8 ms·

Google Eyeing Mission Bay for San Francisco Move?

37 points by blackjack48 13y ago

batbomb 13y ago
Meanwhile SF supervisors have proposed a moratorium on the Ellis act. If rent was ugly before, I can't imagine what if will be like now. I get the feeling that the mayor and supervisors only care about displacement, not placement.
- brandur 13y ago
  Indeed. This is one of the few things that could make the residential situation around here even worse. Provided we don't see another bust before then, it'll be interesting to see how bad it gets before even our municipality is forced to consider changes to policies like rent control. 2x NYC? 2x Manhattan? At what point do companies start looking for space elsewhere?
  - chrisabrams 13y ago
    That's why companies are opening offices in NYC..it's actually become cheaper in parts of NY than SF.
  - harryh 13y ago
    "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." - Yogi Berra
- njudah 13y ago
  What is the source on supervisors proposing a moratorium on the Ellis act? That seems uncharacteristic and unlikely.
  - brandur 13y ago
    It's not a moratorium, but here's an article from today with an early description of proposed amendments: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-politicians-Restrict-Ellis-Act-evictions-4981974.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-politicians-Restri...
- geebee 13y ago
  San Francisco is notorious for opposing development, and at least some of its reputation is deserved. However, this problem can still be overstated. Plenty of new construction is taking place in SF. http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/san-francisco-boom-back http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/san-francis...
  - diogenescynic 13y ago
    >More than 4,220 units of housing began construction in San Francisco in 2012 — following a year in which just 269 net units were added. Is that enough additional housing to cover all the new residents? From 2010 to 2012, the population grew from 805,235 to 825,863: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html It seems like demand is outpacing the supply, driving prices up.
    - chrisabrams 13y ago
      Gentrification is a bitch. If you develop, it makes it worse, but if you don't develop, it makes it even worse.
    - malandrew 13y ago
      What sucks more is that a lot of the new buildings are only luxury buildings going for $2000+ a month per living space per person and most have homeowner's association trying to keep the ratio of owners to renter's high, so most units don't even hit the rental market. Couple this with the fact that the only program in the city focused on making housing affordable, the BMR program, only really makes things accessible for those with a household income between 70 and 90% of the median income, leaving every else out in the cold, and you basically have horrendous conditions for most people to be able to live here. The way I see it, San Francisco's 1% are taken care of, as are San Francisco's 60th to 65th (I don't know the exact equivalent to the 70-90% of median income here), and everyone else is left to fight over what little housing is left.
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    >Plenty of new construction is taking place in SF You've got to be kidding me. This is what "plenty of new construction" looks like: http://rwrant.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/S%C3%A3o-Paulo-Skyline.jpg http://rwrant.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/S%C3%A3o-Paul... Sure, it's ugly. Sure, you don't want SF to look like that. But don't try to pretend that SF is addressing the issue.
- williamcotton 13y ago
  Yeah, it's almost like the city is actually forced to listen to the demands of the people that live in it... Maybe if we got rid of democracy then Mayor Ed Lee wouldn't haven't to cloud his pure ideology with such trivialities? I mean, how else are we going to be truly free?
  - woah 13y ago
    Only solution: Wall around SF. You have to pass the coolness test to get in. Only artisan puppeteers and activist breadmakers allowed. None of these dorky tech folks driving up the rents.
    - williamcotton 13y ago
      Or how about another solution, compromise? How about we open up a dialog and get people talking instead of just gravitating to one sort of ideology or another? What if we open up the conversation to be more than just a binary opposition between the privileged nerds vs the privileged artists? I'm afraid part of the issue is that engineers tend to gravitate towards binary opposition and reductionist thought. The tech industry is very good at talking and terrible at actually listening.
      - batbomb 13y ago
        I don't know many people who aren't frustrated about the cost of rent in the city, but that might be because I'm biased towards knowing people mostly under the age of 40. I'm torn on the Ellis act evictions. I think something needs to be done about them, but on the other hand I think landlords should be able to sell their properties. Without some form of the Ellis Act, landlords will be forever landlords. Companies like Urban Green Properties are kind of shitty, but the big problem is that San Francisco has absolutely no plans for placement or re-placement of residents. Strictly speaking, SF has a ~1% population growth. That's 8500 people a year. Theoretically, 2/3 of that is likely non-native, but still there should be theoretically a net 2k new San Franciscans/year if you account for the numbers native high school graduates and subtract the death rate. And I don't think it's just a nerd vs artist thing, I think it's a bit more of a new adult resident vs established adult resident (which tends to skew to old vs. young). However, the nerd population tends to make more money and larger waves, which means they're the obvious punching bags.
popularopinion 13y ago
This article is currently linking to a link aggregator, the original link is here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/11/google-to-mission-bay-rumors-sweep.html?ana=e_du_pub&s=article_du&ed=2013-11-13&page=all http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/11/google-...
cylinder 13y ago
What does Google do at its Chicago office? I can never quite figure that city out.
- minimax 13y ago
  Google has a development office in Chicago but I don't think it's very big. The 600k sq ft of Chicago office space mentioned in this post is probably a reference to the new Motorola office space in the Merch Mart. http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120726/BLOGS02/120729809/google-moving-3-000-motorola-mobility-jobs-hq-to-merchandise-mart http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120726/BLOGS02/1207...
  - arasraj 13y ago
    The new Google space will actually be in West Loop.
