Facebook Paying Employees to Move Closer to Work | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Paying Employees to Move Closer to Work

fortune.com

40 pointscpeterso70 comments

It is high time for all of the tech companies of Silicon Valley and San Francisco to come together and lobby the hell out of municipal and county governments to push for more housing and better transit.

It is absolutely insane that there is so much wealth being generated by these companies, yet they seemingly have no political will to influence the very localities they are based in, never mind their federal adventures into H1-B skullduggery and patent power-plays.

And the local communities themselves need to accept that tech is a huge tax base and the reason for their affluence, and stop their rampant NIMBYism and obstruction to urban progress.

Note: I'm referring more to past actions by wealthy communities in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties who did things such as impede the growth of BART. Or when rich liberals in San Francisco decry housing construction by citing a fear of "losing the character of the city." Gentrification of indigent areas such as East Palo Alto, the Mission, and so on is another story.

It's often less that there's no political will and more that the people in the cities have more votes to block that political will.

Why stop being a NIMBY when it's great for you?

> It is high time for all of the tech companies of Silicon Valley and San Francisco to come together and lobby the hell out of municipal and county governments to push for more housing and better transit.

The problem is fractal. The reason why the companies locate in SF rather than, say, Gilroy is the same reason why the companies locate in Silicon Valley rather than Tulsa, OK, for example.

The first problem here is that the executives in these companies want to live in those rich communities, so they don't locate the headquarters somewhere sensible. And lack of telecommuting is driven by the fact that executives can't telecommute as everybody now realizes that they actually don't do anything.

Second, there is a recruiting advantage when your company office is in the "cool" area. If you put the Facebook HQ in Gilroy, for example, a bunch of the younger folks would choose to work for a company that is located in SF proper.

That explains why the companies are located in these places. It doesn't explain why the companies don't use their clout to improve them, or even apparently make the attempt.

Because there is no clout in local politics unless you're bringing tax dollars to the table, which tech companies don't.

Don't they pay a ton of property tax on those fancy headquarters?

Possibly? What's the ratio of what they pay compared to the rest of the residential property in the city limits?

I guess I didn't make my point clear:

The executives don't live where the problems are. And, in fact, the executives are quite happy with NIMBY keeping the rabble out of Atherton and Palo Alto, thank you very much.

The HQ location is a balance between where the executives live and where employees can be recruited. With more tilt toward the executives (there was a study somewhere that showed that HQ relocations almost always moved closer to the CEO's residence--funny that...)

I see what you mean. Still, you'd think the difficulty with recruiting, or the increased pay required to attract workers, would at some point give them an incentive to improve things somewhere in the area.

Since when is there anything cool in Silicon Valley but the tech industry? There's nothing to do there, it's just low-density sprawl for miles upon miles. It's a testament to the strength of the industry that so many people are willing to put up with the tedium of an essentially suburban life in order to work there.

> It is absolutely insane that there is so much wealth being generated by these companies, yet they seemingly have no political will to influence the very localities they are based in

Wealth != municipal revenue. Menlo Park was particularly upset that Sun Microsystems (selling hardware and generating sales tax) was replaced by Facebook (no sales tax revenues). A pizza parlor would generate more revenue for the city, seems like, than an Internet company.

The only other venue is for company employees to buy up residential real estate, start paying property taxes and show up for city council meetings, as the city is likely deriving significant revenue from that. But if that is not happening, we can assume that company employees chose to deploy their residential spending elsewhere, and if so, why should the city care?

Does Menlo Park not have property tax for corporate headquarters?

Yeah, I think every city does, but like anything in property tax land, it's the value of land and additions. So a bunch of office buildings plus cheap land by the Bay.

I tried to find an exact answer, but San Mateo county doesn't publish a list of largest property taxpayers (some do http://ttc.ocgov.com/proptax/toptaxpayers so I believe it's public records), and a search for variants of Hacker Way on their site doesn't yield much.

Those places look like they ought to be valued really highly, but I suppose it's probably not a huge amount compared to tens of thousands of houses.

This article seems to imply it was assessed at $355 mil http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_16037583 With new building Facebook erected it will likely get re-assessed at higher value, but still, there are probably residential blocks in Menlo Park valued higher.

