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Comment by paulbaumgart | Hacker News Reader

This is mind-numbingly inefficient. We really need to build up.

It is nearly impossible to build up in Silicon Valley, due to prop-13 driven NIMBY-ism. Thanks to prop-13, most of the people that bought their houses in the 60s and 70s have not been forced to sell due to real estate taxes on their absurdly overpriced homes. These people vote, and they are dead-set against anything that "changes the character of the neighborhood". That translates to anything other than single-story, single family housing.

Add to that the fact that most of the "new" people who would benefit from an increased housing supply are in multiple non-voting demographics (young, non-citizen immigrants of various visa statuses), and the old-timers hold all the political power. Why would they ever vote for anything that might decrease their property values? If you talk to them in person, they will occasionally grumble about traffic, or that they have to drive 1.5 hours to visit their grandchildren (because their children cannot afford to live in the area), but they will not actually do anything to change it. The reliably vote against universal mass transit in the valley, and against dense housing.

The only logical choice is not to play the game at all. Most large employers with satellite offices in other areas of the company do not give an appropriate salary penalty for living in a low-cost area of the company -- at least nothing that resembles the actual cost of living difference between silicon valley and other markets. So the best option is to work for a company where you can transfer to an satellite office in a low cost city (eg, Google Pittsburgh), or to just work for a company that allows telecommuting (which is what I did).

>Most large employers with satellite offices in other areas of the company do not give an appropriate salary penalty for living in a low-cost area of the company -- at least nothing that resembles the actual cost of living difference between silicon valley and other markets.

This has been the case forever though. Back in the 1980s, northern California jobs didn't compensate for higher cost of living even relative to fairly expensive east coast cities. And the cost of living in crappy apartments in Manhattan was a trope back then as well.

One of the things that make Silicon Valley unique is its low density. Almost all other tech hubs are located in extremely dense cities: NYC, London, Seoul, Tokyo... Rather than turning Silicon Valley into another one of these, I'd prefer to see other tech hubs flourish and offer viable alternatives. (I don't own a house in Silicon Valley, nor can afford one.)

NYC, a tech hub? London, a tech hub? Perhaps you have some persuasive arguments to the contrary but in my direct experience there is far more "tech" going on in places like Seattle, Portland, Denver and Austin than these places which have some tech work.

My few examples were not meant to be sorted nor exhaustive. They were meant to illustrate the fact that places that offer a lot of tech jobs tend to be high-density cities, rather than a collection of comparatively lower-density areas like Silicon Valley. The places you mention all seem to be high-density cities as well. Maybe I shouldn't have written "extremely dense" then, I guess Austin isn't that dense compared to NYC—but still much denser than Silicon Valley surely?

The bay area is quite dense. SF, Oakland, San Jose combined come close to the population of Chicago. Austin and Denver are much less dense than the bay area.

Denver is only recorded as "not dense" because the city technically includes all the land around the airport where there is very little built. If you don't include the airport property the density is pretty close to San Jose.

If we are discussing tech hubs, then the surrounding area should be included such as Boulder, Broomfield, etc. Just like we should include Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc. Having lived in both places for ~4 years each, the density in the Denver area is not even close to the bay area.

New York has Columbia University and NYU, as well as nearby schools like Stony Brook, Cornell, Princeton and Yale. New York has commercial banks and investment banks and hedge funds based in New York with massive worldwide networks, huge machine learning setups generating billions in trades (I used to administer one machine which had over $1 billion a day flow through it). Someone like Peter Weinberger (the "w" in awk) bounced between Bell Labs and Rentech. Speaking of AlcatelLucent Bell Labs, there are other R&D departments like IBM research. Plus most of the major advertising and design shops. I know the Facebook Android UI is done in Facebook's NYC office. Google owns a huge building in New York, and many Bay Area companies have large offices in New York. Not to mention publishers and their networks - the New York Times, Time-Warner, Viacom and so forth.

In 2000-2001, when people like Marc Andreessen were having trouble getting VC, investment banks and hedge funds were splurging on tech investment, even after all the Y2K money they had just spent.

One thing is hedge funds don't jump up and down saying look at our algorithms, look at our infrastructure. They tend to be very low key - I only know of one Youtube video with the currnt head of RenTech, which has $65 billion of assets under management, almost all of which is capital from the firm's 300 employees. They are no slouches, and have had some excellent computer scientists, mathematicians and scientists work for them.

