Google Pledges $1 Billion To Tackle Bay Area Housing Crisis (bloomberg.com) 212
Google pledged $1 billion over the next 10 years to try to address an affordable housing crisis California's Bay Area. From a report: The tech giant will re-purpose $750 million of its own land for residential use, allowing the development of at least 15,000 new homes, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on Tuesday. Another $250 million will go to incentives for developers to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units. The success of Google and other Silicon Valley technology companies has contributed to massive housing cost increases in the San Francisco Bay Area. The firms employ tens of thousands of high-earners who have bought or rented homes, leaving fewer options for poor and middle-income residents. Meanwhile, the supply of new houses and apartments has not kept up with demand.
Read about hundreds of Silicon Valley residents living in RVs to make ends meet. "Our goal is to help communities succeed over the long term, and make sure that everyone has access to opportunity, whether or not they work in tech," Pichai said. He noted that just 3,000 homes were built in the South Bay area last year. Silicon Valley is the most expensive housing market in the country, with a median existing-home price of $1.2 million. The San Francisco and Oakland metro area is second with a $930,000 median, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Read about hundreds of Silicon Valley residents living in RVs to make ends meet. "Our goal is to help communities succeed over the long term, and make sure that everyone has access to opportunity, whether or not they work in tech," Pichai said. He noted that just 3,000 homes were built in the South Bay area last year. Silicon Valley is the most expensive housing market in the country, with a median existing-home price of $1.2 million. The San Francisco and Oakland metro area is second with a $930,000 median, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Developers (Score:2)
"Another $250 million will go to incentives for developers to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units."
It took me a moment or two to realize that the reference to "developers" in this case was about builders, not software developers!
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"Another $250 million will go to incentives for developers to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units."
It took me a moment or two to realize that the reference to "developers" in this case was about builders, not software developers!
Also "affordable housing units" is a bit of a euphemism.
Launching Google newest product: The Google Ghetto! Finally, the people who mow our yards and clean our toilets will live nearby - everyone wins!
Google will naturally abandon the project after a few years, like they do with almost everything, making them the biggest slum lords on the West Coast.
Re:Developers (Score:5, Interesting)
When I saw this line, my first thought was to check housing costs in San Fran. Average price for a house is $1.3M. So, some quick division, and I find that Google is going to be lowering prices by 4% or so, best case.
I'm not sure how lowering the cost of housing from $1.3M to $1.25M is going to do anything other than give Google some more deductions on their Income Tax....
Re:Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
If they build it close enough to the Mountain View campus, it can help reduce the traffic problems near the Rengstorff and Shorline freeway exits.
But really, I'd rather them announce that they're adding a new Bay Area campus with 15,000 jobs in Gilroy. Spreading the tech industry out so that it extends significantly beyond the south bay and peninsula would make a much bigger difference in the long term than anything that can realistically be done within the south bay or peninsula. After all, the south bay is an order of magnitude too dense for traffic to work correctly, but a couple of orders of magnitude too sparse for public transit to work effectively. :-/
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But really, I'd rather them announce that they're adding a new Bay Area campus with 15,000 jobs in Gilroy. Spreading the tech industry out so that it extends significantly beyond the south bay and peninsula would make a much bigger difference in the long term than anything that can realistically be done within the south bay or peninsula.
It would also mean Max Zorin couldn't wipe out the entire tech sector in one fell swoop.
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Wouldn't it make more sense to go North/East towards Walnut Creek or Concord where BART already reaches and you're not limited to one route (highway 101) to get in or out?
This could also be due to my preference for the preservation of Santa Cruz and the rest of Monterey Bay
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One problem with that is that the East Bay isn't nearly as tech-heavy, so you'd have a huge, already-dense city between the two tech areas, and instead of causing people to drive in the reverse commute direction, the main impact of that would be to cause more people to move to the East Bay, increasing gentrification in an already dense urban area. Morgan Hill and Gilroy, by contrast, are fairly sparse (and for that matter, so is Salinas). You could build up a LOT without displacing anything but farms, so
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Farmland is a great thing to have, but not in places where the land value is measured in millions of dollars per acre.
