SF, especially on weekdays? If I had a bad morning commute, a full day of work, and a bad commute home, I think I'd most likely spend that evening at home doing things online or watching TV or reading. I don't think I'd be going out. I'd probably only get out on weekends. But that would mean I wouldn't really benefit much from living in SF. I could just as well live near work, and drive to SF on weekends (and time the trip to avoid bad traffic hours) when I want to do something that is better done in SF.
- crzwdjk 11y agoI used to live in SF and work 40 miles away (in Santa Clara), and yes, that is more or less exactly how it was. The one advantage was that going out on weekends was somewhat easier, since I didn't have a car at the time, and weekend Caltrain takes absurdly long to get to SF (an hour and a half), and if you miss the last train back, it's an even slower bus ride.