8 ms·

"Stop liking what I don't like," in twenty inches? Listen, some people want a short commute. There's nothing bad about Google building housing near its campus.

• Bjorkbat 8y ago
  I would argue that at the least it's a little absurd that we're resorting to corporate housing and "work-dorms" for lack of a better term when we could just simply shift more work to small and mid-size cities. Get your short commute, live in an actual house. I mean, it's kind of silly to imagine a small cluster of Google employees in a metro of approximately 200,000 people, but at some point it has to sound less silly than some of the proposed ways of fitting more people into a metro with 3x-5x rent prices.
  • AstralStorm 8y ago
    There is but one risk which USA has seen in the past. When the company owns your living space, there is even stronger pressure on you to stay there, be productive and accept lower wages. When it also owns your food source, the threat is even greater. The result would be replacement of wages with "benefits" such as living. Technical indentured servitude also known as soft slavery. Technically you could move, except you cannot ever possibly afford to. Additional stress would be put on people not in this arrangement as they would potentially have to spend more money to get at the same level. (Albeit there could be less pressure in the housing market.) The next step in this slippery slope would be inheritance. Since company owns everything, your kids inherit little. Either that, or they inherit a position... Welcome to actual indentured servitude again. Company branded kids straight out of a few known dystopias. Mostly because moving is a special kind of hell, especially with kids. Communities cannot form either way. Some people like it, they're a minority though as far as I know.
    • stakhanov 8y ago
      ...the thing about WeWork, however, is that you don't work for them, they work for you. Corporate housing was also done a lot in the post-WW2 reindustrialization of Europe. But coupled with strong tenant protections, it's not such a destructive force at the end of the day. A corporate couldn't kick you out of corporate housing just because you no longer worked there.
      • AstralStorm 8y ago
        All of this is fine until collusion... With current US competition protections a cartel likely will happen a few times or more. Since there is "competition" between companies, even if all of them are doing the same thing.
      • coldtea 8y ago
        >...the thing about WeWork, however, is that you don't work for them, they work for you. Give it time. Besides, when there's as large a dependency as "I get my livelihood through the services they offer" it might as well be the other way around, as one can't just drop them that easily.
    • ronaldl93 8y ago
      Golden Handcuffs
  • eksemplar 8y ago
    We just need better city planning. It used to be that the core of the city was stores, then came a ring of expensive apartments then industry then suburbs. That division doesn’t really make sense now that industry isn’t really polluting and people are buying much of their things online.
    • mhneu 8y ago
      This is an interesting insight. Yes, as industry has changed and retail has changed, city layouts should change too. It’s not just suburban malls that are affect by changing retail.
  • stakhanov 8y ago
    I agree that the way forward has to lie in companies being more willing to locate job opportunities where people are, rather than expecting people to relocate to where companies are willing to provide job opportunities to. It's completely silly that such a big part of the value being created by clusters of economic activity, such as large corporates, startup clusters etc, should end up in the pockets of landlords who happen to own real estate there, plus generating inefficiencies like traffic congestion etc.
  • jahewson 8y ago
    Interesting use of the phrase “just simply“.
  • lsc 8y ago
    > I would argue that at the least it's a little absurd that we're resorting to corporate housing and "work-dorms" for lack of a better term when we could just simply shift more work to small and mid-size cities. Get your short commute, live in an actual house. the problem is workplace choice. I can walk from my house to Broadcom, EMC, drobo, Palo Alto Networks, Dell, citrix, and hundreds of tiny tech companies. 10 minutes in an uber takes me to google, facebook, linkedin, etc, etc,... This means that switching jobs has a much lower cost. The problem with small towns is that each one is only going to support one big employer. You often must move next time you want a new job. My favored solution is to simply upzone near train stops. I'd be happy to abide by a rule that I couldn't own a car in the city if you would sell me a small condo without parking near a train station. (I don't have a car as-is, for that matter, though this will likely change once uber stops dumping)
    • jaggederest 8y ago
      It would be handy if people could work from wherever they liked. Maybe we could build a large system that allowed rapid communication. We could include a software layer, so that not just verbal communication could happen, but even information in all sorts of other formats. We could call it the GlobalSys. Then commutes would stop being a problem. /s I've been working from home, wherever I wanted that to be, since 2011. All of this nonsense could be avoided by simply optimizing for asynchronous cooperation via the internet. We could also avoid some of the approximately 12% of total energy usage devoted to maintaining office space, and some of the 10%+ of urban land usage taken up by offices and parking. That's all leaving aside the approximately 50%+ of all driving miles done for commuting purposes, the maintenance and manufacturing of automobiles for commuting, etc.