- seiji 13y ago
  Google Code was running out of there for a while until they stagnated and let GitHub steal all the cookies.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    It's not stealing if Google Code never had them in the first place. GitHub is running circles around everyone.
    - seiji 13y ago
      ...because Google was being very arrogant in their stagnation of source tools and community coding infrastructure. It's easy to say GitHub is killing it now, but back then (2008), GitHub was slow, buggy, and could have been eclipsed by anybody with the drive and focus to run them into the ground. But, GitHub had (has) those wacky overachieving social coder founders. The entirety of Google doesn't have a chance at even recognizing people like that within their ranks, much less (these days) pulling them up out of the muck into leadership positions to create viable competitive products. It points to a great reason behind the G+ failure too. If they couldn't make a viable social service for nerds—their core in-office demo—what is the chance they can make a social service for the planet?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
k_wisniewski 13y ago
As an European, I've never understand how is that possible that South Bay is such a bad place to live. Everything interesting like night life, public transport even groceries and restaurants are all either non-existent or so far away that you always have to drive. No wonder everyone wants to live in SF because there's nothing to do in the South Bay. What is the problem really? There's a lot of money in there, lots of potential customers, good geographical conditions, creativity and yet it's so badly planned and organized. This year I moved to London and there are lots of things to do in virtually every district. Public transport is amazing compared to the Bay area and you don't even need to own a car. That's completely impossible in the Valley and I have no idea why isn't there someone who tries to change that.
- HaloZero 13y ago
  You have to understand that after the 1950s in the United States, everyone thought cars were awesome. They allowed you to go farther than anywhere else before and they allowed a greater mobility in general than ever before. Combined with the dream of having a house and a yard, this allowed for sprawl. So cities were planned around this. San Francisco itself even had a boom where it tried to utilize cars as much as possible. There were either freeways or plan to build more freeways cutting through the city to get to places. There was going to be a 2nd Bay Bridge to San Leandro, why? Because they wanted more traffic to get into the city and they didn't trust his new fangled thing called BART (the train system for those of you who don't know it). I don't know what the situation was in England or other European countries when cars started taking off but I imagine there had to be something similar, maybe just not with the same momentum as the United States.
  - jweir 13y ago
    Loma Prieta, the earthquake, removed some freeways and opened up the Embarcadero, which was an industrial zoned ringed by a double decker freeway. http://lostsf.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/the-elephant-obstructing-beauty-the-embarcadero-freeway/ http://lostsf.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/the-elephant-obstruct...
  - k_wisniewski 13y ago
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
Since when is SF called "The City"? There is only one "The City", and it ain't in North America.
- ek 13y ago
  You must not be from the Bay Area. San Francisco is "The City", "San Francisco", or "SF" to anyone who lives or has ever lived in the Bay Area.
- douglaswth 13y ago
  As someone who is only familiar with calling San Francisco "The City", I am curious what city outside of North America you are referring to; please enlighten us.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    The City of London. Its a nrifgb within London.
- gojomo 13y ago
  Americans would disagree! See: http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_95.html http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_95.... Also, perhaps even moreso than other places in the US, "The City" (capitalized, with extra stress on each syllable) has long been an affectation in the Bay Area & Northern California to refer to San Francisco proper. See especially the columns of Herb Caen and regional anthems like Journey's "When The Lights Go Down (in The City)".
- r00fus 13y ago
  Sorry, "The City" is a local reference term. Just like "The Store". Trying to dereference without a local frame leads to confusion.
jonnathanson 13y ago
Well, if they're going to move in a bigger way into SF, Mission Bay makes sense. It's basically a big ghost town. Lots of UCSF-owned medical facilities and lifeless condos. But plenty of space. And it's relatively close to the transit hubs in South Beach. As a nearby resident and worker, though, I'm not looking forward to the traffic or the added residential real estate crunch. We've got the Giants, soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge high rises going up, a huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll have a Google office. Oy vey.
- brandur 13y ago
  Agree on this sentiment; it's a quiet part of town compared to its surroundings, which is kind of nice. The coming boom in automobile traffic will compromise it as one of the relatively few peaceful places in the city to walk, run, and bike. Small correction: according to the source article, Google is actually purchasing the land from Salesforce. So it may be one or the other.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > We've got the Giants, soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge high rises going up, a huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll have a Google office. Sounds like a boon, not a burden! Maybe Google should move to somewhere people would be grateful to have them. People here in Philadelphia would love to see some business and industry come their way.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    Yeah, it's absurd how many SF residents are reacting to all this economic activity. There are so many cities across the country that would love to be in the position SF is right now.
    - williamcotton 13y ago
      It's almost like a good number of SF residents aren't sharing in this economic activity and are instead being forcibly removed from their homes to make way for the imported worker bees who can actually contribute to and benefit from the industry.
bsimpson 13y ago
Would that be a headquarters move, or just an SF office move? IIRC, they may have to move out of their present space above Palomino, which means they'd be looking for someplace to put their current SF employees.