Business property taxes and many other services tend to be considerably cheaper than residential rates.

And furthermore - if employees do buy up residential real estate, they now have an incentive against rezoning to allow higher density (and increasing supply -> potentially lowing the value of the very expensive assets they just purchased)

At that time, wasn't it commonplace for manufacturers (ie. Sun) to only pay municipal sales tax on items sold within the city and not for "remote" orders?

It must have been all California sales. They were top sales tax producer for the city http://www.almanacnews.com/news/2009/05/27/menlo-park-a-top-...

And so... Prices in the streets in that radius will go up another notch. As if Fremont and parts of Menlo Parks hasn't gone up because of them already.

Acknowledge it or not, instead of paying 15,000$, Facebook could have been more remote friendly and people can live wherever they want.

For a company the size of Facebook/Apple/Google they can also have micro-offices in cities further away from the valley.

Employees won't have to relocate, housing prices will settle and the damn traffic on the bridge and the 280 will be less horrible perhaps.

Every time I commute I think to myself, what if suddenly most companies realize that they can have 15-25% of the workforce work remotely without damaging the productivity, how many cars in front of me would just vanish?

I think the idea is to optimize, not accomodate.

> Every time I commute I think to myself, what if suddenly most companies realize that they can have 15-25% of the workforce work remotely without damaging the productivity, how many cars in front of me would just vanish?

Increase road tolls, use it to incentivize companies to allow remote work.

Everyone is working on solution for cleaner energy, electric cars and others, no one really makes an effort trying to solve how many of us just waste 2 hours of our lives on the road every day.

Because its a political/human problem unfortunately, not a tech problem.

Remote work clearly works, you just need to incentivize companies to put it in place. Otherwise, they will continue to extract those hours a day of commuting from workers, the money workers put into public transit or their cars, etc. Externalities people!

I was actually about to make this comment when you did.

This is a matter of responsibility and perception. When you are help up in traffic you don't think of Facebook's and Google's responsibility for it, you think of the government.

The solution for this is not hard, it's just something that no one seems to have the guts for making the decision.

Sometimes I wonder, this 15,000$ incentive to employees make me think that no one is even thinking about it over there at Facebook.

Remote work does not clearly work for everyone and everybody. It does not work for me, I need other people's presence and interaction for those 8 hours per day on order to feel like I'm doing meaningful work. Granted, I don't have kids nor pets to keep me company at my one-bedroom apartment.

Except that'll impact everyone, not just office workers who might be able to do that kind of thing.

Right, that's how it should work.

Roads have a finite capacity (you could increase vehicle speeds in order to increase capacity, but you'll run into hard limits); you properly price that capacity based on time of day. If you can't reduce demand with dynamic pricing, you will exhaust supply (in this case, congestion occurs) in short order.

Increase road tolls and facebook will just start paying a fraction of a percent more to their employees.

So the only ones who suffer are the ones hit by a regressive toll system.

In other words, punish people financially for not being rich enough to live close to work. That'll work.

Remote has other benefits like getting more women involved in tech: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/powertofly/

However, companies praise "high-bandwidth" face-to-face communication, and which we most all agree can be useful. The issue though at many companies is they lean on it to try and paint over communication and process issues they have. It's not a problem with remote per se, but it's an easy scapegoat.

The thing is, lots of enterprises do allow for remote work, but apparently it is only allowed for the off-shore consultants, not for their own employees.

I never understood this duality.

It is ok for an off-shore consultant to work remotely from somewhere on earth, but not for the employees.

>what if suddenly most companies realize that they can have 15-25% of the workforce work remotely without damaging the productivity

Because this isn't true at all. Working remotely (on average) is much less productive than an office. Distributed, smaller offices would be a better solution, but then people would be much more locked into whatever team/project they are currently on.

I really disagree on this.

Though I am biased, I've been working remotely for 5+ years.

Since relocating to the US I've been working part time from the office (I am about 30m away).

We are a small company and we still have 10-20% of the people working remotely, some in different time zones completely.

It takes time and process, but given the opportunity I believe it will work really well for a lot of organizations.

There is literally a railroad next to their campus. FB should be offering to pay to modernise it and build stations along it with Caltrain.

