11 ms·

Approaches to providing affordable housing for non-profit workers

58 points by panic 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
matchbok 6y ago
Another attempt that doesn't address the real issues: rent is too high and/or wages are too low. In-demand locations are always going to be expensive. The minute you start providing "special" apartments to a certain group of people you introduce tons of other (negative) issues. That person is basically locked into that apartment and can never move. Any issues with quality or landlord disagreements will be tilted towards the owner, because they know the renter will never leave. The whole thing is a mess.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  Well, in author's defense: > Of all the approaches, the one working the best is #7: Remote Work. Get good at it, and we won’t have the housing stresses of San Francisco. which makes perfect sense to me. Or just move out of SF altogether - et voila.
- acomjean 6y ago
  Housing is a society issue. income inequality and turning housing into business with rent seekers, seeking high returns. hard to fix piecemeal. One wonders if the current pandemic can cause a change.
  - mc32 6y ago
    It is but there isn’t a good fix that satisfies everyone. Even the USSR had private apartments for people who didn’t want to live in multi-family per apartment arrangements (communal apartments). Obviously not everyone could afford private apartments —very few could, buy they existed because even with all the resources of a top down bureaucracy they could not meet the needs of the people.
    - vkou 6y ago
      The USSR always had a shortage of apartments, because of its inability to affordably hammer raw materials together into housing. It had no problems with parceling land into housing, though. The USA has no problem hammering raw materials into houses, but it has a shortage of apartments because of its inability to affordably parcel out land into housing. You need to be good at both, in order for housing to be affordable. However, it should be noted that affordable housing is not the goal of at least half the country - because that half of the country own houses (or mortgages for houses), and housing becoming affordable would financially destroy them. So, in that sense, everything is working by design, and things will never change, if the government can help it.
    - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
      An important thing about USSR, which people often forget about, is there was no free movement. Oversimplifying things a bit, you could only relocate when you're changing jobs and your new employer must have a special permission to hire workers from outside their region. Very similar to H1B quotas.
      - mc32 6y ago
        It’s the same in China today. They have the Hukou system. This is your family registration system and you need special permission to register somewhere new. Your benefits as a citizen are tied to this. If you move to a city without approval, you work illegally and are not entitled to housing or educational facilities (which is why parents who’ve moved illegally need to send their kids to illegal schools). The local government also can go raid these places from time to time depending on what quotas they need to align with. So kind of sort of of like the four belt system in the USSR which limited internal movement and required internal passports.
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    Greedy renters is not the reason here: in the original article the author considered building a house for workers on the company land. But that turned out to be too expensive. Building houses and maintaining them in livable condition is not that cheap.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - maxsilver 6y ago
      > Building houses and maintaining them in livable condition is not that cheap I don't really understand this. Building and maintaining houses (especially single-family houses) is really cheap. (We're talking like ~$600/month or so for a large 4-bedroom home). The expense in housing is primarily financial shenanigans and land monopolization, with some property taxes on top. Actually building and maintaining a house (construction + maintenance costs) is way less than 50% of the total cost.
      - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
        Please see the original article where the author explicitly complains that cost of building their own house is too high.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        > I don't really understand this. Building and maintaining houses (especially single-family houses) is really cheap. (We're talking like ~$600/month or so for a large 4-bedroom home). Not in SF, that's the issue.
- jseliger 6y ago
  In-demand locations are always going to be expensive They need not be nearly so expensive as they are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501
justinzollars 6y ago
I was admiring Sutro tower on my morning walk, and realized if we tried to build Sutro tower today it could never happen. We couldn't build another bridge, tunnel, or anything. Imagine the laughs if you proposed another bay crossing. It's been made impossible to change or develop San Francisco. I don't think the future is here anymore.
- vkou 6y ago
  That's the natural consequence of the value of land eclipsing the value of the economic activity generated by that land. It makes doing anything with land that ruffles anyone's feathers a nightmare. In no sane universe should a house cost millions of dollars - multiple decades of a person's labour. Yet, thanks to easy access to credit, and bad property tax policy, here we are.
- carapace 6y ago
  > We couldn't build another bridge, tunnel, or anything. We just built a bridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco–Oakland_Bay_Bridge#Eastern_section_replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco–Oakland_Bay_Brid... And dug a tunnel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway
  - justinzollars 6y ago
    The bridge was a replacement, and the tunnel is a decade late and still not complete. Both are way over budget. China build 16,000 miles of fully connected high speed rail in the same period of time. I'm going to stand by my statement that the future is not in San Francisco.
    - jordonwii 6y ago
      > I'm going to stand by my statement that the future is not in San Francisco I don't see why this follows. :) SF is a beautiful and diverse city and a hub for (at least one) of the biggest and most innovative industries in the world. This is often true in spite of the Bay area's government, but imo that's the good news: government is fixable. Rather than giving up I try to channel my frustration into volunteering and donating to groups that are working on these problems: YIMBY Action (yimbyaction.org) has clubs throughout the Bay Area that advocate for easing restrictions on building housing and transit, operating small businesses, etc; Seamless (seamlessbayarea.org) also works on improving transit governance throughout the Bay Area.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> This was the kicker: 30-60% of their income went to rent. Is this much different from people with mortgages, especially when they first purchase a home?
