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The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
- elevatedastalt 2y agoAny housing that can be built is good housing for places that have a severe supply-side constraint of housing. The only way to bring house prices down is to build build build. I'd actually be quite trustful of a Costco apartment.
- TMWNN 2y agoI would very, very gladly live in a Costco apartment complex above a Costco store. Being able to buy Costco rotisserie chicken, ribs, and pizza anytime? Sign me up!
- pkaye 2y agoThere is a Trader Joes with a apartment complex above it in Milpitas, CA (in the SF bay area). I've seen that in my city too but it needs to become more common.
- grahamplace 2y agoThe Trader Joe's they just opened in Hayes Valley in SF was put in under existing residential units: https://locations.traderjoes.com/ca/san-francisco/226/ https://locations.traderjoes.com/ca/san-francisco/226/
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoI used to live in an apartment complex with trader Joe in the westwood area of LA near UCLA. Oddly enough, I would walk over to the whole food’s or Ralph’s instead to grocery shop (but everything was walkable, even the target across the street).
- rasz 2y agoWhat about Costco law school?
- grepfru_it 2y agoPentagon city metro is right next to a Costco. Close enough?
- zbrozek 2y agoI would end up eating nothing but Costco hot dogs. When are they doing this in the south SFBA? Sign me up.
- Arrath 2y agoI wonder what the return policy will be like.
- m463 2y agoprobably pretty good, but I wouldn't attempt it on saturday afternoon.
- ryandrake 2y agoI wonder if they plan to also build all the infrastructure required to support all these new people living in these new housing. Like expanded electric service, water & sewer, trash pickup, transportation, schools, another fire station. Or are taxpayers going to have to pick up that bill? Build build build is great, we need more housing, but you can't do it without also planning for all the supporting infrastructure.
- WrongAssumption 2y agoI’m unclear what your concern is. How is this different than any other home builder? Also unclear what you mean by taxpayers being on the hook. More people in housing expands the tax payer base. The new homeowners will literally be paying for these things when they pay their property tax.
- ozuly 2y agoI'm continuously impressed by Costco. Not only is it one of my favorite places to shop, but I also recently recent to the Acquired episode on Costco[0] and was super impressed by how they run their business. They've continuously been able to align their unique advantages to reenforce each other and make their advantages even stronger. I highly recommend this episode to everyone. [0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/costco https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/costco
- zikduruqe 2y agoAnd they are starting their own ad network. https://todaysecommerce.com/2024/06/costco-is-working-on-ad-network-based-on-its-customer-data-for-online-and-in-store-business/ https://todaysecommerce.com/2024/06/costco-is-working-on-ad-...
- ramesh31 2y agoThe beauty of competent management from the very top down. They understand that paying people a living wage has become a massive competitive advantage these days.
- meragrin_ 2y ago> their unique advantages What are those? I never really found any sort of "unique advantage" of Costco. Certainly nothing to drive the extra distance past Sam's. While I had a membership, it was largely more expensive or didn't have what I wanted.
- Dalewyn 2y agoAs a consumer, the advantage to Costco is they've done the product filtering for you. You can reasonably bet that whatever Costco has is in the upper echelons of good within that product category. Costco also ends up being cheaper if you do enough shopping there, because Costco's low prices are realized by the membership fees comprising the lion's share of their revenue. As a merchant, Costco is significantly more efficient than other retailers due to a much leaner and simpler inventory because they only ever sell one or two brands of a given thing and only one or two things of a given brand. They don't have to deal with the overhead of unmoving stock, micromanagement of stock, and other such inefficiencies of non-scale.
- MichaelMug 2y agoWill Costco be collecting rent? The mental gymnastics are impressive. It’s not a good thing that Costco gets to expand to housing. This is just like private equity and 401k’s buying houses. People should be able to own their own housing not become lifelong renters.
- javagram 2y agoRental apartments are important for people who plan to live there less than 5-7 years. If all apartments were condos and there was no renting , where are people who don’t have a down payment saved supposed to live? What if they need to move to a larger place after a year or two?
- MichaelMug 2y agoThat is entirely not the issue I’m raising here.
- BurningFrog 2y agoIf you didn't intend to say that all rental housing is bad, you really phrased it badly.
- Arrath 2y agoShould Costco be explicitly banned from non-commercial development in the otherwise unused air-space above their store's footprint? Forced to sell the air rights to other developers? This mixed-use approach seems like a much better use of the lot space. I wholeheartedly agree that people should be able to own their own housing, but I don't see the two as mutually incompatible in the larger scheme.
- MichaelMug 2y agoI don’t see how my comment would imply or could be understood as wanting a ban or being against mixed use development.
- neilv 2y agoI like what I know of Costco, as a service, and as a company. But that architectural rendering, of the cool housing straddling the no-frills Costco big box, reminded me of Idiocracy's "Welcome to Costco; I love you". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdNmOOq6T8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdNmOOq6T8Y
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoIt is just like how they are tearing down one story grocery stores and building them as 4 or 5+1s with the store on ground floor and housing up top. This is much better land use anyways.
