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Apple Commits $2.5B to Ease California Housing Crunch

170 points by grzm 7y ago

request_id 7y ago
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/11/04/bernie-sanders-slams-apples-2point5-billion-housing-pledge.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/11/04/bernie-sanders-slams-app...
jseliger 7y ago
This is nice but the real problem is legal restrictions that restrict housing supply. https://www.econlib.org/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-highlights https://www.econlib.org/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-highlights
outside1234 7y ago
We don't need more people fueling mortgages (which is only going to make housing MORE expensive for the rest of us). We need more housing supply, which in a lot of cases means we will need more housing density.
KibbutzDalia 7y ago
What we need is more rental housing built. We don’t need to get more people in debt for overpriced housing. And if we built enough housing we wouldn’t need special “low income housing”
lucasyvas 7y ago
Nice to see Apple doing something that is the job of a government. Or they could pay taxes and not have to worry about it.
- briandear 7y ago
  They pay a lot of taxes. But apparently the government in the area is inept.
webwielder2 7y ago
I guess this is part of the post-Reagan civic reality of the US. We've given up on taxation as a means to raise money for the public good. Instead, we must rely on a random patchwork of private enterprises to occasionally improve things for some people.
- rayiner 7y ago
  > We've given up on taxation as a means to raise money for the public good. Have we? California's marginal tax rate is over 50%, higher than many European countries. The Internet suggests that someone making $260,000 (200,000 pounds) will pay about 41.5% of their income in taxes in the U.K. https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php. Using a similar tax calculator for California suggests that they'd pay about 39%. I assume the U.K. is also in a post-Reagan, post-tax world? Must be Reagan. Couldn't be total mismanagement at all levels of California government.
  - bildung 7y ago
    > California's marginal tax rate was over 50%, Is that really true? This official calculator [1] says I'd have to pay only 16k on 200k income. And this source [2] says income tax tops out at 13.3%. [1] = https://webapp.ftb.ca.gov/TaxCalc/Home/Results https://webapp.ftb.ca.gov/TaxCalc/Home/Results [2] = https://www.communitytax.com/state-taxes/california-taxes/ https://www.communitytax.com/state-taxes/california-taxes/
    - shuckles 7y ago
      They mean on top of federal taxes. The right phrasing is probably "The marginal tax rate for a California resident."
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jandrewrogers 7y ago
      That is on top of the Federal tax rate. Americans pay into two separate tax systems. It would be like paying taxes to the EU in addition to your country, which is how the US system works.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
This gives me a bad feeling. On the one hand companies are arguing that their only obligation is shareholder value. How can they square this with spending money on stuff that doesn’t benefit them? More likely this is geared towards benefitting Apple but probably doesn’t do anything to address systemic problems. In the end California needs to build much more housing especially in areas like SV or LA.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  If they're taking advantage of laws for "Opportunity Zones" and such, there are some substantial tax benefits for investing their money this way. It's not gonna have a huge impact on the bottom line for a company like Apple, but it beats having $100 billion just sitting in the bank
cracker_jacks 7y ago
How does creating more demand ease a housing crunch?
magashna 7y ago
$2.5B seems like a drop in the bucket compared to what they should pay in taxes.
- briandear 7y ago
  What should they pay? How much do they pay in local and state taxes now?
  - magashna 7y ago
    https://gizmodo.com/apple-successfully-avoids-50-billion-in-american-taxes-1822189738 https://gizmodo.com/apple-successfully-avoids-50-billion-in-...
selectodude 7y ago
What's ridiculous is there is hundreds of billions of dollars that would love to help ease the housing crunch in California, however due to utterly braindead oppressive zoning regulations, none of it ever gets spent. Apple spending 2.5 billion dollars is meaningless, that money is far better spent on lobbying to fix the underlying cause of the high rents.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  A lot of people don't want to fix the high rents/house prices...
  - rglover 7y ago
    Insert reminder of Charlie Munger's talk on human psychology and incentive caused bias
  - adrr 7y ago
    Baby Boomers are incentivized to keep house pricing high since a lot of their retirement is tied up in the value of the house.
    - meddlepal 7y ago
      Three possible outcomes (with possibility of a blend of all 3 happening): 1. Housing market collapses as boomers realize they need to retire and neither Gen X or Millenials have the money to afford the current stock at their expected price. 2. Alt-outcome #1: Government bails out boomers once #1 occurs (wouldn't surprise me because the Baby Boomer generation is one of the most selfish groups in existence and they actually vote so they tend to be angry, loud, and in control. 3. Alt-outcome #2: Foreign money scoops up all the boomer housing and we have whole new problem.
      - city41 7y ago
        There have been some early signs of #1: https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-vs-baby-boomers-big-houses-real-estate-market-problems-2019-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-vs-baby-boomers-...
Kalium 7y ago
> But it could also be that crisis has gotten so out of control, it can no longer be solved at the local level. We can't do anything. We're helpless! Please rain money on us from DC to spare us having to reform our zoning and permitting processes! All of the policies that drove this mess are local. Which means solving the mess can also be done locally. We're not helpless. We just cosplay as helpless because it means we can avoid discussing the hard changes to popular policies that might be needed. I am so, so sick of seeing this canard given serious credibility.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  > All of the policies that drove this mess are local. Which means solving the mess can also be done locally. Right. But what's a "housing crisis" for society at large is a huge money source for local home owners, who are the demographic setting the local policies. Don't expect them to vote away their source of riches.
  - dev_dull 7y ago
    > huge money source for local home owners, who are the demographic setting the local policies. And why do you think this? A home is one of the least liquid assets one can own. It’s not a huge money source. It’s not even a money source home owners at all.
    - hfern 7y ago
      Because a housing crisis leads to skyrocketing home values. They benefit from increased housing prices. Further, any countering increase in property taxes is dampened by Prop 13. So there is very little reason to sell and cash-in vs just holding on for longer as the problem worsens. When you are a homeowner with an expensive house, you don't want more homes built. That will increase supply and lower price.
      - sjg007 7y ago
        You actually do want more homes built because that will attract more services and the cost of living will go down.
major505 7y ago
A better way would be build a campus in a cheapper place and offer benefits for works to move to this places. Continental US is full of dying cities that need a stead source of income that big companies like Apple, google could supply. In the day and age of remote work and comunication, there`s no more escuses to concentrate resources in places like California, NY, etc.
- basq 7y ago
  Agreed. As someone who has lived in CA all thier life, I'm afraid of leaving, because of lack of opportunity elsewhere, but the cost of living here is absurd. My rent constitutes 75%(!!) of my monthly expenses.
- Ygg2 7y ago
  > In the day and age of remote work and comunication, there`s no more escuses to concentrate resources in places like California, NY, etc. What about infrastructure and clients?
  - major505 7y ago
