47 ms·

$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

• CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
  Most major tech companies want to hire onsite, when there are plenty of places in this country where you can buy a lot of real estate for much cheaper than the Bay Area. I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle. Investing $1B into housing in the Bay Area seems nice at the surface, but maybe if we stopped demanding everyone be willing to relocate to one of a handful of cities to work in our industry, we'll solve the root cause of the problem.
  • davidw 7y ago
    The 'root' cause is that industries tend to concentrate, and that's not an easy problem to solve. And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing.
    • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      Hire remote. Provide relocation assistance to get developers to move out of major cities, instead of the other way. Fringe benefit: Less payroll overhead since the cost of living in rural areas is much lower. > that's not an easy problem to solve. The solution is simple, it's just getting people to actually do it that's hard. > And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing. I don't know enough about California's politics to provide insightful commentary, but from what I have heard, none of it was good or sane.
      • davidw 7y ago
        I've worked remote, and it's ok, but it's not the same thing as being in the office. It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from. Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers. And then there's stuff like high quality universities, and of course venture capital.
        • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
          > It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from. What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions? > Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers. Same question for that perspective, except I do have a few ideas of a cynical answer to that question from the company's perspective.
          • filoleg 7y ago
            >What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions? The advantage is that on the path in-between now and the perfect future where all companies are remote-first( that we are not sure will ever happen), you will not be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to job prospects. I don't think that many people would be willing to heavily limit their job prospects (not even taking into account all the other advantages that come with living in a densely populated coastal city) while waiting for that "bright all-remote future" that may never come.
            • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
              As a short-term strategic move, sure. That's pragmatic. But given a ceteris paribus comparison of the two, my question is what is inherently superior about the onsite position over the remote position?
        • onemoresoop 7y ago
          How about remote offices or remote subdivisions? It always worked out, why wouldn't it work out now?
          • davidw 7y ago
            Remote offices seem like a good compromise once a company is big enough. There are still coordination issues though, I would imagine.
    • manigandham 7y ago
      Why is it not easy? The internet is global just like the products these companies create. There's not much, if any, reason they need to be so consolidated in a single region or city.
      • dymk 7y ago
        Face-to-face communication has not been supplanted with online tools yet, and face-to-face communication is very important to this job.
        • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
          > and face-to-face communication is very important to this job [citation needed] It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.
          • dymk 7y ago
            > It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team. [citation needed] It's clearly important enough for Amazon, Facebook, and Google to invest heavily in already established tech hubs where it's incredibly expensive to build, so they can have their engineers working in the same physical location(s).
            • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
              Do I understand your argument correctly? Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."
              • dymk 7y ago
                You're not understanding my argument correctly. I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed. These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet face-to-face. Emotion is particularly poorly conveyed over email or VC, and sometimes to convince somebody of something, meeting them in person is the best way to do that.
    • falsedan 7y ago
      Software development isn't an industry like oil refining. Imagine if all the architects or civil engineers were located in a small handful of cities!
      • davidw 7y ago
        Architects and civil engineers mostly work where their services are needed, which makes sense. The economics of their industries are different.
        • falsedan 7y ago
          I don’t know what the point of this fact is. Architects and engineers mostly work from offices, which are usually located so that there is a good pool of potential employees around.
      • dredmorbius 7y ago
        Oil workers go to where the oil is. Which is both concentrated and distributed. Software is dematerialised, which means, perversely, it tends to concentrate to a far greater extent. Much as local and regional entertainment, constrained by material proximiy to audience, gave way to Hollywood.
    • erentz 7y ago
      People respond to this agglomeration factor with the argument we should “hire remote cuz the internet thing”. But the other factor to consider is how we are less tied by our jobs to physical location and that allows more choice in where people decide to live too. A lot of people want to live in the Bay Area and other coastal cities. They don’t want to live where housing is cheap in the Midwest. So you may have a liberating force in the way jobs have changed, but that works both ways. People are moving to the big coastal cities. The big coastal cities (and states) are doing a piss poor job of accommodating this - actually they’ve taken active measures to worsen the housing problem with zoning and tax rules. I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit.
      • davidw 7y ago
        > I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit. Hah - see my comment elsewhere. Local politicians are definitely the choke point that doesn't allow the market to function properly.
    • xtracto 7y ago
      Given that "About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born," I think that if a group of FAANG+Friends agreed to open campuses in some other state at the same time, they could easily build a new tech community.
      • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
        If they can launch a global currency, they damn sure can build a tech community in a red state.
    • gamblor956 7y ago
      California recently passed several laws to make it easier for the market to provide housing. However, local governments are still the ultimate deciders and many of them are opposed to new housing, such as in the SF Peninsula. Other parts of CA are less resistant to new housing. In LA's downtown, for example, almost 50,000 units of new housing are being brought online between 2016-2021. In both Korea Town and Hollywood, more than 5,000 new units have come online in the past 3 years (and they're already the densest neighborhoods). In Marina Del Rey and Playa Del Rey, roughly 2500 new units have opened/will open up in 2018 and 2019. Along the Metro Expo Line, more than 25,000 residential units within 4 blocks of a station are planned or already under construction. Inglewood will see somewhere between 500 and 2500 new apartments in the neighborhood around the Sofi Stadium, not including other residential development. Even Santa Monica will see roughly 2000 new apartments over the next 2 years. Edit: these are just the developments that I'm aware of. There are plenty more. If you're interested in following LA-area development, there are several Facebook groups devoted to this subject.
