Rent is so high in San Francisco that Im a software engineer and I live in a van | Hacker News Reader

Rent is so high in San Francisco that Im a software engineer and I live in a van

qz.com

23 pointschjohasbrouck11 comments

Question from a newcomer here - why does one have to live in San Francisco?

I moved to bay area three weeks ago. I live in Walnut Creek which is the boonies to everyone here in SF but 1) it's affordable, 2) it's safe, and 3) it's quiet.

I commute to SF every weekday. I almost always get a seat, pop open my laptop, tether to my phone, and start working. The 45 minute commute usually isn't even noticed.

I live in San Mateo but used to live in SF. It took me a while to realize I hated living in SF. I left when somebody pointed out that since I had no interest in nightlife or bars or going out to restaurants in crowded parts of the city, I didn't really need to live there.

Your "45 minute commute" is a bit optimistic, it's more like an hour from WC.

I think Google would have saved a lot of money if they rented out a dorm-like building for some employees, with cheaper rent vs. higher salary

They used to rent out the barracks on Moffett Field for incoming intern classes, but I heard there was a crime problem and emergency services was pretty slow to respond up there, so it was probably a bigger liability problem than it was worth.

The relationship between Google, employees, California, and the city of Mountain View has always been quite complex wrt housing. Google's argued on a few occasions that it should be able to build housing in North Bayshore so that employees could walk to work and wouldn't strain city infrastructure. There are environmental concerns (eg. the infamous burrowing owls) that the state and EPA bring up. Mountain View itself on one hand would love to eliminate all the Google traffic over Shoreline and 101 and make rents affordable again, but OTOH, they don't want to become known as a company town, and there are jurisdictional issues. Who provides fire & emergency services if Google owns its own housing? Would local police have jurisdiction on private Google property? Is Google responsible for contracting with local utility providers, or is this done through the town?

It is somewhat mind boggling that we can have such a huge, influential company that changed the world and they can't master urban planning challenges well enough to house their employees.

It turns out that urban planning is more complex than searching the entire web thousands of times per second.

Same reason GFiber has taken so long to get off the ground: they had the technical capacity to give everyone in the U.S. gigabit Internet several years ago, but developing the political capacity to get right-of-ways to the utility poles has taken years.

Social challenges always take longer than technical ones. That's why there're still billion-dollar Internet companies being founded today when the WWW has been around for 25 years.

I was studying to become an urban planner at one time. Life got in the way and I never completed my Bachelor's in Environmental Resource Management with a Concentration in Housing. I did get the Certificate in GIS I wanted, but, obviously, never having finished the bachelor's, I also failed to get a master's in urban planning.

There is a long American tradition of megacorps doing things like entire planned towns (Hershey, Pennsylvania) or otherwise influencing local planning. It seriously doesn't make sense to me that Google can't make some kind of arrangements. Megacorps are often very well positioned to cut deals and put through proposals that are de facto urban planning schemes that could not happen if it weren't one company behind it. In other words, if you had to get multiple groups agreeing, which is the thing that causes a lot of friction in the process of urban planning. If all you need is BigCo and TownInQuestion cutting a deal, it often cuts a lot of the red tape.

Google's public-policy attention is largely elsewhere, eg. lobbying for net neutrality at the federal level or self-driving cars at the state.

Also, Mountain View's bargaining position is a lot stronger than Hershey's. If Hershey left the town of Hershey, there would literally be nothing there. If Google left Mountain View, there would still be Intuit, Mozilla, Symantec, LinkedIn, Microsoft, YCombinator, and a whole host of other companies. Google's negotiating position vs. local governments is actually a lot stronger in many of the places where they build data centers, eg. The Dalles, OR; Lenoir, NC; or Jackson County, AL, because those towns have no other major industrial employers.

Thank you.

I am aware that Hershey was a company town. (I think it was, in fact, built by the company, but am not going to put time and effort into verifying it.) I did work for a large company for some years. For a variety of reasons, I chose to leave out examples I know of from that company that are a lot more recent than Hershey. It was the biggest employer in town, though certainly not the only large employer. My understanding is that in one case they did not even try to demand X from the city, they just began scouting for land elsewhere and the city came to them and an arrangement was made that satisfied the company's need for land.

So I am thinking that a) it isn't necessarily about having the power to cram your agenda down the city's throat, more about having a clear agenda to begin with and b) your first line -- indicating that they have other priorities -- sums it up nicely. It isn't that it cannot be done, it's that they don't really care that much about the issue.

come to boston. you don't have to be homeless here.

But you may have to sign a noncompete. Massachusetts needs to make noncompetes illegal like California. It's holding them back from competing against Silicon Valley.

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