Google announces major expansion in New York City | Hacker News Reader

Google announces major expansion in New York City

arstechnica.com

140 pointsrichardboegli111 comments

Tired of the expense of the Bay Area, companies are now uncovering small, cheap gems that no one knew about like NYC.

I know you're being sarcastic, but as someone who lived in NYC and California there is not even a comparison on how better is NYC when it comes to the amount of options you get to flexibly spend your money and smartly extend your paycheck. All this while still living in one of the boroughs.

I lived for a year in Manhattan with a $50K salary. I wasn't living like a king at all and definitely not saving money, but still managed to have a lifestyle that I would consider comfortable and healthy. This was 2015.

Now, compare that to San Francisco. $50K it's basically one level above homelessness.

Well, if it’s not too personal: what was your rent, where, and for how much space in the two cities?

My rent in NYC was $1500 with utilities included. I was renting one bedroom in a 2 bedrooms apartment in 75th street.

Only downside is that it was a semi-basement (Those apartments with tiny windows that are the same height of the street level---Probably a huge fire hazard). The plus was that I lived three blocks away from Central Park.

Some people said that I was lucky to find that place, but in my search I saw similar places that ranged between 1400 without utilities to 2000 in Upper East, some areas of Midtown and East Village. I even saw one guy renting a room for 700 in Upper West.

So yes, I was probably lucky to find that place, but not extremely lucky.

With roommates you can definitely have 1500 of rent in SF in « desirable » neighborhoods.

The average Manhanttan apartment is ~3.5k a month. I'd say you likely got lucky if you lived comfortable on a 50k salary.

People always forget that Manhattan goes all the way up into the 200s of streets. You can live in Manhattan on pretty much any budget imaginable. Whether you should is another question.

The East Village also goes all the way out to Avenue D, and the West Side, to 12th Avenue. These are transit deserts relative to the rest of the island, and priced accordingly.

Right. Yet all of SF is a transit desert relative to Manhattan and is still priced about the same.

I never know why people trot these prices out. Literally nobody I know actually pays 3.5k a month for rent, and a majority of my friends are in the software field in one way or another.

The most that anyone pays is like 1.8k

If you want to live without roommates (you have a family, or you just like living alone), you're probably paying more than 1,800/mo.

And/or you have a lease started after 2016/17.

1,800 will get you a nice 2BR if you're willing to accept a 45 min commute. Even in nicer neighborhoods, e.g. a 2BR in Riverdale is 2,000 - 2,400.

The Riverdale is not manhattan...but yes you're correct.

Yeah it's basically the suburbs, but a 10 min walk from the subway. And within the last two years there are actually lots of good restaurants in the area now.

Well yes, if you don't want to make basic concessions, you have to pay more money.

I find generally fiscal rationality trumps not having a roommate.

Middle class professionals can normally afford their own places with ~30 minute commutes.

If I need a roommate to make things work financially, I’m in the wrong job or the wrong city.

Basic concessions like not having a family? People aren't 25 their entire life.

> Literally nobody I know actually pays 3.5k a month for rent

Thats because rent numbers are based on the 1.34% rental vacancy supply on the market at that point in time, self-reported by landlords.

People very frequently move in with people and other arrangements. So less than half or even 1/4th of new renters any given year actually pay the "market rent".

I pay $2.6k a month in rent. I have friends that pay $3.1k+ in New York and Boston and Seattle (Seattle is a bit of a different story but nonetheless).

I was talking to a guy the other day living in a sub400 sqft place in lower manhattan in a non-luxury unit paying $2.5k.

I moved to NYC in March. I pay more than 3.5k a month for rent.

The reason for that is that places with a reasonable commute time to and from flatiron are really terrible below ~3k, by the standards of most places which are not NYC or SF.

I worked remotely for more than two years before that, so my tolerance for commute was quite low (my NYC commute is about 20 minutes on average, and when I first moved here, it was sooo long), and I was coming from a place where ~1K/mo can get you 3000 sq ft plus a basement and over half an acre.

It depends on what you're looking for.

If you would like a package room, that's extra. In unit washer dryer, that's extra. Doorman - extra. Reasonable commute - extra. AC - extra.

Even more money if you want to live in a fashionable neigborhood (Chelsea, Hell's Kitchen) or spitting distance from a university (Washington Square, Union Square, Morningside Heights) or both (St. Mark's)

All the cool kids live in Brooklyn or Queens.

