4 ms·

The Cost of a Hot Economy in California: A Severe Housing Crisis

32 points by erickhill 9y ago

muninn_ 9y ago
This is going to be a massive thread I predict. There's a big world out there. If you can't afford California, or you don't want a 2 hour commute with a $180,000 salary, then DO NOT LIVE THERE. It's that simple. Are you skilled, and you can't afford or don't want to afford to live in California? Give up the damn weather and move somewhere else. I don't even care if it's because the laws cause unaffordable housing, just don't live there. Besides, if you drop the housing prices so much that anybody can afford to live in California, how great do you think it's going to be there? The issue with a place like California is that there are almost always going to be more people that want to live there, than there is space. If you build more/better/affordable housing, more people will move there, then what?
- adam_seeliger 9y ago
  Bingo.
- jdoliner 9y ago
  > If you can't afford California, or you don't want a 2 hour commute with a $180,000 salary, then DO NOT LIVE THERE. It's that simple. This is great advice, it really is that simple. You have very little voice in California but you have plenty of exit. > The issue with a place like California is that there are almost always going to be more people that want to live there, than there is space. This doesn't seem quite as obviously true to me. While there's lots of people who want to live in California, along with all it's other bountiful resources California has a lot of space. We could, in theory, house many more millions of people before we really started hitting true space limits. It's not infinite of course, but the resources are very underutilized right now. Or at least they appear to be to my eyes.
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    I mean, if developers plan right, you could add people in a more efficient manner, but good luck bulldozing the suburbs and getting rid of cars. Those are the main issues. It's not so much that I don't believe it is possible, I don't think there is the will for the people of California to give up their cars, and their suburbs for Tokyo-style living. I strongly believe that California needs far fewer people, and more efficient/better housing. I don't think more people + more housing is a sustainable solution. Of course this isn't the popular narrative, but I think it's true.
- ghaff 9y ago
  California has been popular for various reasons for a long time. But it's really since the recovery from dot-bomb that things have gotten out of control. Zoning etc. is part of the issue. But by all accounts, the (not so great) public transit--especially in SF itself--is pretty near capacity as, obviously are the highways. Can this capacity be increased over the timeframe of a couple decades? Probably. But there's nothing in the 5-10 year horizon that's going to make a [EDIT: not so big] difference other than a combination of people choosing to not live there, incremental housing construction, incremental public transit improvements, and incremental increases in congestion.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    Well maybe Baby boomers cashing out.. maybe.
  - eastbayjake 9y ago
    I'm hopeful that autonomous buses make this extra capacity possible. The main problems are unpredictable/long waits and overcrowding; the proposals I've seen involve smaller (<20 passenger) buses that run much more frequently and can fit more people into standing-room space because automated drivers have better planned acceleration and longer braking. It's so much cheaper and easier to add hundreds of small buses to the peninsula's streets than to build rail or subways. Another crazy low-footprint idea: connecting our city of hills with an aerial gondola network. https://www.fastcodesign.com/1671214/a-mass-transit-proposal-to-connect-a-city-using-aerial-gondolas https://www.fastcodesign.com/1671214/a-mass-transit-proposal...
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Honestly? Sounds like magical thinking about how self-driving will make things possible that aren't with a relatively low-paid human driver today. And probably wouldn't be available for a few decades anyway. Small buses are available in a lot of countries today.
      - eastbayjake 9y ago
        Unionized MUNI drivers make three times the SF minimum wage [0] before overtime so they're not "low-paid" by any means, but yes if money were unlimited we could achieve a smaller-but-more-numerous bus strategy... the ride will just be really jerky and require more seats at lower capacity, in addition to costing a prohibitive amount of money. And "a few decades" seems extremely conservative when we're already testing driverless buses in San Francisco today [1] [0] https://missionlocal.org/2014/06/is-32-an-hour-too-much-for-muni-drivers/ https://missionlocal.org/2014/06/is-32-an-hour-too-much-for-... [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-autonomous-bus-idUSKBN16E08I http://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-autonomous-bus-...
- akanet 9y ago
  I think this is an incredibly fatalistic attitude. California is also great for many reasons beyond "great weather". Lots of people want to live here for family, emotional, or safety reasons. I've met so many gay and transgender people (tech workers and otherwise) who have told me they just don't feel safe where they're from.