- frockington1 6y ago
  I just bout my first house a year ago. Mortgage is around 22% of take home income. Granted I never asked what mortgage I was approved for and can guarantee you it would have been at least double what I purchased
  - nerdface 6y ago
    Where did you buy though? Bay Area has incredibly high prices.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- smileysteve 6y ago
  Most financial advice and even some loan approval is based on only 25% of income going towards housing.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  If you buy a house, this situation is hopefully only temporary. If you rent, this will just keep going or get even worse.
supernova87a 6y ago
I'm sympathetic to this particular cause but not to the solutions a non-profit in SF like them would probably propose. (because generally a story like this is here for the lessons to be taken by others, not for their particular situation to be solved) What we need is less picking and choosing who is to receive specific housing, and setting aside of property or units for them. Because all that picking and choosing by well-intentioned (but bad overall outcome producing) people is exactly what's creating the problem. Everyone who has a special interest in preserving <x> or helping group <y> puts in their request to their San Francisco supervisor, solving their little corner of concern but making it worse for everyone else. One by one all the little barriers (unaware of what the other hands are doing) get erected to make it impossible to do anything productive for housing. We need planning at a city strategy level, that admits that San Francisco cannot stay the way it has for decades, protecting the landlords and people who've lived there for 30 years from any kind of change. The tax situation is a given constraint, and we're not going to change that anytime soon barring a miracle, so the thing that has to be compromised is "neighborhood character" (whatever that means as a cover for not letting people live near you) or housing density and your spoiled view of the bay / Muni wires. Specify what outcomes you want to achieve, and let the rules be updated to make that happen. Otherwise we will continue to be in a world where the external factors flooding in (lack of local leadership, jobs creation without housing creation, corporate money) will be making the decisions for us without us realizing it -- and a lot of unhappy people who want to live here but can't, or have been displaced from their housing. My desired outcomes: -- Affordable prices of the general rental and house purchase market (not "affordable housing") -- Owners who actually live in their housing, and are not absentee landlords -- Renewal of the creative, productive population and not creating of a rich / retired class that occupies all the housing -- Good transport and home-work districts, and the attraction of small businesses -- Ability of homeowners (and renters if desired) to easily and cheaply improve their properties and change the look and feel of their neighborhood for better/newer I am not in favor of soft arguments that are disguised attempts to regulate who is allowed to live in a place according to some particular interest's judgment: -- neighborhood character, density -- equity-related arguments -- "I got here first"-related arguments -- what is "fair" You will find that if you set up reasonable rules, the communities that emerge will be just as interesting, good, and pleasant places to live as before. They may not look the same, and may not be what you thought, and that may make some people unhappy. But it's what's best for a city.
yonran 6y ago
The housing supply has been very inelastic in the Bay Area. And every business and individual who wants to be here starts out life short on housing. So I would group his approaches to staying in the Bay Area into three main categories: #1, #6: Cover the short by hoarding enough of the fixed amount of housing for yourself and taking that out of the market. #2, #3, #4: Help employees cover their short. I think it is smart that of him to try to do so in a targeted way to help new employees with downpayment and loans rather than ratcheting up everyone’s salary. #5: Build more housing. This is the positive sum approach. I wish he elaborated on this because there are many roadblocks to San Francisco’s failure to convert high incomes into more housing (zoning restrictions, slow entitlement process, high fees, high construction labor costs), and it would help for more leaders to be part of the conversation on how to solve these problems for everyone, not just for his own nonprofit.
- pascalxus 6y ago
  concerning point #5, the voting public is beyond greedy. they'll sue the sh out of any builder that wants to build anything, and there's soo many zoning laws and so many restrictions and taxes. At the end of the day, people who don't have houses yet end up paying for all this. I think Remote work is by far the best option. If you can live in a lower cost city like Houston, TX or Chicago, it's a great way to go. Places like CA are so far beyond repair, there's no more hope, at all.
  - xvedejas 6y ago
    So long as companies pay proportionally less when you work from a lower cost-of-living place, as most seem to do, it's not going to become especially popular to work from a cheaper location. And why should they -- being able to work remotely is something workers want, and companies have the perfect information of your permanent address; supply and demand dictates companies will continue to be able to get away with this kind of policy. If it works the other way around, and companies will pay more when you move to a more expensive area, I expect California to become _more_ popular, not less.
    - 6y ago
rayiner 6y ago