New York does not have to persuade anyone it is a tech hub, especially relative to Austin, Denver, Portland and Seattle.

And Cornell Tech campus in NYC starts running business in 2017.

London has become a massive tech hub. The digital technology sector employs 200k people [1] and is makes it one of the biggest global tech hubs outside of the Valley.

[1] http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500248323/London-steams-...

Pittsburgh, Austin, Portland, and Raleigh - Durham also have a decent tech scene and sane housing prices.

Portland's housing market is incredibly hot right now and their prices are definitely edging out of (if not already) sane territory. The big difference is that you don't have to go quite so far out of town to get back to better prices.

I'm in a wheelchair - I wonder if you can still build in accessibility while constrained to tiny apartments.

Of course. There won't be any internal stairs, and you may well prefer to take a ground floor apartment. If it's a new building, it's more likely to have wider doors and a completely level floor.

If the housing is reasonably dense, there should be useful shops close by.

(In the UK, two friends of mine get an allowance from the state for their disabilities — one uses a wheelchair, the other is blind. It might be £56/week, I'm not sure, but it is paid even though they both have good jobs. Part of the purpose is so they can afford to live a little closer to a station, or in a larger apartment, or whatever.)

The ground floor could be reserved for wheelchair bound people. I'm surprised that isn't more or less a rule anyway, it seems to make perfect sense. In NL elevators are pretty rare in the inner cities so we have these things called staircase elevators, little platforms that you can roll onto with a wheelchair which will then take just about forever to go up one floor.

The problem with this is that there are often more disabled people in an area than there are ground floor units.

I absolutely loathe staircase elevators although in 2015 they proved more reliable than the standard elevators I had to use.

As is the tech world being so concentrated in a single area.

Back to first principles: Location, location, location.

Either build more concentrated housing like Manhattan or make commuting from a longer distance more efficient. Perhaps a little of both.

Google has $60 billion in overseas cash. Negotiate a tax deal to build the Google Maglev from SF to San Jose, turning the 50 mile journey into a 20 minute commute.

Note that 50 mile in 20min is a (relatively modest for european standards) 240 km/h. The fastest links in europe can sustain 270-300km/h, using traditional, overground trains. Since you would probably need to dig, you don't care as much about noise and you could easily go at top speeds using 70s technology.

However, you probably can't succeed with just two terminals 50 miles apart from each other. It'll likely be more successful with 3-4 outlying stations, meaning you won't be at "cruise" for the entire 50 mile journey. Still, 30 minutes is also a win over the current status, especially if it's direct to the campus where you work (no "last mile" problem on that end).

Those are long distance TGV trains not commuter services - though I can get from 65 miles out of London to work (near st Pauls) in just over an hour.

Why not run the Maglev the other direction into Stockton or even Sacramento? The last thing San Fran needs is even more housing competition. Stockton is dirt cheap, San Fran is still crazy expensive.

But "Mag lev to Stockton" doesn't sound so sexy despite being a more rational idea.

Maybe Google instead ought to learn about remote work instead of blowing billions on a Mag Lev.

Yeah, even as far out as Dublin is still very pricey.

Remote work is the cheapest most efficient way if you really look at it. It is the future. The culture is growing and slowly and organically we'll get there.

Hopefully it's a future of options: not mandatory to work remotely. I'm with the majority though: I prefer to work from the office most of the time

If you want to make commuting more efficient, wouldn't it make more sense to have the maglev run from the east bay (or somewhere much more affordable) than SF? I haven't read great things about real estate affordability in that market. How would such a maglev will help affordability in SV?

I think more likely alternatives are:

* build up if a high density coalition can be assembled (unlikely, but possible)

* people stop moving to the bay area or leave when they are ready to settle down. Remote work becoming more acceptable may be part of this.

We face some of the same issues where I am (Boulder), but of course nothing near the intensity. We have huge chunks of uninhabited plains to our east that are being built out. If we have the water for it, and can handle the in commute traffic, we are good to go. (I realize those are big ifs!)

Good luck trying to get any high capacity public transport built in California in less than 20 years. That's the main problem, everybody is fine with stuff being built just not in their back yard or with their tax dollars.

