$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes
blog.google
blog.google
The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the Valley. Towns like Mountain View and Palo Alto ought to be vastly denser, with apartment buildings, duplexes, and other multi-tenant dwellings. The people living there don't want that, though, so the laws prohibit it.
I don't blame people for wanting to keep their quiet neighborhoods and single-unit homes, or low-rises in SF, but until those objections are overcome, the problem is only going to get worse. So while I say that there's a simple cause, there's no simple solution.
The only solution is changing the zoning laws, and that requires changing peoples' minds. Once that's done, the money will flow in directly from tenants, and will ease pressure all around. If Google wants to build more housing, they need to spend that billion dollars on political efforts.
When you spend that kind of money, in additional to otherwise having a large economic presence in a city, the Government tends to listen. Moreso than to individual developers.
I'm glad there's more density, and it's near transit, for the most part. Of course, it will still increase traffic, but by going with density and near transit, it'll reduce the impact vs building more single family homes.
These little steps help, but NIMBYism is still holding back potential housing inventory.
What IS an option is changing mandatory single family home areas to allow for "missing middle" housing, thereby reducing economic segregation currently present on most of the residential land. A lot of people prefer the current level of segregation, though, so it's a hard sell.
The quick summary is that the 2000 Building Code allowed inexpensive construction of 5-floor wood buildings over a concrete base. This "5 over 1" construction gives "near-high-rise densities at a wood-frame price", so it has become very popular in the US.
That's about the only perk of these places. Sometimes they have nice things like a pool, but with how cheap the buildings are, you are going to hear your neighbors above, to the sides, and below you all day. Toured a place like this and noped the fuck out when I heard some dog bark in another unit and it sounded like he was yapping from the bedroom.
The construction quality of multi-family homes in SV pretty poor.
I moved out after my first lease expired.
Nowadays codes and trends - at least in parts of Europe - caught up, and soundproofing has became important through the process. (For architects/engineers, developers/builders and buyers/renters.)
My point is that properties above entry level apartment grade are scarce in the valley despite the fact that rents can support it better than just about anywhere. It actually kept me from moving up there
And you can hear your neighbors cough.
We can do better, and yes, I'm willing to sacrifice the superficial stuff and pay a bit more for quality construction.
I also run a box fan almost all the time, so quieter sounds from neighbors are below the noise floor and not perceptible.
My understanding is most of the price of housing in West coast cities comes from the value of land, the building permits, and the low supply. How much does construction cost really factor into rent?
You answered your own question. The fund manager of an REIT or developer is looking to maximize ROI, and in the absence of higher quality alternatives, they can afford to build to the lowest specs possible that will still rent.
Via 401k(s) and defined benefit pension fund investments, we all are responsible for maximizing for ROI.
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/beautiful-public-housing-red-...
We desperately need to tighten up some of our regulatory codes and force better soundproofing.
Soundproofing simply was left out of the code because the buildings of old were sturdy and massive enough to implicitly take care of most of the noise problems. Now new materials and standards are lean enough to conduct sound very well. Oops.
Buyers also got wise in the last decade. Now anyone buys or rents the first thing - after location, location, location - is checking how noisy it is.
If all housing would have been built by committee, it's just as likely that it'd have taken a lot of time for the committee to change its ways.
> Of course, it will still increase traffic
[adjusts glasses]
Actually, building housing near workplaces decreases traffic. Imagine people who used to drive in from Modesto moving in to these units.
Of course, the zoning law is clearly the root of all housing evil in the Bay area. But in order to fight against it, we need a clear demonstration which can rebut their FUD against a more dense zoning law. I guess Google is trying take that role here.
http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/combined.html https://www.antievictionmap.com/mural-in-clarion-alley
I'd also recommend looking at Janet Delaney's photos of SoMa from when it was a predominantly black neighbourhood. 3rd, 4th and 5th Streets have been rebuilt, but at the expense of pushing out the people of color that used to call that neighbourhood home. Delaney's work has been on exhibit at the SFMOMA, and studying local art in SF can help one understand the factors that lead to local opposition to housing development.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cam-sfmoma-... https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/janet_delaney/
This announcement isn't going to affect the overall narrative around housing in SF. It's just "let's build some houses next to one of our south bay campuses", which Facebook already did a few years back.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/08/facebook-unveils-new-...
Google's has also previously submitted plans to the city of mountain view that include houses on its land (not sure if any of these count towards the 20k number):
https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/09/google-mountain-view-dev... https://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activepro...
Is there a good reason for all of these people to live in one little area? No, I don't think there's a really good reason. Everyone wants to take advantage of what the city has to offer, but nobody actually wants to pay fair market value.
"We only have one bus route and a school, how can we grow this place? It's too crowded". Complete BS.
Those people still need to live somewhere, but bringing everyone closer together increases efficiencies by enormous amounts. Cities are the thing helping to save the environment.