  • GuiA 7y ago
    > I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle. That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company. The large house with an acre of land gives you other opportunities, but if that one specific dimension is what you care about then it falls short.
    • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      > That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company. ...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord. If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.
      • twblalock 7y ago
        > If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay Why would they do that? They only pay as much as they do in Silicon Valley to offset the cost of living.
        • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
          I said comparable, not equivalent. Cost of Living Adjustments can be included in their offer calculus.
        • BurningFrog 7y ago
          No, they pay what they need to pay to get the hire.
      • bluedino 7y ago
        $2,000 house payment vs a $3,000 apartment rental is only $12,000 a year in difference.
        • 7y ago
  • lowdose 7y ago
    We read a lot about the SF real estate market, wonder if it would be possible to dredge up a couple of Islands like the palm island in Dubai.
    • kansface 7y ago
      Houses literally built on sand next to the fault?
    • Retra 7y ago
      Those islands are wasteful, expensive, frivolous, and ecologically disastrous. They are not something to take pride in or repeat.
    • smileysteve 7y ago
      It's worth noting that San Francisco is already a large portion of landfill.
  • malcolmgreaves 7y ago
    Many people want to live in deaireable areas. There's a reason why your home is cheap.
    • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      > There's a reason why your home is cheap. https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happiest-healthiest-city-america/21877229/ https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happ... Swing and a miss. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida > Naples is one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, with the sixth-highest per capita income in the country in 2012, and the second-highest proportion of millionaires per capita in the US. In short, your passive aggressive quip doesn't match reality.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • sfotm 7y ago
        Being the happiest and healthiest city doesn't really affect what's counted as desirable or valuable in the housing market. This doesn't really follow.
      • codemac 7y ago
        You know those are paid for and marketed by your local city's real estate industry, right?
      • keerthiko 7y ago
        People are happy and healthy in a place for all kinds of reasons. That doesn't make them a desirable settlement destination for others. Maybe a town is incredibly racist and who lives there is all from the same longstanding community and they are all extremely close and have good personal relationships with each other and feel a strong sense of belonging to the place and the people. Maybe the town is perfectly suited to being students, young and single and there's a lot of things that cater to them. Maybe the town is better suited to families, couples, people who own dogs. Such people will gravitate there. This could mean they are all happy and healthy, but it would not mean that if I, some random bloke from a different state/culture/language/country moved there and tried to settle in and live my life, I would be particularly happy or healthy. So yes, a place can be the happiest place in the world for the people who already live there, and still be undesirable for the "looking for a nice place to settle" population at large. However, having a highly employable, high income industry, lots of motivated hard workers, a vibrant art scene, and good weather makes a place a lot more universally desirable, and it takes a helluva lot of negatives to offset that desirability (which the bay area is trying really hard to do).
• davidw 7y ago
  You'd think they could spend a bit to "buy" someone like Senator Atkins, who effectively killed SB50. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-single-family-zoning-senate-bill-50-dead-20190516-story.html https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-single-fa...
  • umeshunni 7y ago
    I was wondering the same thing. The California housing crisis is a political choice and fixing the politics that caused it might be more effective long term than stop gap patches like this.
  • newsoul2019 7y ago
    Why can't they "grow their own" powerful politicians? Find somebody young, put them in all the right places with all the right people, and have them say all the right things. Shouldn't be hard with unlimited resources.
    • Zenbit_UX 7y ago
      Sounds like the plot to the departed.
    • csmattryder 7y ago
      The problem with humans is that Free Will stuff. Eventually the human says or does something unpopular and your investment is written off, along with the politician. Maybe this young upstart has already tweeted something in their more free-spirited days, just waiting to be scrolled onto. Much more effective to pump money into the political parties directly. They're going nowhere.
    • pessimizer 7y ago
      For that you have to know the right things, or to know someone who knows the right things. That requires a degree of empathy.
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
    Episodes like this shows that politicians aren't as easily bought as many think. For better and for worse.
• georgeecollins 7y ago
  I think this is good and should be encouraged. The Bay Area needs more housing desperately.
  • brianwawok 7y ago
    My only question, is will these houses have access to public transit or will they drive? If driving, can your roads handle the increased traffic? Housing, transit, schooling.. these all seem interconnected. Just increasing supply of one just strains the rest of the system, no?
    • twblalock 7y ago
      The only way transit will be built is if a strain develops. Otherwise what problem would be solved by building it?
      • ketzo 7y ago
        Man, sometimes it's fun to imagine having a gigantic autocratic government like China that could just... build empty cities, or huge railroads that 11 people ride every day, knowing people would fill them up eventually. But then I guess you'd get everything else that comes with a gigantic autocratic government.
    • koboll 7y ago
      Right now the point of most strain is at housing availability, so easing that would be a step in the right direction, even if it relocates the point of most strain to other forms of infrastructure. You can't solve every problem all at once.
    • summerlight 7y ago
      One of the trick here is a significant portion of this development will be placed near Googleplex and they will only provide parking units enough for less than half of them. This incentivizes not having a car at all (yes, there's a number of young new grad without a car even now) and implicitly give more benefits to their employees and TVCs. This is not necessarily a bad thing as a decent number of those high salary Google employees will not participate to the housing market thus reduce the upward pressure.