    Google is providing internet using ballons. My guess is that extending fiber optic networks would be a cheapper option. Infrastructure can always be build, and cities are willing ti give fat tax cut to companies that bring this kind of infra and jobs to it. Lets be honest: is cheapper to build an data center in a more distant citie than spend time, money and energie trying to covince San Francisco buroucrats to change its zonning laws.
    - luckydata 7y ago
      Balloons are a cockamame scheme that never made sense. In the US if you have the need it's always cheaper to just run a cable, in the great scheme of things it's not that hard to do, we have millions of miles of cables everywhere.
    - beambot 7y ago
      > My guess is that extending fiber optic networks Google tried that: Google Fiber. Apparently it wasn't economical. > In October 2016, all expansion plans were put on hold and some jobs were cut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber
BurningFrog 7y ago
> $1 billion to help first-time home buyers find mortgages. Adding more money to the supply while leaving demand frozen will only raise housing prices. I'm sure everyone making this decision already owns a house, and will enjoy the benefits.
- papln 7y ago
  "Yes, the student loan bubble and the first housing bubble and the two stock market bubbles of the past 30 years weren't enough, let's intentionally create another housing bubble."
- dmix 7y ago
  The same people doing nothing to fix the supply problem are pushing small blocks of 'affordable housing' as the only solution, while simultaneously blaming the job/wealth creators for giving people enough money to buy houses. The addition of loans by Apple also seems odd to me. We've seen repeatedly that gov backed 'affordable housing' is not a sufficient solution to supply problems. It's just going to further create a two-tier market, with the lucky few getting 'affordable' houses and everyone else stuck paying millions for tiny houses using gov/company incentivized loans. Not to mention this continues the trend of incentivizing and redirecting increasing amounts of middle class capital into low-value housing instead of into job creation and other net-gain investments.
- jkestner 7y ago
  > Apple’s plan includes making available land it owns in San Jose, Calif., which it said was worth $300 million, for new affordable housing Question the efficacy if you like, but here's how they're addressing the other side.
judge2020 7y ago
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/apple-commits-two-point-five-billion-to-combat-housing-crisis-in-california/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/apple-commits-two-poi...
caseyf7 7y ago
Apple, Google and Facebook should invest on making other areas new tech hubs. Creating more and more jobs in the Bay Area just makes it worse. There are so many talented employees willing to work in other areas.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  > There are so many talented employees willing to work in other areas. Not enough though. I've worked at so many companies that fled the midwest due to lack of a technical talent pool and an inability to attract remote talent, even with generous relocation benefits. The appeal of Silicon Valley, NYC, or Seattle is the abundance of high paying, prestigious tech companies to work for. While it may be cheaper to live in Pittsburgh or Columbus, there's still the issue that you can't find nearly as many comparable jobs in the same market. Currently, if you work for Google in Pittsburgh, you're stuck there unless you're willing to take a paycut. This isn't a problem if you're in Seattle.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    That's why Apple and other companies need to put more than money where their mouth is, and also commit to expanding more resources in those areas and attracting workers to relocate there. It isn't as if there's a dearth of talent where CMU is, and the lower CoL and other expenses are additional benefits for opening up offices there.
    - qaq 7y ago
      They actually do Apple is investing a billion into Austin campus expansion.
  - sudosteph 7y ago
    The problem with Pittsburgh (and the rust belt in general) is that it's still losing population in general. Adding a few tech jobs won't change the fact that it's a generally undesirable place to live (old infra, cold winters, high crime) - so people with the means of relocating will generally do so. Meanwhile, there are plenty of cities in the south that are rapidly gaining population, especially from people with education, and would be excellent places for companies looking to expand. Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, Dallas, Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte are all far cheaper than SV, and are much easier to recruit talent to than Pittsburgh or Columbus.
H8crilA 7y ago
If only there was a trivially simple policy that is nearly guaranteed to work, that has worked everywhere it was tried, like reducing zoning restrictions ... If only the most obvious things were possible, such as building apartment buildings all over the place ...
- pascalxus 7y ago
  We wouldn't want to do that. That might reduce the "character" of the neighborhood. No, it's far better to have homeless camps all over the place with poop lining the streets and people paying 80% of their paycheck for rent/housing than take a chance on reducing "character".
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    If America even had any "character". I'm sorry for being frank but most of the US, in particular outside of big cities but also often in big cities, looks like crap and depression. Neighbourhoods look better in Argentina, Italy and Greece, countries currently in the middle of their own Great Depression. Rows of boring malls and identical houses, no people walking around, parking lots. Everything is built in the cheapest way it could possibly be built, and out of a single template repeated across the country, and yet somehow costs a fortune. Including most of Silicon Valley. You have to go to Connecticut or some other super wealthy place with a bit of history to have some enjoyable neighbourhoods. Also, the reason why for example Spain is so exciting visually is precisely because it mixed styles and influences over time. It's completely natural. Have you seen the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba? It's mind blowing, so cool. There's only one thing that people really want to preserve, and that is the current price of their homes. US government is complicit in running this ridiculous policy of forever home price appreciation, be it via Fannie Mae or the FED or mortgage incentives or zoning restrictions.
    - manthedudeguy 7y ago
      The first time I went to France, I became really overwhelmed by seeing how beautiful every building was. Like, wow, coming from the US I never really stopped to think that there were times and places where people actually cared about making the things around them look nice.
schlu 7y ago
Apple would do themselves a lot of favors by embracing the fact that most technologists don't live in SV. My proposal: - Spend 10X this amount (25 Billion) making a slack competitor. - Dog food it in house. - Launch when you have solved the problem sufficiently. - Make a profit and help solve many local housing problems globally.
- lm28469 7y ago
  Or you can skip the first 3 because apple already makes insane profits anyway and no one needs a 25B message app.
- skyyler 7y ago
  They did this because their employees are feeling the pain of the housing crisis. I'm almost sure of it.
robomartin 7y ago
The only way to fix California's many ailments is to vote and vote out the ideology that has had a firm grip on this State and it's cities for decades. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. They can do anything they want. Pass any law they wish. And things are getting worse, not better. It's as simple as that. Keep voting these people into office from the local to the State level and you will not solve any problems, you'll create more and more. I know so many people, both families and business owners who are planning to leave California. It isn't easy, you can't uproot your life and business just like that. One company where a friend works moved the entire operation to Arizona. Large company. They service multi-million dollar contracts and support hundreds of families with the jobs they create. They had enough and moved camp. Everyone I know from that one company could not be happier with the move. This is not an isolated example. If Californians truly understood the financial state of this State, the abject failure of the government they have supported for so long, they would be horrified. I have done lots of construction in CA, and so have friends and family. It's a nightmare, even for the simplest things. Want to improve housing and the overall economic environment here? Stop voting for the same ideologies that have created and maintained the problems in the first place.