It's a million times easier to plant strawberries in former tobacco fields in Kentucky (or, for that matter, even in barren desert in Nevada) than it is to remove entire chains of mountains to create more buildable land in California. The Bay Area is landlocked, and there are only a couple of narrow valleys through which it can easily grow. It makes very little sense to continue using tha
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Or anywhere. Are you telling me that if Google built a decent sized headquarters that people wouldn't move there? You could do it around Davis, Folsom, hell rebuild Paradise and put your office there. The foothills are great, smart people will follow you, especially if it means a chance a a decent quality of life versus the SV rat race.
What's interesting is that for all the claims of innovation, new ways of doing things, and so on. These tech companies resemble GE, GM, and IBM more than anything new. E
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Yes, this is what surprises me. The group pretty much responsible for making things work remotely, adding communication to the far reaches of the planet, and can't move their offices out of one area California.
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I was thinking the same thing.
I sympathize with the low-income people in these areas, but they would be much, much, MUCH better off if they relocated. It can be very difficult to migrate when you're poor, but $50,000 (Google's incentive per affordable housing unit) is more than enough to move a low income individual/family to a less expensive region of the country that is also much more likely to have need of their lower skilled labor. You could probably get the job done for a lot less, like $10k, allowing
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That's actually a really good idea, pragmatically. But think of the headline. "Google pays $250M to move the undesirables away." That would never fly.
Maybe, "Google pledges $250M to help improve the lives of families struggling in Silicon Valley"?
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You're also talking about moving those low income people who do necessary work.
Are the Software Engineers going to clean their own toilets, mop the floors, cook at restaurants, wash cars, repair cars, drive buses....i could go on forever.
A working society needs people to do these jobs. You NEED these people in every city. I'd argue they're more important ( though earn less) than your average coder.
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Stop the suburbs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stop the suburbs (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop the space wasting campuses. Stop the midrises and single family.
Build TOWERS. Big ones.
Don't blame Google. This is caused by the zoning and planning policies of the city of Mountain View.
Google's proposal is just a PR stunt to highlight the problem. The probability that they will actually be allowed by the city to implement it is exactly 0%.
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Yes, but then you'd be in San Francisco.
Re:Stop the suburbs (Score:5, Insightful)
Downtown San Francisco is where they can build towers. Salesforce did.
Salesforce built an office tower, not residential.
Office towers provide jobs, tightening the labor market, make the housing shortage worse, and push up real estate prices. So they are popular with voters who want to see their property appreciate.
A residential tower would do the reverse. So they are unpopular with voters, and generally not allowed to be built.
People that live in SF get to vote. People that want to live in SF, but can't afford to, don't get to vote.
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That "big giant circle thing" is being build 50 miles from SF in suburban sprawl which just about all of the South Bay consists of
Is Zoning really the solution? (Score:3)
I moved to a big city for work, but I hate it. I'm stuck in an Apartment, my car just had a wheel stolen off it and the city is dirty, cramped, smoggy and lossy for biking. But here I am, where the work is. Could I work from home 100% and live w
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Would you want to raise a family in a 100 story high rise with little or no sun and zero chance of a backyard?
Gee, maybe you are right. I guess the low demand is why housing is so cheap in San Francisco.
I think you misunderstood (Score:2)
The idea would be to stop folks from rushing into over crowded cities just because there's jobs there. To do that you'd need a concerted
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Unlike friends I know who breed and they need school breakfasts and food stamps, or worse have mental/addiction issues that land them in the prison industrial complex. sigh....
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You want them to build TOWERS in time for the Big One [sfchronicle.com]? Sounds legit.
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Do you really want to live in a east bloc concrete urban wasteland? Because that's what you get when you build a shit ton of giant towers in the name of affordable mass housing.
It's not going to be the fantasy of an architecturally inspired living space with a ton of amenities. It's going to be square miles of poured concrete.
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Modern "Company Town" (Score:2)
Like back when coal mining companies built towns where they owned the houses and the stores, and rented them to their employees.
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Google is proposing build-to-sell, not build-to-rent.
Let's look at the math: The land is worth $750M. They propose building 15,000 units. The construction cost of a nice condo in the South Bay is about $200k. The sale price is easily $1.2M per unit.