• lalos 7y ago
  Reminded me of this interview with Peter Thiel: https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1133942478501888000 https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1133942478501888000 Interesting investment decision but to their defense they might be diversifying.
• ikeboy 7y ago
  I'm reading this as Google has a bunch of land and they want to cash in on sky-high prices.
  • ketzo 7y ago
    Eh. If you wanna be cynical, they could've cashed in harder by building more commercial real estate. They say they're specifically rezoning a bunch of land that's currently zoned for office or commercial space, so I gotta give 'em some credit.
    • ikeboy 7y ago
      >First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. This doubles their investment if the average home price net of costs is 100k. It seems likely the number will be way above that, just glancing at median home prices.
    • ikeboy 7y ago
      I don't know offhand - is commercial space more valuable?
• goatsi 7y ago
  So 15000 single family homes? What density are they going for? The language isn't clear.
• bufferoverflow 7y ago
  That's $50K/home. Is that even remotely realistic in the Bay Area?
  • nugget 7y ago
    The headline is misleading. In the article it says Google is rezoning $750 million worth of land (+ $250m in subsidies) from commercial to residential use, and making it available for private development. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest problems for Google was retention of young talent driven primarily by prohibitively high housing costs. In that way there is an incentive for them to bring down housing costs, although I'm not sure what impact 20k units will have unless they retained ownership and became a landlord to their own employees.
    • TotempaaltJ 7y ago
      $750m worth of land, $250m investment fund for affordable housing.
    • chucksmash 7y ago
      > It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest problems for Google was retention of young talent driven primarily by prohibitively high housing costs. Well, it would surprise me :-) According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in. Next tier, still not senior, clears $250k/year. That's more than $20k/mo pre-tax. Even at an outrageous $5k rent on a single income and with no roommates, you're still talking about $6k or so >>monthly<< surplus for living your life and saving.
      • maxsilver 7y ago
        > Well, it would surprise me :-) According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in. Even at an outrageous $5k rent Is that really enough to afford to live? Is that housing cost accurate? A programmer at Google making $180k/yr salary brings in about $9,315.58 in after-tax income (according to PaycheckCalculator). The average house within 10 miles of Google's HQ currently costs about $1.5 million dollars according to Zillow's current month averages. (That's $9,745/month in after-tax costs per month, assuming 0% down on 30yr mortgage). Like, maybe if you are single and live off of ramen and you pick the shittiest housing you can find, those numbers can work. But I personally couldn't afford to live in California on that salary (despite it being, under normal circumstances, an amazingly high salary).
• abc_lisper 7y ago
  Nice of google to do this. People who complain about this also complain about google being one of the causes, but there is only so much one can do. Glad that google is setting a good example for other companies to follow!
• newsoul2019 7y ago
  Every state and local official is going to try and stop this in its tracks, with their hand out, until they "Get Theirs!"
• quelsolaar 7y ago
  Here is a buisnes idea Ive been thinking about lately for SF, Hong Kong, NY and other expensive places. Buy a smaller cruise ships and rent a pier to dock it. I found a newly renovated ship with 72 cabins for 5.8 million. With the average rent in SF that ship has paid for itself in 2 years (yes there will be additional costs, but back of a napkin, its a good start). Then buy more ships and stack them. Renovate/remodel in cheep places, then sail them to the bay. This could create housing in months not years, without the need for planing and building. If i had the money I would do it in a heart beat. It would be so much faster and cheaper then what google is planing.
  • yters 7y ago
    And then once the ship city state has developed enough independence it can quietly slip out to sea beyond national borders and become its own seastead mini-nation of Google.
  • calvinbhai 7y ago
    Bottle neck: commute between ship and land. How do you factor for that?
    • dmead 7y ago
      they'd be docked or anchored in the bay. daily ferries to the south bay and SF. duh.
  • stcredzero 7y ago
    Here is a buisnes idea Ive been thinking about lately for SF, Hong Kong, NY and other expensive places. Buy a smaller cruise ships and rent a pier to dock it. This has been tried before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueseed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueseed EDIT: Oh, you mean as residences! There are people who live in the marinas. There is some gatekeeping for that. A high speed high tech ferry running between SF and the South Bay would be dandy.
  • the-dude 7y ago
    This is already being done in Groningen(NL) to accommodate influxes of students to our university. edit: but I should mention, we have waterways reaching into the city. Being old Europe.
• albertshin 7y ago
  Welcome to Googleville. It's been a while since I've read cyberpunk novels like Cryptonomican, but I feel like the reality of corporations becoming villages and societal entities is slowly getting there anyways. Your move, We.
  • runevault 7y ago
    I'd put this more on Snow Crash than Cryptonomicon.
    • DataWorker 7y ago
      Right, don’t they live in shipping containers in snowcrash. A few years back I heard there was a movement in Oakland to build shipping container villages. Nothing new since the 90s except for Facebook.
      • 0xEFF 7y ago
        Ready Player One is the shipping containers.
        • runevault 7y ago
          Actually I'm pretty sure Hiro also lived in a shipping container at least at one point during the book. Though it's been years since I read it (something I need to correct).
        • logfromblammo 7y ago
          Ready Player One is stacked manufactured homes. Snow Crash is storage units. I am not aware of any sci-fi story that predicted people living in ISO shipping containers prior to its real-world occurrence.