We are having some important conversations about equality these days, so I think it’s worth bringing up this point. The notion of subsidizing housing for non-profit workers is concerning. While many non-profits deal with problems like homelessness that overwhelmingly victimize people of color, non-profit workers themselves are overwhelmingly white. Much more so than the workforce as a whole: https://communitywealth.com/the-state-of-diversity-in-the-nonprofit-sector https://communitywealth.com/the-state-of-diversity-in-the-no.... Moreover a large fraction of revenues (for example, 65% for “human services” non-profits) comes from the government, so it’s taxpayer dollars that are paying for people to live in San Francisco and would be paying to subsidize their housing. This is one reason why people are interested in things like UBI. It seems perverse for the government to use taxpayer dollars to say combat homelessness in San Francisco (the supermajority of whom are black, Hispanic, or multi-racial) only to have much of that money go to paying salaries for mostly white college educated people. Of course, non-profit workers of all ethnic backgrounds can be tremendous value-adds. But when we’re considering whether we want to subsidize housing for those workers, it’s worth stepping back for a moment. There is a lot of money on the line: even excluding universities and hospitals, non-profits spend $750 billion annually, more than the US military. When taxpayers spend money out of a desire to help certain groups of people—especially now that we are becoming more aware of the disproportionate impact of things like homelessness on certain groups—we should strive to make sure that the money helps the people taxpayers think they are helping.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > Moreover 80% of non-profit funding comes from the government, so it’s taxpayer dollars that are paying for people to live in San Francisco. Really? This astounds me! I would have thought the vast vast majority of non-profit funding would be companies funding non-profit industry publicity bodies and standards bodies and similar.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Apparently the 80% number includes hospitals and fee-for-service revenues (think Medicare or Medicaid) which isn’t quite what I’m getting at. I’ve edited the able to refer to the 65% of government funding for “human services” non-profits as reported here: https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/sites/default/files/documents/Full%20Report.pdf https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/sites/default/files/docu...
chaostheory 6y ago
I feel remote work is the most viable solution that was listed. It works around the problem of limited housing inventory. In addition, it helps the environment.
- nutshell89 6y ago
  When talking about the environment, I think it's useful to think about what remote work would mean at scale. Non-profits in SF often work directly with vulnerable populations, take Larkin Street Youth Services, for example. their mission directly involves interacting with homeless youth on the streets. San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is basically a giant warehouse in SF. Even if you do have no-profit work that can be done over Slack or Zoom, these are still people who'll commute to the beauty parlour, buy groceries at the farmers market, or visit the museum during the weekend - so there are still excess car trips while living in the suburbs versus the Sunset District.
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    Any reduction in the commute is a net positive for traffic, the environment, and even productivity. > Non-profits in SF often work directly with vulnerable populations, take Larkin Street Youth Services, for example. their mission directly involves interacting with homeless youth on the streets. San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is basically a giant warehouse in SF. Sure, not everyone can work remotely. However, even they will benefit from the reduced traffic and commute times. > Even if you do have no-profit work that can be done over Slack or Zoom, these are still people who'll commute to the beauty parlour, buy groceries at the farmers market, or visit the museum during the weekend - so there are still excess car trips while living in the suburbs versus the Sunset District. You're not seeing the bigger picture. Not everyone lives in the Bay Area. With remote work becoming an integral part of office culture, this also means not everyone has to work in the Bay Area even when they work for Bay Area companies. ie. They're not going to go to Sunset on weekends; everything is more decentralized. Remote work scales better than just throwing money away when you can't fix the root problem of a limited supply of physical space. If you can't fix available housing inventory, all that happens long term when you give people more money is that housing just keeps getting more expensive. We've already seen this first hand with the large salary increases for Silicon Valley engineers
opportune 6y ago
We should not continue shoveling any money into “affordable” (read: subsidized if you win some lottery system) and instead need to focus on reducing the market rate rents. The whole “affordable” and “subsidized” housing system is a scam to sell $10 for $3 to a few lucky souls without addressing the root cause of the problem Furthermore nobody should feel entitled to live in SF proper. It is easy to commute in from much cheaper areas in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, and it doesn’t make sense to subsidize some small set of people to not make that commute
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
LatteLazy 6y ago
I've never understood the logic in these programs. People either think they can something for nothing or that they can fool others into believing that. Pay people enough to cover their needs, or accept that we don't want them to do whatever they're doing. Weird systems where you subsidize peoples rent but you won't pay them cash just end up forcing them to spend more on housing than they want. So you spend more than it would cost in cash and they're less happy than if you just paid them. So wtf is the point!? Plus housing gets very sticky. People get very upset if they are required to move just because a program ends or they go part time. If an area gets more expensive, you have to (rapidly) increase the subsidy, if it gets worse you lose all your employees. Making your employees move house every time they want to change jobs is very anticompetitive Programs like this are also opaque and hard to value. I knew a teacher who thought she was getting free rent up to X, but the small print said it was actually 25% of rent up to 25% of X. I actually think this is why providers favour these schemes: they're deceptive. All this so that... We can avoid paying people what they're worth, and being honest about what that number is.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  You make some good points, but the logic is pretty clear from the employers point of view. It might be helpful to think of it as analogous to supply chain integration. One advantage is decreasing overall costs by cutting out the middle man. If a property owner is making money on your company’s worker, you can save that much by doing it yourself. Another advantage is supply chain security. If The market rent doubles, your won’t go out of business.

