A city, where you have separate classes of homeowners and all the service personal commuting in sounds pretty dystopian to me.
An area of land has a carrying capacity dictated by the will of the people who live there through their votes. Why fight it when you can simply move work elsewhere?
You can't really do that. You underestimate the powerful network effect Silicon Valley has on the tech industry. Almost all of the investors are here, and many of the world's best software engineers choose to live here and will not move elsewhere for work. There are only a few other cities that have a lot of software jobs and also a large pool of software talent, and they also have a high cost of living -- NYC, Boston, and Seattle come to mind.
Your argument about investors and quality developers only being in SFBA is a strawman. There are successful startups all over the world. Unicorns? Probably not, but that's a perception issue, not a quality issue (current unrealistic valuations will continue to come back down to Earth)
The number of orgs supporting remote, even fully remote, grows all the time: https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#companies... ; if an employee chooses to expose themselves to outrageous housing expenses due to the employer's ability to externalize this cost to the employee (with no penalty to the employer, because "that's just the way it is"), this will never change.
That was not my argument. I said most, or "almost all," not all. And that's true! Even the NYC startups have to come to the Bay Area to meet with VCs.
The reason why it happens is the same reason why VC have historicly had negative returns; VC's as an industry make most of their money by convincing investors to part with there money not from actual returns. As such they like having a dog and pony show in the area while they try and fleece more people.
This sets up boom and bust cycles and many market distortions. As VC's still want positive returns it's just not their #1 goal.
The problem is that the large global companies like Facebook and Google are extracting an unnatural amount of money and that's flowing into the Bay Area, and translating into high-paying engineer jobs. The problem is all of the great jobs are landing in the Bay Area, and in the age of the Internet that just doesn't make any sense anymore.
These large global companies need to spread that around the US and move jobs around to other areas, so that young people can get exciting jobs in lower cost areas. This will take off the burden off the Bay Area, and ease the pressure of housing prices.
Because familial relationships are not transactional in the same way that business relationships are?
You sound like someone who has never actually had to work in a multinational company before or with remote team members. Anyone who has can tell you that things are much easier when co-workers know each other personally and become friendly with each other than when they're just strangers to you on the other end of the email. It changes how you respond to them.How likely you are to misunderstand them. How likely you are to respond with kindness or terseness. And it changes how you feel about your job in general. When you go into work and you like the people you work with and you consider yourself their friend, you're far more likely to like your job overall and stay there. If you treat your entire work life as a "transaction" then you're far less likely to be happy with your work life.
How far away does said land need to be before you think current homeowners shouldn't have a say anymore? Should someone who lives on the border of Palo Alto and another city be able to prevent housing being built in that other city, or just in Palo Alto? It's pretty arbitrary.
The people who are trying to prevent housing being built today are the same people who benefited from lots of new housing being built during the 1960s-1980s. Why should they have the right to prevent other people from doing what they themselves did? Should the Palo Alto residents in the 1960s-1980s have been able to prevent the newcomers at that time? I suspect very few current residents would agree with that, which is hypocritical.
I think there is a much simpler way to deal with this -- if land is zoned for housing, allow housing to be built. If some rich guy in Palo Alto wanted to control what happened on that land, he should have bought it. Why should anyone be able to veto the development of housing on land they don't own, if it is zoned for housing?
If it were legal to build fourplexes anywhere in Palo Alto, merely wealthy families would be able to outbid some of the insanely wealthy with their four rent payments combined. For the most part, single family homeowners can't actually afford single family homes in such desirable locations, but our laws make it illegal for middle class families to outbid the wealthy the way they always have: using less land.
This is an obvious injustice, and the people who insist on laws that exclude others will soon find themselves in our history books. Stop letting Dixiecrats call themselves progressives.
I mean, climate change is a worldwide problem, why can't all the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions be done outside the US?