  • SilasX 7y ago
    Yes, but Google isn't the one that created this problem. You should be drawing the opposite conclusion: that the problem is so bad, even a company town would be an improvement!
• kennystone 7y ago
  George Pullman made a town outside of Chicago for workers to build his railcars. It didn't end well: "the town and its design were... a paternalistic system that took away men's rights as citizens, including the right to control their own domestic environment" http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1030.html http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1030.html Happy that google is making this investment; it's worth a shot even if it is far the ideal way to build housing. Hopefully the NIMBYism that defines this area won't kill it.
  • pessimizer 7y ago
    It ended perfectly well for the person who built it. The object wasn't to make the workers happy, the object was to make Pullman money.
• thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. So much so, that local politicians even brag about how much housing developments they've stopped. Why fight such a huge uphill battle in trying to get housing in the Bay area? Wouldn't it be easier to start from a city or town outside of CA? or at least outside the bay area? Maybe somewhere in the middle of no-where (there's still so much unused land immediately outside the Bay area - even within -> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land), where NIMBYs have no jurisdiction. Then create a high speed train or subway system connecting it to the rest of the world. Since out there land should cost very little, it would be a lot cheaper to create a highly effective transportation system then spending 1.5 million dollars per lot! I know in the past new towns have failed, but that's because they didn't put employers there first. If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there.
  • jofer 7y ago
    > If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there. Welcome to Houston! Seriously, the typical model for growth here has been for a major employer to make a new campus out in the middle of nowhere away from town, then things spring up around it. As a result, we have lots of urban clusters with skyscrapers a long way from downtown. The energy corridor and the med center started out that way. Ditto for NASA and League City. Currently we have Exxon in Spring, Igloo out west of Katy, all of the Woodlands (weird place), etc. It's not exactly good or bad, but it is a recipe for sprawl.
    • enraged_camel 7y ago
      Houston also famously has no zoning laws, which massively exacerbates problems associated with sprawl.
      • jofer 7y ago
        That's a bit of a misnomer. Most cities inside/near Houston are zoned, and Houston itself is effectively zoned. Almost all of the sprawl is zoned. (E.g. Katy, Sugarland, Spring, etc all have zoning laws.) Land usage inside Houston city limits is mostly controlled through deed restrictions. E.g. I'm technically breaking the law by working from home as my deed is explicitly noncommercial. It's completely inflexible, as it was all set around 1900, but it is a form of zoning, nonetheless. Commercially-deeded lots are in planned areas that made sense at the time the property lines were drawn. There are also deeds that forbid residental development (often due to flooding, but again, it's inflexible). The key differences are that there aren't any real restrictions beyond commercial / non-commercial. As a result, you'll often see a shipping yard in the middle of a residential district or similarly impractical commercial developments in unlikely areas. Most of the examples people will dig up of flooding during Harvey that could have been prevented by zoning are actually in cities that _are_ zoned. The real issue is that developers get to dictate what the zoning laws are and get to develop however they want. For example, there's currently yet another development going up _inside_ the reservoirs on the west side of town. It's in a city that's zoned. They changed the zoning to allow the development there literally inside the reservoir, 10 ft vertically below the top of the dam. I'm not saying that zoning is bad, or that Houston doesn't have problems, but I am saying that zoning here wouldn't help. Developers have infinite political sway and get to change zoning at will. That's the real issue.
• pneill 7y ago
  Politics is a huge factor in the lack of affordable housing. Both legislation and concerns by citizen about how new housing will "change" a neighbor make it next to impossible to build higher density housing. Watch this video - it's eye opening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
• caymanjim 7y ago
  It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the Valley. Towns like Mountain View and Palo Alto ought to be vastly denser, with apartment buildings, duplexes, and other multi-tenant dwellings. The people living there don't want that, though, so the laws prohibit it. I don't blame people for wanting to keep their quiet neighborhoods and single-unit homes, or low-rises in SF, but until those objections are overcome, the problem is only going to get worse. So while I say that there's a simple cause, there's no simple solution. The only solution is changing the zoning laws, and that requires changing peoples' minds. Once that's done, the money will flow in directly from tenants, and will ease pressure all around. If Google wants to build more housing, they need to spend that billion dollars on political efforts.
  • tartuffe78 7y ago
    FTA: "In Mountain View, we’ve already worked with the city to change zoning in the North Bayshore area to free up land for housing, and we’re currently in productive conversations with Sunnyvale and San Jose."
    • ac29 7y ago
      It should be noted these are the three cities that come to mind where Google has bought multiple billions of dollars worth of real estate just in the last 5-10 years. When you spend that kind of money, in additional to otherwise having a large economic presence in a city, the Government tends to listen. Moreso than to individual developers.
  • rconti 7y ago
    Have you seen the absolute explosion of skyscrapers/mid-rise condo buildings in San Jose, Redwood City.. Hell, even San Carlos and Menlo Park have quite a few higher density units going in. I'm glad there's more density, and it's near transit, for the most part. Of course, it will still increase traffic, but by going with density and near transit, it'll reduce the impact vs building more single family homes.
• bcp2384 7y ago
  It's sad how many times I walk around in SF and see basically crumbling buildings or empty parking lots and wonder why new housing has not been built there yet? And more importantly who would actually oppose development on crumbling or wasted land?
  • scarmig 7y ago
    It's a historic garbage dump, dontcha know. Have to maintain the neighborhood's character.