58 points by panic 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Another attempt that doesn't address the real issues: rent is too high and/or wages are too low. In-demand locations are always going to be expensive. The minute you start providing "special" apartments to a certain group of people you introduce tons of other (negative) issues. That person is basically locked into that apartment and can never move. Any issues with quality or landlord disagreements will be tilted towards the owner, because they know the renter will never leave. The whole thing is a mess.

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Well, in author's defense: > Of all the approaches, the one working the best is #7: Remote Work. Get good at it, and we won’t have the housing stresses of San Francisco. which makes perfect sense to me. Or just move out of SF altogether - et voila.
acomjean 6y ago
Housing is a society issue. income inequality and turning housing into business with rent seekers, seeking high returns. hard to fix piecemeal. One wonders if the current pandemic can cause a change.
- mc32 6y ago
  It is but there isn’t a good fix that satisfies everyone. Even the USSR had private apartments for people who didn’t want to live in multi-family per apartment arrangements (communal apartments). Obviously not everyone could afford private apartments —very few could, buy they existed because even with all the resources of a top down bureaucracy they could not meet the needs of the people.
  - vkou 6y ago
    The USSR always had a shortage of apartments, because of its inability to affordably hammer raw materials together into housing. It had no problems with parceling land into housing, though. The USA has no problem hammering raw materials into houses, but it has a shortage of apartments because of its inability to affordably parcel out land into housing. You need to be good at both, in order for housing to be affordable. However, it should be noted that affordable housing is not the goal of at least half the country - because that half of the country own houses (or mortgages for houses), and housing becoming affordable would financially destroy them. So, in that sense, everything is working by design, and things will never change, if the government can help it.
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    An important thing about USSR, which people often forget about, is there was no free movement. Oversimplifying things a bit, you could only relocate when you're changing jobs and your new employer must have a special permission to hire workers from outside their region. Very similar to H1B quotas.
    - mc32 6y ago
      It’s the same in China today. They have the Hukou system. This is your family registration system and you need special permission to register somewhere new. Your benefits as a citizen are tied to this. If you move to a city without approval, you work illegally and are not entitled to housing or educational facilities (which is why parents who’ve moved illegally need to send their kids to illegal schools). The local government also can go raid these places from time to time depending on what quotas they need to align with. So kind of sort of of like the four belt system in the USSR which limited internal movement and required internal passports.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  Greedy renters is not the reason here: in the original article the author considered building a house for workers on the company land. But that turned out to be too expensive. Building houses and maintaining them in livable condition is not that cheap.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - maxsilver 6y ago
    > Building houses and maintaining them in livable condition is not that cheap I don't really understand this. Building and maintaining houses (especially single-family houses) is really cheap. (We're talking like ~$600/month or so for a large 4-bedroom home). The expense in housing is primarily financial shenanigans and land monopolization, with some property taxes on top. Actually building and maintaining a house (construction + maintenance costs) is way less than 50% of the total cost.
    - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
      Please see the original article where the author explicitly complains that cost of building their own house is too high.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > I don't really understand this. Building and maintaining houses (especially single-family houses) is really cheap. (We're talking like ~$600/month or so for a large 4-bedroom home). Not in SF, that's the issue.
jseliger 6y ago
In-demand locations are always going to be expensive They need not be nearly so expensive as they are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501

