Google Invests $86 Million In Low-Income Housing | Hacker News Reader

Google Invests $86 Million In Low-Income Housing

techcrunch.com

33 pointsrafaelc23 comments

I think there's a corporate equivalent of godwin's law. "The chance of a company turning into a bank is proportional to how big it is".

I prefer an analog of Zawinski's Law here:

"Every company attempts to expand until it can make loans."

Maybe it's more like Greenspun's tenth rule: Any sufficiently large organisation contains an ad-hoc, informally specified, [bug-ridden] implementation of a bank.

*Half a bank ;)

This includes all the large banks and financial services firms (Bank of America, Citi, AIG, etc.), which to me all feel like ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden implementations of half of a bank.

This reminds me of an article I came across on HN a couple of months ago:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american...

"Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades."

Spoiler alert: When you tear down the projects and move everyone into the suburbs, the gangs go with them.

$86,000,000 / 480 units = $179,000/unit ?! Sounds like someone is getting ripped off. My guess it's the government with the low income housing tax credit.

Yes it does, at first. Low income housing ain't what it used to be. My wife works with low income families. Many of these residences are at least comfortably middle class. Some are quite nice and you'd never know they were "low income" unless you saw the sign.

very true. where i used to live, there was a very nice looking, new complex being built. i went to check out the property and ask about when units were available, and it was low income housing. i made too much to qualify for a unit.

and on the flip side of that coin, these units weren't any cheaper to rent than the regular ones in the area. in fact, they were nicer, and i thought they would be more expensive. perhaps you could say they were subsidizing luxury.

You'd be surprised. Its been a while since I checked, but in 2003 it cost ~$140k to build a Habitat house in Winston-Salem, NC, not including the cost of the land.

"Low-income" shouldn't mean shitty. Good construction is expensive, even on relatively small buildings.

Does the typical American house have "good construction" though? Or does it vary by state.

(In Europe construction seems to be extremely good quality, I'd like a comparison.)

Does anyone know which part of Google organized the deal? The original press release is unclear. Google has a decent-sized treasury department; after all, they have billions of dollars of cash that needs a high-yielding home. Perhaps they viewed this as just a plain old investment.

Maybe Google can actually pull off free wi-fi, unlike its attempts in San Francisco.

I think this may be a smart move. It works from a charitable perspective, but it's also strategic for Google to keep an eye on the other side of the digital divide as more and more low-income households become wired.

Will they wire it up with gigabit fiber to each unit?

For a corporation with money to invest, housing isn't such a bad thing. There's a reason Metlife build stuytown.

Smart way to combat some of the recent PR trouble they've stumbled into with what clearly falls into the investment diversification category.

Charity write-off.

This is not the worst way to spend money, but really, if Google doesn't need the money for its business, it should just pay it back to its shareholders in the form of either stock buybacks or dividends.

I stand by this comment.

Wow, this screams "Philanthropic PR stunt to get people to forget they hated us for killing net neutrality with Verizon."

They killed net neutrality? When did the bill pass? I must have missed it.

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