  • ryanianian 7y ago
    It's pretty easy to understand locals' opposition. More people => more congestion. More housing supply => lower property values (at least at first). It doesn't matter if the housing is on what used to be a parking lot it's still more people and housing supply. (You can argue that NIMBYism is selfish and short-sighted but that doesn't mean it's irrational in the economist sense.)
    • m463 7y ago
      Maybe someone could bore tunnels underground to alleviate traffic problems.
  • deepakhj 7y ago
    If it casts a shadow on a park for 15 minutes, it gets denied! https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/One-housing-project-in-SF-s-SoMa-finds-itself-13751424.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/One-housing-proj...
• scarmig 7y ago
  Google should take a couple billion dollars, build a company town in South Dakota, and simultaneously get a House seat and maybe even some Senators out of it.
• option 7y ago
  A much better solution would be: 1) open more large centers in other states. having a single supercenter with good jobs in one place only is bad for that place and country as a whole 2) encourage and promote remote work
  • pertymcpert 7y ago
    No it's not a better solution, it can help but the you have a ghost town that is the Bay Area it makes sense to make it denser and more like European cities.
    • option 7y ago
      Bay Area is not a ghost town, it is already overcrowded
      • pertymcpert 7y ago
        It is. Walk around Cupertino or Sunnyvale. Everything is so far apart, cars everywhere. You can be the only person walking on a block.
• option 7y ago
  I don’t understand why all the growth need to happen in this place and this place alone. Wouldn’t it be nice if “good” jobs overflow SV and appear in other places? (kind of happening to Austin, Boulder, NY, etc.) And people who already live in the area should absolutely have a right to direct it’s future.
  • s3r3nity 7y ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvoted - it's the argument from NIMBY's that keeps getting pushed aside and needs to be properly addressed if this issue will ever get resolved. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: you don't have to live in California. For $1B, you could probably build enough houses for every single Google employee in a place like Detroit, or most other states (Arizona? Nevada? Colorado? etc. etc.) and then have those employees live there on campus. In fact, with the savings on cost of living and the like, which would mean those workers don't need as high wages, you could probably do the math that this would _save_ you money in the long run. (...then again someone probably _did_ do the math and determined that the investment in these 20k homes, with current market rates increasing at a crazy pace, would probably be a higher return, but I digress.) People can complain about NIMBY's / supply side all they want, but the fact that the demand side (the labor market) refuses to correct itself more strongly (there is _some_ growth in places like Austin, Boulder, Chicago, Boston, etc., but not enough) is bonkers to me. And if I owned a home in the Valley, my incentive would be to never change that market dynamic.
    • ivalm 7y ago
      Why would people move to Detroit for lower salaries to live in Google provided housing? They would just find other jobs in the bay.
      • s3r3nity 7y ago
        Because a rational labor market participant would consider that $1 purchasing power in SF <> $1 purchasing power in [Any other city / state]. Hypothetically if you were planning this as Google you wouldn't make the 1-1 scaling of lower salaries, but if you as employee would pay 80% less rent, could buy a massive home after working for <1 year, and still have more left over than you would ever have working in the bay, the trade-off would at least look somewhat appealing.
• ProAm 7y ago
  > The only solution is changing the zoning laws Or these companies can move. If you take successful STEM related businesses and move them to better area's the talent will follow. There is more than 1 answer to this problem, most people just want to change laws because its easier for them.
  • djakjxnanjak 7y ago
    No way, no how is Google or any other decent employer going to uproot all their knowledge workers and make them unproductive for the foreseeable future by forcing them to move to another region. The diaspora from the Bay Area will keep happening the way it has been: at the economic margins. Over time, people outside of tech who aren’t subsidized by prop 13 or rent control will get priced out. There will be a perpetual underclass living in trailers and garages, and the landed aristocracy will be further entrenched.
    • PaulHoule 7y ago
      It's an interesting question. How much less productive would these workers be if they were moved to Salt Lake City or Henderson, NV or Syracuse, NY? If you lost 20% of the productivity but could pay 30% less that would be OK, wouldn't it?
      • rhinoceraptor 7y ago
        In the long run they'd be as productive (or more, since the commute would likely be better). The problem is it would take months or years to move, and a lot of people don't want to or can't move, so they'd quit and find a new job almost instantly.
        • erik_seaberg 7y ago
          The fact that they can find a new job almost instantly is why they came here in the first place. It would take many competing employers showing up to make another labor market similarly appealing. You'd have to pay me a lot to move to the middle of nowhere, because not only am I not excited about living there, I'm still better off moving back here for the next job.
• ChuckMcM 7y ago
  Personally this class of things really highlights an imbalance for me. Consider that Google runs its own own bus service for employees, and now is building housing for the same. Traditionally, successful businesses in a region paid taxes, and those taxes were used by the local governments to invest in infrastructure like public transport and urban development. So in this regard Google usurps the mandate of the community government in favor of using their excess profits to invest in the community that only benefits them (well peripherally it benefits others as Google employees would otherwise burden city services) What is wrong with that picture is of course that the people without advocates are literally left out in the cold. From the article Google is investing $1B in better housing for their employees and putting $18+3+1.5 ($22.5M toward homelessness which is 2.25% of a billion dollar investment. Contrast that with if Google paid $1B in taxes to the bay area communities where it has facilities, would those governments have the same priorities for those funds?