37 points by blackjack48 13y ago

Meanwhile SF supervisors have proposed a moratorium on the Ellis act. If rent was ugly before, I can't imagine what if will be like now. I get the feeling that the mayor and supervisors only care about displacement, not placement.

brandur 13y ago
Indeed. This is one of the few things that could make the residential situation around here even worse. Provided we don't see another bust before then, it'll be interesting to see how bad it gets before even our municipality is forced to consider changes to policies like rent control. 2x NYC? 2x Manhattan? At what point do companies start looking for space elsewhere?
- chrisabrams 13y ago
  That's why companies are opening offices in NYC..it's actually become cheaper in parts of NY than SF.
- harryh 13y ago
  "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." - Yogi Berra
njudah 13y ago
What is the source on supervisors proposing a moratorium on the Ellis act? That seems uncharacteristic and unlikely.
- brandur 13y ago
  It's not a moratorium, but here's an article from today with an early description of proposed amendments: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-politicians-Restrict-Ellis-Act-evictions-4981974.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-politicians-Restri...
geebee 13y ago
San Francisco is notorious for opposing development, and at least some of its reputation is deserved. However, this problem can still be overstated. Plenty of new construction is taking place in SF. http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/san-francisco-boom-back http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/san-francis...
- diogenescynic 13y ago
  >More than 4,220 units of housing began construction in San Francisco in 2012 — following a year in which just 269 net units were added. Is that enough additional housing to cover all the new residents? From 2010 to 2012, the population grew from 805,235 to 825,863: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html It seems like demand is outpacing the supply, driving prices up.
  - chrisabrams 13y ago
    Gentrification is a bitch. If you develop, it makes it worse, but if you don't develop, it makes it even worse.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    What sucks more is that a lot of the new buildings are only luxury buildings going for $2000+ a month per living space per person and most have homeowner's association trying to keep the ratio of owners to renter's high, so most units don't even hit the rental market. Couple this with the fact that the only program in the city focused on making housing affordable, the BMR program, only really makes things accessible for those with a household income between 70 and 90% of the median income, leaving every else out in the cold, and you basically have horrendous conditions for most people to be able to live here. The way I see it, San Francisco's 1% are taken care of, as are San Francisco's 60th to 65th (I don't know the exact equivalent to the 70-90% of median income here), and everyone else is left to fight over what little housing is left.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  >Plenty of new construction is taking place in SF You've got to be kidding me. This is what "plenty of new construction" looks like: http://rwrant.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/S%C3%A3o-Paulo-Skyline.jpg http://rwrant.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/S%C3%A3o-Paul... Sure, it's ugly. Sure, you don't want SF to look like that. But don't try to pretend that SF is addressing the issue.
williamcotton 13y ago
Yeah, it's almost like the city is actually forced to listen to the demands of the people that live in it... Maybe if we got rid of democracy then Mayor Ed Lee wouldn't haven't to cloud his pure ideology with such trivialities? I mean, how else are we going to be truly free?
- woah 13y ago
  Only solution: Wall around SF. You have to pass the coolness test to get in. Only artisan puppeteers and activist breadmakers allowed. None of these dorky tech folks driving up the rents.
  - williamcotton 13y ago
