Living In A Van in Google's Backyard | Hacker News Reader

Living In A Van in Google's Backyard

bloomberg.com

78 pointspseudolus106 comments

This is a very interesting thing to see here as a resident. I bike a lot and am amazed by all of the little signs and regulations neighborhoods around here have posted clearly aimed at these van dwellers. A lot of places have limits on vehicle heights for parking long term, and I see signs that say 'no vehicles over 7ft tall overnight' among other things. One of my coworkers who owns a home here bought his own RV, and he has to deal with cops knocking on it's door and trying to tow it even though it's in front of a home he owns.

For what it's worth, after 5 years the wife and I have decided to leave the area. Even though we are able to save 100% of one of our incomes, there doesn't feel like there will be a time when purchasing makes any sense to us. If we put down 300K, we are still looking at a roughly 150% higher monthly mortgage payment than rent for a house that needs work. And looking at the interest paid over the life of the loan is dizzying, almost a million in interest.

This article fails to mention that Mountain View has been blocking improved transit to service the office parks in the area for at least a decade.

Starting a private bus service wasn’t Google’s “plan A”. Their preferred approach was to get the city to set up adequate service between the Mountain View train station and surrounding office parks.

Although a bit of new housing is finally going in, it’s clearly too little and too late.

Anyway, needing to ban shanty towns usually means you suck at being mayor (at least in city simulators). Maybe they’ll take the housing and transit shortages more seriously moving forward.

If only the company that would benefit from this subsidy would contribute in some way...

Like creating demand for thousands of rides per day?

Google has done a lot for Mountain View.

Like?

There is probably some fine taxes being brought in.

Autonomous self driving surveillance cars roaming the streets?

"Every increase in the real wealth of the society, every increase in the quantity of useful labour employed within it, tends indirectly to raise the real rent of land."

-Adam Smith, "The Wealth Of Nations"

Book I, XI. Of the Rent of Land, Conclusion

https://www.bartleby.com/10/111.html

"We will pretend to be a suburb in 1957 forever"

—Mountain View and Palo Alto zoning board

Yup. As much as I love federalism here in the US, the housing crisis is directly caused by local NIMBY governments who refuse to accommodate housing needs. The only way I see this changing in the US (since it's afflicting every growing city), is some sort of federal subsidy for dense housing.

If the federal government adopted California housing policy it would spread the disease everyone.

At least this way california loses residents to other states that dont have such regressive policies. What will change this in california is an economic crisis.

At least there's no longer a pack of dogs living in 444 Castro Street.

https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2009/01/05/mt-bay-plazas-muddy...

"I never dreamed it would change the way it did," [Bill] Jelavich said of the city's downtown.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/97694017

Austin similarly chose to not annex the unincorporated areas surrounding the city, resulting in the new construction going with septic systems rather than tied to city sewage. There's a reason I can no longer safely swim in Bull Creek due to high fecal coliform levels and that's why.

https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/swimmers-braving-bull-creek...

Henry George has better land value models.

I truly believe california has it all wrong talking about housing: people asking for more construction don't understand what is going on when they campaign for that, and people that complaing about boards also dont understand it.

California does not need housing reform, it needs tax reform.

I became interested in Georgist tax models a few years ago but at one point I came across something that didn't seem to be Georgist exactly but perhaps a later modification that seemed terrifying. The idea was that you were responsible to tell the tax authority what the taxable value of your land was. The catch was that anyone could come and (forcibly?) purchase the land at that price. It struck me as an incredibly dangerous and almost Orwellian version of the "make me move!" concept. You have to decide at what price you'd be willing to sell essentially and then you'd pay taxes on that assessed value. I found it deeply disturbing but I have never been able to find any additional information about the proposal. Of course I think we'll probably colonize Jupiter before we'd ever adopt a model like that in the U.S. but it really was fascinating to contemplate.

Radical Markets chapter 1 [1]. It was a really interesting idea, I wanted to see more discussion on it, I don’t think it’s entirely without problems. Maybe cabals could form for example.