Cost = $750M + 15,000*200,000 = $3.75B
Gross = $1.2M * 15,0000 = $18B.
Profit = $14.25 B
This would be an extremely lucrative project for Google.
But it would be equally lucrative for many other builders to receive building permits.
The NIMBYs and BANANAs will no
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Like back when coal mining companies built towns where they owned the houses and the stores, and rented them to their employees.
Back then, the miners weren't even paid in dollars, but "company currency" that would only be accepted at "company stores".
Hmmm . . . maybe the plan is to pay Facebook and Google employees in Libras . . . ?
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Like back when coal mining companies built towns where they owned the houses and the stores, and rented them to their employees.
Sounds like it already is one.
$1 billion? (Score:3, Insightful)
Only way out is down (Score:1)
San Francisco will never stand for building any kind of large scale housing.
The only solution? Underground capsule apartments. Have Musk's crack borers construct miles of tunnels that can be converted into dirt cheap (get it??) apartments.
Lots of people in SF live already is super crowded apartments or closets that are way worse than a tunnel with no view. You can easily manage ventilation and other issues, it would keep the top pretty locking while providing space for anyone who really wanted to live in
Re:Only way out is down (Score:4, Interesting)
San Francisco will never stand for building any kind of large scale housing.
TFA isn't clear, but it sounds like they are proposing building housing in the South Bay (Santa Clara Valley), not San Francisco.
But it isn't going to happen either way. The NIMBYs and BANANAs will stop it.
Same answer applies (Score:2)
No place in California wants new houses, and the ones they have are way too expensive for most...
Tunnels that people can live in are still a great answer, it's not like Bay Area houses are not also expensive (just not as bad as SF).
Tunnel apartments with a shuttle also could mean one end gets out somewhere like a shopping district, another in a work center like downtown...
it only sounds like a lot of money (Score:4, Interesting)
$1B is only 1000 $1M homes. If they want to build ~20k homes, that's only ~$50k per home. With South Bay housing construction prices at ~$0.5-1M per unit, that's only a small subsidy. That would roughly cover the cost of the various permits needed to start construction.
Better than nothing, I guess.
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$50K is about what it costs to actually build a modest 3 bedroom house. That doesn't mean they actually sell the finished house for $50k, though. Some is profit, some is land costs, some is taxes and fees.
Re:it only sounds like a lot of money (Score:4, Interesting)
$50K is about what it costs to actually build a modest 3 bedroom house.
That's too low. A modest three-bedroom is about 1200 square feet, call it 1000 to make the math easy. So you're claiming $50 per square foot, which is well below typical costs, even excluding land. $100-150 per square foot (excluding land) is more typical. I recently went through the exercise of designing and costing out a home, with the assistance of an experienced contractor who was also a family friend and therefore willing to be more open about the cost breakdown, including his profit (which I insisted had to be reasonable). My home was designed with high-spec materials, but built in a region with low to moderate labor costs, and it was coming in at about $200 per square foot, excluding the land (which I already owned). The contractor fees amounted to about 15% of that. There were no taxes other than sales taxes on the materials and payroll taxes for the labor, taxes that are generally considered just to be part of the cost of each item, and fees were very small, well under 1%.
In the bay area, land is ridiculously expensive, of course... of that $1.2M home price, probably $1M is for the lot to put it on. And labor is also much more expensive than elsewhere in the country, precisely because the laborers have to live within commuting distance of the job site, and living there is expensive.
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So you're claiming $50 per square foot, which is well below typical costs, even excluding land.
Yes, after I posted I realized I should have specified it was reasonable for material costs.
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So you're claiming $50 per square foot, which is well below typical costs, even excluding land.
Yes, after I posted I realized I should have specified it was reasonable for material costs.
Materials only, and low-end materials at that, yes that I can believe. Labor cost roughly matches materials cost, boosting it to around $100K for that modest three-bedroom. Add another $50K for the postage-stamp lot to put it on, and now you're up to $150K, which is a reasonably-normal price for a new-build three-bedroom in much of the country. Except in the bay area where the postage-stamp lot will cost most of a million, and that being the case you may as well go premium materials all the way on the co
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Jeff is from 1970.