I was just wondering - how difficult is it to commute by bike in from e.g. Brooklyn? NYC seems pretty flat, so biking could get you there quicker than by car if there's a lot of traffic.

I commuted for years from Queens and Brooklyn to Wall St. NYC is mostly flat, good to commute during the nicer months.

Meanwhile, hackers live in Jersey

Hell, I managed Manhattan for three years on <30K during grad school with money leftover to take trips here and there and party a bit on the weekends. I wasn’t living like a king, but it’s 100% doable. Get a roommate in Washington heights near the A, be smart about your grocery purchases, get an unlimited metro card and don’t take cabs or Uber.

As someone who currently lives in NYC, I personally prefer it to San Francisco, but I wouldn't call it better without comparison. A lot of the cheap rent is a longer commute away-- like is the case with SF.

In the case of Google, they have shuttles in California, and I would personally take a shuttle over the subway any day.

I'm not living in the cheapest apartment I could find (tried that before and regretted it twice, both because it wasn't that cheap, and because it was horrible), and as far as I've researched I'd pay about the same as I would in San Francisco.

I'm pretty sure they have shuttles in NYC too.

I live in Boston and my company has shuttles to the suburbs as well. All of the Big4 do.

No, Google does not have shuttles in NYC. There is no need for them (the Port Authority building literally stands on top of a subway station) and it would be nearly impossible to run them (even if you ignore the traffic, there isn't any space next to the building to legally park a shuttle).

Interesting. Even my old internship had shuttle buses in NYC.

> I would personally take a shuttle over the subway any day.

If you're crossing any bridges or tunnels, a 15 minute train ride could easily be 45 minutes in a shuttle or car.

Took that shuttle for 2 years. It's nice but ... it's still a bus. There's no nice way to be on a bus for 3hr a day. I'd much prefer the subway, which is much faster.

SF really has no low end on anything. There's no $1 pizza slice when you really need a cheap meal and there's nowhere cheap to live without a punishing commute.

The high end of NY is also much higher than SF. NY is where the first $100M apartment is.

NY is as expensive on average but it's an average of a much wider and range.

There's an In-N-Out on the north side of SF and Chinatown has a ton of cheap eating options. You can eat for cheap in either city.

Just one in-n-out?

Yeah SF has only one In-N-Out and it's more expensive and crowded than any other location I've seen.

SF strongly limits fast food (which I find annoying). My suburb home town had more McDonald's locations than SF does.

"on the north side of SF" is really "over in Fisherman's Wharf", which is a notorious tourist trap that's not convenient to get to in the slightest. It can't be compared to a pizza slice joint or falafel or what have you.

Chinatown, yes.

There’s this thing, called a grocery store.

I’ve even heard there is multiple of those in the city !

> NY is where the first $100M apartment is.

Most things being sold for more than 20M are probably being sold for money laundering purposes. A more fair comparison would be looking at only apartments that people actually live in full time; a pied-à-terre isn’t really part of basic living expenses.

I did the research when interviewing for a job in NYC.

What would cost ~3500 in SF was more like 1500-2000.

NYC has much better transit - I could commute in from Park Slope to Manhattan and have a 1500 studio which would have been much much more expensive if I say, commuted from Mission to Civic center on BART.

It is significantly cheaper if you don't live in Manhattan, and transit allows that

Sure, but you could commute from Millbrae to Civic Center in the same time as Park slope to manhattan (depending on the exact stop obviously), and that's uhh, cheaper, than Mission.

And living in Park Slope is much nicer than living in Millbrae, at least if you're looking for an urban lifestyle with walkable amenities. New York City just has that everywhere, for miles and miles.

Also the parts of Millbrae that rival Park Slope in cost are not walkable to the subway (well technically walkable but quite a walk) vs the places I was looking at were a 5-10 min walk to the subway station.

Trains in NYC come much more often, later, and frankly Millbrae is no Park Slope ;)

Yea but transit in the Bay shuts down hella early. Getting to Park Slope at 2am from Manhattan is significantly easier (and safer) than Millbrae (or Oakland or wherever) from San Francisco.

Just for perspective Google also is planning to add ~50k employees in the Bay Area. They have been on a massive real estate buying spree here

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Google-s-Bay-Ar...

Also Seattle. Building a big new office near all the Amazon ones, as well as expanding their existing Seattle sites.