[1] http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s11222.pdf

We have a model like that in racing sports, it's called a claiming race. If you enter a $500 claims race you better not spend more than 500 bucks on your car or else someone will buy it out from under you.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15365342/yes-24-hours-of-...

That model works way better on something that isn't as important or hard to move/replace as your home...

That is a fascinating idea, and I think it would work for anything except a primary residence. (How can you tax "I'm 83 and will only leave in a coffin?")

For everything else, particularly investment or rental properties, it seems like a perfect setup. Like bringing the dynamics of the stock market to the property market.

For primary residences, maybe it could be a "half-tax" setup (with actual exemptions for people who would be devastated by moving). So you would actually claim twice the taxable value, and if some developer came along and actually offered the 2x, you would be delighted to take it.

> (How can you tax "I'm 83 and will only leave in a coffin?")

Easily. All the people that work on tax money that give value to that tax are not working for free. If you can pay them with sympathy it could work, but it won't.

I’m not sure you want to exclude those 83 year olds, especially if they are on their own in a family sized home.

It's a fun idea, but i don't think its practical.

There are other Georgist ideas that are more interesting, like preference voting.

The idea is that tax expenditures affect people disproportionately, so for the spending to pass you hold a vote where yayers accept paying the nayers (or the economic equivalent, pay an extra tax and nayers pay less tax for the policy) so the law passes.

For example, if SF wanted to improve golden gate park its a great benefit for people that live near the park, and great disservice to those away. If yayers paid the nayers, then they wouldnt get the benefit of taxing people that don't use the park.

You could implement this on land taxes rather easily.

The version of that that I recall was from Heinlein's Number of the Beast. The detail he added in his version was that you could reassess your property at any time, but you had to pay 5 years of back taxes at the new value immediately. This means you can sit at a low value until someone comes along to buy you out, but you have to have the money set aside to avoid immediate purchase.

This seems like an improvement - part of the what makes capitalism useful is information propagation. You don't know what the the true value of the land is until someone comes to buy you out (and even then, you don't really know - it's just a hint).

But it perverts the process of sale negotiation in bizarre ways, coupled to the arbitrary 5 year requirement, which has great impact on the economics of it. Consider - if someone really wants to buy your land, and the only way you can say no is by re-valuing higher than their offer (with a big payout to the government), then a large player could force someone out of business with unreasonably high offers - and then pick up their land on the cheap from the liquidators. Every offer/counter-offer would have to backed by a contract to actually make the sale if the other party agrees, with the back taxes only paid when the sale is made. But then what happens when someone plain doesn't want to sell?

This was a "self enforcing property tax" implemented by the Greeks:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/self-enforcin...

George's view of land directly was inspired by Adam Smith. And by David Ricardo, who was primarily inspired by Adam Smith.

If only there were some way for people to work together without having to be in the same physical location.

Guess it will never happen. Oh well.

If only people would move to other places when there's no space somewhere. Oh well.

No space? Yet I'm driving on 280 every morning and all I see are green fields. Yet 75% of San Francisco land has zoning rules that prevent buildings of more than 2 stories. What you really meant is: no space for you, I got mine

If you filled every damn square inch of that space with 5 story apartments, your commute would go from 3 hours to 45 days.

Right, the "oh we need better infrastructure first" chicken and egg problem. Of course infrastructure projects don't happen either. It took 20 years to rebuild half of the Bay Bridge. The shiny SF TransBay terminal was barely opened last year and got closed right away. SF has been debating for 10 years whether or not to turn a car lane into bus only on Geary Blvd... Because NIMBY also opposes transportation projects of course. Meanwhile major metro cities in the world build automated subway lines, highways without potholes etc. While Caltrain looks straight out of the 1950's.

While Cali boomers are milking the next generation instead of investing in it, the world keeps moving. If you compare it to a major chinese or european city, Bay Area looks like it hasn't changed in the last 50 years.