Jeff, let me help you out with looking up what it costs today, we'll use a computer and the intertubes:
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=What's+t... [lmgtfy.com]
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Unfortunately the construction costs are also astronomical in the Bay Area. Not only the hourly rates for work is higher, there are lengthy permit processes (which costs in terms of man hours just to follow), and very rigid building codes [for example, solar is now mandatory: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0... [nytimes.com] ]. All put together it would be around half a million dollars for construction alone:
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/... [sfgate.com]
The only way to bypass this is building on Federal land (no California laws), and u
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$1B is only 1000 $1M homes. If they want to build ~20k homes, that's only ~$50k per home. With South Bay housing construction prices at ~$0.5-1M per unit, that's only a small subsidy. That would roughly cover the cost of the various permits needed to start construction.
Better than nothing, I guess.
What Google is proposing to do, I think, is not to build houses, but to make the land available for a reasonable price, and to try to push through the zoning changes needed to repurpose the land from commercial to residential use... and maybe even to try to get the city (or cities; I don't see any information about where the land is located) to allow higher-density housing construction.
The latter two items are the really hard ones, but I suspect Google believes that by providing a large chunk of land rath
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$1B is only 1000 $1M homes.
Only if they cost $1m to build, which they never do. Maybe 1/10th of that.
Anyway, TFS says that 3/4th of the billion is just land they already own and are giving over to residential development.
We need taxation, not charity (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm glad Google is being generous, but we need sustainable solutions, not charity. Solving social problems is the purview of government, not corporate generosity. That money ought to be taxed away from the wealthy and spent through the democratic process, not undemocratically donated on the whims of wealthy.
Wrong answer (Score:1)
Solving social problems is the purview of government, not corporate generosity.
That's exactly how you get Venezuela. Putting all your charity eggs in one very inept basket.
You are arguing against things like the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders, who do far more than any government to really help people...
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You guys really need to stop with the idiotic Venezuela trope [currentaffairs.org]. There is a huge difference between authoritarian socialism and social democracy. Do some reading. Educate yourself.
One turns into the other.... (Score:3, Informative)
> There is a huge difference between authoritarian socialism and social democracy. Do some reading. Educate yourself.
I have, I just finished reading a collection of short stories by survivors of the Khmer Rouge the other day, in fact. I remember the story of one woman yelling at Angka telling them "how is this free! how is this equal!" even as they were about to execute her, as they did to everyone who questioned the regime, who had any connection to Lon Nol's regime, who had any sort of education, etc
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When Scandinavia's social democracy devolves into the authoritarian hellscape you assume is so inevitable, then I'll buy into your slippery slope argument. Until then, it's merely a slippery slope fallacy. One that has been refuted thousands of times by people with clearly better media diets than you.
Re:Traditional food in Marx' country (Score:4)
The existence of even a single country with both a generous welfare state and a high score on the Democracy Index is absolutely proof that social democracy need not devolve into authoritarianism. To refer to that as a "marginal success story" is to deny the existence of proof staring you in the face. If people had thought like you in the late 18th century, then the French revolution never would've happened. They'd have called the United States a "marginal success story," preached the inevitability of the collapse of republics into monarchies, and France would still be ruled by the descendants of King Louis today.
Perhaps instead of twisting yourself into pretzels trying to pretend Scandinavia doesn't exist, you might do better to study the differences between their free and democratic society versus the authoritarian ones you prefer to talk about instead. I'll give you a hint: it has little to do with how free the markets are and a lot more to do with how free the elections are. To put it more directly: the people of Scandinavia can vote out their generous welfare state anytime they want should their cultural preferences shift in the direction of freer markets. The people of Venezuela not so much.
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To me, the much bigger difference would be that Scandinavian countries have a well established rule of law, court system, and contract enforcement. Venezuela was doing great at one point, until the government thought th
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It's a pretty cheap debate move and beyond cliched by this point to insist that the existence of bad socialist states proves socialism is wholesale bad and that talking about Scandinavia is just a distraction from some inevitable badness that is somehow immutable despite not happening there. It's not any different than if I were to blithely argue that you can't argue capitalism works because look at what's going on in Somalia. With no functioning government to get in the way, they have the freest markets on
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First you argue there is nothing at all wrong with equating Scandinavia to authoritarian socialist states. Then you say Scandinavia isn't socialist, which is tantamount to conceding that there is something very wrong with equating Scandinavia to authoritarian socialist states. Thanks for conceding the whole debate to me...?
