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Comment by tmh79 | Hacker News Reader

The real story here is how the political conditions of the SFBA have prevented growth of the housing supply. The sad reality is that housing here is now a zero sum game, and any broad based increase in wages would pretty quickly be captured by landlords. The real solution to this issue is not higher wages, but targeted efforts to decrease the cost of living through building a ton of of "missing middle" housing like 4-plexes near office space in the sea of land populated by single family home zoning as well as renters protections (rent control and eviction protection) ADUs ("accessory dwelling unit": stand alone units in peoples garages or back yards) and likely some for of social housing subsidy for the worst off among us.

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Why is the real estate market "the real story"? Seems like the real story is that facebook ought to pay its cafeteria workers more.

Don't be so susceptible.

The literal story is about food workers who can't afford to raise a family in Palo Alto. The intended message seems to be that Facebook should pay food workers more than $20/hr.

I think it's acceptable for people to ponder outside of that claim.

I think people are pondering outside of that claim because young programmers in Palo Alto also want cheap real estate so there's a shared interest. But things this article brings up that are more uncomfortable for the members of this board to think about like paying service workers more or pondering this:

“They look at us like we’re lower, like we don’t matter,” said Nicole of the Facebook employees. “We don’t live the dream. The techies are living the dream. It’s for them.”

The smaller indignities are numerous. At the end of every shift, Nicole watches large amounts of leftover food go into the compost – food that she’s not allowed to take home. Cafeteria workers only enter Facebook’s medical clinics if they’ve been selected for a mandatory drug test. Facebook recently held a “Bring your kids to work” day, but cafeteria workers’ children were not allowed.

are going to go untalked about. And what's the problem with saying that Facebook should pay it's workers more than $20/hr? If it's not enough to live on, that's kind of all there is to it isn't there?

The fact that its not enough to live on combines two things, to varying amounts

- The prices of their needs are high enough that they can't afford them (given the amount they make)

- The amount they make is low enough that they can't afford their needs

Its reasonable to attack both issues, not just the one.

> At the end of every shift, Nicole watches large amounts of leftover food go into the compost – food that she’s not allowed to take home.

On that one in particular - is there a law against that? I know rules on food service workers taking things home vary quite a bit.

I've heard that restaurants will spoil food at the end of the day rather than give it to employees to prevent employees from deliberately over-making or mis-making food so they can take it home.

I knew someone who worked at a supermarket many years ago when they were in college. Apparently staff were allowed to take home products that were damaged (crumpled/torn packaging, etc.), rather than just throwing them in the trash.

Apparently chocolate cookies had an unfortunate and inexplicable habit of being crushed under other products and being deemed unfit for sale.

Once the policy changed and staff had to throw damaged products in the garbage compactor, apparently a lot less chocolate cookies were getting damaged.

People using policies in abusive unintended ways, this, is why we cant have nice things.

In a low-margin business, it make sense to pay attention to "loss control" but one of the main benefits of keeping food workers on campus is the productivity gains by the "core business" staff.

That is to say, a take-home box of food a day shouldn't be a problem on financial grounds, so rules like this are more of a power of ethics issue. In abstract.

However, in most cases (I don't know about facebook in particular) food service workers are contractors, and I'm sure the economics don't sort themselves out that way.

Anyway, facebook leadership could discourage this sort of nitpicky loss control.

Throwing things away is still wasteful. Clearly the right thing to do here is to allow taking some merchandise home, but tie it to following rules and minimizing gratuitous loss in other ways.

One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves’ Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorised crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in it.

There's a lack of law to protect companies from legal liability in case someone gets food poisoning. Once the food leaves campus, the company has no control over packaging, storage, temperature, allergy labeling, etc.

Incorrect.

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

At some point we have to recognize that service workers must be paid a living wage, or be automated. We cannot, morally or economically, have an entire class of worker that we utterly depend on that lives permanently below the poverty line and we just step on them because "they didn't work hard in school" or whichever narrative you prefer to go with for why people who don't have a degree do work that is essential to our civilization.

The reality is that the fair market isn't perfect, and even jobs that are low on the totem pole but essential must be compensated in such a way where people don't need to work 60 hour weeks to barely afford a shithole home and car.

> or be automated

That's an extreme opposite from living wage.

Well if you follow the popular theories, this means better jobs are created elsewhere and improve life etc. etc. Historically this is true, this time is a lot different, in general it's just a different discussion I didn't feel like broaching in this thread.