As all of the comments below are comparing the San Francisco Bay Area with New York City in terms of real estate, transit time, etc. it's worth noting the stark differences between the two.

The Bay Area is of size 6,000-10,000 sq. mi. with a population of 7.7-8.8 million people[1]. NYC is of size 302 sq. mi. (yes, really! That's 20x-50x smaller) with a population of 8.1-8.6 million people[2]. Perhaps it's easy to underestimate just how much of a big world city NYC is and how varied its people and industries are compared to what they might be used to on the west coast.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City

Why are you comparing the SF bay area to the city limits of New York? Better would be to compare SF bay area to New York Metro Area, which is far bigger than the SF bay area.

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

I originally had the same reaction as you, but reading the parent's comment charitably I believe he's getting at "the population of the entire Bay Area is actually comparable to the population of just NYC proper with it's much tinier (relatively) area)."

In other words, some people tend to think of NYC as "huge major East Coast city" and SF as "huge major West Coast city", but the sheer enormous density of NYC makes it actually on a whole other level than SF.

Even coming from the Midwest SF feels like a midsize city. I've visited SF, I considered doing the SF software dev thing, but SF just feels like if Cincinnati developed a tech sector.

Chicago's urban population is 8.66m, and the urban area is 2,200 sq miles. I feel like I'm in a city here. When I go to West Coast cities I feel like I'm in a giant (sometimes quaint and charming) suburb. There's no density.

SF is a little under 50 square miles with a population of around 900,000

I can't be the only one concluding that we're near the end of a nice run for tech, with all these expensive real estate moves. I don't know, maybe we've been there for a while now.

What better way to spend piles of cash you have no idea what to do with than extort local governments for billions in tax breaks and park that money in a some commercial real estate you can depreciate? I'm not judging these companies for doing this per se (Amazon, Apple, and Google have all recently done this as far as I can tell - haven't noticed anything from Microsoft), but I do consider it a bit ominous that they've all picked expensive places that certainly seem like good picks.

It really does seem like these companies have no idea what to do with their money. Buying up land and taking the next 3-5 years to build billion dollar campuses seems so boring to me.

What do you want them to do without people? Spend money on what? Raw materials? They need people to develop IP. And they need somewhere to put those people.

If a FAANG's fundamental bottleneck is people, then the money should first be spent on improving the hiring pipeline. If traditional pipeline sources are insufficient or non-compliant, that means building their own pipeline sources - in-house degree or certification programs. The most well-known case study is the military, which runs all of its own training, the question is only whether a) a given FAANG company has reached an organizational scale where this makes sense and b) how to tinker with the military's model given that the military relies on people not leaving after finishing training but only after enough value has been extracted from their education.

Google hasn't extorted local governments for tax breaks in their recent San Jose deal.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/12/san-jose-deal-google-ca...

>Liccardo says, the city didn’t offer the company any tax incentives in exchange for its business. “More importantly,” he added in a Medium post, “Google never asked for a dime.”

>While Google won’t get outright public subsidies, as Liccardo noted, the company will benefit as much as the community from Diridon Station, which will cost taxpayers $10 billion.

Why are you holding the bag for Google?

Of course not directly, they have their lobbyists to do their dirty work for them.

Where do you think they should put all the new people they are hiring? Or maybe they should stop hiring? That would not be good for us, their demand keeps the market rate for programmers absurdly high.

Hmm maybe there’s more to technology than “keep[ing] the market rate for programmers absurdly high.”

Not for programmers there isn’t.

A company choosing to expand in New York without billions in incentives? Could it be? The municipal government didn't think it was possible...

On the contrary, the municipal government very loudly believed that it would have been possible. Unfortunately it appears that, for some reason I don't understand, New York City's Council doesn't have any input into those sort of incentive programs.

Yep. The State officials can run roughshod over you whenever they like.

We just need a nation wide system where politicians can make these Foxconn type deals, but the deals would be null and void until voters actually signaled approval in some kind of referendum.

As someone living in California, my advice is to be very cautious about how much direct democracy you ask for. It can very easily go very badly.

This doesn't deserve downvotes. Some of the products of the referendums (prop 13, for example) have had disastrous long term consequences.

And let's not forget everyone's favorite:

> This [literally any object imaginable] contains materials known to the State of California to cause cancer.

Oh yeah, that one's great. My two favorite uses of this sign - first, on the jetway, when you're stuck in line, and second, in the baby food aisle at our local grocery store. I guess you could think of it like a memento mori, though: "Everything is killing you, slowly".