      • lsc 8y ago
        Personally, I am a lot less effective when I work from home. I need the social pressure of being in the office around other people that are working to stay focused. But I've hired some incredible people that I totally wouldn't be able to afford in person who were able to be pretty effective working remote. I have worked with people who are absolute monsters when you leave them alone at home with a problem. Certainly, some people are far more effective working remote than working in the office. I'm just not one of them. In my experience... I am in the majority here. (interestingly, I think I'm a better manager when managing remote than managing in person, the opposite of my effectiveness as an individual contributor. though I think that might also have had something to do with the sort of people I've managed.) Right now, the market values people willing to go into an office who are able to communicate well face to face and get work done in that context a lot more than the market values people who are able to make themselves effective while working remote, though, and I think that's in part due to the preponderance of people who are more effective workers when they are physically near other workers? But... certainly part of that is that management is behind the times.
  • figgernaggot 8y ago
    Yes, but then Democrat voting white collars would vote in Republican voting majorities and probably not enough to shift the vote, but the city would lose their votes and might go Republican. Can't allow that? So elites make sure Democrat voters stay in the cities.
    • fairopps210 8y ago
      No, the issue is that young people and educated people are statistically Democrats (by large margins; I won’t comment further on why most smart/informed people are Democrats.) And young and educated people want to live in cities because it seems like creative and technical jobs benefit from being near other creative smart people. On a larger note, did you know that Steve Bannon was funded by billionaires to propagandize and radicalize young white male tech workers? That was his pitch for Breitbart as he raised funding. And he was funded by a billionaire (Mercer) who spent the money to get votes for cutting billionaire taxes. When do you think those young tech workers will figure out that they’ve been suckered?
  • whorleater 8y ago
    >some point it has to sound less silly than some of the proposed ways of fitting more people into a metro with 3x-5x rent prices. This ignores the reality that a lot of people want to live in urban areas
• vertexFarm 8y ago
  I think you're deliberately confusing what they're talking about. Sure, having a walkable urban center where everyone lives close to the things they need and they don't create dystopian traffic is great. But company housing, tenements, indebted servitude, working hours from can't-see until can't-see, is all a spectre from our not-so-distant past which we have mostly forgotten about. Well it's coming back. A labor revolution gave us such amazing leaps in dignity and basic humanity which were sorely lacking after the eruption of the industrial revolution. We take that entirely for granted now, like it can't come back and get us. It can. People in America are just not educated enough about the horrors of the labor revolution. Our own, not the communist's overseas. Unions exist in this strange historical agnosticism, and people only know them as some kind of cartoon, a mob-ruled bureaucracy that enables hilariously lazy laborers to cite ridiculous rules and get in the way of progress. Well they weren't always that way. It is not common human decency that stops the captains of industry from merely hiring private police forces to mow bad workers down with rifles and artillery. That's our past as well as our cyberpunk future. That stuff can come back if we don't keep maintaining the levee between it and us. People have an instinct to normalize and rationalize things which happen slowly compared to a human lifetime. Well there's a very real and disastrous difference today in how people work and maintain a decent living. It's becoming more and more like back when a decent living was only reserved for the insanely wealthy, the richest of the rich. Everyone else toiled in disease and squalor fourteen hours a day, breaking their bodies, without any possessions of their own; everything belonged to the company, and they worked just for the privilege to live a week at a time. It really wasn't that long ago. We like to hope that if it comes back we'll still be behind the fence of the upper-middle class, safe from the horror. But the vast majority of us won't. Working is taking up more and more of our days. Gone is the 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours leisure. It's going back to "as many hours as you can physically go without sleep" once again. No benefits, no retirement, no healthcare, no affordable higher education, no affordable family housing aside from company closet tenements with communal utilities, next to a corporate campus but far from a town center. Out in the suburbs with one company store. That will come back in our complacence. Fewer opportunities than our fathers.