As for labels, I'm not hung up on them. I'm perfectly fine with your insistence that we not refer to Scandinavia as socialist, because you're right, they're not. It's a mixed economy. As
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Why are you so completely unable to recognize that political freedom and degree of market freedom exist on separate axes? There are four corners to the political compass [wikipedia.org]. It's not a simple left/right spectrum.
The four corners:
1. Authoritarian left: No elections or nonfree elections with a socialist-leaning economic system, e.g. Venezuela.
2. Authoritarian right: No elections or nonfree elections with a capitalist-leaning economic system, e.g. Hungary.
3. Libertarian left: Free elections with a socialist-leani
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Firstly, you'd know which of those two replies was meant for who if you took all of a minute to learn the (admittedly not great) threading system Slashdot uses.
That said, for all that you're insisting on getting the labels right, you're doing a great job of butchering them. It's idiotic to equate socialism with fascism, because they're on two entirely different axes of the political compass.
The axes:
1. Political freedom axis: libertarian vs authoritarian.
2. Economic system axis: socialist vs capitalist.
You'
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Re: threading, it continues to work after 10 levels. Use the permalinks.
Re: the rest, I find this semantic debate tiresome. It ought to be obvious that when people use the term socialism in opposition to capitalism, they're using it as a shorthand for "economic system of regulated markets with a generous welfare state funded by taxes." Not some Marxist/Leninism authoritarian command economy. Just as the colloquial use of the term capitalism does not automatically imply unregulated capitalism nor the total a
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It's mystifying to me how right-leaning people have developed a kind of political psychology that invests in status quo bias so much that people proposing that we make things better is somehow seen as a greater threat than actual suffering that exists today.
Imagine the left/right divide playing out fixing a toaster.
L: "I'm'a fix this toaster."
R: "No! What if it explodes and kills us?"
L: "Any evidence that it will?"
R: *non-representative analogies*
R: "And that's why trying to fix things is worse than leaving
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I get the basic idea from right-leaning political theory that the more things you make primarily the responsibility of government, the more power government will have to potentially abuse; and the more power government has that could be potentially abused, the fewer defenses there are against that government becoming tyrannical. Sounds sensible on the surface. I'm certainly not interested in nationalizing Silicon Valley, as state ownership of all tech companies would indeed offer the government far too much
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Single payer hasn't happened in one of the states yet for two reasons:
1. The Democratic party is still too conservative. This is generally supported only by leftmost faction.
2. Setting aside political will, it's even harder to roll out in a state than it is federally for technical reasons, such as A. the federal government would have to permit it (this administration would not), B. if it were rolled out nationally, the federal government doesn't necessarily have to pay for it right away (the Fed can print m
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You are arguing against things like the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders, who do far more than any government to really help people...
Actually, they don't. For example, US Foreign aid is far, far, far, far, far, far, far more money than Red Cross or MWF. And as a result, does far, far, far, far, far more than those groups.
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US Foreign Aid is a subsidy program for American farmers and companies as the country receiving aid must spend the money on American goods and food. The local farmers are hurt because American food has been bought and is being distributed instead of what they have been able to grow. While there's normally an emergency that has impacted their crops, by passing what they have grown makes it nearly impossible for the local farmers to be able to pay for the next years supplies. Even a small part of of a normal
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You might want to re-read what he said. He didn't say Red Cross or DWB spend more money, he said they do far more./quote
You might want to re-read what I said. For example, if you go ALLLLLLLL the way to sentence number 3 I cover this.
And if you're particularly clever, you might notice there are fewer "far"s in sentence number 3, covering inefficiency.
Red Cross and MWF does crisis situations. They don't do nation building. Which means they do less stuff, including the inefficiency you folks are absolutely sure must be present, even when you can't find it.
Re:We need taxation, not charity (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm glad Google is being generous, but we need sustainable solutions, not charity. Solving social problems is the purview of government, not corporate generosity. That money ought to be taxed away from the wealthy and spent through the democratic process, not undemocratically donated on the whims of wealthy.