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • askafriend 7y ago
    I can guarantee you that Bay Area politics would destroy the $1b if you gave it to them.
  • iandanforth 7y ago
    FWIW I think it would be illegal if Google tried to make the housing exclusive to its employees in the same way that the buses are.
    • ChuckMcM 7y ago
      So far in my quick bit of research since this story came up I have not found a law that would prevent it. There are laws about discrimination based on race, religion, Etc. but not about employee / non-employee. I have yet to find either a California law or Sunnyvale city ordinance that would disallow an owner from preferentially selling or leasing a house to someone who was employed by a specific entity, even if that entity was themselves.
• nova22033 7y ago
  >This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018) This nails the root cause of the housing "crisis" in the bay area.
  • khazhou 7y ago
    That's not the only root cause. It is also trivially easy for Google and other BigCo's to hire from outside the Bay Area (college recruits, etc) and those people move here without a plan of where to live. They arrive and set up in a small apartment and soon discover there's no other housing option, but the job is too lucrative and interesting to leave. Another 1000 follow the next week.
• dannykwells 7y ago
  This is awesome. I hope they follow through on actually making this affordable and not only for Google employees (which I agree, would likely be illegal). Pols in the bay area suck. All of them. They are against affordable housing and against families. But, they love money more than they hate families. So way this approach will help and pave the way for the other major companies to do the same.
  • wbronitsky 7y ago
    “Ah yes, all of them. Every politician in a place where millions live is bad, none of them are working to build housing and schools, transit and infrastructure.” That’s a horrible argument that has no basis in fact. Multiple cities, like Mountain View, Oakland, San Jose and Foster City, just to name a few off the top of my head, are putting in affordable housing. Alameda County Transit has vastly expanded their bus fleet, something the tax payers chose on the ballot! You might hate your elected officials, but not all of us do.
• redm 7y ago
  Its a big country with lots of space. Remote work and virtual offices work. Companies should spread out some.
• rndmize 7y ago
  As usual when big tech talks housing, "Bay Area" actually means "Peninsula and west SJ". The other two-thirds of the Bay, bedroom communities and cheaper areas - who cares about those? Perhaps there's something about say, the tri-valley area that makes it unacceptable for office buildings that I don't know? Dublin has doubled in population in the last 20 years. That sounds like an area that is pro-growth, where a company could have a useful impact without getting shot down by NIMBYs every step of the way. I'd dig up stats on the biggest employers in Dublin, but can't seem to find any, so we'll go with Pleasanton as a proxy - Kaiser, Safeway and Oracle. Wew. We got one. Too bad most of tech doesn't even know the East Bay (much less the parts of it past the hills) even exists. There are options to deal with the housing problems, even staying within the bay. Companies simply aren't pursuing them.
  • dver 7y ago
    San Ramon as well. GE digital and SAP are big in Bishop Ranch. Of course there is the Chevron HQ. Many of my neighbors are FANG employed, equally as mystified as to why none of those haven't opened a satellite office here.
• summerlight 7y ago
  There's a bunch of people saying "why not going out of the Bay?" This doesn't work because for most of the foreign workers with H1B visa job security matters more to them. With H1B visa, you gotta find another job in 60 days when there's a trouble with your employer. Otherwise you'll be kicked out. Also note that Chinese and Indian people are typically stuck at H1B for 5~10 years and they're the majority of SWE H1B holders. If you're in the Valley (or at least a big city), the solution is pretty simple; take a day off, go to interviews and get a job. You don't have to move out and will have a good chance to get a job relevant to your career. The same thing doesn't apply to most of the other areas. The risk is so high that it can effectively end your career, those people with H1B just tend to pay more for living in the Bay. So in order to have another big campus out of those big cities, there must be a pre-established, significant SWE ecosystem that can guarantee a level of job opportunity. Unfortunately, this cannot be done by a single company.
  • pacetherace 7y ago
    Exactly and going out of the Bay doesn't solve the Bay Area's problems. It only tries to plug the premise that all the housing problems are happening because of the influx of people into the Bay Area. A lot of people who want better-housing options are millennials who Bay Area or nearby locals or people who have already been living in the Bay for more than 5-10 years.
  • HillaryBriss 7y ago
    > take a day off, go to interviews and get a job. but you can go pretty far in a day. for example, a one day round trip from LA to San Jose, including time for a full work day, is within reach. people do that routinely.
  • koala_man 7y ago
    Do you really think H1Bs are driving this? When I got my H1B, I was significantly more willing to move into a company town in the middle of nowhere. Arguably I did. Instead of New York or London, I moved to some dusty suburb an hour south of SF just because Google's HQ was there. Now that I'm no longer on an H1B, but have a house and wife with a job in the area, I'm way less willing to do anything like that.
• yep_thats_right 7y ago
  As someone who lives in a single-family home, I'm totally for public transit, having fewer cars on the streets, more walkability, etc. But until cities solve the issues of smell and noise, I'm not interested in living in a dense area. Keep it clean and quiet. Invest in urban forestry. Then it starts to look appealing.
  • jefftk 7y ago
    I live in Somerville MA, which is has about 18k people per square mile, compared to the ~2-6k I see in the South Bay. It gets that density through many two and three family houses placed closely together, and it's not smelly or noisy. Here's a representative street view example: https://goo.gl/maps/ggwHETDomuRUQAB89 https://goo.gl/maps/ggwHETDomuRUQAB89 You can be much denser than the Bay Area while still having trees and feeling "residential".