- robomartin 7y ago
  Just thought of this as an interesting add-on to the above. A friend of mine has a company that installs holiday decorations, mostly for large businesses. Think everything from CNN to Disneyland. The other day he was telling me that for years doing any fabrication work on site has had so much red tape that it is incredibly expensive in time and money. If, for example, they have an aluminum rod that needs to be cut a little shorter, they are REQUIRED to get the Fire Department, Fire Marshall, Security and other groups involved. I asked what the theory might be. He said sparks and fire. To which I replied: "Aluminum doesn't spark, even steel won't spark unless you are using a grinder. Even at that, the sparks have virtually no energy and only fly a few inches." It doesn't matter, he said, that's the rules and we have to abide by them or we can't do business. He explained that one of the consequences of this is that the cost of some of these projects is massive. They have to do a ton more planning and work in order to avoid any fabrication work on site. Even worse, because you can't plan everything perfectly, any fabrication requires taking things down, bringing them to the shop and then back to the site. It ends-up being cheaper than getting a small army involved to make a small cut on a a 1/4 inch piece of aluminum rod. This is a drop in the ocean when compared to totality of the California "experience" if you are in business here.
papln 7y ago
Headline is repeating Apple PR. This is a $2B pay-through to landlords, plus a claimed $300M contribution of land.
coolspot 7y ago
What if housing crisis should be approached from other end - controlling population growth. Building more housing just converts beautiful places into ant farms with terrible traffic. Do everyone want their grandkids to live in 100sqf cells like in 5th element? All our major problems are because we got too many people on earth - global warming, plastic contamination, air pollution, food and water availability, etc.
- j8014 7y ago
  Do what ya need to do on the coasts; Destroy personal liberties and freedoms, regulate and outlaw everything, have fun with your social experiments, but please leave me out of it. People tend to be pretty shitty, when your surrounded by millions all on top of each other I guess I can see how you believe its getting close to the end of the world. Your utopia is my hell. I prefer smaller cities, personal vehicles, the outdoors, good schools, the space and freedom where the only thing I really bitch about with the local gov is the road construction and how it takes me a couple more minutes every once in a while to run an errand.
umeshunni 7y ago
Skims the article. Sees no mention of Prop 13. I guess this is just another PR move..
- rcpt 7y ago
  Yes. A $2.5B anti Prop 13 warchest could actually do something about housing prices and quality of life for young families here.
buboard 7y ago
They could make a lot of their employees remote. Literally anything tech-related should be, and apple would set a great example. Why spend even more on what is apparently a bottomless pit? Are workers going to live there, or will the properties be endlessly flipped by all kinds of investors as prices rise ?
novok 7y ago
They should spend $2.5B on lobbyists to remove the restrictive apartment & house building laws in the first place.
moonfern 7y ago
I created this chart which shows change in real house prices in the USA (and Belgium) with 2015=100, from 1970 till 2016 https://data.oecd.org/pinboard/4sxE https://data.oecd.org/pinboard/4sxE Prices doubled,while real income rose 66% in that period. Household size shrunk from 3.14 to 2.53 during that time. Sources: https://www.multpl.com/us-average-real-income https://www.multpl.com/us-average-real-income https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-households-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...
jandrese 7y ago
Is $300M worth of land in San Jose a lot? My guess is that would only amount to a few dozen acres. Will they be building actual dense housing on that land? IMHO California would be better of if the entire $2.5B was spent on high density housing and local support (mass transit connections, food, and retail space).
- kikki 7y ago
  You're right - it's not. In fact the median house price in San Jose is around $1 million. $300m is not going to go far.
  - my_usernam3 7y ago
    Ehhh, as a professional armchair land developer, I'm sure IF they can build upwards with the land it could amount to a lot of new apartments. Just a theory.
- beefalo 7y ago
  If these are single family homes at average prices and average lot sizes in SJ, then it works out to about 35 acres of land
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/FFKDk http://archive.is/FFKDk
- deckar01 7y ago
  They served the full article, the JS is just getting in the way. You can pop the console open and read the text in the article tag. console.log(document.querySelector('article').innerText.replace(/(.{80}\w*)\s*/g, '$1\n'))
Skunkleton 7y ago
Meaningless. How about 1) California figures out some meaningful zoning reform and 2) Apple starts paying its fair share of taxes.
rgbrenner 7y ago
Almost all of the funds will go towards increasing demand by helping people buy homes. It does little to increase supply. So this fund will actually make the housing situation worse overall since it'll increase the competition for the meager supply of housing that's available.
- comex 7y ago
  That's not true. 1.3 billion out of the 2.5 billion is to increase supply: > $1 billion affordable housing investment fund: The $1 billion commitment to the state of California is a first-of-its-kind affordable housing fund that will provide the state and others with an open line of credit to develop and build additional new, very low- to moderate-income housing faster and at a lower cost. > $300 million Apple-owned land will be available for affordable housing: Apple intends to make available land it owns in San Jose worth approximately $300 million for the development of new affordable housing.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  If I remember my supply/demand curves correctly, doesn't moving the demand curve increase the volume?
  - jagannathtech 7y ago
    When the supply is artificially constrained it doesn't.
KorematsuFred 7y ago
Can someone tell me why entire west of interstate 280 is empty and not opened up for housing ? Why is that there are only 3 bridges crossing the bay and not 10 ? It puzzles me why housing of any kind be expensive in bay area. There is like ton of free land there.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Those are the Santa Cruz mountains. They already house many parks, and small residential enclaves. However, In today's wildfire-prone climate, it is extremely unlikely insurers would ever offer policies for residences built there as the mountains are heavily forested and quite rugged.
  - KorematsuFred 7y ago
    Can't those forests be razed and replaced with residential communities ?
solidsnack9000 7y ago
It is so crazy that people continue to blame tech for public policy issues. No one can say what tech did besides make money and spend it that led to the crisis — but successful industries do that everywhere without it leading to a housing crisis. Apple on Monday announced a $2.5 billion plan to help address the housing crisis in California, becoming the latest tech giant in the state to address a problem that it helped cause. Apple makes computers! They don’t write tax laws or run housing associations. Policymakers and older Californians have managed to shift blame to a younger generation of working people.
- amelim 7y ago
  Tech spends money on lobbying local politicians to write favorable public policy. This should be obvious.
  - jdminhbg 7y ago
    If they're spending money lobbying local politicians to write favorable housing policy, they should all be fired for incompetence, because none of it is working.
  - thecosas 7y ago