Colorado is another state where the ballot initiatives are getting out of hand. Very conflicted because there are some decisions I believe should go directly to the people.

My ballot this year was pages long. Took me over half an hour to fill it all out. The wording on some of the initiatives are so confusing you have to read them numerous times to decipher.

> until voters actually signaled approval in some kind of referendum

Worked so well with Brexit

For historical reasons, the State and City have never gotten along well. If you read the State constitution, you will see a lot of (now unconstitutional) clauses that target the City in all but name only.

The state has arcane mechanisms to override city home rule because home rule is generously interpreted by state courts to mean nothing at all. I think the most surprising thing is that Bill De Blasio agreed to this at all, but he can't politick his way out of a paper bag.

Not only that, but soon after Google bought the main NYC building, the tax bill went up for a small number of the largest properties in the city, which of course included Google's. The valuation has since fluctuated a number of times because of byzantine rules in how properties are assessed, especially when the owner is also a tenant.

Well in fairness, tax bills are based on market values, and ought to respond to events in the market.

In competitive markets with lots of supply and demand, you'd expect many transactions, and the effect of any one comparable transaction on the price of a given property would be quite small.

In niche markets where transactions are rare (like, say, “commercial properties in mid to lower Manhattan with >2.5mm sq ft of floor space”), individual transactions involving comparable properties can be expected to have an outsized effect.

The net impact is going to be different. Amazon wanted to move to a part of town most tech companies aren't already and announced a significantly larger headcount.

Cities like NYC and Los Angeles are seeing an explosion in tech jobs lately as the Bay Area is bleeding out.

There is no bleeding out. Google is actually expanding massively in the Bay Area with a huge purchase in San Jose, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and SF. They are adding space for 50k more employees in the Bay, far more than in NY. Facebook is building out its Menlo Park campus and also signed the largest lease in SF history. Tesla has basically taken over every bit of office space in Fremont. Apple recently opened their $5bn campus.Bay Area can only accommodate 8mn people and with housing push perhaps 10mn at max. So obviously the biggest companies in the world needs to expand somewhere else as well

Amazing. Driving through the Penninsula is already a total nightmare. Took me 90 minutes to get from San Bruno to San Jose last week. The drive back to the city took 35 minutes in the late evening.

How people ride these shuttles, drive, and deal with these commutes blows my mind. It’s only going to get way worse. Most expensive traffic jam in the country. No thanks.

Yeah, it's terrible unless you can avoid driving between 7am - 10am and 4pm - 7:30pm. Also 280 instead of 101 helps.

> Most expensive traffic jam in the country.

Not sure if this was your point, but when we can make such a big deal about how a meeting with ten people costs the company ten man-hours and therefore meetings are sooo expensive yet everyone at the entire company goes and sits in traffic twice a day. The macroeconomic cost must be astronomical.

Does anyone know why Google, Amazon, and Apple have all announced large incentive programs recently? Is there something about it being the end of the fiscal year? Or are there other possible reasons?

I think the tax bill from last year helped some with this[0]. Apple announced that they would be bringing back billions of $ from overseas holdings due to changes in the laws, and investing it in the US.

Google has been expanding in NYC for a while. Back in February, they bought their existing building for $2 billion[1].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/technology/apple-tax-bill...

[1] https://nypost.com/2018/02/06/google-to-buy-chelsea-market-b...

So this is Trump's doing?

Did he really help add about 100k high paying tech jobs and within the biggest tech companies on earth?

Google, Apple, Amazon had been hiring like crazy well before Trump came into office. Google and Amazon revenues have gone through the roof in the last decade and they have doubled quadrupled their workforce. This is largely a PR move to respond to Amazon's show. And Amazon itself got started to extract maximum tax incentives from cities. Their HQ2 RFP was announced before the tax bill was passed

The executive branch doesn't make changes to laws, including tax laws.

Why is this getting downvoted?

I was asking a question?

Mitch McConnell stated that the tax cuts increased employment. Politifact rates that statement as Half True[0]. In reality, it's fair to say tax cuts created an environment that was conducive to hiring, but also, the levels of hiring have been pretty steady since 2010.

That being said, there's even less evidence that this is even Half True in the tech industry.

0. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jun...

___

edit: Also, I assume you're being downvoted because your question was phrased as bait whether you meant it to or not.

