Google’s modular apartment plan hailed as possible housing crisis fix | Hacker News Reader

Google’s modular apartment plan hailed as possible housing crisis fix

mercurynews.com

39 pointsMz66 comments

FactoryOS, the builder, has never built anything. But they have a really cool team video.[1]

It sounds like Google is building a "man camp", like the ones in oil fields.[2] "Owned by management companies, the oil companies typically pay a daily rate per employee for residency at the camp, and, depending on the employment arrangement, the oil company may require employees to be responsible for a certain portion of the cost. ... Many oil companies have set up company policies that forbid alcohol, illegal drugs, firearms, and unauthorized women. Rowdiness is controlled not only by background checks of employees but also by working the employees long hours so that each day is like "Groundhog Day" – work, eat, sleep – leaving little time for shenanigans."

[1] https://factoryos.com [2] http://www.ogfj.com/articles/print/volume-10/issue-4/feature...

> so that each day is like "Groundhog Day" – work, eat, sleep – leaving little time for shenanigans

Someone didn't watch that movie very closely.

Some estimates put the time Phil spent repeating Feb 2nd at 10000 years. He spent half a year, practicing 4-5 hours a day, just learning how to flip playing cards!

There's some fun analysis of the length at https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/6334/how-long-was-..., including a post directly from the screenwriter.

Moats and drawbridges are not far off for the modern day kingdoms and sharecropper serfdom that work is turning into.

That's Foxconn in Shenzhen, where they had to put anti-suicide nets on the employee dorms.[1] Google isn't at that level.

[1] http://www.dailytech.com/Foxconn+Installs+AntiSuicide+Nets+a...

"innovative ways to address the housing crisis..."

So the bar for innovation has now been lowered to include fancy trailer parks and the resurrection of the 'company town'?

In a region where building housing is disruptive innovation...

I thought most of the problems with prices in the area are geographic constraints (think peninsula nature of San Fransisco) coupled with city zoning laws (that, for one, limit vertical growth). In general, I never saw speed and cost of construction as the biggest issue.

So the innovation here would be Google adding housing supply on its own land—a company camp met of course with healthy critique.

I do think modular construction is set to dramatically change the way we create buildings. For anyone interested, there's a still-operating 1968 modular 500-room deluxe hotel in San Antonio, Texas —designed, completed and occupied in a then unprecedented period of 202 working days.

The best tidbit: Before arriving on the construction site, each room was fully decorated, including color TV, AM/FM radios, beds, carpeting, bottle openers, automatic coffee makers, ash trays, etc.

http://www.modular.org/htmlPage.aspx?HtmlPageId=400

I want so badly to believe this, but the "innovative" modular apartment complex recently constructed near the Barclay's Center in Brooklyn turned out to be a boondoggle.

It was touted as being faster to erect than conventional construction. Then it took nearly 5 years to assemble (similar-sized conventionally built towers a block or two away have gone up in 18 months or less). And it's been plagued by issues like leaks due to imperfect alignment (which can be adjusted for more easily using traditional methods).

Can't someone see the absurdity of this? Building temporary housing for extremely well-paid employees in a city where everyone is rich? Something is off to say the least ... they will end up with uber-expensive makeshift homes because people can simply afford to pay more for them. The logical thing to do would be to expand their offices in other cities, or offer remote work. It all seems to be driven by the billionaires who just love their city, but maybe someone should point out that in the end the entire wealth and vibrance of the US will be concentrated in a single city and that would have very bad implications.

The peasants (reasonably well paid tech workers) flock to their wealthy patrons (billionaire CEOs).

The last time that didn't end very well

Don't expect change to come from the peasants. They have bulwark of conservatism throughout history.

Come now, they don't see themselves as peasants. They're getting paid to do what they love! What more do they want? They should feel lucky that their rich patrons deign to pay them for doing something they're so passionate about.

(This comment is a sarcastic commentary on attitudes in this industry.)

Unlike polluting industries of old, billionaires want to live next to their modern day tech factories. Thus their headquarters are a short drive away from their minimum 3 million dollar ranch homes in Palo Alto, their town councils demand low growth to keep the traffic down and the feeling suburban and all the worker bees must commute in from someplace uglier where poor people may live. Seriously, this is why all this is happening. There is no other reason. Google is attempting to remedy this problem by building compact quarantined worker bee colonies that won't impact the multi-millionaire enclaves that management cherishes.

> It all seems to be driven by the billionaires who just love their city

I think it's more on the workers than anything else. The types who flock to Google, Facebook, etc. are mostly urbanites who'd sooner die than live anywhere outside of the coasts. So, you put your offices where your target demo of workers want to live.

Honestly Google and Facebook should just become their own cities. The housing restrictions are so incredibly broken in the south bay/peninsula that I'm not sure there's a solution other than to work around them entirely.

