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See also: Friday's “Don’t Blame Tech Bros for the Housing Crisis” column: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/housing-crisis-silicon-valley.html

by raldi 7y ago

See also: Friday's “Don’t Blame Tech Bros for the Housing Crisis” column: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/housing-crisis-silicon-valley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/housing-cr...

arcticbull 7y ago
If they spent that $4.5B on lobbying for upzoining and densification the problem would likely sort itself out. Probably for a fraction of the cost.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  If we divided that 4.5B by the number of tech workers, where would we be at? If there are 100,000 tech workers in the Bay Area, that'd be around $45,000 per person of lobbying for affordable housing. If those tech workers saved $500 per month, they would earn back what their companies spent on them in 90 months, or 7.5 years. Assumption, I don't know how many tech workers there truly are.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    >100,000 tech workers in Bay Area Seems pretty low of an estimate tbh. Just for scale, Google has around 45k employees in Bay Area alone. I realize that not every single one of them is an engineer. But even if just 30k of them are (completely ballpark guessing here), it seems pretty implausible that every 3rd engineer in bay area is a googler. Just did some googling, and according to this source[0], there are about 624k software developers in CA. I realize that it includes not only Bay Area, obviously, but I am willing to reasonably bet that a heavy majority of the developers are there, with a notable chunk in LA as well, something on the order of 116k. To be more specific about how I arrived to that estimate, I checked StackOverflow Jobs portal, to see how many job openings there are in LA vs Bay Area, assuming that the number of job openings proportionally correlates (positively) with actual people working in said jobs. LA had 118 openings [1], while Bay area had 518 [2]. 624,000/(518+118)*118 ~= 116,000. Yes, it is napkin level of statistics, but that's the best estimate I could think of. 0. https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software-developers-world https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software... 1. https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=Los+Angeles%2C+CA%2C+USA&d=20&u=Miles https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=Los+Angeles%2C+CA%2C+USA&d=... 2. https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=bay+area&d=20&u=Miles https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=bay+area&d=20&u=Miles
  - ThrustVectoring 7y ago
    The number I heard was that tech was somewhat less than 10% of the employment of the Bay Area. This includes non-programmers and non-engineers working in tech companies, too, and is a broadly constructed number.
MarketRateSucks 7y ago
Real galaxy brain take there. “Housing prices have always fluctuated, therefore these fluctuations are unrelated to this other highly correlated factor”. Not that I disagree much with the substance of pointing out Prop 13, etc, but you should also definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area.
- knolax 7y ago
  Sounds like the rhetoric against anthropogenic climate change.
- raldi 7y ago
  Traditionally, metro areas would have not just one, but many industries (e.g., NYC with banking, fashion, journalism, law, or Tokyo which is the capital of most of Japan's industries, and the national capital too), but they would also allow housing to be built, and that did indeed avoid the kinds of housing crisis we're seeing in cities today that are practicing exclusionary zoning.
- helen___keller 7y ago
  > definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area Supply and demand gonna supply and demand. It's weird to "blame tech" for existing and injecting a massive amount of jobs into our economy; there's no metro region that could have handled that growth without the same effect on price, and there is no singular entity responsible for concentrating tech into a single city instead of distributed more evenly. Maybe Houston could have come close to handling it without massive price increases, but I'm guessing Houston is too spread out to enjoy strong network effects, and probably would have become gridlocked with traffic to boot. New York could have "handled" it, from a raw housing & transit perspective, but the region is already pricy and all of Manhattan (which has the best access to jobs and transit across the metropolitan region) has long since gentrified, so I don't know if that really counts. (Of course, part of the reason no region could have handled it is precisely because of how Americans approach zoning and growth. Like our politics, our cities and neighborhoods seem to be static until there's an absolutely overwhelming force against the status quo, and even then sometimes that's not enough to change anything)

by raldi 7y ago

arcticbull 7y ago

If they spent that $4.5B on lobbying for upzoining and densification the problem would likely sort itself out. Probably for a fraction of the cost.

WhompingWindows 7y ago
If we divided that 4.5B by the number of tech workers, where would we be at? If there are 100,000 tech workers in the Bay Area, that'd be around $45,000 per person of lobbying for affordable housing. If those tech workers saved $500 per month, they would earn back what their companies spent on them in 90 months, or 7.5 years. Assumption, I don't know how many tech workers there truly are.
- filoleg 7y ago
  >100,000 tech workers in Bay Area Seems pretty low of an estimate tbh. Just for scale, Google has around 45k employees in Bay Area alone. I realize that not every single one of them is an engineer. But even if just 30k of them are (completely ballpark guessing here), it seems pretty implausible that every 3rd engineer in bay area is a googler. Just did some googling, and according to this source[0], there are about 624k software developers in CA. I realize that it includes not only Bay Area, obviously, but I am willing to reasonably bet that a heavy majority of the developers are there, with a notable chunk in LA as well, something on the order of 116k. To be more specific about how I arrived to that estimate, I checked StackOverflow Jobs portal, to see how many job openings there are in LA vs Bay Area, assuming that the number of job openings proportionally correlates (positively) with actual people working in said jobs. LA had 118 openings [1], while Bay area had 518 [2]. 624,000/(518+118)*118 ~= 116,000. Yes, it is napkin level of statistics, but that's the best estimate I could think of. 0. https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software-developers-world https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software... 1. https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=Los+Angeles%2C+CA%2C+USA&d=20&u=Miles https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=Los+Angeles%2C+CA%2C+USA&d=... 2. https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=bay+area&d=20&u=Miles https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=bay+area&d=20&u=Miles
- ThrustVectoring 7y ago
  The number I heard was that tech was somewhat less than 10% of the employment of the Bay Area. This includes non-programmers and non-engineers working in tech companies, too, and is a broadly constructed number.

MarketRateSucks 7y ago

Real galaxy brain take there. “Housing prices have always fluctuated, therefore these fluctuations are unrelated to this other highly correlated factor”. Not that I disagree much with the substance of pointing out Prop 13, etc, but you should also definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area.

knolax 7y ago
Sounds like the rhetoric against anthropogenic climate change.
raldi 7y ago
Traditionally, metro areas would have not just one, but many industries (e.g., NYC with banking, fashion, journalism, law, or Tokyo which is the capital of most of Japan's industries, and the national capital too), but they would also allow housing to be built, and that did indeed avoid the kinds of housing crisis we're seeing in cities today that are practicing exclusionary zoning.
helen___keller 7y ago
> definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area Supply and demand gonna supply and demand. It's weird to "blame tech" for existing and injecting a massive amount of jobs into our economy; there's no metro region that could have handled that growth without the same effect on price, and there is no singular entity responsible for concentrating tech into a single city instead of distributed more evenly. Maybe Houston could have come close to handling it without massive price increases, but I'm guessing Houston is too spread out to enjoy strong network effects, and probably would have become gridlocked with traffic to boot. New York could have "handled" it, from a raw housing & transit perspective, but the region is already pricy and all of Manhattan (which has the best access to jobs and transit across the metropolitan region) has long since gentrified, so I don't know if that really counts. (Of course, part of the reason no region could have handled it is precisely because of how Americans approach zoning and growth. Like our politics, our cities and neighborhoods seem to be static until there's an absolutely overwhelming force against the status quo, and even then sometimes that's not enough to change anything)