  • wincy 8y ago
    Geez man just relax a bit and move to a smaller city. I make 100k and live in a 2200 square foot house with 3 grocery stores within walking distance and a 10 minute commute. Life is pretty easy, I make websites for my companies marketing team. I don’t even have a high school diploma. Nobody is pressuring me to work as many hours a day as possible. California and New York are not the whole world, and things are really great for raising a family in the Midwest. Both of those places seem like a dystopia borne of the city councils own design and people’s willingness to live in a bad environment. And billionaires aren’t going to treat everyone super terrible because any billionaire knows if the peasants aren’t getting their bread instead they want the riches heads. That’s not really a great gambit if you’re ultra rich.
• adamsea 8y ago
  I think you may have missed a central, if not primary point of the article. From TFA: "It is time, too, that we begin to understand that the great wave of popular resentment sweeping across advanced societies is partly about the way the modern economy shreds some of people’s most basic emotional attachments. We all know the modern rules: millions of people have to leave where they grew up to find even halfway dependable work; and they find that creating any kind of substitute home somewhere new is impossible. For people at the bottom of the economic hierarchy, life proves to be unendingly precarious and often itinerant."
  • asfasgasg 8y ago
    I don't buy that "the great wave of popular resentment" is driven by the type and quality of housing options provided to techies. I can buy that life proves too itinerant for people at the bottom, but as far as I could see, the types of housing and services described in the article do not represent a delta for the people at the bottom.
• 8bitsrule 8y ago
  If I recall my oater history correctly, the ranchers used to house ka-boys in 'bunkhouses'. Back to the article, though: the idea of 'Roams' where travelling contractors hang out and ply their trade, IS a new and a intriguing development. Pretty much the opposite of a cubicle & commute life.
• coldtea 8y ago
  >"Stop liking what I don't like," in twenty inches? No, stop making the workforce into indentured slaves, in regular print. If it was just for those that "like it" it would be fine (and not under discussion -- people could work like that in 1985 too, if they were so inclined). The troublesome part is the whole culture that grows around this, and infects work relations and expectations even from unwilling people. (It's the same notion as undercutting).
  • asfasgasg 8y ago
    The people affected by these types of housing situations (except those in China) are generally wealthy, even by first world standards. Referring them as indentured slaves (not a thing, by the way -- there are indentured servants, and slaves) is unreasonable.
    • coldtea 8y ago
      >not a thing, by the way -- there are indentured servants, and slaves I was making a point, akin to "wage slave". Just because you entered a contract doesn't mean you weren't coerced into it (the inverse is the perennial argument of those OK with no minimal wage and sweatshop labor).
• systemtest 8y ago
  Look at the bigger picture. I spend 1.5 hours per day commuting, but the higher pay means I have to work less. High paying job, LCOL area: 6 months, 21 working days per month at 9.5 hours per day is 1197 hours per year. Mid to low paying job, LCOL area: 11 months, 21 working days per month at 8.25 hours per day is 1905 hours per year. It is a choice to make. Spend an extra hour each evening with your family or spend every other month completely with your family. The magic of geo-arbitrage.
• 18973294 8y ago
  >"Stop liking what I don't like," That isn't the argument though. The argument is that people who don't want what you like are forced to do it. >Listen, some people want a short commute. This is like the "would you like to help the disabled" line that people selling things on the street say. >Hell, it's even good for family, which the author seems hung up on. You know what you're not doing while driving home from work for forty five minutes? I would accept an arbitrarily short commute to work. If there were reasonably priced dwellings in the building I work at, I would live there. More time to play with my kid, cook dinner, or whatever else. I had to live below a family with 3 kids for a year. There was constant running on my ceiling. "thump thump thump" all day and night. Apartments are not really designed for kids. In fact, they aren't really designed for anybody, which is why everybody buys houses where it is possible. I don't feel like I have any privacy here because there are always people very close to me. Most people just shut all their windows and pull the blinds down. Living in a windowless box is not ideal. >Well, is it sinister to live near work, or isn't it? I think he is complaining about the fact that you have to move away from where you grew up and that the options available for housing are basically a dorm room.
• toss1 8y ago
  True, and if you really want to examine the history, go back to farming, where there was a zero commute -- you woke up and walked over to the barn to start caring for the animals, then breakfast, and walk around the barn to tend the fields. For craftsmen and merchants, seems they typically lived in the same building as their shop. I didn't see anyone complaining about that as somehow degrading the human experience. Seems like no big deal, just what is the most practical living/working arrangement in a given situation.