    • shados 7y ago
      > and it's not smelly or noisy Yes, yes it is. Somerville mades me go to NYC when I want a quiet vacation. The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, but the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it. When houses are built in cardboard with no space between the walls and the sidewalk, and someone walks home drunk, you'll get woken up something quick.
      • jefftk 7y ago
        > The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it My experience of Somerville has been very different from yours: I've never been woken up by noise coming in from the street, and I've lived in two very typical wood-frame houses (first a triple-decker in East Somerville, now a two-family near Davis). But it's also worth separating "what should you build a house out of to avoid noise infiltration" and "what sort of neighborhood densities can you have with low levels of ambient outdoor noise".
        • 7y ago
• 40acres 7y ago
  I think Big Tech has enough clout to make a dent in the housing woes of large coastal cities. The cost of moving away from California is too high for Google, using it's political capital to advocate for housing is a great way to force change. NIMBYs are gonna NIMBY, but if half these NIMBYs work for companies that are lobbying for rezoning of land they own and providing grants.. who wins out?
• pier25 7y ago
  So Google plans to spend 50,000 for each home?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• taurath 7y ago
  As a thought experiment, lets say Google owns a significant percentage of the housing market in the areas they operate in. They thereby receive both rent from their own employees, and others in the area. Lets see how this gives them leverage: * Want to fully choke out competition on salaries, while leveraged against it by taking in the rent money those salaries provide for? * Why not invest in housing, when you're the company that is vastly increasing the home values? It seems like you'd end up actually make a killing since you then control the market Maybe someone more clever than I can come up with more things - it feels like a neo company town model, where you don't own everything, but you have all the control and all the levers.
  • aiisjustanif 7y ago
    Welcome to the less extreme version of Seoul.
    • taurath 7y ago
      It feels like a vertical integration ala a Zaibatsu. If they move heavily into education next they'll have control of their own knowledge worker supply chain.
    • gruez 7y ago
      Explain?
  • gniv 7y ago
    Yup, this definitely feels like Company Town 2.0. A gentler version, but still mostly favoring the Company. Might not be bad for the area though.
• all_blue_chucks 7y ago
  Alternative headline: Software company expands into the real estate business.
• gok 7y ago
  > we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing Generally it's not up to the owner of property how it should be re-zoned...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• timwaagh 7y ago
  Google home just took on a whole different meaning
  • judge2020 7y ago
    "Get a free Google home mini for each room in your Google Bay area house!"
• abeppu 7y ago
  They're pitching this as being a benevolent gesture, but (a) It sounds like they're just becoming a larger real-estate developer? They didn't say "we're donating all this land plus some capital to a housing non-profit"; they're going to receive revenue from their investments. Are we supposed to say thanks? (b) How does 20k units compare to their impact on Bay Area housing to date? This is not my area, and I'm not aware of any region that has this requirement, but here's an idea: In the same way that we require large physical development projects to do an environmental impact study, and actively make mitigating affordances (e.g. setting aside land) to offset those impacts .... should employers who intend to hire large numbers of employees from out of the area (sending recruiters to schools across the nation, etc) be required to do housing impact studies, and actively participate in building the housing stock for the new residents they're pulling to an area? How quickly would the Bay Area housing situation change if the ability of tech companies to grow headcount was tied to their ability to proportionally build housing?
  • andromeduck 7y ago
    Haha, having to do onerous amounts of environmental impact studies and various community impact studies/hearings, is exactly why we're in this situation to begin with. We already have plenty of people that want to build, that's not the problem. Problem is local regulation and policies that don't align with regional interests.
  • derekdahmer 7y ago
    You have the right idea but the wrong enemy here. Local governments love adding corporations. They pay taxes while using few resources. So corporate campuses get approved super easily - sometimes even with tax breaks! New housing on the other hand is fought against tooth and nail because it brings new residents that require roads, services, and schools. Worse, if all the land has been used up, it requires larger buildings to be built where there used to be smaller houses and commercial strips which upsets local residents with voting power. Local governments sometimes even make residential developers pay extra taxes or make mandatory donations to the community. It's these local city governments like Palo Alto and Mountain View that allowed Google to massively expand without also allowing developers to build housing to support the employees for that expansion. Hence, why Google is spending its own capital just to get some units built.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  George Carlin had it right. We should turn all golf courses into public housing, and plow up cemeteries for farming.
• gesman 7y ago
  Why don’t allow employees to WFH full time and only come to office as necessary? Why don’t government stimulate and encourage corps who promote full time (not 1 day a week for good behavior) WFH policies? There is absolutely no need for 2/3 of all high tech employees in Bay Area to drag their physical bodies into their statically assigned corporate chairs. Lots of meetings, conf calls and work can be done remotely. That’s the solution that doesn’t require $1B and will take very little to implement and could have REAL impact.
  • foolfoolz 7y ago
    this is already happening and a big part of the problem. when you separate work location from living location, that opens up people to live farther away from work. so you end up with more people living in places with less housing because its "cooler". like san francisco. even though tons of people work at businesses outside the city.
    • camel_Snake 7y ago
      Are you aware of any studies that support this hypothesis? It's an interesting one.