The government should be solving this problem, but the solution does not require, and would not really be facilitated in any appreciable way by, taxation. Mostly, the government just needs to stop getting in the way. It's regulations that have created the problem, by restricting most of the available land to single-family homes, and by enforcing strict height limits (four stories) on the few apartment buildings and condominiums that are permitted. This makes commercial development much more lucrative and attractive and drives up the price of what little housing is available.
Google is trying to break the logjam, a little, by making a bunch of land that is currently intended for more valuable commercial use available for residential development. Hopefully they're also going to use the "gift" as a lever with the local government to pry loose permission to allow high-density housing on that land.
I suppose you could use tax money to enable local government to buy up expensive commercial real estate, zone it as residential and sell it at a loss, but that would be a very wasteful approach. Much better for local government to simply issue more permits for apartment and condominium complexes, which are lucrative enough to justify residential instead of commercial development. Even better if they allow truly high-density (high-rise) housing, and high-rise commercial development, to make much more effective use of the space. Per square-foot cost of both housing and commercial space would drop, even if land prices stayed high.
Basically, they need to allow the area to become a city, not a suburb. Government attempt to crowd a city's worth of businesses and people into the area while maintaining a suburban feel is just never going to work. It's awesome for the property values of the people who already own the land, though, which is exactly why they've done what they have.
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Actually money is needed for one big reason: infrastructure. Mountain View is not a big city like San Francisco. Even if the residents are willing to support density in certain areas (e.g. downtown and North Bayshore), there need to be improvements in road capacity, public transit, water/sewer, schools, and other things to support growing from a small town into a large city.
Public transit needs to be improved, but a shift to city-style infrastructure should allow road capacity to actually be reduced. Suburbs require a lot more road per residence and even a higher ratio of road per square foot of residential real estate footprint than cities do. As for the rest, it'll come pretty naturally.
Palo Alto is probably the worst. Aside from the well-above-average levels of NIMBY-ism, in practical terms many of the major thoroughfares of the city (University, Embarcadero, Middlefield, Alma) are residential, lined by houses with driveways directly on the main road. You wouldn't be able to add lanes or raise the speed limit above 25 without buying out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of houses and angering a bunch of people in the process
Not a problem, really. Just add a good bus system (clean, safe, frequent, with good Wifi -- don't even have to be particularly cheap) and make it known that you'll issue building permits f
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"Undemocratically donated"? That's a hell of a doublespeak term. Your argument suggests you'd rather compel (that is, *force via gunpoint*) wealth redistribution rather than allow voluntary charity.
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Flat taxes are actually regressive [washingtonpost.com].
The percentage of someone's income that is disposable rises with higher incomes. It's reasonable to expect the wealthy to pay more in both absolute terms and percentage terms.
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It's reasonable to expect the wealthy to pay more in both absolute terms and percentage terms.
You've made that claim, but failed to support it in any way. Should you be charged more for a hamburger at diner simply because you have more wealth than the person next to you?
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So you slope the flat line a bit ( say a slight increase in percentage for every additional dollar earned), and remove all deductions.
If EVERYONE is paying taxes, they've got skin in the game.
The problem is twofold:
People who pay NO taxes have no issues with raising the tax rate.
Extremely wealthy people use accountants to avoid paying taxes.
As a result, the middle class gets screwed.
Bleeding heart liberals (Score:3, Insightful)
Ironically, the housing issues as well as the epic homeless problems in the bay area are a result of the bleeding heart liberals.
How can that be, you ask?
Simple. For decades, developers have been trying to build more apartment stacks and high density housing units.
Due to the wonder proposition system in CA, laws were enacted which gives residents a say in zoning and what can and cannot be built.
So.. every single time they want to build housing someone can afford, these asshats vote it down because they do not want to decrease their property values.
I guess they are only in favor of a socialist agenda when it does not personally affect their property values.
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Which conservative city gives landowners the right to do with their property as they wish? Even Houston won't let you open a bar unless you also provide enough parking for all your drinking customers!
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Due to the wonder proposition system in CA, laws were enacted which gives residents a say in zoning and what can and cannot be built.
And here's where you're completely wrong.