Too much local democracy is bad because people optimize for their own selfish interest (like not having to cut some trees in the backyard of some Atherton mansion so that millions of people can go to work more efficiently). For some things, you need a strong government to do what's good for the greater good.

The best leadership solution - in open source at least - seems to be a BDFL..

It works in open source for a decade or two. Cities need continuity over much longer time horizons.

Sounds like a reason to invest in immortality research to me!

Still not the point.. the world is big why on earth would you obsess on SV to the point of impacting your living condition ?

Because, for some strange reason, the densest and richest tech hub in the world — one which regularly promotes remote working, video calling, VR and AR, Seasteads, self-driving vehicles, and things like O'Neill cylinders — has enough employers who don’t want remote working that the local real estate market has gone mad.

Perhaps that's a sign that remote work is not as valuable as local work.

The solution is not to pave over the rightfully protected wild lands but to add a little density to the built suburban tracts. Allowing duplexes, triplexes and 4 plexes would be a good start

This.

580 Westbound is jam packed to a slow crawl, on a 7 lane highway! With people making commutes 100 miles every day! You would think there'd be sky scrapers everywhere, at least close to the highways. Nope. NOt a single building or house for miles and miles, nothing but green and yellow slopes of nothingness. It's such a waste.

With commute distances x10 more than normal and most global C02 coming from commuting, I can't even imagine how terrible this is for the environment.

Oh but don't worry, Cali boomers think about the environment: they're forcing all new constructions (not their own properties, mind you) to have solar panels on their roof - another thinly disguised NIMBY policy to make construction harder and more expensive, under the pretense of helping the environment... When increased density would be a much more efficient solution to this problem too.

If only the company in question were some sort of specialist in tech, then possibly it could discover some sort of technical alternative to location-based work environments.

I understand the people that have been living there since before the boom. But what about the security guard and other such people that moved there knowing they would need to live in a van? There's 100s of cities to choose from so its not necessary to put yourself through that.

Maybe some people don’t mind cheap, tiny housing and we should be building extremely high density housing for those people to reduce the demand pressure?

Moving away from your home where all your friends and family and network are is actually an incredibly difficult thing to do. These things are very valuable to a lot of people.

But they knew the consequences ? The guard says she wants to save more and doesn't want to live in an apartment for that reason.

A big part of this is prop 13 and tax policy. My anecdote is not unique: My mom inherited my grandfather's condo when he died. Because of Prop 13 (and it's follow ups) she gets to keep his original tax rate from his original home, which was set in 1978. She makes about $500/mo profit on the condo only because her tax rate is about $500 less per month than if it were purchased new. If we didn't have Prop 13, it wouldn't make a ton of sense to keep that condo, and instead we would probably sell it.

And for a lot of people, they're making a whole lot more on that arbitrage.

On my street is my house and three others that are all basically the same (4 bedroom, 3 bath, about 1750sq ft, give or take). My neighbor, who has been here for 40+ years, pays X in property taxes, my other neighbor pays 2X, I pay 10X and the last house pays 20X. All of our houses would sell for about the same amount. So basically the city is starved of resources for transit and subsidized housing. Things that would actually make this place affordable for people who make less than $150,000 a year.

And then to make matters worse, a local developer is trying to tear down our old mall and build "more housing" on it, but if you look closely, what they're really building is a huge office park with the bare minimum of housing to call it a housing project. They want to put in space for 15,000 workers and 4,000 people to live. That will not solve any housing problems. The city is trying to stop them, but they are using the CA state law that was supposed to fix this problem to get around the city. But the law was so poorly written that they will be able to create a housing deficit using a housing bill!

We need to get rid of Prop 13 and figure out a better way to stop the elderly from being priced out of their homes (which was the original purpose) and we need to move to a Japanese zoning model, where someone could buy (or tear down their own) single family home and replace it with a fourplex. Yeah, my neighborhood would loose it's "character" if a couple of these houses were replaced with quads, but at least some servers and maids and city employees and construction workers and teachers and .... could live here.