If that solution ends up being cheaper, it's likely to be the solution that gets implemented.

(That might be OK, provided the now displaced workers choose to move someplace with a lower cost of living where they are able to make ends meet being paid an amount commensurate with the value they create.)

You need to seriously think through every level of what you are suggesting. You want us to revamp the way we handle the complex interactions of individual autonomous groups from one in which your worth is tied to the value you contribute to society (The rapper 50 cent has a lot more money than a brain surgeon because like it or not the value he created for society was much greater than that one surgeons contribution) to one in which you are rewarded simply for existing. Do you truly believe that is a sustainable system without fully automated existence from resource extraction all the way to finished goods ( which we are not even remotely close to achieving)?

It's called a social welfare system.

Firstly, 50-Cent versus Brain Surgeons is actually a very simple one: there are many brain surgeons (not a ton, but many) and only one 50-Cent. Also one is a performer, which is something inherently unique. Despite the KPop industry's assertions, you cannot "train" a performer. Brain Surgeon on the other hand is a job you train for; it's a lot of training, at great expense, but it is still training and there are many: 33,000 worldwide according to Google. So that's just simple scarcity.

Secondly, there is a massive flaw here that I can't quite put into words, so I'll attempt to show my reasoning for what I'm getting at:

* Workers are paid for (in a perfect world) by the profits of a business that generates revenue providing a service. Therefore, whatever that service generates in revenue is passed to employees in whatever structure. By extension of the above, the rarer a service is by whatever measure be it difficulty, hazard, required equipment, regulation, training, etc. the more expensive that service is and therefore the higher paying that job should be. This is why neurosurgeons make more than McDonalds cooks.

* Cafeteria chefs, short order cooks, waitstaff, baristas, etc. are all examples of jobs that are almost universally terrible, universally poorly paid, and absolutely essential to many people's daily lives. They may not generate very much value individually, but if tomorrow they all decided to fuck off and not come to work, society as a whole would notice and be definitely worse off for it. In addition, to large groups of the population such jobs are their only source of income. We therefore have a situation where many entire sectors of the economy are composed of jobs that do not pay their workers enough to live, yet we absolutely need them. This doesn't make sense and is not sustainable.

What I'm saying is: you cannot have a situation where someone's still essential job does not pay them enough to live. Eventually, something has to give: we have to accept that just because someone lives a life of simple labor that they are not ours to then condemn to a life of check-to-check stress, lack of healthcare, and poor living conditions, especially when the majority of those in that life did not choose it, because who the fuck would choose that, but were forced into it by circumstance, fortune, poor decisions early in life, or some combination of the three.

Now, how we solve this problem I'm not remotely qualified to say. Basic Income is one idea, raising minimum wage is another, both of which will have far reaching implications that I can't even get into right now. What I'm saying is: the current scenario is not morally right, and not economically sustainable. We need something different.

They are one of many lower wage workers you might see at a place like Facebook that aren't Facebook employees. They probably contract out for janitorial services, landscaping, security guards, etc. All at probably similar wages.

I'm not sure what your point is? I was saying this was a perfect example, it's far from the only one.

Sometimes replies aren't argumentative, but rather, additive. Thought it worth pointing out that a typical corporate campus has many types of workers that don't work directly for the company.

They're subcontracted from Flagship Facility Services, not actual Facebook employees

At the very least, I'm a little surprised Facebook isn't offering more subsidized healthcare.

>>The literal story is about food workers who can't afford to raise a family in Palo Alto.

Even well paid programmers, managers and other well paid people can't raise a family in Palo Alto.

You can't pick the most expensive and costly neighborhood in all of US and use that as a benchmarks for what people should expect from the economy.

If they were to do that, what do you think would happen to the price of the finite/scarce housing supply?

The workers are employed by Flagship Facility Services. I assume it's fairly common to contract out the operation of your cafeteria, versus managing that in-house. Their wages are mentioned in the article...$19.85/hr and $17.85/hr. It that unusually low for someone working at, say, a table-service chain restaurant in the same area?

Edit: Comparison to tipped workers seems apples/oranges. More curious if ~$18/hr is unusually low for a worker in a similar, non-tipped, job in the same area. Like maybe a BBQ restaurant where the service is similar to a cafeteria.

Actually, yes. California doesn't allow tipped restaurant servers to be paid less than minimum wage like many other states. PA minimum wage is $15(10-12 take home), and you can expect another $15-30/hr cash.

So yes, that's not that much. Not a living wage.