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    Excluding some areas/situations, I'd just say grow thicker skin. There isn't anything particularly special about California with respect to LGBTQ and it certainly isn't a good justification for living there. You can be gay in Pittsburgh or Chicago or D.C. just as well as you can in Portland or L.A.. There are definitely family and emotional considerations and that's fair, obviously there are reasons other than the weather to live in California - that wasn't my point, rather, my point was that a lot of people want to live there and you can't expect to just get this somehow incredibly affordable cost of living you'd get in Kansas or something in California. If you could, we would ALL be living there. People need to realize that location and where you live can be a luxury, and you have to pay proportionally for that luxury. I can't go move to Boulder or something on a $30,000/year salary and expect to ski year round then complain that I can't afford housing. The world simply does not, and should not work that way.
- matt_m 9y ago
  This is a common sentiment. How far does this concept go though? If a neighborhood gets too expensive, you can move without much trouble. The whole city and commuting area gets too expensive? Move again, but now find new company/personal relationships. What about all cities for <industry> get too expensive. Change careers maybe? At the very least the supply of housing should expand until it's proportionate to the amount of office space (jobs) in the area (although apparently office space is more lucrative for municipalities than housing, so we get more of it). It isn't unique to California either, most cities in the US with good job markets (NYC, Boston, Washington DC, LA, etc) have seen housing prices shoot up. I'm not sure it's true that building more housing has no effect on prices, Seattle has had a lot more housing built and apparently they haven't had quite as extreme price increases, although they also have a thriving tech industry. Raleigh/Durham has been growing incredibly fast but adding a lot of supply too. And more people moving in surely must lower the price at least where they are moving from, so if several places build prices can't go up everywhere. It might be late / politically difficult to address the issue in California, but the escalation of housing costs is such a common problem that the solution can't always be "move away from <job center>". Of course how to manage growth without excessively burdening existing residents or communities is another matter, but hopefully not impossible? Development doesn't have to go everywhere, but surely it should go somewhere? At least around transit hubs would make sense.
HarryHirsch 9y ago
What's the alternative to San Diego or San Francisco if you are in Pharma? Boston? You really need to live in a hub city, nowadays everyone changes employers every two years. Wouldn't it be nice of we could go back to the old times, and there was a choice between Philly, the New Jersey pharma cluster, Kodak in Rochester, Solvay in Syracuse, Dow in Midland, MI, Upjohn in Kalamazoo and many more?
- ghaff 9y ago
  >nowadays everyone changes employers every two years They don't but, yes, there's a lot of clustering for various industries and industry sub-segments. I expect Kendall Square in Cambridge is bigger than most other pharma centers these days though.
tabeth 9y ago
1. Commute 2. Cost of living 3. Income potential Pick two. Like everyone else, everyone wants everything. There's no place on Earth that has a short commute, low cost of living and amazing income potential. Compromise is the name of the game. Public transportation can help, but even still you'll have a commute. The only solace there is that you can do other things while you commute. It'll be very interesting if commutes become on average 1.5+ hours each way and employers count time spent working while commuting.
- akanet 9y ago
  I don't see any theoretical reason to only choose two, and reject it. We can choose three. Building more housing to lower the cost of living probably has very little to do with the bay area's tech income potential.
  - tabeth 9y ago
    New York, the only example I can think of, has plentiful housing and it's still more expensive (yes, all boroughs) than most of the country. Will more housing help? Sure. The question really is whether or not increasing housing supply will or will not increase demand more than the newly available supply. Why not just move to another area? If there's something uniquely good about the Bay Area perhaps it's that same thing that makes the incumbents not want to let more people in. It's kind of a geopolitical problem.
    - mahyarm 9y ago
      Look at Seattle, it has built a lot more than SF in response to the demand and as a result, the price of housing has not gone up nearly as much. So yes, increasing supply does lower price.
      - tabeth 9y ago
        Huh? Seattle's median home price has doubled from five years ago. [1] [1] http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-home-prices-hit-700000-for-first-time-after-doubling-in-five-years/ http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-hom...
timr 9y ago