Why not make working from home more efficient instead? We run from home and it works fine. Meet once every few minths somewhere nice (as you save all those costs for an office, expensive housing etc). I did both scenario's multiple times and I have not found more efficiency in sitting in an office together /most/ of the time.

The D programming language dev team is all over the world, every continent but Antarctica. I initially worried that it would be a mess to work together, but with github/Skype/email/forums and the annual D conference it works surprisingly well.

Doesn't work as well as collocated teams even more so for a start-up where team collaboration is key.

Life is about tradeoffs. There are certainly successful startups that are significantly distributed. But I don't really disagree with your general point. I suspect that we'll see startups for which collocation is a priority increasingly looking outside the Bay area.

We are a startup. We collaborate fine; I think this is a myth and/or it depends on getting the right people.

And to that point; you can sit in an office in another city or state which costs a fraction. You are not in silicon valley just because you need to sit together in your startup right?

But from experience a collocated team works better - some types of work are more suited to remote working LOB support for a mature system for example.

> Either build more concentrated housing like Manhattan

Manhattan is not affordable either. Especially considering that getting kids in good schools is famously challenging.

But one could argue that Manhattan's ultra density tends to geographically consolidate lots of the craziness to a small area. The outer boroughs are quite reasonable in comparison to either the article, SF or Manhattan, but are still within NYC boundaries.

another solution is to spread out the interesting stuff more.

I think higher-density zoning is an easier thing to do in real life, but if this were Sim City I'd concentrate on making more areas be somewhat independent, so we don't all feel the need to go to the same spot

No, that doesn't help much either: see New York city. Besides the point of buying a house is to have a yard and not have neighbors bouncing on your ceilings or leaving trash in the hallways or stealing your bike.

What's actually needed is more remote working and a departure of the colocation mentality for businesses that don't actually need colocated employees.

Software engineers rarely ever need to be in an office. A hardware engineer almost certainly does. SaaS sales people: no need for an office. Customer support -- no office needed there either.

Even many lawyers don't need an office (by office, I mean a traditional office, not a home office.) I was a plaintiff in a lawsuit and never once did I even see my attorney face-to-face.. And it was complex litigation.. And we won.

Doctors obviously do, content marketers obviously do not. Accountants.. Definitely not.

My point is that the problem isn't housing, it's the density of tech companies that seem to think physical proximity to Sand Hill Road actually matters. The problem is also that Sand Hill Road also seems to think it matters. But it doesn't. Cases in point Basecamp and Github.

Commuting to an office only to use Slack as the primary day-to-day communication. THAT'S mind numbingly inefficient. Commuting to an office only to stand in a circle for standup and then going back to a desk to work all day.. That's inefficient. Marissa Mayer is wrong.

> No, that doesn't help much either: see New York city.

NYC manages to have cheaper housing than SF despite having radically more demand, thanks mostly to the ability to add supply at a reasonable rate.

I think the point is already lost if NYC is an example of affordable housing. Houston is probably a better example if you want to talk about affordable housing in a major city. But commutes in Houston are getting pretty crazy even.

> I think the point is already lost if NYC is an example of affordable housing.

NYC is actually quite affordable though. If you're willing to have a ~30 minute commute, you can easily live in some affordable places.

There are even more affordable options internationally though. Berlin, for example.

I feel like the problem with working from home is that people tend to procrastinate and do anything to avoid doing actual work.

There's a new guy at the coworking space I work at who is self employed, and specifically moved from his home office to the coworking space, just to get himself out of the house and stop procrastinating.

I'm the same, I can't get anything done at home. Having a dedicated work space improves productivity a heap.

That being said, it's totally possible to have the staff spread through coworking spaces or serviced offices through different cities, working remotely.

Also, I spend a lot of time at work interacting with other developers, which is a lot easier and better to do in person. Pair programming is an exercise in frustration trying to do it remotely.

Not everybody is equal. I really like to work from my little 1 square meter here in my house and I'm by far the most productive here, rarely get any work done in regular offices with all kinds of distractions around me.

It's richly ironic that everybody out to innovate and "disrupt" every other traditional business is so conservative about remote working. I've been working remotely for five years now. I'll admit it comes with its own set of challenges but with good people it can be very productive and efficient.

I could easily get a job in Silicon Valley right now but why would I?

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