My guess is Google realized how many of their employees really, really want to live in NYC for some reason. I don't get it but literally everybody I've talked to wants to work in New York.

If you are a single guy who dates women, NYC is where you want to live demographically. The dating pool is much larger and the female to male ratio is in your favor.

Thank god for NYC... Poor tiny NYC I'm sure could use the tax revenue.

Why can't they pick some place that could actually use the growth? Boulder?

Boulder has a lot of policies in place that actually prevent growth (height limits, limits on suburban growth, etc.). They seem to literally not want Boulder to grow.

they don't want to become the next Austin!

I'd assume it's a lot easier to hire 7,000 tech employees in NYC than Boulder and they already have a big presence there.

One day Pittsburgh will get its big hockey-stick shaped break.

Hopefully this time Pittsburgh won’t be the smog poster child.

Pittsburgh and Madison are both low COL cities with great engineering schools where only a small handful of companies are soaking up all the talent. Definitely underrated.

Madison has one good school. How many CS graduates are there that still want to live in Madison after they graduate?

Pittsburgh I can somewhat agree.

Don't know about CS graduates per se, but Madison has the reputation of being a place where people come to attend school, and then don't want to leave. I don't want to leave here either. ;-)

You guys drink/ booze like it's going out of fashion. Must be all those cold long Wisconsin winters. Madison is an OK place in summer, but not a place I would like to live in. And this coming from a guy who grew up in Michigan. I prefer Ann Arbor for that reason.

Wisc-Madison has a great reputation for mech/industrial/ops types of degrees.

To be honest, both suck compared to NYC and SF. There's just no comparison. NYC and SF have high numbers of PhD level tech talent, neither Pittsburgh nor Madison have anywhere near the number of the MIT-Stanford-Caltech PhD crowd. NYC and SF have higher density. And NYC, for example, has far more jobs in industries unrelated to tech. Not only more jobs in other industries, but way more other industries in general. Which is always attractive for the significant other.

The name of the game is to get high end tech talent. So sure, the University of Wisconsin can crank out code monkees for you. That's fine if that's all you need. But all the PhDs from the elite tech schools will sit down with their spouses or significant others to think about where to live and Madison and Pittsburgh just won't be terribly high on those lists. It's not all about the PhD that Google wants to hire, you have to have something for his or her spouse too. It's a lot easier to do that in NYC or SF. Just kind of the reality right now.

We’re not trying to find the next SF/Seattle/NYC here. We’re talking about the next Austin/Portland.

>How many CS graduates are there that still want to live in Madison after they graduate?

Since that was literally the subject of the conversation, the obvious answer is "I hope all of them".

Doesn't Pittsburgh have a google brain office? It's coming, and the only "big break" will be for the people that already own property.

I'm waiting for Minneapolis to get that break. It's happening.. the big techies are coming (Amazon is here), as well as a lot of home grown tech. I think the new 2040 plan will drive a lot of tech growth.

Boulder (city limit) housing prices are as bad as the bay area.

Affordable housing isn't far away, but yes, in-Boulder rates are getting much worse. I work out of the Boulder office and have a 4BR house a 25 minute commute away for a lot less than I'd spend in CA.

There is no way that's true. I looked at numbeo.com and it says Sunnyvale rents are 60% higher than boulder. Insert your favourite Silicon Valley suburb in place of Sunnyvale.

When I was there 2 years ago, the cheapest house was $890k. The mean was about $1.3M. These are $200k houses in normal markets.

Google actually recently opened a pretty extensive Boulder office[1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/photo-essays/2018-02-23/insid...

Why do you think it's Google's responsibility to aid in the development of one city?

I think everyone could benefit a lot more if Google did what was most optimal for itself to make better products and compete with Apple/Netflix/Amazon/Uber/Comcast/etc.

how confident are we that spending $1B on real estate in a market where you already have a strong footprint is optimal?

I guess at what point does it make more sense to locate to a less pricy metro and pay engineering talent to come (basically pick Amazon's reject list other than the VA and NY winners)?

Having a critical mass of people matters. Large, dense cities have economies of scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JUAx445ReU

Cultural relevancy.

Companies are building in NYC because the people that make decisions in those companies want to be in NYC.

And not Boulder.

The whole point of Jeff Bezos' fake contest was to make it abundantly clear to the whole country and end this tired trope that Silicon Rockies - or whatever nearby geographical feature sounds catchy - ever had a chance.

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