While I generally support the legislation discussed in this article, I wish the YIMBY people would stop talking about this in such simplistic terms. In some parts of California (e.g. San Francisco's eastern, urbanized third), no amount of building will ever satisfy the need, because all you can build on expensive land is "luxury" housing, and when those units don't sell/rent, developers will just stop building, because the unit economics don't work out. Some places definitely need to build more housing -- see, for example, the western 2/3rds of San Francisco, or the cutesy little suburban enclaves of Silicon Valley -- but this won't help until transit allows people to commute from those neighborhoods to their jobs. So we should also be saying "YIMBY" to transit infrastructure and reducing/eliminating the broken tax incentives that are helping to create the problem in the first place (like the ill-conceived Mid-Market tax incentives, which have replaced SROs with tech offices, thus making the homelessness problem worse.)
- akanet 9y ago
  I am a YIMBY and we consistently say all those things. I also reject the notion that the eastern district is "built out" or that developers will stop when things don't "pencil out". What pencils or doesn't is a direct consequence of the regulation and tax burden we place on construction, and there's probably an order of magnitude of levers we've yet to pull.
  - timr 9y ago
    I also reject the notion that the eastern district is "built out" or that developers will stop when things don't "pencil out". Reject what you like, but you're wrong. Investors don't finance real-estate projects where the per-square-foot returns don't justify the expense. The expense, in the case of eastern SF, is >80% land and materials. It's been documented, extensively, by groups like SPUR. Taxes and regulation are less than 20% of the cost of construction in San Francisco. It's simply not the limiting factor [1] [1] http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2014-02-11/real-costs-building-housing http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2014-02-11... (You'll note that this link shows $48,000 of a $469,000 unit -- or about 10% of the cost -- is attributable to permits and regulatory fees. The cost of land and labor and materials amounts for >75% of the cost. When you read people complaining about "regulatory" costs in SF, it's really a political dog-whistle to the BMR housing subsidy, which developers hate. Most self-professed "YIMBYs" I talk to do not know this.)
wnissen 9y ago
I am amazed at the scale of the RV housing in industrial areas of Oakland. I walked several miles yesterday in southeast Oakland and saw up to five RVs on a block, obviously housing. As the article says, this is not a question of a few very poor people having trouble finding housing in few very expensive coastal areas. The Bay Area town I live in has a median household income of $100K. The payment on a 3-bedroom condo or 2-bedroom home is now just about $100K as well. And my area is a solid 1.5 hours from San Francisco.
- johan_larson 9y ago
  This is one of those things the municipalities need to stop doing, promptly. If this becomes an established part of the housing market, it will acquire a constituency and it will be much harder to stop later. Just look at what a political mess decades of winking at illegal immigration from Mexico caused.
tstegart 9y ago
I always see news articles about companies building campuses and headquarters out there. Can anyone tell me why Google/Facebook/apple can't just build a residential tower for 10,000 people next to their building? It seems they get approval for everything else they build out there. The only time I went out there it was very suburban, with plenty of room for more buildings. Seems odd that the businesses with all the money paying all the taxes can't get a city council to approve giant apartment complexes right next to their headquarters. Anyone have the answer? Must be the only place in America where corporations don't get their way, unless they don't actually want housing for their workers.
- ghaff 9y ago
  1. Zoning 2. Corporate housing that you need to move out of as soon as you leave your job sounds pretty dystopian.
  - tstegart 9y ago
    The zoning is what I'm wondering about. In most of the rest of the country large corporations make the rules. It seems the taxpayers in Silicon valley are the tech companies, and they want housing. So who is voting against changing the zoning? It seemed like miles and miles of corporate offices out there when I visited. Just build a giant apartment complex on top. And I wasn't actually talking about corporate housing, just giant residential buildings. But even then, company towns still exist, why haven't Google and Apple built them?
    - blackflame7000 9y ago
      "It seems the taxpayers in Silicon valley are the tech companies" - Most of the taxpayers are also homeowners who don't want to see their property values fall due to an influx of new affordable housing.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      >large corporations make the rules I think you've been reading too much political chatter. It's not that straightforward. >So who is voting against changing the zoning? The actual voters. >company towns still exist Well, they mostly exist in the sense that some modest-sized cities/towns mostly have a single employer for a fairly large radius. That isn't true in any meaningful way in Silicon Valley.
unabridged 9y ago
I would love to see a state pass an amendment removing all density restrictions on residential zoning and making all commercial zoning mixed use.
purplezooey 9y ago
Here's a question: why don't more companies locate in the East Bay? There's a bigtime 'follow the herd' mentality when it comes to where VCs are allowing companies to make their headquarters. You don't need to have an office in Mountain View or Palo Alto. Many of your employees will live in places like Fremont, Pleasanton and Walnut Creek. Why not start a company there instead?