    More often than not, companies lobby for public policy which is favorable to the company, not necessarily favorable to the employees, neighbors, and communities which they are present in. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2019&id=D000021754 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
  - pembrook 7y ago
    It's in their interest to make housing as cheap as possible so they can pay their employees less to live in the Bay Area. While your statement is true, it makes no sense in the context of this topic.
- andrewxdiamond 7y ago
  The complaints about tech raising costs aren't totally unfounded. Most people will point to the rather absurd salaries that employees of these companies get. These large salaries are affecting inflation in the areas the employees live, driving up the demand for large homes that the typical non-techie could never hope to afford. It's indirect, and it's not fair to lay everything at the feet of the companies, but there are consequences to them growing so quickly. That said, this is a systemic issue that needs to be solved at a higher level, not at the level of individual companies or people.
frandroid 7y ago
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/car-releases-its-2020-california-housing-market-forecast-300924777.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/car-releases-its-20... Home resales forecast for 2020: 393,500 Median forecast price: $608,000 Total resale market size: $235,800,000,000 235 billion dollars. I don't see Apple making much of a difference on their own.
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  Fair enough, but hopefully others follow. There are other "free", or even cost savings, things they could do too. For example, if silicon valley could hire more remote people, that could help relieve some bay area home pricing pressure. I would love to work for Apple to improve their SDK/API documentation, and that probably isn't a job that would require feet on the ground in cupertino to be effective.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    Hell, I would pay you to improve Apple's documentation.
mistrial9 7y ago
How does this plan compare to what Intel and others built in NW Portland area a decade ago? Genentech and a few others moved a lot of operations up there, it seems.
crb002 7y ago
Apple is throwing their money into a REIT essentially. Guessing a lot will be small apartments for their own staff which will save a lot in wage demand.
archie2 7y ago
California will squander this money on literaly nothing like they already do - what a waste.
samstave 7y ago
This was on NPR today, and they glanced at it, but really, the elephant in the room, sitting on top of the housing issue, is fucking transportation. I have turned down no less than FOUR positions in the last few years for one reason: they were in Sunnyvale, and there was no way I would move back to Sunnyvale, and there is no way to commute to Sunnyvale on any semblance of efficient public transportation. Fuck Sunnyvale. But more largely; fuck the state of transportation in silicon valley as a whole. BART is a joke, cal-train is a joke, Amtrak is a joke, buses are a joke. Not everyone is a Tesla driving google employee who could give a shit about how people actually need to move about to make the whole economy work here. If tech companies actually had the best interests of the long term viability of silicon valley in mind, housing is nothing without the ability to get around efficiently. And cars ain't it.
ragona 7y ago
The thing that fascinates me about the narrative around the tech industry is that it’s one of the few where salaries have not been utterly flat since the 70s as adjusted for inflation. We make a lot more than many other workers, but mostly because many industries have gotten away with giving their increased profits to their CEOs and not their workers. Our executives are just as wealthy, but our workers actually make competitive salaries. I wish we could move the conversation towards actually paying average workers much more rather than complaining about how much tech workers are making. My takeaway is that other people should make more, not that we should make less.
- Traster 7y ago
  Is that right? Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos. It seems to me like the average Tech worker is 3-5x higher paid than the average worker. The average tech CEO is 3-5x more valuable than the average CEO. It's not that the trend is different, it's just that tech workers are comfortable enough not to kick up a fuss.
jmpman 7y ago
Is Apple going to increase supply by providing free loans for their workers to build mother in-law apartments on to their houses? Or decrease demand by reducing their workforce in the bay? Or install high speed rail to expand the number of viable commuter cities? If they’re not increasing supply, or decreasing demand, they’re just shuffling money around.
SXX 7y ago
This reminds me how Steve Jobs answered the question about how city residents will benefit from their new campus (2011) [1]. So I honestly don't get why in the US of all countries private company have to solve problem that government supposedly taxes them for. [1] https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=663 https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=663
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Any benefit that's passed out will go through nine hoops of doubt and support an entire agency of people before actually distributed. Any fines however, is administered quickly and efficiently.
- jedberg 7y ago
  It's funny to watch this now. Living in Cupertino, none of those benefits materialized. Only 10% of Apple's workforce lives in Cupertino (thanks in large part to those busses he talked about). Apple barely pays any taxes in the city, because they get a bunch of tax breaks. Their employees do patronize the local restaurants to some extent, but for the most part they eat in their cafeterias. And most importantly, the campus is closed to the public. The original proposal was to make the center of a spaceship a public park, but somehow they managed to get it approved as a private space.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Absolutely appalling.
jedberg 7y ago
If they really cared about this issue, they would start with their own backyard. Apple is currently supporting the plans of a developer in Cupertino who wants to build 3M sq ft of office space for them and then not build enough housing to offset that space. If Apple really cared, they would tell the developer that they won't rent any of that office space unless the development is more housing than office, and use their leverage and clout to make that happen.
- MarkSweep 7y ago
  Beyond that, they should lobby to up-zone the suburbs surrounding the Apple Park.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    Yes, that would be huge too. They have a lot of clout with the Cupertino City Council. They could lobby to have the entire city up zoned! But that might not be in their best interest, because then a lot of local residents would be pissed at them.
- Redoubts 7y ago
  >If Apple really cared, they would tell the developer that they won't rent any of that office space unless the development is more housing than office This is the city's job, and it's the city that is actively pushing the office/housing ratio way out of wack like this.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    > the city that is actively pushing the office/housing ratio way out of wack like this. No it's not. The city is trying to make them build only housing and no office, but they are using SB35 to go around the city. The city has approved a ton of housing but the developers aren't building it because the city won't approve the office space the developers want to go with it. The city is trying to improve the housing ratio and the developers are trying to make it worse. Apple could push the developers to make the housing ratio better if they actually cared.
gbronner 7y ago
Perhaps "The Circle" wasn't that far off...
PHGamer 7y ago
the bay area needs to loosen housing laws and allow more building. Its not really an apple problem (except in the PR/political sense), but a supply and demand problem.
m0zg 7y ago
Easy to solve this problem: just spend this $2.5B on bribes and repeal a bunch of bullshit laws and regulations which enable NIMBYs and don't allow housing to be built. Moreover, there's no other way of solving this problem. I'm not an Apple shareholder, so I don't really care how they spend their money, but if I were, I'd be pissed.
notus 7y ago
Just let your employees be remote and they will go live wherever they feel like.