Not all the employees get tips though. Cooks, busboys, host/hostess, etc.

Often waiters will pool tips are pooled with kitchen staff, the exception being managers (managers taking tips would be illegal)

The fair labor standards act limits that basically to front-of-house in the US.

"A valid tip pool may not include employees who do not customarily and regularly received tips, such as dishwashers, cooks, chefs, and janitors."

So THIS is why California has so many" no waiter, order at window and take food back to table" restaurants. I knew there has to be a reason but couldn't figure it out...

Which I guess means this policy is very polar. The waiters that still have a job make more money. The ones that got replaced by a to go window have nothing.

Re-read the comment.

There's a lot of truth to it: raise their wages, and in a heartbeat, those workers will see their rents rise.

...and more development projects will make financial sense, so there will be more investment in housing. Rising rents are a short term problem, but they do provide long-term solutions.

Of course, communities in the Bay Area (and elsewhere) can make it less expensive to build affordable, denser housing. That should have similar long term benefits.

>...and more development projects will make financial sense, so there will be more investment in housing.

Not with the current policies that the G/GGP were criticizing! Numerous projects already make sense, in spades, but are being blocked by planning commissions.

> and more development projects will make financial sense, so there will be more investment in housing

Maybe. The price of land and the price of construction labor reflect the new realities as well.

>There's a lot of truth to it: raise their wages, and in a heartbeat, those workers will see their rents rise.

This offers a brilliant solution, just in the other direction. Let's lower the wages of programmers in the area. As their wages decrease the price of real estate will go down!

That's true, housing prices will go down as techies move to other areas with better wages like Seattle, Austin, Boston, etc.

But then the low paid techie cafeteria workers will be out of a job. So I'm not sure that's a net win.

It sounds like you think you are being sarcastic, but this is actually what will happen.

See: Any area where this has occurred due to plant closings, etc.

That is more-or-less exactly what anti-gentrification activists are trying to accomplish: push tech out, reduce the average wage, rent goes down.

Why not get rid of political NIMBYism? Aritficially reducing housing supply to increase demand is morally wrong.

The fact is Apple, Facebook and Google have not been able to do that already, despite all three companies and their employees showing interest in doing precisely that.

Turns out our democratic processes have not yet been entirely subverted, for better and for worse.

Both Palo Alto and Mountain View have recently elected pro-growth majorities to their city councils.

Rents are rising at 5-10% a year in the south bay, and if you don't live in mountain view you don't have renters protections. There is no end in sight for cost of living stabilization for the bottom end of the market without large supply growth and/or rent control policies being enacted. Facebook could solve the problem this year by issuing a broad based 10% raise for all of their contract workers, but they would need to do the same thing next year, and the year after that etc etc etc. At the end of the day, all of this money takes a winding route through the valley and ends up in the pockets of people who own land, which is the most scare resource out here.

Due to the land use policies of the SFBA (huge swaths of Single family zoning), land itself has become a proxy for access to opportunity, and the land value is derived from both its scarcity and its proximity to high paying jobs. Single family zoning in essence creates a minimum amount of land you need to occupy through rents or investment to have access to the opportunity in the area. While we cannot create more land, we can minimize the amount of land one must occupy to have access to opportunity through up-zoning single family districts to multi family districts (more families occupying the same plot of land in multi family housing compared to single family housing).

If we want more people to have more access, then we need to reduce the amount of land they must occupy for that access, through sensible land use reforms. As far as I know, there is no other solution (other than full communism) that does not involve the equivalent of vast subsidies to existing land owners

You can also invest in improving public transit and shoring up what you already have - for example, BART and systems like it could be used to link areas more effectively/reliably.

In talking with some friends in the Bay Area, all feel that East Bay is just too risky with problems BART has been facing in reliability, but all love the less congested feel of say Moraga or Walnut Creek.

The article focuses on the fact that the family cannot afford Menlo Park. There are surrounding communities that would allow them at least a 2br for what they earn, yet I suspect they cannot do this because of commute difficulties and schools for kids. Both parents can't really be expected to endure 2 hour commutes, as things come up with kids and you need to be there for them quickly.

Schools deserve a separate discussion though.

Menlo Park is great and super expensive, but I don't think it's fair to demand that everyone be able to afford it. I can't and that's ok with me. However, the cost of not being able to afford it should not be not seeing your kids grow up. That's a solvable problem and not a class struggle.