justinzollars 6y ago

I was admiring Sutro tower on my morning walk, and realized if we tried to build Sutro tower today it could never happen. We couldn't build another bridge, tunnel, or anything. Imagine the laughs if you proposed another bay crossing. It's been made impossible to change or develop San Francisco. I don't think the future is here anymore.

vkou 6y ago
That's the natural consequence of the value of land eclipsing the value of the economic activity generated by that land. It makes doing anything with land that ruffles anyone's feathers a nightmare. In no sane universe should a house cost millions of dollars - multiple decades of a person's labour. Yet, thanks to easy access to credit, and bad property tax policy, here we are.
carapace 6y ago
> We couldn't build another bridge, tunnel, or anything. We just built a bridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco–Oakland_Bay_Bridge#Eastern_section_replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco–Oakland_Bay_Brid... And dug a tunnel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway
- justinzollars 6y ago
  The bridge was a replacement, and the tunnel is a decade late and still not complete. Both are way over budget. China build 16,000 miles of fully connected high speed rail in the same period of time. I'm going to stand by my statement that the future is not in San Francisco.
  - jordonwii 6y ago
    > I'm going to stand by my statement that the future is not in San Francisco I don't see why this follows. :) SF is a beautiful and diverse city and a hub for (at least one) of the biggest and most innovative industries in the world. This is often true in spite of the Bay area's government, but imo that's the good news: government is fixable. Rather than giving up I try to channel my frustration into volunteering and donating to groups that are working on these problems: YIMBY Action (yimbyaction.org) has clubs throughout the Bay Area that advocate for easing restrictions on building housing and transit, operating small businesses, etc; Seamless (seamlessbayarea.org) also works on improving transit governance throughout the Bay Area.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> This was the kicker: 30-60% of their income went to rent. Is this much different from people with mortgages, especially when they first purchase a home?

frockington1 6y ago
I just bout my first house a year ago. Mortgage is around 22% of take home income. Granted I never asked what mortgage I was approved for and can guarantee you it would have been at least double what I purchased
- nerdface 6y ago
  Where did you buy though? Bay Area has incredibly high prices.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
smileysteve 6y ago
Most financial advice and even some loan approval is based on only 25% of income going towards housing.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
If you buy a house, this situation is hopefully only temporary. If you rent, this will just keep going or get even worse.