170 points by grzm 7y ago

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/11/04/bernie-sanders-slams-apples-2point5-billion-housing-pledge.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/11/04/bernie-sanders-slams-app...

jseliger 7y ago

This is nice but the real problem is legal restrictions that restrict housing supply. https://www.econlib.org/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-highlights https://www.econlib.org/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-highlights

outside1234 7y ago

We don't need more people fueling mortgages (which is only going to make housing MORE expensive for the rest of us). We need more housing supply, which in a lot of cases means we will need more housing density.

KibbutzDalia 7y ago

What we need is more rental housing built. We don’t need to get more people in debt for overpriced housing. And if we built enough housing we wouldn’t need special “low income housing”

lucasyvas 7y ago

Nice to see Apple doing something that is the job of a government. Or they could pay taxes and not have to worry about it.

briandear 7y ago
They pay a lot of taxes. But apparently the government in the area is inept.

webwielder2 7y ago

I guess this is part of the post-Reagan civic reality of the US. We've given up on taxation as a means to raise money for the public good. Instead, we must rely on a random patchwork of private enterprises to occasionally improve things for some people.

rayiner 7y ago
> We've given up on taxation as a means to raise money for the public good. Have we? California's marginal tax rate is over 50%, higher than many European countries. The Internet suggests that someone making $260,000 (200,000 pounds) will pay about 41.5% of their income in taxes in the U.K. https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php. Using a similar tax calculator for California suggests that they'd pay about 39%. I assume the U.K. is also in a post-Reagan, post-tax world? Must be Reagan. Couldn't be total mismanagement at all levels of California government.
- bildung 7y ago
  > California's marginal tax rate was over 50%, Is that really true? This official calculator [1] says I'd have to pay only 16k on 200k income. And this source [2] says income tax tops out at 13.3%. [1] = https://webapp.ftb.ca.gov/TaxCalc/Home/Results https://webapp.ftb.ca.gov/TaxCalc/Home/Results [2] = https://www.communitytax.com/state-taxes/california-taxes/ https://www.communitytax.com/state-taxes/california-taxes/
  - shuckles 7y ago
    They mean on top of federal taxes. The right phrasing is probably "The marginal tax rate for a California resident."
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago
    That is on top of the Federal tax rate. Americans pay into two separate tax systems. It would be like paying taxes to the EU in addition to your country, which is how the US system works.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

This gives me a bad feeling. On the one hand companies are arguing that their only obligation is shareholder value. How can they square this with spending money on stuff that doesn’t benefit them? More likely this is geared towards benefitting Apple but probably doesn’t do anything to address systemic problems. In the end California needs to build much more housing especially in areas like SV or LA.

Rebelgecko 7y ago
If they're taking advantage of laws for "Opportunity Zones" and such, there are some substantial tax benefits for investing their money this way. It's not gonna have a huge impact on the bottom line for a company like Apple, but it beats having $100 billion just sitting in the bank

cracker_jacks 7y ago

How does creating more demand ease a housing crunch?

magashna 7y ago

$2.5B seems like a drop in the bucket compared to what they should pay in taxes.

briandear 7y ago
What should they pay? How much do they pay in local and state taxes now?
- magashna 7y ago
  https://gizmodo.com/apple-successfully-avoids-50-billion-in-american-taxes-1822189738 https://gizmodo.com/apple-successfully-avoids-50-billion-in-...

selectodude 7y ago

What's ridiculous is there is hundreds of billions of dollars that would love to help ease the housing crunch in California, however due to utterly braindead oppressive zoning regulations, none of it ever gets spent. Apple spending 2.5 billion dollars is meaningless, that money is far better spent on lobbying to fix the underlying cause of the high rents.

londons_explore 7y ago
A lot of people don't want to fix the high rents/house prices...
- rglover 7y ago
  Insert reminder of Charlie Munger's talk on human psychology and incentive caused bias
- adrr 7y ago
  Baby Boomers are incentivized to keep house pricing high since a lot of their retirement is tied up in the value of the house.
  - meddlepal 7y ago
    Three possible outcomes (with possibility of a blend of all 3 happening): 1. Housing market collapses as boomers realize they need to retire and neither Gen X or Millenials have the money to afford the current stock at their expected price. 2. Alt-outcome #1: Government bails out boomers once #1 occurs (wouldn't surprise me because the Baby Boomer generation is one of the most selfish groups in existence and they actually vote so they tend to be angry, loud, and in control. 3. Alt-outcome #2: Foreign money scoops up all the boomer housing and we have whole new problem.
    - city41 7y ago
      There have been some early signs of #1: https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-vs-baby-boomers-big-houses-real-estate-market-problems-2019-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-vs-baby-boomers-...

Kalium 7y ago

> But it could also be that crisis has gotten so out of control, it can no longer be solved at the local level. We can't do anything. We're helpless! Please rain money on us from DC to spare us having to reform our zoning and permitting processes! All of the policies that drove this mess are local. Which means solving the mess can also be done locally. We're not helpless. We just cosplay as helpless because it means we can avoid discussing the hard changes to popular policies that might be needed. I am so, so sick of seeing this canard given serious credibility.

BurningFrog 7y ago
> All of the policies that drove this mess are local. Which means solving the mess can also be done locally. Right. But what's a "housing crisis" for society at large is a huge money source for local home owners, who are the demographic setting the local policies. Don't expect them to vote away their source of riches.
- dev_dull 7y ago
  > huge money source for local home owners, who are the demographic setting the local policies. And why do you think this? A home is one of the least liquid assets one can own. It’s not a huge money source. It’s not even a money source home owners at all.
  - hfern 7y ago
    Because a housing crisis leads to skyrocketing home values. They benefit from increased housing prices. Further, any countering increase in property taxes is dampened by Prop 13. So there is very little reason to sell and cash-in vs just holding on for longer as the problem worsens. When you are a homeowner with an expensive house, you don't want more homes built. That will increase supply and lower price.
    - sjg007 7y ago
      You actually do want more homes built because that will attract more services and the cost of living will go down.

major505 7y ago

A better way would be build a campus in a cheapper place and offer benefits for works to move to this places. Continental US is full of dying cities that need a stead source of income that big companies like Apple, google could supply. In the day and age of remote work and comunication, there`s no more escuses to concentrate resources in places like California, NY, etc.