Yup, those outlying areas are great. But they're getting expensive too - you're looking at $700k plus for a townhouse in Walnut Creek, and homes are over a million. And you're already looking at a 45+ minute commute to the city via BART.

There's simply no affordable place within an hour of the city. That's not just because of bad public transportation - that's because of poor housing policy.

For sure - these investments need to be made together, otherwise it won't work.

Say we build more housing but it's across the bay. Those bridges and BART can only transport so many people.

That said, I do think that transportation investment is lacking and should be increased.

Let's build some businesses across there too. So not everyone want/need to all live at the same place, so we don't need everywhere to be NYC.

denser housing and better transit go hand in hand. Its hard to have a good mass transit system when everyone lives on their own 1/3 acre plot of land in a single family home.

Bay Area has natural choke points because of bridges and terrain. Because of this you can still have fairly efficient setup with some driving and park'n'rides at the hubs.

This is a lot harder to do with LA sprawl.

Why should they be paid more? If someone is willing to work for that wage then that is what the wage will be set at.

"willing to work"

This pretends there is actual choice for most folks, when the truth is most folks are just choosing between jobs that pay around the same. The alternative is to not have food, shelter, and such things. That is hardly a choice - of course folks will be willing to work for that amount.

Theoretically one can go to college or work their way up, but all those take time. College takes money. I don't know where one is supposed to get that without taking such jobs in the meantime, nor how one is supposed to afford it if they can't afford basic things. Promotion? good luck.

Student loans?

Which are becoming less and less worth it everyday as other forces extract all the value out of them with higher rates? It's a problem along every facet of society currently, all of the value is being extracted to an increasing few

They generally won't cover housing and food costs to make up for the lost wages while going to school, especially if you have a family to feed. One might make it working part-time so long as you have a spouse to help you out. But hey, folks get lucky. Others don't, though, and still wind up paying for some books and fees on top of taking out loans. Not to mention buying things like a current computer, making sure to have internet access (lets face it, with a job, kids, and school, you probably aren't making it to the library), and so on.

Afterwards, you'll need to pay that student loan back. You get 6 months before you start paying it back. You might not even find a decent job at all.

There are income-based payment plans. They require not falling behind on your loans most times, and even if they don't the private company collecting might make you think that way. If you can't pay and stupid things happen, they'll garnish your wages. 25% (ish), but they'll make sure to leave you a salary equal to 30 hours work at minimum wage. They'll take your tax returns too.

And as an odd fact: It really ins't possible to take out loans for part-time schooling if you want to get a bachelors degree: Federal student loan funding stops after 6 years, at which point you must pay off the first year's loan to get another year. (I think full time does 5 years). You might be able to get an associates or professional certificate at the local community college, though, if you are lucky enough to have one in your area (many do not).

I know this isn't everyone's story, but this stuff is common enough to consider as a risk factor. It might have been a way to financial stability at one time, but it isn't such a sure thing anymore.

Did you read the article? They don't work for Facebook. They work for a contractor that Facebook uses to supply food service to employees.

Your absolutely right. I hope the progressives who prevent housing supply from increasing learn something from this - otherwise the rest of the bay area will be heading the same direction.

But, I think Facebook can also play a role in the solution by moving half the company out of the bay area, or at least off the peninsula.

When tech companies pay out billions and billions more per year in salary which end up in rent or mortgage, we should question why they don't decide to move partly or expand largely elsewhere and save those billions. They must know that a lot of talents will follow them to whichever city that has reasonable living conditions.

My suspicion is that the system serves as a golden handcuff. The elite tech workers feel like they are getting paid a lot more, which they are, but they still cannot retire or pay off mortgage easily. So they need to continue to work diligently at the company for a long time.

This reduces turnover and keeps experienced workers happy and handcuffed.

Downvoters:

Please give your reason why you think the theory is likely wrong. There are many nice, much cheaper areas that these companies can expand to. Many groups can function without always connecting with the headquarters.

Why is the USA the center of the developed world from post WW2 until whatever future point that it transitions to China?

Why is New York where all of the large financial players are?

Why was Rome so much more magnificent then the corners of the empire?

Why does your group of friends all meet at te same bar to watch the game on Sunday?

Why does the top streamer for a game on twitch have 10-20 times the viewer of the rest of the streamers for that game?

There is no conspiracy at work. Just a large disparate group of humans engaging in human nature when faced with the same core set of principles.

The housing supply obviously isn't the main problem as the bay area techies can afford to pay it. The core of the problem is the wage disparity between techies and service workers.

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