This tear down is what $5.5M buys you in Palo Alto | Hacker News Reader

This tear down is what $5.5M buys you in Palo Alto

blog.sfgate.com

30 pointswyclif24 comments

I don't know why the article intentionally hides the address of this place. Annoying. It's 1027 Waverly. Here's the trulia listing, if anyone is curious (like I was):

http://www.trulia.com/property/3236376439-1027-Waverley-St-P...

It's a shitty title anyway, it's suggesting the tear-down is somehow relevant to the price. Additionally, $5.5 million is the asking price, and luxury real estate is notoriously over priced in listings - the real price is usually tremendously lower.

What, so only $2.5M for that wreck?:)

$2.5 million for a huge plot of in land in a very popular city, in the most desirable state in the country, in one of the most desirable countries in the world. It seems pretty reasonable to me.

It's been reduced to $5M after 1 week[0]. Also, if you are buying, you're buying the lot, not the house. A 10,000 ft lot zoned for housing. (and a small old house you need to get rid off, which therefore actually has negative value)

[0] See randycupertino's link to trulia.

I doubt this is zoned for multiple dwellings.

This is what I dislike / don't understand about Palo Alto. Look around here (https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4173571,-122.1312807,3a,75y,...). This is 5 minutes by car to Stanford and to downtown Palo Alto. What do you see? Nothing! Empty sidewalks, empty lots, Jiffy Lubes, a lamp store. Nothing over a few stories high in sight. The entire place looks abandoned---yet this is in the center of one of Silicon Valley, where housing and space, we are told, are at a premium.

The culprit I suspect is the unwillingness of local governments to permit construction that would allow for affordable housing. Space is obviously not a problem.

I am not sure your conclusion makes sense. It's also perfectly possible that there isn't much development going on in this area because land prices are so high and the owners are waiting for someone to buy and develop. It doesn't make sense to build a $200,000 gas station on your plot of land worth $5 million dollars if someone is going to buy it within 5 years and tear down the gas station to build something catering to upper class residents living nearby.

Look at the stuff in that area that is clearly new development: A nice credit union, a Starbucks, a Corner Bakery, expensive name brand clothing store, a swanky private K-8 school, an optometrist for animals - all stuff that will continue to exist and make sense 10+ years from now when that entire area is built up with new development.

There are good arguments against changing commercial zoning to residential zoning. This is what creates suburbs, which I would assume Palo Alto wants to prevent.

That could be the case. The thing to note though is the lack of density. In a free market you would see developers taking advantage of the real estate prices by building vertically. That would encourage not sub-urbanization, but urbanization proper. I am suggesting that Palo Alto residents want to prevent urbanization by artificially limiting density which is bad for... well everyone, except existing property owners. And even that is questionable, the area I link here is not at all nice to live in because it feels abandoned and the businesses it supports are sub-urban---the muffler place, a crappy donut shop, a car wash. You want to drive by and get out as soon as possible. There is no convenient public transportation to the university that is only a few miles away. There are no cute coffee shops or bars to create a neighborhood feeling.

The existing people living there in their $1 million plus homes don't want to live next to a bunch of high density residential. They want a small, quiet community that doesn't have traffic problems. Obviously this sucks for everyone else that wants to live there, but I am not sure "build high density residential" is such a clear-cut correct solution. Do people in a city have the right to not want to encourage further population growth? My hunch is that they do, but maybe there's an argument that could persuade me otherwise.

Also, there's a bus line that does down the exact street you linked, and has many stops.

I'm pretty sure on 5.5M you can go to Spain, buy a very decent house in 1st line of sea and continue to live a good life till the rest of your days. :)

Yes, but taking pitch calls in Coupa is going to be hard if you live in Spain. Being able to just walk down the street to your pitch calls is the point of living in Palo Alto.

Spain will probably have internet eventually though, right?

When I see properties like this that have been abandoned, I often wonder what the story is...

UK: Someone (and I'm trying to find a source now) worked out there were something like half a million empty houses in UK because of developers going bankrupt, owners dying, abandonment &c. There are some legal tools to get housing back into use. And you need planning permission to change things sometimes.

In some parts of America, if the taxes for the property go unpaid for long enough, an interested party can start paying taxes and improve the property to gain legal ownership. This is effectively a formal method of squatting called "adverse possession".

Yeah, this happened a few years ago: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/texas-man-claims-mansion-16/s...

The story here is Prop 13. Homeowners are incentivized not to make improvements to their home, so that their property taxes remain tiny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prop_13

This is why 3D holographic projections will have a massive impact on house markets. Not right now, or for the effect to take-hold over the next decade+, but soon (in terms of properties for a retirement plan). Because we'll be sitting next to each other despite potentially being very physically distant.

Investment property is places with high connectivity, nice external living environments (some like cool, some like warm, some like mountains, some like all, I'm agnostic to what is 'best'), low (current) prices, easy transport access when absolutely needed - not local, but flights or other rapid transport.

This is a great long-ball investment.

We have had the telephone, email, cell phones, video chat, and yet, the trend is still towards people moving in to cities.

Is 3d projection really going to change that trend?

Extremely unlikely, seeing that 3d projection doesn't help with Amazon Prime Now, which is partly a big reason for me personally living in city ...

What you need to remember about 3d projection is that it can defeat network latency, in some case bringing intercontinental one-directional latency under 40ms. It can also decrease rendering latency relative to audio and video over IP. Between these benefits, the VR telepresent conversation feels more real, more present. Oh, wait. /s

(40ms one-way latency on London-NewYork or LA-Beijing requires beating the speed of light, unless I screwed up my math).

Another thing that makes realistic VR unsuitable for telepresence (though perhaps not a problem for "3d holographic projection") is that an HMD makes it much harder for the system to find out what facial expression you have, and so there's actually less information to transmit to your remote correspondent.

Especially when San Mateo could just fall into the sea someday.

I assume you're referring to earthquakes. I live in San Mateo, have lived in California for 25 years, and floods, fires, droughts, and traffic all seem like more immediate risks.

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