    Or how about another solution, compromise? How about we open up a dialog and get people talking instead of just gravitating to one sort of ideology or another? What if we open up the conversation to be more than just a binary opposition between the privileged nerds vs the privileged artists? I'm afraid part of the issue is that engineers tend to gravitate towards binary opposition and reductionist thought. The tech industry is very good at talking and terrible at actually listening.
    - batbomb 13y ago
      I don't know many people who aren't frustrated about the cost of rent in the city, but that might be because I'm biased towards knowing people mostly under the age of 40. I'm torn on the Ellis act evictions. I think something needs to be done about them, but on the other hand I think landlords should be able to sell their properties. Without some form of the Ellis Act, landlords will be forever landlords. Companies like Urban Green Properties are kind of shitty, but the big problem is that San Francisco has absolutely no plans for placement or re-placement of residents. Strictly speaking, SF has a ~1% population growth. That's 8500 people a year. Theoretically, 2/3 of that is likely non-native, but still there should be theoretically a net 2k new San Franciscans/year if you account for the numbers native high school graduates and subtract the death rate. And I don't think it's just a nerd vs artist thing, I think it's a bit more of a new adult resident vs established adult resident (which tends to skew to old vs. young). However, the nerd population tends to make more money and larger waves, which means they're the obvious punching bags.

popularopinion 13y ago

This article is currently linking to a link aggregator, the original link is here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/11/google-to-mission-bay-rumors-sweep.html?ana=e_du_pub&s=article_du&ed=2013-11-13&page=all http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/11/google-...

cylinder 13y ago

What does Google do at its Chicago office? I can never quite figure that city out.

minimax 13y ago
Google has a development office in Chicago but I don't think it's very big. The 600k sq ft of Chicago office space mentioned in this post is probably a reference to the new Motorola office space in the Merch Mart. http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120726/BLOGS02/120729809/google-moving-3-000-motorola-mobility-jobs-hq-to-merchandise-mart http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120726/BLOGS02/1207...
- arasraj 13y ago
  The new Google space will actually be in West Loop.
seiji 13y ago
Google Code was running out of there for a while until they stagnated and let GitHub steal all the cookies.
- astrodust 13y ago
  It's not stealing if Google Code never had them in the first place. GitHub is running circles around everyone.
  - seiji 13y ago
    ...because Google was being very arrogant in their stagnation of source tools and community coding infrastructure. It's easy to say GitHub is killing it now, but back then (2008), GitHub was slow, buggy, and could have been eclipsed by anybody with the drive and focus to run them into the ground. But, GitHub had (has) those wacky overachieving social coder founders. The entirety of Google doesn't have a chance at even recognizing people like that within their ranks, much less (these days) pulling them up out of the muck into leadership positions to create viable competitive products. It points to a great reason behind the G+ failure too. If they couldn't make a viable social service for nerds—their core in-office demo—what is the chance they can make a social service for the planet?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

k_wisniewski 13y ago

As an European, I've never understand how is that possible that South Bay is such a bad place to live. Everything interesting like night life, public transport even groceries and restaurants are all either non-existent or so far away that you always have to drive. No wonder everyone wants to live in SF because there's nothing to do in the South Bay. What is the problem really? There's a lot of money in there, lots of potential customers, good geographical conditions, creativity and yet it's so badly planned and organized. This year I moved to London and there are lots of things to do in virtually every district. Public transport is amazing compared to the Bay area and you don't even need to own a car. That's completely impossible in the Valley and I have no idea why isn't there someone who tries to change that.