basq 7y ago
Agreed. As someone who has lived in CA all thier life, I'm afraid of leaving, because of lack of opportunity elsewhere, but the cost of living here is absurd. My rent constitutes 75%(!!) of my monthly expenses.
Ygg2 7y ago
> In the day and age of remote work and comunication, there`s no more escuses to concentrate resources in places like California, NY, etc. What about infrastructure and clients?
- major505 7y ago
  Google is providing internet using ballons. My guess is that extending fiber optic networks would be a cheapper option. Infrastructure can always be build, and cities are willing ti give fat tax cut to companies that bring this kind of infra and jobs to it. Lets be honest: is cheapper to build an data center in a more distant citie than spend time, money and energie trying to covince San Francisco buroucrats to change its zonning laws.
  - luckydata 7y ago
    Balloons are a cockamame scheme that never made sense. In the US if you have the need it's always cheaper to just run a cable, in the great scheme of things it's not that hard to do, we have millions of miles of cables everywhere.
  - beambot 7y ago
    > My guess is that extending fiber optic networks Google tried that: Google Fiber. Apparently it wasn't economical. > In October 2016, all expansion plans were put on hold and some jobs were cut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber

BurningFrog 7y ago

> $1 billion to help first-time home buyers find mortgages. Adding more money to the supply while leaving demand frozen will only raise housing prices. I'm sure everyone making this decision already owns a house, and will enjoy the benefits.

papln 7y ago
"Yes, the student loan bubble and the first housing bubble and the two stock market bubbles of the past 30 years weren't enough, let's intentionally create another housing bubble."
dmix 7y ago
The same people doing nothing to fix the supply problem are pushing small blocks of 'affordable housing' as the only solution, while simultaneously blaming the job/wealth creators for giving people enough money to buy houses. The addition of loans by Apple also seems odd to me. We've seen repeatedly that gov backed 'affordable housing' is not a sufficient solution to supply problems. It's just going to further create a two-tier market, with the lucky few getting 'affordable' houses and everyone else stuck paying millions for tiny houses using gov/company incentivized loans. Not to mention this continues the trend of incentivizing and redirecting increasing amounts of middle class capital into low-value housing instead of into job creation and other net-gain investments.
jkestner 7y ago
> Apple’s plan includes making available land it owns in San Jose, Calif., which it said was worth $300 million, for new affordable housing Question the efficacy if you like, but here's how they're addressing the other side.

judge2020 7y ago

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/apple-commits-two-point-five-billion-to-combat-housing-crisis-in-california/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/apple-commits-two-poi...

caseyf7 7y ago

Apple, Google and Facebook should invest on making other areas new tech hubs. Creating more and more jobs in the Bay Area just makes it worse. There are so many talented employees willing to work in other areas.

mywittyname 7y ago
> There are so many talented employees willing to work in other areas. Not enough though. I've worked at so many companies that fled the midwest due to lack of a technical talent pool and an inability to attract remote talent, even with generous relocation benefits. The appeal of Silicon Valley, NYC, or Seattle is the abundance of high paying, prestigious tech companies to work for. While it may be cheaper to live in Pittsburgh or Columbus, there's still the issue that you can't find nearly as many comparable jobs in the same market. Currently, if you work for Google in Pittsburgh, you're stuck there unless you're willing to take a paycut. This isn't a problem if you're in Seattle.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  That's why Apple and other companies need to put more than money where their mouth is, and also commit to expanding more resources in those areas and attracting workers to relocate there. It isn't as if there's a dearth of talent where CMU is, and the lower CoL and other expenses are additional benefits for opening up offices there.
  - qaq 7y ago
    They actually do Apple is investing a billion into Austin campus expansion.
- sudosteph 7y ago
  The problem with Pittsburgh (and the rust belt in general) is that it's still losing population in general. Adding a few tech jobs won't change the fact that it's a generally undesirable place to live (old infra, cold winters, high crime) - so people with the means of relocating will generally do so. Meanwhile, there are plenty of cities in the south that are rapidly gaining population, especially from people with education, and would be excellent places for companies looking to expand. Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, Dallas, Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte are all far cheaper than SV, and are much easier to recruit talent to than Pittsburgh or Columbus.

H8crilA 7y ago

If only there was a trivially simple policy that is nearly guaranteed to work, that has worked everywhere it was tried, like reducing zoning restrictions ... If only the most obvious things were possible, such as building apartment buildings all over the place ...

pascalxus 7y ago
We wouldn't want to do that. That might reduce the "character" of the neighborhood. No, it's far better to have homeless camps all over the place with poop lining the streets and people paying 80% of their paycheck for rent/housing than take a chance on reducing "character".
- H8crilA 7y ago
  If America even had any "character". I'm sorry for being frank but most of the US, in particular outside of big cities but also often in big cities, looks like crap and depression. Neighbourhoods look better in Argentina, Italy and Greece, countries currently in the middle of their own Great Depression. Rows of boring malls and identical houses, no people walking around, parking lots. Everything is built in the cheapest way it could possibly be built, and out of a single template repeated across the country, and yet somehow costs a fortune. Including most of Silicon Valley. You have to go to Connecticut or some other super wealthy place with a bit of history to have some enjoyable neighbourhoods. Also, the reason why for example Spain is so exciting visually is precisely because it mixed styles and influences over time. It's completely natural. Have you seen the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba? It's mind blowing, so cool. There's only one thing that people really want to preserve, and that is the current price of their homes. US government is complicit in running this ridiculous policy of forever home price appreciation, be it via Fannie Mae or the FED or mortgage incentives or zoning restrictions.
  - manthedudeguy 7y ago
    The first time I went to France, I became really overwhelmed by seeing how beautiful every building was. Like, wow, coming from the US I never really stopped to think that there were times and places where people actually cared about making the things around them look nice.

schlu 7y ago

Apple would do themselves a lot of favors by embracing the fact that most technologists don't live in SV. My proposal: - Spend 10X this amount (25 Billion) making a slack competitor. - Dog food it in house. - Launch when you have solved the problem sufficiently. - Make a profit and help solve many local housing problems globally.

lm28469 7y ago
Or you can skip the first 3 because apple already makes insane profits anyway and no one needs a 25B message app.
skyyler 7y ago
They did this because their employees are feeling the pain of the housing crisis. I'm almost sure of it.

robomartin 7y ago

The only way to fix California's many ailments is to vote and vote out the ideology that has had a firm grip on this State and it's cities for decades. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. They can do anything they want. Pass any law they wish. And things are getting worse, not better. It's as simple as that. Keep voting these people into office from the local to the State level and you will not solve any problems, you'll create more and more. I know so many people, both families and business owners who are planning to leave California. It isn't easy, you can't uproot your life and business just like that. One company where a friend works moved the entire operation to Arizona. Large company. They service multi-million dollar contracts and support hundreds of families with the jobs they create. They had enough and moved camp. Everyone I know from that one company could not be happier with the move. This is not an isolated example. If Californians truly understood the financial state of this State, the abject failure of the government they have supported for so long, they would be horrified. I have done lots of construction in CA, and so have friends and family. It's a nightmare, even for the simplest things. Want to improve housing and the overall economic environment here? Stop voting for the same ideologies that have created and maintained the problems in the first place.