Zoning is done by the city, or county if the location is unincorporated. Zoning was not changed by propositions. It was changed by those city councils, at the behest of the current landowners. Rich folk like low-density housing, and they love scarcity driving up the value of the property they already own. These folks also tend to lean conservative, especially on economic issues.
Meanwhile, the folks who can't afford to live in that city can't vote for the city cou
What a coincidence! (Score:1)
Drop meet bucket (Score:2)
Sounds good but even a billion won't translate into much.
Fix the retirement problem first (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Metro NYC. While we don't have the insanity-level prices that is the Bay Area, we do have very high real estate prices and very high taxes. We're experiencing similar issues here with house prices...crappy houses are selling for WAY more than they're worth just because of proximity. There are only 2 things that will solve the housing crunch long term:
Let the retirees cash in their ATM and move, Don't forget that most people have only their house as an asset to retire on. There are going to be bucketloads of retirees soon, and they all want to get the money out of the house they bought for $40K back in 1978 that is now worth $4 million because it's right down the road from Apple's HQ. Once enough of these retirements happen and inventory goes up, prices will have to come down. The issue is that you'll probably have people who want to hang onto the house forever...I'll admit that SF/SV climate is probably the best in the US but I'd hate to deal with all that traffic and the insane cost of living.
Tech companies, stop insisting that everyone live and work in Silicon Valley. Branch out and place offices in more affordable cities. IBM used this strategy before they became an Indian outsourcer and AI-peddler...they'd stick product engineering groups in smaller cities where they could still get talent, but that talent would have fewer places to go, so they created an internal labor market. If you stopped forcing your employees to come in and shoot Nerf guns at each other, eat 3 meals a day "on campus" and collaborating in an agile manner, you could avoid paying basic engineering people $300K and have that just be subsistence income given that they need to buy a $1.8M house.
Seriously, those two things will fix things faster than any affordable housing plan.
Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Time for some San Francisco nutters (Score:2)
Housing in the Bay Area is so expensive that if a Silicon Valley company wants to dump a large sum of money into building new units, it can explore the sort of high-end futuristic solutions that would otherwise be outside the realm of possibility.
Let's see now...drill thousands of feet below SF and blast out a Project Plowshare nuclear cave? Seabed apartment buildings offshore? A base tunnel and maglev line under the Sierra to reach cheap housing in the Owens Valley? Replace Google HQ with a saled off high
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Replace Google HQ with a saled off high rise arcology that incorporates housing, offices and all the necessities of life?
They definitely should do that. They really really should. Apple's problem was they didn't think big enough with their silly "spaceship" crashed UFO headquarters. Google is also thinking too small.
It actually fits with Google's current ethos. The word "arcology" is explicitly a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology" as stated by Paolo Soleri, the Italian architect who coined it. (He died in 2013 at the ripe old age of 93.) Google will want to downplay the Soleri name though, as he allegedly sexua
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Apple will not appreciate being upstaged. It will insist on putting its Spaceship into orbit.
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And in a few years it'll become derelict in orbit because of an iOS update, so the employees will have to pay half their salary to have Apple HQ send up a new one.
UBH (Score:3)
People talk about universal basic income, but perhaps we should consider universal basic housing for zero rent. Something that provides shelter, safety and cleanliness but that someone with cash would want to move out of as soon as they were able.
Put physical and mental health facilities, along with a police station in the basement.
Politics prevents housing from being built (Score:4, Informative)
San Francisco's leftwing interest groups refuse to let more housing be built [battleswarmblog.com]. A property owner spent nearly 5 years and $1.4 million trying to convert his laundromat into new housing in San Francisco’s Mission district, only to be stymied by far-left interest groups at every turn.
The free market would build more housing if regulators would let it. In California, they refuse to.
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Google should do what big corporations have been doing for decades and just throw briefcases full of money at politicians until it gets what it wants. That said, the amount of money it would take to convince the politicians to tell the special-interest groups (who probably have a fair bit of power when it comes to getting people to actually vote for or against said politicians) to "get stuffed" is probably more than even the mighty Google is able to spend.
Why do so many dimwits want to live there? (Score:2)
Or just move. (Score:2)
Offer relocation bonuses to boot. Miles cheaper I'll bet, and better for everybody- including the cheaper failing location they choose to move to.