HaloZero 13y ago
You have to understand that after the 1950s in the United States, everyone thought cars were awesome. They allowed you to go farther than anywhere else before and they allowed a greater mobility in general than ever before. Combined with the dream of having a house and a yard, this allowed for sprawl. So cities were planned around this. San Francisco itself even had a boom where it tried to utilize cars as much as possible. There were either freeways or plan to build more freeways cutting through the city to get to places. There was going to be a 2nd Bay Bridge to San Leandro, why? Because they wanted more traffic to get into the city and they didn't trust his new fangled thing called BART (the train system for those of you who don't know it). I don't know what the situation was in England or other European countries when cars started taking off but I imagine there had to be something similar, maybe just not with the same momentum as the United States.
- jweir 13y ago
  Loma Prieta, the earthquake, removed some freeways and opened up the Embarcadero, which was an industrial zoned ringed by a double decker freeway. http://lostsf.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/the-elephant-obstructing-beauty-the-embarcadero-freeway/ http://lostsf.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/the-elephant-obstruct...
- k_wisniewski 13y ago

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

Since when is SF called "The City"? There is only one "The City", and it ain't in North America.

ek 13y ago
You must not be from the Bay Area. San Francisco is "The City", "San Francisco", or "SF" to anyone who lives or has ever lived in the Bay Area.
douglaswth 13y ago
As someone who is only familiar with calling San Francisco "The City", I am curious what city outside of North America you are referring to; please enlighten us.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  The City of London. Its a nrifgb within London.
gojomo 13y ago
Americans would disagree! See: http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_95.html http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_95.... Also, perhaps even moreso than other places in the US, "The City" (capitalized, with extra stress on each syllable) has long been an affectation in the Bay Area & Northern California to refer to San Francisco proper. See especially the columns of Herb Caen and regional anthems like Journey's "When The Lights Go Down (in The City)".
r00fus 13y ago
Sorry, "The City" is a local reference term. Just like "The Store". Trying to dereference without a local frame leads to confusion.

jonnathanson 13y ago

Well, if they're going to move in a bigger way into SF, Mission Bay makes sense. It's basically a big ghost town. Lots of UCSF-owned medical facilities and lifeless condos. But plenty of space. And it's relatively close to the transit hubs in South Beach. As a nearby resident and worker, though, I'm not looking forward to the traffic or the added residential real estate crunch. We've got the Giants, soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge high rises going up, a huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll have a Google office. Oy vey.

brandur 13y ago
Agree on this sentiment; it's a quiet part of town compared to its surroundings, which is kind of nice. The coming boom in automobile traffic will compromise it as one of the relatively few peaceful places in the city to walk, run, and bike. Small correction: according to the source article, Google is actually purchasing the land from Salesforce. So it may be one or the other.
rayiner 13y ago
> We've got the Giants, soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge high rises going up, a huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll have a Google office. Sounds like a boon, not a burden! Maybe Google should move to somewhere people would be grateful to have them. People here in Philadelphia would love to see some business and industry come their way.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  Yeah, it's absurd how many SF residents are reacting to all this economic activity. There are so many cities across the country that would love to be in the position SF is right now.
  - williamcotton 13y ago
    It's almost like a good number of SF residents aren't sharing in this economic activity and are instead being forcibly removed from their homes to make way for the imported worker bees who can actually contribute to and benefit from the industry.

bsimpson 13y ago

Would that be a headquarters move, or just an SF office move? IIRC, they may have to move out of their present space above Palomino, which means they'd be looking for someplace to put their current SF employees.