> And then to make matters worse, a local developer is trying to tear down our old mall and build "more housing" on it, but if you look closely, what they're really building is a huge office park with the bare minimum of housing to call it a housing project. They want to put in space for 15,000 workers and 4,000 people to live. That will not solve any housing problems.

A lot of the Vallco project will be affordable housing, which was necessary to qualify for SB 35, funded via the office space. Adding to the market-rate housing deficit is a problem, but subsidized affordable housing is so desperately needed, and funding for it is so scarce, that I think Vallco is a win on balance.

> A lot of the Vallco project will be affordable housing

This is not true. The majority is market rate, with the bare minimum of affordable housing to just meet SB35 (and they played games with the SB35 calculation by including parking lots in the "housing" square footage, which the City Attorney pointed out and then was fired for "unknown reasons" right after). The developer is super shady and is using legal tricks to make themselves tons of money at the expense of the community. They don't care one iota about affordable housing.

There are plenty of other ways for them to be both profitable and provide below market housing without building millions of square feet of office space.

> The developer is super shady and is using legal tricks to make themselves tons of money at the expense of the community.

The developer bent over backwards to please the "community" only to see Better Cupertino torpedo the whole process out of rage at having to live by poorer neighbors. SB 35 is precisely the "legal trick" that was needed to force bad actors like Cupertino to do their part.

> There are plenty of other ways for them to be both profitable and provide below market housing without building millions of square feet of office space.

Cross-subsidy of affordable housing with office space is how affordable housing gets built. There is almost no funding available. Look at how long it took to get a paltry 211 units of affordable housing built in Oakland: https://twitter.com/LibbySchaaf/status/1128872869771980800?s...

Anyway, Vallco is an embarrassing blight on the South Bay. Virtually anything would be better than the decaying mall that's there today.

> The developer bent over backwards to please the "community"

I was part of those meetings. Not a single thing the residents asked for was offered in their plans.

Furthermore, if you look at their track record, it's terrible. They don't deliver on anything they promise. Did you know that there was supposed to be a park at Main Street? They somehow got the City Council to approve a variance after the project went forward (and coincidentally raised a bunch of money for one of the city council members). I suspect they would do the same with that park roof they suggested, which every engineer you ask will tell you is most likely impossible to build.

The crux of the issue here is that there was some major corruption between the city council and the developer, which seems to have been solved with the most recent election, and now someone needs to clean up the mess.

> Cross-subsidy of affordable housing with office space is how affordable housing gets built. There is almost no funding available.

That's fine, but how about building less office than housing, and then put in an amount of affordable housing commensurate with the income from the offices? Or how about no office at all, and instead put an extra tax on the retail businesses to pay for affordable housing? There are lots of other options besides building a mega office park that would create a housing deficit. That solves nothing.

> Anyway, Vallco is an embarrassing blight on the South Bay. Virtually anything would be better than the decaying mall that's there today.

It's only decaying because the developer wouldn't renew the leases of the people who were in there, so they could push the "abandoned" narrative. It sucked for the business owners who were forced out. Yeah, a lot of them were behind on rent, but that was because the developer put no resources into the mall. They manufactured its accelerated demise for their narrative.

So yeah, I agree, it's a blight now, but a blight the very same developers brought upon us.

Oh, and did I mention those developers break city ordinances all the time with seemingly no consequence? They were doing construction at 3am on Sunday at one point. How do I know? They banged so hard my kid was scared awake. I have video of them bulldozing at 3am on a Sunday. I called to police, who said they couldn't even identify if they had a permit. But they were at it again the next weekend!

> I was part of those meetings. Not a single thing the residents asked for was offered in their plans.

Because Better Cupertino refused to work with the developer in any way. It is impossible to negotiate with a group that is operating in bad faith; conspiracy theories and accusations of "corruption" are a hallmark of bad faith debate. The goal was simply a wish to prevent any housing whatsoever from being developed. There is inconsistency in your very post about whether you want affordable housing (which you have not proposed a funding mechanism for) or retail on the site. Steven Scharf made his intentions very clear when he made a disgusting joke about building a wall around Cupertino and making San Jose pay for it.