32 points by erickhill 9y ago

This is going to be a massive thread I predict. There's a big world out there. If you can't afford California, or you don't want a 2 hour commute with a $180,000 salary, then DO NOT LIVE THERE. It's that simple. Are you skilled, and you can't afford or don't want to afford to live in California? Give up the damn weather and move somewhere else. I don't even care if it's because the laws cause unaffordable housing, just don't live there. Besides, if you drop the housing prices so much that anybody can afford to live in California, how great do you think it's going to be there? The issue with a place like California is that there are almost always going to be more people that want to live there, than there is space. If you build more/better/affordable housing, more people will move there, then what?

adam_seeliger 9y ago
Bingo.
jdoliner 9y ago
> If you can't afford California, or you don't want a 2 hour commute with a $180,000 salary, then DO NOT LIVE THERE. It's that simple. This is great advice, it really is that simple. You have very little voice in California but you have plenty of exit. > The issue with a place like California is that there are almost always going to be more people that want to live there, than there is space. This doesn't seem quite as obviously true to me. While there's lots of people who want to live in California, along with all it's other bountiful resources California has a lot of space. We could, in theory, house many more millions of people before we really started hitting true space limits. It's not infinite of course, but the resources are very underutilized right now. Or at least they appear to be to my eyes.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  I mean, if developers plan right, you could add people in a more efficient manner, but good luck bulldozing the suburbs and getting rid of cars. Those are the main issues. It's not so much that I don't believe it is possible, I don't think there is the will for the people of California to give up their cars, and their suburbs for Tokyo-style living. I strongly believe that California needs far fewer people, and more efficient/better housing. I don't think more people + more housing is a sustainable solution. Of course this isn't the popular narrative, but I think it's true.
ghaff 9y ago
California has been popular for various reasons for a long time. But it's really since the recovery from dot-bomb that things have gotten out of control. Zoning etc. is part of the issue. But by all accounts, the (not so great) public transit--especially in SF itself--is pretty near capacity as, obviously are the highways. Can this capacity be increased over the timeframe of a couple decades? Probably. But there's nothing in the 5-10 year horizon that's going to make a [EDIT: not so big] difference other than a combination of people choosing to not live there, incremental housing construction, incremental public transit improvements, and incremental increases in congestion.
- sjg007 9y ago
  Well maybe Baby boomers cashing out.. maybe.
- eastbayjake 9y ago
  I'm hopeful that autonomous buses make this extra capacity possible. The main problems are unpredictable/long waits and overcrowding; the proposals I've seen involve smaller (<20 passenger) buses that run much more frequently and can fit more people into standing-room space because automated drivers have better planned acceleration and longer braking. It's so much cheaper and easier to add hundreds of small buses to the peninsula's streets than to build rail or subways. Another crazy low-footprint idea: connecting our city of hills with an aerial gondola network. https://www.fastcodesign.com/1671214/a-mass-transit-proposal-to-connect-a-city-using-aerial-gondolas https://www.fastcodesign.com/1671214/a-mass-transit-proposal...
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Honestly? Sounds like magical thinking about how self-driving will make things possible that aren't with a relatively low-paid human driver today. And probably wouldn't be available for a few decades anyway. Small buses are available in a lot of countries today.
    - eastbayjake 9y ago
      Unionized MUNI drivers make three times the SF minimum wage [0] before overtime so they're not "low-paid" by any means, but yes if money were unlimited we could achieve a smaller-but-more-numerous bus strategy... the ride will just be really jerky and require more seats at lower capacity, in addition to costing a prohibitive amount of money. And "a few decades" seems extremely conservative when we're already testing driverless buses in San Francisco today [1] [0] https://missionlocal.org/2014/06/is-32-an-hour-too-much-for-muni-drivers/ https://missionlocal.org/2014/06/is-32-an-hour-too-much-for-... [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-autonomous-bus-idUSKBN16E08I http://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-autonomous-bus-...
akanet 9y ago
I think this is an incredibly fatalistic attitude. California is also great for many reasons beyond "great weather". Lots of people want to live here for family, emotional, or safety reasons. I've met so many gay and transgender people (tech workers and otherwise) who have told me they just don't feel safe where they're from.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  Excluding some areas/situations, I'd just say grow thicker skin. There isn't anything particularly special about California with respect to LGBTQ and it certainly isn't a good justification for living there. You can be gay in Pittsburgh or Chicago or D.C. just as well as you can in Portland or L.A.. There are definitely family and emotional considerations and that's fair, obviously there are reasons other than the weather to live in California - that wasn't my point, rather, my point was that a lot of people want to live there and you can't expect to just get this somehow incredibly affordable cost of living you'd get in Kansas or something in California. If you could, we would ALL be living there. People need to realize that location and where you live can be a luxury, and you have to pay proportionally for that luxury. I can't go move to Boulder or something on a $30,000/year salary and expect to ski year round then complain that I can't afford housing. The world simply does not, and should not work that way.
matt_m 9y ago
This is a common sentiment. How far does this concept go though? If a neighborhood gets too expensive, you can move without much trouble. The whole city and commuting area gets too expensive? Move again, but now find new company/personal relationships. What about all cities for <industry> get too expensive. Change careers maybe? At the very least the supply of housing should expand until it's proportionate to the amount of office space (jobs) in the area (although apparently office space is more lucrative for municipalities than housing, so we get more of it). It isn't unique to California either, most cities in the US with good job markets (NYC, Boston, Washington DC, LA, etc) have seen housing prices shoot up. I'm not sure it's true that building more housing has no effect on prices, Seattle has had a lot more housing built and apparently they haven't had quite as extreme price increases, although they also have a thriving tech industry. Raleigh/Durham has been growing incredibly fast but adding a lot of supply too. And more people moving in surely must lower the price at least where they are moving from, so if several places build prices can't go up everywhere. It might be late / politically difficult to address the issue in California, but the escalation of housing costs is such a common problem that the solution can't always be "move away from <job center>". Of course how to manage growth without excessively burdening existing residents or communities is another matter, but hopefully not impossible? Development doesn't have to go everywhere, but surely it should go somewhere? At least around transit hubs would make sense.