supernova87a 6y ago

I'm sympathetic to this particular cause but not to the solutions a non-profit in SF like them would probably propose. (because generally a story like this is here for the lessons to be taken by others, not for their particular situation to be solved) What we need is less picking and choosing who is to receive specific housing, and setting aside of property or units for them. Because all that picking and choosing by well-intentioned (but bad overall outcome producing) people is exactly what's creating the problem. Everyone who has a special interest in preserving <x> or helping group <y> puts in their request to their San Francisco supervisor, solving their little corner of concern but making it worse for everyone else. One by one all the little barriers (unaware of what the other hands are doing) get erected to make it impossible to do anything productive for housing. We need planning at a city strategy level, that admits that San Francisco cannot stay the way it has for decades, protecting the landlords and people who've lived there for 30 years from any kind of change. The tax situation is a given constraint, and we're not going to change that anytime soon barring a miracle, so the thing that has to be compromised is "neighborhood character" (whatever that means as a cover for not letting people live near you) or housing density and your spoiled view of the bay / Muni wires. Specify what outcomes you want to achieve, and let the rules be updated to make that happen. Otherwise we will continue to be in a world where the external factors flooding in (lack of local leadership, jobs creation without housing creation, corporate money) will be making the decisions for us without us realizing it -- and a lot of unhappy people who want to live here but can't, or have been displaced from their housing. My desired outcomes: -- Affordable prices of the general rental and house purchase market (not "affordable housing") -- Owners who actually live in their housing, and are not absentee landlords -- Renewal of the creative, productive population and not creating of a rich / retired class that occupies all the housing -- Good transport and home-work districts, and the attraction of small businesses -- Ability of homeowners (and renters if desired) to easily and cheaply improve their properties and change the look and feel of their neighborhood for better/newer I am not in favor of soft arguments that are disguised attempts to regulate who is allowed to live in a place according to some particular interest's judgment: -- neighborhood character, density -- equity-related arguments -- "I got here first"-related arguments -- what is "fair" You will find that if you set up reasonable rules, the communities that emerge will be just as interesting, good, and pleasant places to live as before. They may not look the same, and may not be what you thought, and that may make some people unhappy. But it's what's best for a city.

yonran 6y ago

The housing supply has been very inelastic in the Bay Area. And every business and individual who wants to be here starts out life short on housing. So I would group his approaches to staying in the Bay Area into three main categories: #1, #6: Cover the short by hoarding enough of the fixed amount of housing for yourself and taking that out of the market. #2, #3, #4: Help employees cover their short. I think it is smart that of him to try to do so in a targeted way to help new employees with downpayment and loans rather than ratcheting up everyone’s salary. #5: Build more housing. This is the positive sum approach. I wish he elaborated on this because there are many roadblocks to San Francisco’s failure to convert high incomes into more housing (zoning restrictions, slow entitlement process, high fees, high construction labor costs), and it would help for more leaders to be part of the conversation on how to solve these problems for everyone, not just for his own nonprofit.

pascalxus 6y ago
concerning point #5, the voting public is beyond greedy. they'll sue the sh out of any builder that wants to build anything, and there's soo many zoning laws and so many restrictions and taxes. At the end of the day, people who don't have houses yet end up paying for all this. I think Remote work is by far the best option. If you can live in a lower cost city like Houston, TX or Chicago, it's a great way to go. Places like CA are so far beyond repair, there's no more hope, at all.
- xvedejas 6y ago
  So long as companies pay proportionally less when you work from a lower cost-of-living place, as most seem to do, it's not going to become especially popular to work from a cheaper location. And why should they -- being able to work remotely is something workers want, and companies have the perfect information of your permanent address; supply and demand dictates companies will continue to be able to get away with this kind of policy. If it works the other way around, and companies will pay more when you move to a more expensive area, I expect California to become _more_ popular, not less.
  - 6y ago

rayiner 6y ago

We are having some important conversations about equality these days, so I think it’s worth bringing up this point. The notion of subsidizing housing for non-profit workers is concerning. While many non-profits deal with problems like homelessness that overwhelmingly victimize people of color, non-profit workers themselves are overwhelmingly white. Much more so than the workforce as a whole: https://communitywealth.com/the-state-of-diversity-in-the-nonprofit-sector https://communitywealth.com/the-state-of-diversity-in-the-no.... Moreover a large fraction of revenues (for example, 65% for “human services” non-profits) comes from the government, so it’s taxpayer dollars that are paying for people to live in San Francisco and would be paying to subsidize their housing. This is one reason why people are interested in things like UBI. It seems perverse for the government to use taxpayer dollars to say combat homelessness in San Francisco (the supermajority of whom are black, Hispanic, or multi-racial) only to have much of that money go to paying salaries for mostly white college educated people. Of course, non-profit workers of all ethnic backgrounds can be tremendous value-adds. But when we’re considering whether we want to subsidize housing for those workers, it’s worth stepping back for a moment. There is a lot of money on the line: even excluding universities and hospitals, non-profits spend $750 billion annually, more than the US military. When taxpayers spend money out of a desire to help certain groups of people—especially now that we are becoming more aware of the disproportionate impact of things like homelessness on certain groups—we should strive to make sure that the money helps the people taxpayers think they are helping.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> Moreover 80% of non-profit funding comes from the government, so it’s taxpayer dollars that are paying for people to live in San Francisco. Really? This astounds me! I would have thought the vast vast majority of non-profit funding would be companies funding non-profit industry publicity bodies and standards bodies and similar.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Apparently the 80% number includes hospitals and fee-for-service revenues (think Medicare or Medicaid) which isn’t quite what I’m getting at. I’ve edited the able to refer to the 65% of government funding for “human services” non-profits as reported here: https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/sites/default/files/documents/Full%20Report.pdf https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/sites/default/files/docu...