There isn't anything more I can say on the topic of Vallco that hasn't been already written by others. Suffice it to say that that the NIMBYism of exclusive suburbs like Cupertino is not a good look to ordinary Californians, which is why SB 50 for example polls so overwhelmingly well.

I'm the least NIMBY person you will find. I think they should build 30 story towers of housing on that property and make 1/2 of it affordable.

I'm not at all against housing on that site. I think it's critical that we put housing there.

I'm against that developer putting offices on the site that would create a housing deficit.

> There is inconsistency in your very post about whether you want affordable housing (which you have not proposed a funding mechanism for) or retail on the site

I proposed a tax on the retail to fund the affordable housing.

> which is why SB 50 for example polls so overwhelmingly well.

I'm a huge supporter of SB 50.

I'm not sure you would need to get rid of prop 13. An alternative might be a state law that gives workers who work more than, say 20 hours a week in a city the right to vote in that city's elections. That way the commuters, who tend to be more numerous and poorer than those who manage to rent in the area would form a voting bloc that might be sufficient to offset the (natural) self interest of the city's home owners, who often want to restrict supply of new housing or transport.

> “You guys need to take care of it, like ASAP,” he said, lecturing the young couple living in the vehicle. “I’m not going to tow it today, but tomorrow if I come out here and it’s like this, it’s getting towed!”

As he delivered the ultimatum, a self-driving car rolled past.

A nice retort would have been, "You guys need to build more affordable housing, like ASAP".

Startup idea: convert traditional multilevel parking lots in urban centers to RV parks. Run power, water, and sewage to each space. Build a shared gym/kitchen to charge access to. Even install car elevators to really pack ‘em in! You could also lobby for enforcement and fines to go up in your local area to increase your customer base! Not dystopian at all!

I think you just invented apartments, which would need residential zoning, which is already the problem.

No, I’m disrupting zoning laws. Paradigm shift!

Twist: rather than rent out the spaces, just post the parked RVs on Airbnb! Can we divide an RV into a duplex? As long as it still has wheels, how big can an RV get before it's legally an apartment building?

Hey, how about instead of parking, they’re self-driving and they just drive themselves around the block all night? I think we just solved the housing crisis!

Needs more blockchain... with Bee Token! Man, this is all coming together.

Apartments on wheels != traditional apartment.

I'm doubt the regressive city council will appreciate that nuance.

That's actually been tried in the 70s, but for various reasons it never really took off: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/mobile-home-skyscrape...

It looks like the main problems were problems with HVAC (which wouldn't be a problem in California and probably could be more easily solved with modern building materials) and the ugliness of it. Everybody in the Bay Area would surely hate a version of the Skyrise Terrace in their city but it could be a good idea if someone could buy a large parking structure and retrofit it for mobile home utilities.

There's a huge RV park at San Francisco Airport, too, in a lot near I believe the United hangar. Some of the vehicles look like they've been there for decades, and all of them look abandoned. I've often wondered what the story is there.

It's a group of LAX employees. It's been a while since I watched this [0] doc about it or read [1] about it but there's some pilots in that group too iirc. Some more recent posting about it on a forum seem to indicate they're trying to just quietly snuff it out by not accepting new 'residents' and will eventually shut it down.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000004630021/long-t...

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jul-20-me-lax-c...

Just remember when talking about this topic that public employees like Firefighters and policemen make 300k+

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=firefig...

Those figures (which include benefits) are like, what a junior software engineer costs in the bay area. They don't seem outrageous to me.

I've also seen three entries for "Thomas G McKenzie" on the first few pages of this source.

> what a junior software engineer costs in the bay area

What. Not even close.

> I've also seen three entries for "Thomas G McKenzie" on the first few pages of this source

The incompetence of Transparent California is the incompetence of the state.