robomartin 7y ago
Just thought of this as an interesting add-on to the above. A friend of mine has a company that installs holiday decorations, mostly for large businesses. Think everything from CNN to Disneyland. The other day he was telling me that for years doing any fabrication work on site has had so much red tape that it is incredibly expensive in time and money. If, for example, they have an aluminum rod that needs to be cut a little shorter, they are REQUIRED to get the Fire Department, Fire Marshall, Security and other groups involved. I asked what the theory might be. He said sparks and fire. To which I replied: "Aluminum doesn't spark, even steel won't spark unless you are using a grinder. Even at that, the sparks have virtually no energy and only fly a few inches." It doesn't matter, he said, that's the rules and we have to abide by them or we can't do business. He explained that one of the consequences of this is that the cost of some of these projects is massive. They have to do a ton more planning and work in order to avoid any fabrication work on site. Even worse, because you can't plan everything perfectly, any fabrication requires taking things down, bringing them to the shop and then back to the site. It ends-up being cheaper than getting a small army involved to make a small cut on a a 1/4 inch piece of aluminum rod. This is a drop in the ocean when compared to totality of the California "experience" if you are in business here.

papln 7y ago

Headline is repeating Apple PR. This is a $2B pay-through to landlords, plus a claimed $300M contribution of land.

coolspot 7y ago

What if housing crisis should be approached from other end - controlling population growth. Building more housing just converts beautiful places into ant farms with terrible traffic. Do everyone want their grandkids to live in 100sqf cells like in 5th element? All our major problems are because we got too many people on earth - global warming, plastic contamination, air pollution, food and water availability, etc.

j8014 7y ago
Do what ya need to do on the coasts; Destroy personal liberties and freedoms, regulate and outlaw everything, have fun with your social experiments, but please leave me out of it. People tend to be pretty shitty, when your surrounded by millions all on top of each other I guess I can see how you believe its getting close to the end of the world. Your utopia is my hell. I prefer smaller cities, personal vehicles, the outdoors, good schools, the space and freedom where the only thing I really bitch about with the local gov is the road construction and how it takes me a couple more minutes every once in a while to run an errand.

umeshunni 7y ago

Skims the article. Sees no mention of Prop 13. I guess this is just another PR move..

rcpt 7y ago
Yes. A $2.5B anti Prop 13 warchest could actually do something about housing prices and quality of life for young families here.

buboard 7y ago

They could make a lot of their employees remote. Literally anything tech-related should be, and apple would set a great example. Why spend even more on what is apparently a bottomless pit? Are workers going to live there, or will the properties be endlessly flipped by all kinds of investors as prices rise ?

novok 7y ago

They should spend $2.5B on lobbyists to remove the restrictive apartment & house building laws in the first place.

moonfern 7y ago

I created this chart which shows change in real house prices in the USA (and Belgium) with 2015=100, from 1970 till 2016 https://data.oecd.org/pinboard/4sxE https://data.oecd.org/pinboard/4sxE Prices doubled,while real income rose 66% in that period. Household size shrunk from 3.14 to 2.53 during that time. Sources: https://www.multpl.com/us-average-real-income https://www.multpl.com/us-average-real-income https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-households-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...

jandrese 7y ago

Is $300M worth of land in San Jose a lot? My guess is that would only amount to a few dozen acres. Will they be building actual dense housing on that land? IMHO California would be better of if the entire $2.5B was spent on high density housing and local support (mass transit connections, food, and retail space).

kikki 7y ago
You're right - it's not. In fact the median house price in San Jose is around $1 million. $300m is not going to go far.
- my_usernam3 7y ago
  Ehhh, as a professional armchair land developer, I'm sure IF they can build upwards with the land it could amount to a lot of new apartments. Just a theory.
beefalo 7y ago
If these are single family homes at average prices and average lot sizes in SJ, then it works out to about 35 acres of land

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/FFKDk http://archive.is/FFKDk

deckar01 7y ago
They served the full article, the JS is just getting in the way. You can pop the console open and read the text in the article tag. console.log(document.querySelector('article').innerText.replace(/(.{80}\w*)\s*/g, '$1\n'))

Skunkleton 7y ago

Meaningless. How about 1) California figures out some meaningful zoning reform and 2) Apple starts paying its fair share of taxes.

rgbrenner 7y ago

Almost all of the funds will go towards increasing demand by helping people buy homes. It does little to increase supply. So this fund will actually make the housing situation worse overall since it'll increase the competition for the meager supply of housing that's available.

comex 7y ago
That's not true. 1.3 billion out of the 2.5 billion is to increase supply: > $1 billion affordable housing investment fund: The $1 billion commitment to the state of California is a first-of-its-kind affordable housing fund that will provide the state and others with an open line of credit to develop and build additional new, very low- to moderate-income housing faster and at a lower cost. > $300 million Apple-owned land will be available for affordable housing: Apple intends to make available land it owns in San Jose worth approximately $300 million for the development of new affordable housing.
paulddraper 7y ago
If I remember my supply/demand curves correctly, doesn't moving the demand curve increase the volume?
- jagannathtech 7y ago
  When the supply is artificially constrained it doesn't.

KorematsuFred 7y ago

Can someone tell me why entire west of interstate 280 is empty and not opened up for housing ? Why is that there are only 3 bridges crossing the bay and not 10 ? It puzzles me why housing of any kind be expensive in bay area. There is like ton of free land there.

gamblor956 7y ago
Those are the Santa Cruz mountains. They already house many parks, and small residential enclaves. However, In today's wildfire-prone climate, it is extremely unlikely insurers would ever offer policies for residences built there as the mountains are heavily forested and quite rugged.
- KorematsuFred 7y ago
  Can't those forests be razed and replaced with residential communities ?

solidsnack9000 7y ago

It is so crazy that people continue to blame tech for public policy issues. No one can say what tech did besides make money and spend it that led to the crisis — but successful industries do that everywhere without it leading to a housing crisis. Apple on Monday announced a $2.5 billion plan to help address the housing crisis in California, becoming the latest tech giant in the state to address a problem that it helped cause. Apple makes computers! They don’t write tax laws or run housing associations. Policymakers and older Californians have managed to shift blame to a younger generation of working people.