chaostheory 6y ago

I feel remote work is the most viable solution that was listed. It works around the problem of limited housing inventory. In addition, it helps the environment.

nutshell89 6y ago
When talking about the environment, I think it's useful to think about what remote work would mean at scale. Non-profits in SF often work directly with vulnerable populations, take Larkin Street Youth Services, for example. their mission directly involves interacting with homeless youth on the streets. San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is basically a giant warehouse in SF. Even if you do have no-profit work that can be done over Slack or Zoom, these are still people who'll commute to the beauty parlour, buy groceries at the farmers market, or visit the museum during the weekend - so there are still excess car trips while living in the suburbs versus the Sunset District.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  Any reduction in the commute is a net positive for traffic, the environment, and even productivity. > Non-profits in SF often work directly with vulnerable populations, take Larkin Street Youth Services, for example. their mission directly involves interacting with homeless youth on the streets. San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is basically a giant warehouse in SF. Sure, not everyone can work remotely. However, even they will benefit from the reduced traffic and commute times. > Even if you do have no-profit work that can be done over Slack or Zoom, these are still people who'll commute to the beauty parlour, buy groceries at the farmers market, or visit the museum during the weekend - so there are still excess car trips while living in the suburbs versus the Sunset District. You're not seeing the bigger picture. Not everyone lives in the Bay Area. With remote work becoming an integral part of office culture, this also means not everyone has to work in the Bay Area even when they work for Bay Area companies. ie. They're not going to go to Sunset on weekends; everything is more decentralized. Remote work scales better than just throwing money away when you can't fix the root problem of a limited supply of physical space. If you can't fix available housing inventory, all that happens long term when you give people more money is that housing just keeps getting more expensive. We've already seen this first hand with the large salary increases for Silicon Valley engineers

opportune 6y ago

We should not continue shoveling any money into “affordable” (read: subsidized if you win some lottery system) and instead need to focus on reducing the market rate rents. The whole “affordable” and “subsidized” housing system is a scam to sell $10 for $3 to a few lucky souls without addressing the root cause of the problem Furthermore nobody should feel entitled to live in SF proper. It is easy to commute in from much cheaper areas in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, and it doesn’t make sense to subsidize some small set of people to not make that commute

deleted 6y ago

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LatteLazy 6y ago

I've never understood the logic in these programs. People either think they can something for nothing or that they can fool others into believing that. Pay people enough to cover their needs, or accept that we don't want them to do whatever they're doing. Weird systems where you subsidize peoples rent but you won't pay them cash just end up forcing them to spend more on housing than they want. So you spend more than it would cost in cash and they're less happy than if you just paid them. So wtf is the point!? Plus housing gets very sticky. People get very upset if they are required to move just because a program ends or they go part time. If an area gets more expensive, you have to (rapidly) increase the subsidy, if it gets worse you lose all your employees. Making your employees move house every time they want to change jobs is very anticompetitive Programs like this are also opaque and hard to value. I knew a teacher who thought she was getting free rent up to X, but the small print said it was actually 25% of rent up to 25% of X. I actually think this is why providers favour these schemes: they're deceptive. All this so that... We can avoid paying people what they're worth, and being honest about what that number is.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
You make some good points, but the logic is pretty clear from the employers point of view. It might be helpful to think of it as analogous to supply chain integration. One advantage is decreasing overall costs by cutting out the middle man. If a property owner is making money on your company’s worker, you can save that much by doing it yourself. Another advantage is supply chain security. If The market rent doubles, your won’t go out of business.