A lot of sentiment here around "housing is the root of all these problems", but isn't it also the problem of these companies creating offices in communities that can't support them?

Given there are a lot of places that offices could be built that could support the employees, I think some of this responsibility lies with the companies who consciously keep their offices in locations that may cause their employees (not to mention facilities contractors) to be homeless.

Companies put their offices in expensive cities because that’s where most of the people who work for them want to live. If Google decided to move their HQ to rural Kansas tomorrow, most of the company would quit overnight.

Google isn't in Kansas because Kansas isn't silicon valley. Google is in Mountain View because it's down the road from Stanford.

> If Google decided to move their HQ to rural Kansas tomorrow, most of the company would quit overnight.

Which is merely a different form of "I got mine, F' you" from some employees (especially the C level employees) to other employees.

But why wouldn't they have a smaller branch in Kansas? (maybe not Kansas but there are a lot of places in the US other than NY and CALI). And smaller offices all over the US?? It would be cheaper too, employees would maybe consider moving to a smaller hub where they could actually buy a home, local economies would benefit as well, etc..

Big companies do have satellite offices all over the place.

Google has small branches around the US (and around the world) hiring. https://careers.google.com/locations/

A common joke (prank? Advertising tactic?) internally is to make links with titles about finding affordable housing refer to the Pittsburg office page, and people do make the switch. Just less than keep coming to the Bay Area I bet.

Disclaimer: Random Google grunt, my opinions are my own, I don’t know anything you don’t about google’s plans to expand offices, etc.

Would you rather people, jobs, and an economic powerhouse of an industry move away or just build more housing? It's not like the software industry is a monolith, it's a collection of people and companies who have decided the network effect of moving to a high cost place with a lot of engineering talent is better than the alternatives. It's hard to move that inertia somewhere else.

Then there's the serious question of where would the industry go? So many cities are so NIMBY controlled in this country (although SF is up there with the worst) that not many places are better.

If the city can't (or won't) support the company, yes, the company should move. The city can make decisions from there, instead of assuming that the companies will be there regardless of the city's actions.

There's a lot of cities throughout the US (even a few within easy driving distance of SF) who would love to house Google.

Presumably Google still has a massive Bay Area presence because it's more profitable for them to stay there than move, at least that's what is implied. Maybe they should be pushing hard for the city to build more housing. But it seems like the current residents in that area are holding their hands to their ears, closing their eyes and shouting away any evidence that more people require more housing, or things will get worse. I can see your point that Google should probably move if that's the case, but the costs involved probably make it super unrealistic for that to happen, at least in the near future.

Where would you move Google, at this point, if you were in charge? There's not a single city -- in the US, at least -- that I can think of that would be prepared, with the right infrastructure or ready to build out a lot more. That probably factors into Google's decision making process as well.

Maybe we should be going back to the idea of company towns. Or possibly have urban planners building new cities from the ground up with proper infrastructure, housing, transportation, etc. that have the ability to expand for new residents and companies. Certainly the big cities in the US don't have that capability due to our car based infrastructure and our attraction to 30 year mortgages on suburban houses.

The root of all problems is the tax system in california.

It bleeds out foreigners and renters to pay high incomes to retirees that dont pay income taxes or property taxes.

Everyone is absolutely wrong focusing on housing: it is a symptom, not the disease.

If san francisco eliminated the regressive sales tax and put it on say, garbage collection, it would shift away 2 billion dollars from all workers, including low income to the very enriched landlord class. Iterate that on business taxes, which are about 25% more of its budget if i remember, and then businesses will grow and wages will go up: and landlords holding the bags will be the first to change zoning codes on the plummeting value of their properties.

The irony is that they put their campus where it could be supported by the local city, but the city refuses to do so, then complains.

Two regional train systems have a major station a mile or so from google hq. Three freeways intersect near there as well. There is also a bus system that should be able to service local trips.