amelim 7y ago
Tech spends money on lobbying local politicians to write favorable public policy. This should be obvious.
- jdminhbg 7y ago
  If they're spending money lobbying local politicians to write favorable housing policy, they should all be fired for incompetence, because none of it is working.
- thecosas 7y ago
  More often than not, companies lobby for public policy which is favorable to the company, not necessarily favorable to the employees, neighbors, and communities which they are present in. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2019&id=D000021754 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
- pembrook 7y ago
  It's in their interest to make housing as cheap as possible so they can pay their employees less to live in the Bay Area. While your statement is true, it makes no sense in the context of this topic.
andrewxdiamond 7y ago
The complaints about tech raising costs aren't totally unfounded. Most people will point to the rather absurd salaries that employees of these companies get. These large salaries are affecting inflation in the areas the employees live, driving up the demand for large homes that the typical non-techie could never hope to afford. It's indirect, and it's not fair to lay everything at the feet of the companies, but there are consequences to them growing so quickly. That said, this is a systemic issue that needs to be solved at a higher level, not at the level of individual companies or people.

frandroid 7y ago

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/car-releases-its-2020-california-housing-market-forecast-300924777.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/car-releases-its-20... Home resales forecast for 2020: 393,500 Median forecast price: $608,000 Total resale market size: $235,800,000,000 235 billion dollars. I don't see Apple making much of a difference on their own.

bonestamp2 7y ago
Fair enough, but hopefully others follow. There are other "free", or even cost savings, things they could do too. For example, if silicon valley could hire more remote people, that could help relieve some bay area home pricing pressure. I would love to work for Apple to improve their SDK/API documentation, and that probably isn't a job that would require feet on the ground in cupertino to be effective.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Hell, I would pay you to improve Apple's documentation.

mistrial9 7y ago

How does this plan compare to what Intel and others built in NW Portland area a decade ago? Genentech and a few others moved a lot of operations up there, it seems.

crb002 7y ago

Apple is throwing their money into a REIT essentially. Guessing a lot will be small apartments for their own staff which will save a lot in wage demand.

archie2 7y ago

California will squander this money on literaly nothing like they already do - what a waste.

samstave 7y ago

This was on NPR today, and they glanced at it, but really, the elephant in the room, sitting on top of the housing issue, is fucking transportation. I have turned down no less than FOUR positions in the last few years for one reason: they were in Sunnyvale, and there was no way I would move back to Sunnyvale, and there is no way to commute to Sunnyvale on any semblance of efficient public transportation. Fuck Sunnyvale. But more largely; fuck the state of transportation in silicon valley as a whole. BART is a joke, cal-train is a joke, Amtrak is a joke, buses are a joke. Not everyone is a Tesla driving google employee who could give a shit about how people actually need to move about to make the whole economy work here. If tech companies actually had the best interests of the long term viability of silicon valley in mind, housing is nothing without the ability to get around efficiently. And cars ain't it.

ragona 7y ago

The thing that fascinates me about the narrative around the tech industry is that it’s one of the few where salaries have not been utterly flat since the 70s as adjusted for inflation. We make a lot more than many other workers, but mostly because many industries have gotten away with giving their increased profits to their CEOs and not their workers. Our executives are just as wealthy, but our workers actually make competitive salaries. I wish we could move the conversation towards actually paying average workers much more rather than complaining about how much tech workers are making. My takeaway is that other people should make more, not that we should make less.

Traster 7y ago
Is that right? Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos. It seems to me like the average Tech worker is 3-5x higher paid than the average worker. The average tech CEO is 3-5x more valuable than the average CEO. It's not that the trend is different, it's just that tech workers are comfortable enough not to kick up a fuss.

jmpman 7y ago

Is Apple going to increase supply by providing free loans for their workers to build mother in-law apartments on to their houses? Or decrease demand by reducing their workforce in the bay? Or install high speed rail to expand the number of viable commuter cities? If they’re not increasing supply, or decreasing demand, they’re just shuffling money around.

SXX 7y ago

This reminds me how Steve Jobs answered the question about how city residents will benefit from their new campus (2011) [1]. So I honestly don't get why in the US of all countries private company have to solve problem that government supposedly taxes them for. [1] https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=663 https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=663

Aperocky 7y ago
Any benefit that's passed out will go through nine hoops of doubt and support an entire agency of people before actually distributed. Any fines however, is administered quickly and efficiently.
jedberg 7y ago
It's funny to watch this now. Living in Cupertino, none of those benefits materialized. Only 10% of Apple's workforce lives in Cupertino (thanks in large part to those busses he talked about). Apple barely pays any taxes in the city, because they get a bunch of tax breaks. Their employees do patronize the local restaurants to some extent, but for the most part they eat in their cafeterias. And most importantly, the campus is closed to the public. The original proposal was to make the center of a spaceship a public park, but somehow they managed to get it approved as a private space.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Absolutely appalling.

jedberg 7y ago

If they really cared about this issue, they would start with their own backyard. Apple is currently supporting the plans of a developer in Cupertino who wants to build 3M sq ft of office space for them and then not build enough housing to offset that space. If Apple really cared, they would tell the developer that they won't rent any of that office space unless the development is more housing than office, and use their leverage and clout to make that happen.

MarkSweep 7y ago
Beyond that, they should lobby to up-zone the suburbs surrounding the Apple Park.
- jedberg 7y ago
  Yes, that would be huge too. They have a lot of clout with the Cupertino City Council. They could lobby to have the entire city up zoned! But that might not be in their best interest, because then a lot of local residents would be pissed at them.
Redoubts 7y ago
>If Apple really cared, they would tell the developer that they won't rent any of that office space unless the development is more housing than office This is the city's job, and it's the city that is actively pushing the office/housing ratio way out of wack like this.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > the city that is actively pushing the office/housing ratio way out of wack like this. No it's not. The city is trying to make them build only housing and no office, but they are using SB35 to go around the city. The city has approved a ton of housing but the developers aren't building it because the city won't approve the office space the developers want to go with it. The city is trying to improve the housing ratio and the developers are trying to make it worse. Apple could push the developers to make the housing ratio better if they actually cared.

gbronner 7y ago

Perhaps "The Circle" wasn't that far off...

PHGamer 7y ago

the bay area needs to loosen housing laws and allow more building. Its not really an apple problem (except in the PR/political sense), but a supply and demand problem.

m0zg 7y ago

Easy to solve this problem: just spend this $2.5B on bribes and repeal a bunch of bullshit laws and regulations which enable NIMBYs and don't allow housing to be built. Moreover, there's no other way of solving this problem. I'm not an Apple shareholder, so I don't really care how they spend their money, but if I were, I'd be pissed.

notus 7y ago

Just let your employees be remote and they will go live wherever they feel like.