HarryHirsch 9y ago

What's the alternative to San Diego or San Francisco if you are in Pharma? Boston? You really need to live in a hub city, nowadays everyone changes employers every two years. Wouldn't it be nice of we could go back to the old times, and there was a choice between Philly, the New Jersey pharma cluster, Kodak in Rochester, Solvay in Syracuse, Dow in Midland, MI, Upjohn in Kalamazoo and many more?

ghaff 9y ago
>nowadays everyone changes employers every two years They don't but, yes, there's a lot of clustering for various industries and industry sub-segments. I expect Kendall Square in Cambridge is bigger than most other pharma centers these days though.

tabeth 9y ago

1. Commute 2. Cost of living 3. Income potential Pick two. Like everyone else, everyone wants everything. There's no place on Earth that has a short commute, low cost of living and amazing income potential. Compromise is the name of the game. Public transportation can help, but even still you'll have a commute. The only solace there is that you can do other things while you commute. It'll be very interesting if commutes become on average 1.5+ hours each way and employers count time spent working while commuting.

akanet 9y ago
I don't see any theoretical reason to only choose two, and reject it. We can choose three. Building more housing to lower the cost of living probably has very little to do with the bay area's tech income potential.
- tabeth 9y ago
  New York, the only example I can think of, has plentiful housing and it's still more expensive (yes, all boroughs) than most of the country. Will more housing help? Sure. The question really is whether or not increasing housing supply will or will not increase demand more than the newly available supply. Why not just move to another area? If there's something uniquely good about the Bay Area perhaps it's that same thing that makes the incumbents not want to let more people in. It's kind of a geopolitical problem.
  - mahyarm 9y ago
    Look at Seattle, it has built a lot more than SF in response to the demand and as a result, the price of housing has not gone up nearly as much. So yes, increasing supply does lower price.
    - tabeth 9y ago
      Huh? Seattle's median home price has doubled from five years ago. [1] [1] http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-home-prices-hit-700000-for-first-time-after-doubling-in-five-years/ http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-hom...

timr 9y ago

While I generally support the legislation discussed in this article, I wish the YIMBY people would stop talking about this in such simplistic terms. In some parts of California (e.g. San Francisco's eastern, urbanized third), no amount of building will ever satisfy the need, because all you can build on expensive land is "luxury" housing, and when those units don't sell/rent, developers will just stop building, because the unit economics don't work out. Some places definitely need to build more housing -- see, for example, the western 2/3rds of San Francisco, or the cutesy little suburban enclaves of Silicon Valley -- but this won't help until transit allows people to commute from those neighborhoods to their jobs. So we should also be saying "YIMBY" to transit infrastructure and reducing/eliminating the broken tax incentives that are helping to create the problem in the first place (like the ill-conceived Mid-Market tax incentives, which have replaced SROs with tech offices, thus making the homelessness problem worse.)