What is it about the bay area that convinces people to accept the insane cost of living? I can't get my head around it. If I'm accepting a 2x pay increase, but it comes with a 10x COL increase... I don't think the math works. Not to mention all the other cultural oddities that come with living in the bay area.
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I don't think the factors you've posted are accurate.
Also keep in mind that money is money. If you work for 15 years at a high salary to buy a $1.3m house, you can sell it and have $1.3m. If you work for a low salary for 15 years to buy a $200k house, you can sell it for $200k.
Also, the "cultural oddities" are a big part of the draw: no one wants to live in places where the culture is based on a toxic hatred of anyone that is different. If other places didn't suck so much, people wouldn't leave them.
Ah, the whole "California is kewl, everywhere else suxxs!" argument.
I was born in California, bought into that up until I was in my early twenties, then started travelling a bit.
And realized California wasn't the best. There are tons of places all over the US, and the world, that are much nicer for less cost.
Many of them are mono-cultures that I don't belong to- but they were friendly and accepting.
I'll take friendly and accepting mono-culture over the toxic angry and shouting to enforce diversity while tre
Start a damn tech hub in a different location. (Score:2)
That city is done, it's finished. Life there is miserable.
At least don't expand there anymore, use other locations.
No regional strategies (Score:3)
You can't solve this problem with isolated programs like this. You need to think about the big picture, decide what you want the region to look like, and get all the cities to work together.
There's no right amount of housing to have. There's also no right number of jobs. But if you have too many jobs for the amount of housing, prices skyrocket. So you add more housing, but everyone takes that as encouragement to keep adding more jobs, so the problem doesn't get any better.
You need to decide, how many people do we want living in this region? Then you create enough housing for all of them and no more, and enough jobs for them and no more. And you also plan your infrastructure around it. What kind of transportation network do you need? Do you have enough water supply for everyone (really big issue in Silicon Valley)?
But instead it's all being done without a long term plan. Oh, housing prices are too high, so let's build housing! But we'll also keep adding office space because it makes a lot more money than housing, so housing prices don't get any better. You're right back where you started, only now the traffic has gotten worse because there's more people but no good public transit network.
Of course (Score:2)
...Google could spend 1/10 that, build their hq in Topeka or Buffalo (because why does their physical location actually matter?), and both materially improve the standard of living of their employees and massively take a role in improving a whole metro area more or less to their specifications...but then their management wouldn't get to build their monuments to ostentatious consumption or live in the trendy coastal hipster zone.
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...Google could spend 1/10 that, build their hq in Topeka or Buffalo (because why does their physical location actually matter?)...
Physical location matters because of vertical supply chain and suppliers located in the area that need not only to move material but have meetings, the current economy needs a large pool of skilled workers for how it is currently set up and used, and because those skilled workers more often than not, decide where they want to live and then look for a job. As somebody that came from a short drive from Topeka, no way would I want to live my life there. As there isn't a huge amount of people there, pretty much
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"Physical location matters because of vertical supply chain and suppliers located in the area that need not only to move material ..."
Nonsense. Google's not taking giant truckloads of freight from a factory down the street. Whatever "google the hq" is having delivered enmasse is likely manufactured in China. So why do they need to physically be in SFO, again?
"..but have meetings..."
Again, sorry, that's nonsense. This isn't Mad Men 1960. I work for a PAPER company (one of the oldest and most hidebound o
It's not the houses (Score:3)
It's infrastructure. ...
15000 homes is a town of 30-50.000 people.
Before building you need streets, street-lighting, water, natural gas, electricity, waste-water, fiber, waste-water treatment plants, water pumping stations with at least 1 tower, schools, public transportation, policing,
Just putting a bunch of tickytacky houses on a few hills doesn't cut it.
The headline should read... (Score:2)
"Google decides to build company town", because does anyone really believe that's not what it will be?
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@gmail.com
I always trust banks that can't operate their own mail server!!
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Iamarealbankandnotsomeguyinhisgarage@yahoo.com
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> Public "schools' fail to make competent students over the course of 13 years. THIRTEEN.
You're assuming that's the goal. It is not. They are there to indoctrinate the next generation of voters.
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