They need to lobby the state to take away the city and county governments power to derail construction with bullshit zoning and permitting. If someone wants to build 45 story high rises in sunset district, why should SF stop it.

City planning is not done well in SF. But it is a real thing. And it can be done well.

Sure, but SF has proved it has no interest in doing it well and the entrenched interests are strongly incentivized to not do well.

The current situation is worse than unplanned.

I think urban planning makes more sense when you are going from undeveloped to developed. But it's harder to do once you already have developed land that needs to be torn down and redeveloped.

I'm sure it's possible, but at this point getting rid of it entirely would be a net improvement.

They really need to just eliminate all local power and consolidate all zoning decisions with a single housing czar. It's clear that democratic solutions have failed.

It's possible that democracy hasn't failed, but merely hasn't been structured properly. If zoning and permitting processes were held accountable to the millions of people that have to commute to or through their walled towns, instead of those who merely live in them, they most definitely would act differently.

Wow. You know you screwed up city planning when "having to use company housing" is an improvement.

Is it?

Perhaps part of the issue is the fact that companies like Google/Apple/FB use tax loopholes so their HQ cities don't really have the funds to properly manage the problems these companies create with their large employee base.

Mountain View doesn't have the funds to permit more housing? My understanding is they give permits for new offices no problem, so I'd like to know where that point of view comes from.

What tax loopholes are used to avoid local taxes ? From my understanding corporate tax doesn't go to the local government. Looking at City of MV page they only tax Business license, property and sales tax. From what I know they prefer offices due to prop 13 which limits property tax growth.

It really seems like some corporate tax should go to the cities. These companies are more or less responsible directly for the insane gentrification of the Bay Area, why shouldn't they use some of their immense profits to help the city deal with the consequences of it?

Local government consistently fails at enabling adequate public transportation to the point where the large tech companies need to step in and fill in the gaps with their own bus services. Is it any surprise that local government fails to enable adequate housing?

FTA:

"The tech giant plans to buy 300 units of modular housing to serve as temporary employee accommodations on its planned “Bay View” campus at NASA’s Moffett Field, according to a source familiar with the plan."

Are the units temporary, or are the employees? Serious question.

“The end product is of the highest quality. It’s impossible to tell the difference between a modular construction project and a traditional project, other than that the modular goes up much quicker.”

I would like to see more based on this assertion.

Could be they're billed as "temporary" for legal reasons. Another thing to consider is there's a lot of "temporary" housing from the post-WWII era that's still in great shape.

It always starts as temporary and then they will petition for it to become permanent.

My university housed chunks of departments it didn't like in one of those buildings. The cyber-security club located its infrastructure (racks of old servers) in the center of the building in a vain attempt to make it settle as fast as the perimeter of the building.

Probably both. Temporary housing is used for new hires that need a place to stay while looking for apartments themselves, and contractors that fly in.

I hope they have a company store too, and you can get paid in credits for it! /s

Personally, I don't like the idea of handing money right back to the company you work for, for property they own and you just rent.

Stanford does it for their faculty since they don't pay them enough to actually afford to live in the area:

https://fsh.stanford.edu/

The housing crisis is the result of both policy and innate incentives to rentier asset inflation. If you want to attack housing, you've got to change the system, not simply construction.

We know how to build attractive and high-density housing. And there's a hell of a lot room for improvement above Palo Alto's 960 persons/km^2

Redondo Beach, CA, ranked at #132 on the list of most densly-populated U.S. cities, clocks in at 3,900/km^2.

Changing tax laws, real-estate financing, and costs of failure to develop will have a far greater impact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

Well said. Unfortunately, California has Prop 13 which prevents implementation of reforms such as the Land Value Tax.

An obvious place to start concentrating fire.

Could someone explain the pricing? $30 million for 300 "modular homes" that appear to be very similar to trailer homes seems a bit much. That's $100,000 a unit; you can build a much larger and fancier house for that kind of money. From the WSJ article mentioned in the article, it sounds like the deal is for the houses only, not any land.

$100,000 for the location is very very cheap — I think that's the key. You could easily build out for $100k in most of the country, but you're not centrally located.

You literally can not own anything for $100k in the top 5-10 cities.

"That's $100,000 a unit; you can build a much larger and fancier house for that kind of money."

Not here, where the minimum tends to run around ~350 a sq ft, and higher quality homes can be ~600-800 per sq ft.

(coming from the east coast, yes, this is bonkers, but ...)

It sounded like the $30 million was for construction costs only, not the price of land. The price of a house is mostly land, not the actual materials and labor that go into building the house. If the $30 million includes the land price, then it's a great bargain. If not, it feels like Google's being ripped off.

Company towns are a very old idea.

Unfortunately, demand response curves are fun. By providing company housing, this venture will cause more people who've stayed away from the area due to housing costs to consider it more favorably, as they will have the prospect of obtaining relatively affordable housing through their employer.