akanet 9y ago
I am a YIMBY and we consistently say all those things. I also reject the notion that the eastern district is "built out" or that developers will stop when things don't "pencil out". What pencils or doesn't is a direct consequence of the regulation and tax burden we place on construction, and there's probably an order of magnitude of levers we've yet to pull.
- timr 9y ago
  I also reject the notion that the eastern district is "built out" or that developers will stop when things don't "pencil out". Reject what you like, but you're wrong. Investors don't finance real-estate projects where the per-square-foot returns don't justify the expense. The expense, in the case of eastern SF, is >80% land and materials. It's been documented, extensively, by groups like SPUR. Taxes and regulation are less than 20% of the cost of construction in San Francisco. It's simply not the limiting factor [1] [1] http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2014-02-11/real-costs-building-housing http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2014-02-11... (You'll note that this link shows $48,000 of a $469,000 unit -- or about 10% of the cost -- is attributable to permits and regulatory fees. The cost of land and labor and materials amounts for >75% of the cost. When you read people complaining about "regulatory" costs in SF, it's really a political dog-whistle to the BMR housing subsidy, which developers hate. Most self-professed "YIMBYs" I talk to do not know this.)

wnissen 9y ago

I am amazed at the scale of the RV housing in industrial areas of Oakland. I walked several miles yesterday in southeast Oakland and saw up to five RVs on a block, obviously housing. As the article says, this is not a question of a few very poor people having trouble finding housing in few very expensive coastal areas. The Bay Area town I live in has a median household income of $100K. The payment on a 3-bedroom condo or 2-bedroom home is now just about $100K as well. And my area is a solid 1.5 hours from San Francisco.

johan_larson 9y ago
This is one of those things the municipalities need to stop doing, promptly. If this becomes an established part of the housing market, it will acquire a constituency and it will be much harder to stop later. Just look at what a political mess decades of winking at illegal immigration from Mexico caused.

tstegart 9y ago

I always see news articles about companies building campuses and headquarters out there. Can anyone tell me why Google/Facebook/apple can't just build a residential tower for 10,000 people next to their building? It seems they get approval for everything else they build out there. The only time I went out there it was very suburban, with plenty of room for more buildings. Seems odd that the businesses with all the money paying all the taxes can't get a city council to approve giant apartment complexes right next to their headquarters. Anyone have the answer? Must be the only place in America where corporations don't get their way, unless they don't actually want housing for their workers.

ghaff 9y ago
1. Zoning 2. Corporate housing that you need to move out of as soon as you leave your job sounds pretty dystopian.
- tstegart 9y ago
  The zoning is what I'm wondering about. In most of the rest of the country large corporations make the rules. It seems the taxpayers in Silicon valley are the tech companies, and they want housing. So who is voting against changing the zoning? It seemed like miles and miles of corporate offices out there when I visited. Just build a giant apartment complex on top. And I wasn't actually talking about corporate housing, just giant residential buildings. But even then, company towns still exist, why haven't Google and Apple built them?
  - blackflame7000 9y ago
    "It seems the taxpayers in Silicon valley are the tech companies" - Most of the taxpayers are also homeowners who don't want to see their property values fall due to an influx of new affordable housing.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >large corporations make the rules I think you've been reading too much political chatter. It's not that straightforward. >So who is voting against changing the zoning? The actual voters. >company towns still exist Well, they mostly exist in the sense that some modest-sized cities/towns mostly have a single employer for a fairly large radius. That isn't true in any meaningful way in Silicon Valley.

unabridged 9y ago

I would love to see a state pass an amendment removing all density restrictions on residential zoning and making all commercial zoning mixed use.

purplezooey 9y ago

Here's a question: why don't more companies locate in the East Bay? There's a bigtime 'follow the herd' mentality when it comes to where VCs are allowing companies to make their headquarters. You don't need to have an office in Mountain View or Palo Alto. Many of your employees will live in places like Fremont, Pleasanton and Walnut Creek. Why not start a company there instead?