• dev_dull 7y ago
  Eventually people will wake up and realize the Bay Area is the way it is because there’s vested political, financial, and ecological interest in keeping it broken. The reason there’s no affordable low income housing isn’t because that specific type of housing isn’t being built, it’s because they’ve made it nearly impossible to build anything BUT luxury.
• ficklepickle 7y ago
  Google wants to disrupt the inefficient legacy government. You won't even need to vote. They will already know how you feel about the candidates. Much more efficient!
• blograbbit 7y ago
  May I suggest you take a look at this?? https://www.onmoneygrounds.com/target-redcard-credit-card-target-red-credit-card-login-apply-now/ https://www.onmoneygrounds.com/target-redcard-credit-card-ta...
• arghzoo 7y ago
  My friend wrote a really interesting piece on why this is important: https://medium.com/@seandoeshousing/cssr-corporations-shouldering-societys-responsibility-f830fbc87ba1 https://medium.com/@seandoeshousing/cssr-corporations-should...
• thrower123 7y ago
  How are they going to build houses for 50k apiece? You'd be hard-pressed to throw up a trailer park that cheaply.
• pyb 7y ago
  How were they allowed to rezone their land to residential ? Are they getting preferential treatment?
• Apes 7y ago
  I feel like I'm going crazy here: why is absolutely no one talking about the fact that $1B is no where near enough money for 20,000 homes? That's only a budget of $50,000 per home. In an area where the average cost to build a home is over $250,000, they're clearly only investing around 1/5 of the required cost, but seem to be taking the credit for all the work.
• wallacrw 7y ago
  Still a shithole -- https://memes.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/57b0057d-268a-48dd-b4e5-c9ff5d235a45 https://memes.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/57b0057d-268a-48dd-b4e5-c...
• ei8htyfi5e 7y ago
  Are we entering a new age of Feudalism? Corporations will provide housing, food, salary and company stores. This is so incredibly dystopian it's crazy.
• optimuspaul 7y ago
  that billion would be better spent moving their workforce to more hospitable environments.
• realshowbiz 7y ago
  Soo... What’s the catch?
• carapace 7y ago
  > Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse. https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme... However, if the political consensus could be developed there are possibilities, e.g. "Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days" 22 units, four stories, four days. > This new 22-unit project from local developer Patrick Kennedy (Panoramic Interests) is the first in the nation to be constructed of prefabricated all-steel modular units made in China. > Kennedy notes that the cost of trucking to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong. > But the savings haven’t been as great as expected, he said. “Sixty-five to seventy-five-percent of the construction costs are still incurred on the site. In addition to the usual trades, we have crane operators, flagmen, truckers and special inspectors.” https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-complex-for-uc-berkeley-students-built-in-four-days https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl... (Reminds me of Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion House. Factory built prefab homes that were to be delivered by helicopter, installed onto masts built onsite and containing the power/comms/water/sewage hookups.)
• lisper 7y ago
  There are tons of apartments going up in San Carlos and Redwood City.
• m0zg 7y ago
  $1B/20000 is 50K. That's perhaps enough to build an outhouse in SV, or a tool shed, but not a "home".
  • partingshots 7y ago
    I think in this case, this money is not going to be used for building the homes themselves but rather developing the land in partnership with private developers who will then do the actual portion of making buildings.
• bprasanna 7y ago
  Sorry, off the topic. Firefox and Opera browsers report this page as Insecure Connection! "The owner of blog.google has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website."!!
  • what_ever 7y ago
    Looks okay here on FF.
    • bprasanna 7y ago
      Well looks like being in VPN makes the difference! Same error observed in Chrome as well. https://imgur.com/a/cpe12US https://imgur.com/a/cpe12US
• shrimpx 7y ago
  This looping discussion, the same observations raised over and over, with similar responses, threatens to completely kill people's drive to get to the actual issues. Oh it's that same thread about nimbyism and the general hopelessness surrounding bay area politics.
• khazhou 7y ago
  There's a very large area of land directly south of Redwood City with an extremely low housing density, that could be torn down (with some controversy, no doubt) to make way for the new Google housing. You can easily see the underutilized density on the satellite view, by how green it is compared to surrounding cities: https://goo.gl/maps/K3i32Rj4yoQ9gcUD6 https://goo.gl/maps/K3i32Rj4yoQ9gcUD6
  • skoocda 7y ago
    I do wonder if you're joking when you say "some" controversy. A quick check of property values shows that these are estates in the $5M - $20M range: https://www.zillow.com/homes/Atherton-CA_rb/ https://www.zillow.com/homes/Atherton-CA_rb/
    • khazhou 7y ago
      Indeed. To be less facetious about it, there is some irony in this project being promoted by Google executives, who live in chateaus and mansions in Atherton, Los Altos Hills, Woodside, etc, with an acre of land to their name, when this investment is of course to house the labor that got them those mansions to begin with. The execs who sponsor the housing projects obviously won't sell or give up their own land to make room for the new apartments. Random Atherton listing on Trulia: https://www.trulia.com/p/ca/atherton/87-patricia-dr-atherton-ca-94027--2082694121 https://www.trulia.com/p/ca/atherton/87-patricia-dr-atherton...
    • beetwenty 7y ago
      That's the joke - Atherton is the town of the tech billionaires.
• os7borne 7y ago
  Quick Question: Will Google be using this project, once built out, to test all its future "Home" products? Clearly it will have the leverage to do so and will greatly benefit the company over the long term. If so, great strategic thinking.