This will intensify employee competition for those jobs, a quest in which personal connections still help. Those personal connections are best cultivated onsite and in-person, so this will likely drive up prices further for non-company housing in the area.

I'm not sure that's much of a solution to the housing crisis.

Ok, if anyone relevant from Google is passing by, please consider spending a few percent of total cost on soundproofing.

Your tenants will thank you. And they will be better rested and more productive.

This feels like the Arcology of Shadowrun lore.

"Arcology (short for Architectural Ecology) is a term used to describe a self-sustaining colony, typically a massive building which does not need to import or export supplies to stay running and maintain a population of humans. The most famous arcology is the [...] Self-Contained Industrial-Residential Environment (SCIRE), and now known as Arcology Commercial and Housing Enclave (ACHE) [...] Originally was home to over 90,000 Renraku employees and family members. The SCIRE served as a shopping mall, industrial complex, and basically self-contained private city of Renraku within the Seattle Metroplex."

It's worth noting that this universe has the widespread concept of a "wage slave", employees that have to work to keep living and live to keep working.

Arcologies have nothing to do with videogames, they were a concept for a three-dimensional city invented by the architect Paolo Soleri. Soleri's 1969 book Arcology: The City in the Image of Man is worth reading.

This project has nothing to do with arcologies. It is a trailer park.

ShadowRun has video games but it's not a video game. It's a huge RPG universe (first published in 1989) featuring video games, pen & paper rule sets, novels (around 60 of those) and tons of lore.

I was pointing out the similarity of contemporary coporate campuses (Google, Apple, etc.) with the "Self-Contained Industrial-Residential Environment" of that very dystopian world where corporations have taken the upper hands on governments.

> this universe has the widespread concept of a "wage slave"

"Wage slave", as I recall, was adopted into cyberpunk literature from pre-existing 1970s-1980s American culture, which itself got it from the Marxist critique of a core dynamic of capitalism.

A handful of huge tech companies could single-handedly fix the housing crisis* by taking one of those disruptive risks they claim to cherish and move headquarters outside of Silicon Valley/Seattle. Because other companies want to be around the big guys, it will become a trend.

* - This is presuming you consider the current state of things, $2,500+ for housing as the norm, to be a crisis in the first place. At some point you have to admit that it couldn't really be a crisis, if thousands of people eagerly advance its existence year after year.

300 units is a "game changer"?

Google getting 3 units, let alone 300, built in its home turf of Mountain View is quite the breakthrough. If it sounds silly to you, it's because you are not familiar with the soap opera that is the relationship between the city and its largest business.

Tell me about it. Google has wanted to do things like making road changes to improve traffic from the massive amount of people getting on and exiting 101 and Shoreline, and as I recall, MV basically said no.

Isn't the main reason for high rent costs in desired places , is the high cost of land, not construction ?

We're talking CA here. Just parking a double wide requires a 30-man crew paid prevailing wage, ten grand in permits, etc, etc. Land and construction are both expensive.

Yes. Hence why cheaper construction cannot solve this problem, even in theory. The more people cram into a location, the higher the land prices will go. Cheap modular apartments just continues what is already occurring.

Doesn't strike me as very creative. Sounds like Google should be talking with their van-dwelling employees to seek a better solution. Would be great to open up a van-dwellers Mecca to the public as well. I've thought about doing it myself but I don't have the money to bootstrap such a thing myself.

They already have those. They're called Walmart parking lots and the arrangement is mutually beneficial. Walmart gets security, people get a place to park and sleep for free without being hassled by cops. I understand that people who live in "nice places" may be skeptical of their existence but trust me, they exist.

"Nice places" with Walmart usually make the existence of said Walmart conditional on that particular store not allowing overnight parking.

Walmart parking lots pale in comparison to what I'm suggesting. If you are a Google employee already, a Google parking lot is pretty darn good but still not as good as what I'm suggesting.

Sure, if you are on a road-trip and in a pinch Walmart is OK. But if tied to a region, you can do much better than Walmart (as evidenced by driving around the valley and cities and seeing where the vans are parked).

> Would be great to open up a van-dwellers Mecca to the public as well.

RV parks have been around for a very long time.

I suppose it would be like RV parks in a superficial sense of vans parking and paying a fee. However, I would suggest catering to car/van dweller minimalists, that don't have the features of an RV, by offering high quality, useful amenities. I would also take inspiration from maker/hacker spaces for more value-added options.

Really maker-spaces or artist loft warehouses could fill most of the need if they had enough parking and tweaked some things.

What a bad joke. This isn't even remotely close to fixing the big issues, like prop 13 or zoning/NIMBYs or regulatory processes, or even minor ones in Google control, such as building office space somewhere that isn't on the peninsula.

Google Feudalism

Disclaimer: idea not mine, just shamelessly copying from someone else.

I think the word crisis is beginning to lose its strength.

I was expecting something more along the lines of THX 1138

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