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Comment by tstegart | Hacker News Reader

I always see news articles about companies building campuses and headquarters out there. Can anyone tell me why Google/Facebook/apple can't just build a residential tower for 10,000 people next to their building? It seems they get approval for everything else they build out there.

The only time I went out there it was very suburban, with plenty of room for more buildings. Seems odd that the businesses with all the money paying all the taxes can't get a city council to approve giant apartment complexes right next to their headquarters.

Anyone have the answer? Must be the only place in America where corporations don't get their way, unless they don't actually want housing for their workers.

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The super short version is that for existing homeowners a big corporate campus benefits them, while housing doesn't.

If Google builds a huge office park next door, their housing value shoots through the roof. Every residential unit that gets built means more supply, which reduces their value.

People are also fiercely defensive of the "character" of their residential neighborhood. They do not care nearly as much what happens to office towers.

For a lot of people in the peninsula, nearly all their net worth is in their suburban house - it's not something they could never hope to afford in today's market. It's terrifying to imagine anything happen to it.

FWIW, Google doesn't push for this sort of thing very hard. Corporate housing generally brings the specter of "Company Towns" and all that came with it, which makes it a tough sell all around.

I actually don't believe that high rises diminish the value of SFH, in fact the opposite. As they become more rare relative to other options, their value as a status symbol increases. I believe that younger lower paid people will live in higher density and there will be more higher paid management to oversee them, who will bid on low density places.

They want to, the city and NIMBY don't allow them to.

See e.g. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/23/mountain-view-slashes-...

The problem with that land is that it is trapped between 101 and the Bay with only 3 already-crowded ways in and out.

They try - in fact they just got their proposal slashed from on the order order of 10,000 units to around 1,000 for their new campus in San Jose.

Answer: NIMBYs who don't want new neighbors

In Mountain View they tried to build housing at the campus but were denied - among the stated reasons being that Google wanted to build 5000 units which is apparently close to the turnout in the entire city election. The city made the argument that Google could tell its employees how to vote

There have been some efforts: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/09/facebook-... However, building a few thousand apartments is hardly going to make a dent on the larger housing market. The area needs construction on a scale that large tech companies have no incentive to provide or expertise to do so.

Furthermore, attempts to get regulations changed are very hard. The people who are comfortable with the status quo are long-term residents in power, and generally don't want to bring down the value of the homes they own/ spoil the 'charm' of their neighborhoods.

Prop 13 is a major component. Property tax grows at below inflation, whereas commercial tax grows at the pace of the local economy.

So, if you zone housing, eventually the cost of servicing that housing exceeds the tax revenues from it, and there is little you can do to avoid that process. If you zone businesses, you get sales tax and similar revenue from the workers. Financially, it's best to let your neighboring municipalities build homes for your workers.

There is also a backlash from locals who see higher density housing as the core cause attributed to most local issues: traffic, crime, overtaxed city services, etc. This is mostly an incorrect perception, but it's a persistent one.

These combine to prevent zoning for housing.

The property tax seems like a likelier answer. NIMBY-ism always strikes me as a weak answer. At least in the midwest, if one city won't build it the city next door will. Seems odd (and in my view, unlikely) that every single city bands together and can resits the market forces of the most powerful companies on the face of the planet.

I'd have thought a municipality would have cracked by now and let everyone build huge residential buildings and used that population growth to fund everything else. Seems every weird no municipality isn't building houses like crazy.

  Property tax grows at below inflation

Property tax can go up 2% per year. Inflation has been below that for many years.

On the peninsula, property taxes for housing do not offset the school and other costs for the residents that live there. Therefore, no town wants more housing. We have to allow some projects because the state has mandated it (local authority comes from the state, so our hands are somewhat tied.)

Until with fix prop 13, residential development economically hurts peninsula city budgets. The taxes towns are able to levy against new construction don't make up for it.

1. Zoning

2. Corporate housing that you need to move out of as soon as you leave your job sounds pretty dystopian.

The zoning is what I'm wondering about. In most of the rest of the country large corporations make the rules. It seems the taxpayers in Silicon valley are the tech companies, and they want housing. So who is voting against changing the zoning? It seemed like miles and miles of corporate offices out there when I visited. Just build a giant apartment complex on top.

And I wasn't actually talking about corporate housing, just giant residential buildings. But even then, company towns still exist, why haven't Google and Apple built them?

"It seems the taxpayers in Silicon valley are the tech companies" - Most of the taxpayers are also homeowners who don't want to see their property values fall due to an influx of new affordable housing.

>large corporations make the rules

I think you've been reading too much political chatter. It's not that straightforward.

>So who is voting against changing the zoning?

The actual voters.

>company towns still exist

Well, they mostly exist in the sense that some modest-sized cities/towns mostly have a single employer for a fairly large radius. That isn't true in any meaningful way in Silicon Valley.

In everywhere I've lived, the pressure to build has usually won out because the neighboring municipality will let someone build if the first one doesn't. So urbanism slowly creeps in. seems weird that it never has in 20 years out there.

I suspect a lot has to do with what draws many people to California in the first place. (In addition to jobs, which are more recent in many cases.) Those reasons didn't include remolding the Bay Area in the image on New York City and New Jersey.

Unless you're building SRO housing, it would be very hard to fit 10,000 people in a single "tower".

Le Lignon near Geneva, Switzerland, is one of the largest apartment complexes in the world by square footage, and it only houses ~6,500 people with ~900k sq. m of floor space across 28 hectares of land.

So you'd need something on the scale of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, which houses 25,000 people on 32 hectares. Maybe Google could build a Stuytown or two of their own at Moffett Field (400 hectares).

Stuy town is actually what I was thinking of. Or at least mixed use, with office/commercial on the bottom and a residential tower on top. Everyone else seems to do it, it's weird to see purely office buildings still being built without residential up top.

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