Google HQ was built by SGI in the 90s so Mountain View has had 20 years to increase the capacity (car and mass transit/bus) of the stretches of road between downtown and the amphitheater, but have repeatedly chosen not to.

Similarly, there is no sane freeway connector between the Dumbarton and Palo Alto / Mountain View, and the need for that has been obvious for at least a decade as well.

Any changes to a city are going to occur over the timespan of decades. Any company that comes into a city that can't support them now is doing their employees (and company) a disservice.

> have repeatedly chosen not to

And why has Google done nothing in response to that then? The city has gotten accustomed to Google always being there, no matter what the city does. It's up to Google to fix that for the sake of their employees.

The city doesn't let Google do anything either.

I work for one of those companies, and yes, I do think they should bear part of the blame.

Look at the large tech companies of the past - IBM, DEC, Sun. They had many buildings in many cities all across the country. HQ would be bigger, sometimes there'd be notable clusters of buildings in one area (e.g. Littleton or Marlboro for DEC). Often a certain building/region would have a particular technology or product focus. The thing is, it worked and it even worked even before we had modern communications technology. The reasons those companies declined had nothing to do with the efficiency of their physical work environment.

Google and Facebook and Amazon could do the same thing. Yes, they all have offices elsewhere, often in the same few places (e.g. Boston). But they're still massively overconcentrated in Mountain View, Menlo Park, and one particular part of Seattle. They all literally have money to burn, so they don't care, but it has all kinds of negative effects both on their own workers and on the general economy throughout the area.

It's just inefficient. It's a waste of everybody's money and energy. And that's before we even get into the issue of letting people work remotely. ;)

The bigger problem is the classism, hate and othering used to heap upon and smear people who can't or don't want to afford fixed housing. So much for "tolerance" and "liberalism," if many people even remember what these words meant, because it looks a lot like fascism, judgement and discrimination to me.

To all those that say "build more housing" will solve all our problems, I don't think they've actually been looking at the housing markets.

All of the new housing in the Bay Area is at a premium price. All of it. There are tens of thousands of condos slated to be built in SF. They are all top of the end condos. They haven't and they won't dent the prices. Building more homes will just let more rich people move to the Bay Area and it will sustain prices.

Supply will increase at a much, much lower rate than demand when it comes to housing. Unless you literally create ghost cities like in China, you won't get the effect that you want.

The only way to curb prices is to reduce demand. Force Facebook, Google and Amazon to build outside of the Bay Area. I guarantee that will be the quickest way to curb demand and to throttle house prices. Have Google build in Kansas City instead of San Jose. Have Facebook build in Detroit. There's enough money to sustain an entire ecosystem and it will help increase house prices in other areas and dampen demand here.

Last I checked, there's physical limits to that kind of growth. According to the textbooks (and history), if you build a zillion super expensive condos in a single area without building an equivalent (or more) amount of low to medium income housing the market will rather quickly self-regulate to reduce the value/price of those luxury condos. It's a bubble.

Ask Miami how it works out. The vacancies in expensive condos are out of control. If it weren't for wealthy foreign investment trying to park their wealth in "safe" places the value of these properties would plummet.

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/downtown-miami-has-six-ye...

The bubble will eventually burst and those properties will quickly go bankrupt. Resulting in massive loses to not only other property owners in the area but to the city from tax revenue. Revenue they desperately need to mitigate the effects of global warming.

There's been a ton of expensive development all over Portland. Condos and apartments in desirable areas, none of it affordable except for rich folks. However, housing prices have stabilized here somewhat. Having more options for rich folks in highly desirable areas means less pressure on housing away from those areas.

Something like 65% of San Fransisco is zoned for single family housing. Some rich people looking to move there will balk at the prices and then look further out, increasing demand in the surrounding areas. With more dense housing in SF, more rich folks who can afford it can live there. Currently the housing supply is so low (because of the zoning) that it forces most rich folks to look elsewhere.

> There's been a ton of expensive development all over Portland. Condos and apartments in desirable areas, none of it affordable except for rich folks. However, housing prices have stabilized here somewhat. Having more options for rich folks in highly desirable areas means less pressure on housing away from those areas.