Trains are absolutely the solution to Bay Areas traffic problems. Even better, with WiFi/LTE and decent seating/tables (add first class if required for people willing to pay so you get a seat) you can get a lot of work done on the train to and from work.

> FB should be offering to pay to modernise it and build stations

I'm sure Facebook pays taxes, why should they be building train stations on top of that?

Google builds internet balloons and self-driving cars, a few train stations wouldn't be too terribly absurd for a big tech company.

I don't think anyone is saying Facebook et al. should be expected or required to undertake municipal improvement programs, but in certain cases it really could be in their own best interest to do so.

California's high speed rail project is estimated to cost $70B. That's like 15% of Google's entire market cap... I'm not sure trains (esp. in the Bay Area) are within the capability of even the largest internet companies. Plus: You'd probably require some level of imminent domain to seize land -- which would be wildly unpopular and generate a lot of bad PR.

I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The original commenter's suggestion was to "modernize" a train route that runs near their campus. My assumption is that the route is currently functional, only missing the required stations and amenities necessary for relatively short-term passenger transport. I don't think high speed is called for in that situation, just anything capable of making a commute more bearable and less costly, therefore a conventional passenger train would likely suffice.

Additionally, it would still be a primarily municipal project, for which Facebook (and perhaps other interested private parties) would only partially contribute to in monetary terms.

Maybe it'll be cheaper than sustaining a private bus fleet in the long run? Maybe it'll be a good PR move for the company to show that they want to give back to the community they're based in? Not to mention, New Balance did it, so it's not exactly an unprecedented corporate move: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/new-bala...

To help them attract and retain talent. I couldn't say if it's a worthwhile investment financially, but there's certainly plenty of reasons why a company may want to improve public services beyond what their tax dollars are capable of.

Precedent: Facebook paid Caltrain a bunch of money to clean up those tracks a few months back.

http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/Projects/Caltrain_Capi...

There's actually a European company that is working with Facebook to do just this. I don't remember the company's name, but I met their CEO a couple months ago at the Pioneer Summit (which had a focus on transportation, among other things).

Existing passenger train service in the Bay Area is a ridiculous mess, with BART, Caltrain, ACE, Amtrak, VTA all run by different entities. It's a total disgrace. Unsynchronized, disconnected, few good ways to transfer from one to the other, and schedules that don't make sense. I tried commuting on ACE, their trains are pretty nice (WiFi!), but their LAST evening train leaves San Jose at 6:38 PM, which you'd know is useless if you've ever worked at a tech company.

We need expanded and coordinated schedules, trains that actually connect in sensible ways, and a ton more tracks, which is just not going to happen. Look how difficult it is to get BART extended anywhere.

There are 20 metro areas in the US with a population over 3 million people.

What would it take to get the big players in tech, say, the 10 biggest companies by market cap or # of people employed, to open up satellite offices in all (or even half!) of those metros, employing, say, 100-500 people.

These companies all have satellite offices - some of them are even growing those satellite offices. Every one of these companies has offices in the bay area, Seattle, and NYC. Some have offices in Colorado, LA, Austin, and beyond. They've proven it can work - so why not double down on that strategy, instead of incurring the exponentially growing costs of keeping talent in the bay area?

This would be a huge win for all parties involved.

Employees get some choice over what climates and cultures they want to live in, and don't have to worry about family or other ties that keep them in a specific geographic reason.

Employers get access to talent that isn't willing to relocate to the bay area.

Employers and employees benefit from employees living in cities with real estate as cheap as 1/10th the cost of the bay area.

The nation as a whole benefits, because more cities get to reap some of the economic rewards these companies are producing, instead of watching it all concentrate in the wallets of landowners in California.

This is a great idea, actually. Though at the moment it looks like most tech companies are simply doing this to Oakland, which is simply pushing existing Bay Area urban issues across a bridge.

I wonder which of any of these other metro areas are in the running to be the next SV/Seattle: http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/cities/best-places-tech-jobs-...

EPA and Oakland and the East Bay will all gentrify.

This is an awesome move. When I was at Amazon in SF I had a team mate who literally commuted around 90 minutes each way from Sunnyvale. This summer at Open Listings we built a product to help people shop for homes with short commutes [0]!