- Apocryphon 2y agoI too am in a Costco household, one of my friends is a long time employee there and loves it, and I would like to visit a Costco apartment open house, and the satire that this proposal (a big box store getting into residential housing) reminds me of is Sorry to Bother You's WorryFree: https://thebaffler.com/latest/worryfree-seymour https://thebaffler.com/latest/worryfree-seymour
- Arrath 2y agoAs a former (well, still card holding) union laborer I have to express my displeasure at Costco circumventing the prevailing wage requirements by building modular sections offsite and trucking them in. Other than that, I like the mixed use approach to this building.
- someluccc 2y agoIf only housing could be more expensive
- Arrath 2y agoI find it curious that people generally applaud Costco for paying good wages to their workers yet don't extend that consideration to those who build the stores. Is it latent classism? Disdain for tradespeople? Is outsourcing bad when it comes for office jobs, but good when it shaves a few percent off of the final $/ft2?
- WrongAssumption 2y agoI’m struggling to think of a form of classism that ranks retail workers over trades people. Can you elaborate?
- Arrath 2y agoJust anecdotes or vibes, having been on both sides of that one. I'd call it more of an "indoor" vs "outdoor" work dichotomy, honestly.
- klooney 2y agoEven if the modular housing factory is union? In the Bay area there's an SF carpenter's union vs Vallejo carpenter's union thing, because there's a modular housing factory in Vallejo.
- chrisbrandow 2y agoOf course, the fact that this housing will be filled up immediately, will have almost no effect on anyone’s opinion in the local governing world
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- modeless 2y agoCostco is great but their parking lots are awful. I hope the housing has a separate parking entrance because fighting Costco shoppers every time I leave home sounds like a nightmare.
- throwup238 2y agoOn the other hand, imagine all the money you could save if you just had a $1.50 hot dog and soda for every meal. You could eat on less than $200 a month. If you ate nothing but pepperoni pizza, you could feed a family of four for like $500 a month!
- ericd 2y agoThe bulk pack of medical care you’ll need soon might kill the savings.
- throwup238 2y agoNothing bulk gummy multivitamins and semaglutide can't solve. Costco even sells an MCT supplement that doubles as the best massage oil and lube I’ve ever used.
- breakbread 2y agoNow I’m imagining a Costco acropolis. One membership for literally all your needs. Never leave Costco
- ericd 2y agoFrom Costco cradle to Costco grave.
- modeless 2y agoCostco indeed sells both cribs and caskets. https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/coffins-and-caskets-at-costco-FOWQQJM2CFEWPNOHWH5DXQJFUE.jpg?auth=ce9d9e680ba099b3ed56769de7cd9eb97eb65df68237704b9c63cdeabc81b2d7 https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/co...
- josephpmay 2y agoHi, I'm the person who wrote the Twitter thread this article is based off of, so happy to answer any questions about it
- carabiner 2y agoDo you regret writing it in misleading clickbait style, calling it a "prison"?
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- Apocryphon 2y agoThis gotcha question already has an answer, funnily enough: https://x.com/CohenSite/status/1800905974490005978 https://x.com/CohenSite/status/1800905974490005978 > Because it got over 400,000 people to read a tweet about somewhat esoteric housing regulations
- smugma 2y agoThe article had a great headline but I didn’t really understand it. Your Twitter post filled in the missing details. Thank you!
- happyopossum 2y ago> It will also result in housing that looks like a stack of shipping containers. This is an either temporally or willfully ignorant statement - prefabricated housing hasn’t had to look like a boring box in decades. I’ve been involved in prefab projects where you couldn’t tell the on-site builds from the prefabs. Also there’s an elevation rendering of the project that clearly isn’t ’a stack of shipping containers’.
- MBCook 2y agoThat was what struck me. Sure it could look like shipping containers, but that seems very uncharitable. Without plans or a render showing that’s the case I don’t know why we can’t assume it would be at least a little better looking.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago> prefabricated housing hasn’t had to look like a boring box in decades. Arguably all the way back to Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house, nearly a hundred years ago.
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- jerlam 2y agoI like Costco but I feel that living next to it wouldn't be significantly better than living a bit farther away. It's a place where people with larger homes can buy in bulk and save time and money by storing those bulk items in their homes. There is no good reason to go to Costco more frequently than you can use up those bulk items, or until they expire. Gas and pharmacy would be borderline. I live within walking distance of a nice grocery store and would definitely prefer that over a Costco. There are more hot food items than just a hot dog and two types of pizza. It's easy to pick up a small amount of fresh ingredients to make a meal at the last minute.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoSo a standard mixed-used development but with certifications of how wonderful and eco-friendly they are allows throwing out most regulations everyone else has to follow, creating a preferential, tiered system. That sounds fair and respectful of community interests. /s