Correct. This is the economic consensus view, and a lot of data has borne it out.

> To all those that say "build more housing" will solve all our problems, I don't think they've actually been looking at the housing markets.

Nobody thinks building more will solve all the problems. But it's a necessary part of the solution. Economists have in fact looked at housing markets and come to this conclusion. Here's an example recently: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sHh6BJ8dPoN9VQj-PXTPK5ATa8m...

> Force Facebook, Google and Amazon to build outside of the Bay Area. I guarantee that will be the quickest way to curb demand and to throttle house prices. Have Google build in Kansas City instead of San Jose. Have Facebook build in Detroit.

Nobody, and certainly not random suburban municipalities, can force large multinational companies to do that sort of thing. And, as I've explained before, it's a failed strategy in the first place. If the market was going to solve the problem that way, it would have by now.

The problem is simply that the FAANG companies all think the best engineers live here in the Bay Area. The best engineers in SFBA have a choice of where they work. So if Google were to decide to leave the Bay Area, a lot of Google employees will go work for competitors instead. This dynamic is why so many tech companies locate, or have a significant presence, here.

> it will help increase house prices in other areas

In other words, it gentrifies those communities and drives residents out, all because wealthy Bay Area suburbs don't want to build housing. That's unfair.

You're mixing up two things. When a lot of new premium housing is built, you might indeed see the reported "average sales price" go up, since there are lots of sales of new fancy new houses.

But the price of older housing goes down. Because people who bought a new premium house, therefore did not buy an older house, which reduces demand for older houses.

There are lots of nice older (1940-1990) houses in SV that are good to live in. Before the tech boom they were perfect for middle class families: pleasant and affordable. They could be affordable again (and they're still pleasant) if the supply of premium housing were increased enough.

That depends on somehow not having the extra supply on the high luxury end being soaked up by foreign investment parking their money in real estate.

Supply and demand works there too. There's a finite amount of people with a finite amount of money they want to invest in US real estate. If you create enough (by $ value) real estate for them to buy, they can't buy any more.

For a city to have its real estate bought as investments can be troublesome, but at least it doesn't increase road traffic. So you can have tall, dense skyscrapers with condos all owned by foreign trusts, without it creating parking or traffic problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Yards_(development) seems like an example of this.

If you don't create investable condos, then the foreign money buys single family homes that some family could otherwise live happily in.

This is absolutely wrong.

I live in an "old" neighborhood where the houses are about 60 years old or more. The house prices have doubled in the last 6 years, and they are almost 2M. Old houses go up much faster because they are in much much better locations.

When full self-driving hits, all of these vehicles will go off and recharge their batteries during the day while people are at work.

So much for the 2-hour window during early afternoon when the 101 is drivable.

Automated traffic can drive much, much faster, more densely, and without stopping.

It will be a net positive.

Self driving cars won't arrive for at least another 20 years.

#vanlife

The community can do something:

* Build more housing.

The tech companies can do something:

* Build offices in more places

That's it. That's the whole plan.

Local and state regulations have the housing market locked down. That leaves option B, and I really don't understand why more companies aren't doing that.

We humans are remarkably solipsistic creatures. Why not build more elsewhere? Probably because leadership isn’t feeling the squeeze.

Local and state regulations are controlled by "the community" so that is option A.

This situation is perhaps the finest example of the self-licking ice cream cone.

Consider:

* “The community” (houseowners) own the present stock of houses;

* The price of a house is driven not by materials or labor, but by supply;

* The supply of houses is controlled by the houseowners.

But it gets better. If houses cost more, not less,

* The local government gets more money from property taxes;

* The banks get their cut out of interest on the loans;

* The employers (corporations) keep their employees on the treadmill;

* The state and federal governments get their cuts from the income taxes.

We have the technology. You could probably buy a mansion for $100k if it was in literally anyone’s interest besides the line-level worker.

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