Here's a list of homes with short commutes to Facebook HQ: https://www.openlistings.com/near/facebook-hq

Pricey but maybe doable by cashing out some of that cush FB stock, going with an FHA loan, or one of those crazy new 0 down jumbo loans [1].

[0]: https://www.openlistings.com/near [1]: http://www.housingwire.com/articles/35789-san-francisco-fede...

Quoting ChuckMcM's post from a previous thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555):

> I've often wondered what might happen if Apple, Google, and Facebook joined forces, bought a couple of Tunnel boring machines, and bored a pair of tunnels from Cupertino to San Francisco, right underneath El Camino. If you looked at the number of people carried by private busses between San Francisco and the south bay it would get good ridership. If you threw in access to as much dark fiber as you wanted between those two points and added big fiber drops to PAIX, MAE-EAST and SF, you could offset costs by selling this capacity up and down the peninsula. I also know if Google built the tube they could figure out how to do it for a whole lot less than the $1B/mile that these things command in the public sector.

How often do people who live in San Francisco but work 30-60 miles away actually have time to do things that take advantage of living in SF, especially on weekdays?

If I had a bad morning commute, a full day of work, and a bad commute home, I think I'd most likely spend that evening at home doing things online or watching TV or reading. I don't think I'd be going out. I'd probably only get out on weekends.

But that would mean I wouldn't really benefit much from living in SF. I could just as well live near work, and drive to SF on weekends (and time the trip to avoid bad traffic hours) when I want to do something that is better done in SF.

I used to live in SF and work 40 miles away (in Santa Clara), and yes, that is more or less exactly how it was. The one advantage was that going out on weekends was somewhat easier, since I didn't have a car at the time, and weekend Caltrain takes absurdly long to get to SF (an hour and a half), and if you miss the last train back, it's an even slower bus ride.

You don't have to pay extra to get people to work remotely. When is one of the big tech giants going to embrace telecommuting?

When they believe that telecommuting works.

I wonder when companies will flat out start offering dorms.

My office already has futon.

I mean...they (apple, amazon, etc.) already do offer corporate housing for interns and co-ops. It's certainly possible for these benefits to extend to full-time hires.

> Old hands remember a time when Facebook offered a few hundred dollars for employees who lived within a few blocks of its old offices in Palo Alto. Landlords got wind of the situation and quickly raised rents to match, they say.

There's a big difference between "within a few blocks" and within 10 miles (which includes 3 separate counties). Landlords would be foolish to raise rents just because one employer is giving a housing incentive.

> Landlords would be foolish to raise rents just because one employer is giving a housing incentive.

Landlords would be foolish not to capture the highest rent would-be renters are willing to pay; the subsidy increases that, so landords would be foolish not to react to it.

Similar to student loans and tuition prices. When the access to capital increases, increasing costs will maximize profit without the typical problems of churn.

Probably that explains why the home prices in nearby areas like East bay(Newark and Fremont) are rising so much. I live in Newark and housing prices have risen by more than 15% since last year.

Incredible! I just looked up trends for Menlo & East Palo -- unbelievable.

nice way to buy local votes - displace existing residents and replace with your employees, and the city council will in a few years become just a meeting of your PM-s :)

I wonder how this is going to affect residential real-estate prices (and COL in general) in Menlo Park/E. Palo Alto...

How much will Apple pay to move closer once they build the spaceship in Cupertino?

I hope they don't.

Even if they don't it will drive prices and make finding places to rent harder, if they do, well, that would be a real mess.

Had a family friend sell a house 5-6 min from the future spaceship for 1.2 million. It's a tiny box and they had 8 offers over their 800k asking price on the first weekend. The highest bidder was quoted saying "It's close to work(apple)". That area is already expensive for the schools.

In the bay area, "asking price" is just the start of the communication on the low end.

I have a friend that was in the market for a house, most houses went for 150K avg over the asking price.

Alternative min tax (AMT) is also driving high wage earners to buy expensive homes, too.

I hope SV companies allow remote work. Otherwise, I can't afford to rent a place with less than 30 mins commute.

I've never heard of anyone from Apple getting perks to move closer. Seriously I do hope they work to improve mass transit instead - even if it's just for employees, that's less people on the roads.

This is great news for all of us in San Francisco

In other news, rental prices near Facebook just went up $10k / year. Odd.

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