There is another solution - don’t locate on the west coast or build out satellite offices that aren’t on the west coast.
What about pulling a HongKong / Singapore: Create a special economic zone that is a stand-alone municipality with extremely lax zoning laws to spur housing & transportation growth?
Google is kinda-sorta doing this. To avoid Mountain View NIMBYism, just carve out the Google land for this purpose.
It's harder to build denser if you have very little good public transit (or walk/bike infra) to speak of. Density doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I mean, Houston is the principal city of a metro area of 7 million people, and has no subway, no mass transit that's separated grade whatsoever. That's not a setup that's going to easily support higher population densities.
Meanwhile, you look at a city like Munich that's in a smaller metro area, and it has several subway lines, plus several hybrid commuter/mass transit lines that are separated-grade at least within the city proper. They're steadily building yet more, and Munich residents don't even consider their transit to be all that great! (lots of complaints about the S-Bahn, for sure)
If you wait until things are very dense to actually start planning good transit, that means you'll have many years where it's too dense for just cars and so things are borked, plus by then building tunnels or acquiring right of way will be much more expensive.
If you have been to any major city in Asia, they have WAYYY more people and are able to commute from much further distances because the public transportation is clean, safe, fast, reliable.
We have tons of land under utilized in the bay area, especially in the east bay, if we were to allow those people to reach their offices under 1 hour, then I think a lot of issues are going to be solved.
I also believe we should build more taller buildings, but that's happening already. I grew up in Cupertino and everywhere you go there are apartment buildings going up right now. Likewise with Mountain View where my parents work.
The worse situations is when a zoning change happens and goes into effects quickly and construction projects start without people having had time to get the hell out. Selling near those projects is hard (no one wants to deal with it), and the people who live there are stuck.
I bought a place near a construction project that was almost done, and right around the time it ended, the city issued special permits for other big projects across the street that no one really expected, and now we're a bit stuck (People in our building cant find buyers without losing large amounts of money, and until they do, have to deal with the unexpected construction).
Where I live, the transit agency has been building a $2B light rail extension with the understanding that areas around the stations would be rezoned for high density.
But so far, it looks like the city will cave in to pressure from homeowners for lower-density zoning, leaving a very expensive transit investment with far fewer people riding it than anticipated.
This attitude is exactly why people are uncomfortable with processes like this. It ignores existing inequities of property ownership that have impacted wealth distribution.
If where you decide to build the station is like most of the bay, the people living in these homes aren't the owners. Especially if they're presently black or latino-majority neighborhoods, American housing policy over the last 50 years has purposefully kept these communities from gaining ownership equity by explicitly redlining them or locking them out of the credit market.
They won't profit from selling the property, they will simply be displaced.
But yes, if you're trying to dump a subway station in the middle an area as you describe, your point is totally correct.
My thought is why I wouldn't want a skyscrapper popping in my backyard: because I can't easily get the hell out once the news drop.
It's certainly the case that more can be done for both of these.
CalTrain during rush hour is operating many trains at 120+% capacity. As a ride, that number feels way too low given how many people are often without a seat. I type this on a ride where I didn't get a seat for the front half of the ride. Riderships what growing by 5k daily riders YoY, though I think it's finally topped out due to train capacity. Bikers get bumped on a regular basis due to space, and riders on rare occasion. My understanding is that CalTrain is also running essentially as many trains as they can during rush hours. (They have to allow a certain following distance between trains, and that's the constraining factor. Electrification will have locomotives that have better acceleration, and thus stopping distances, and thus will allow packing more trains — and thus capacity onto the tracks. I worry however that this will be too little too late.)
If the areas around the stations were denser and had a more diverse mix of destinations (offices, retail, schools, etc.) then there would be be enough all day demand to justify running trains all day on a frequent schedule, potentially even on 5-10 minute frequencies like the RER and S Bahn systems, which would also alleviate congestion at the peak.
He nicely has the exact per-car figure for the newer Caltrain cars ($5.7M / car…); he puts a $2.5M car at ~$162k/yr in depreciation, and $100k/yr in maintenance. If we double the depreciation to account for CalTrain's apparently expensive purchase, that's $325k + $100k / yr per car, or $2.55M/yr for a six-car train. (But: I don't get these depreciation numbers? This figure adds up to ~$13M over the life of the train assuming the 40 yr life in the article, which seems appropriate given that the gallery equipment is nearly 50 IIRC; why would depreciation be more than 100% of the vehicle cost, or is this a "it depreciates faster in earlier years but becomes more cost effective later"? This could greatly make most of the numbers I'm getting here make no sense.)
The passengers, meanwhile, assuming they pay the same price as I do for a Zone 3 pass (and Zone 3 is fairly popular, though some people will travel further to SJ which will cost more…) we get ~$1.6M/yr assuming 100% capacity (570 passengers, n.b. this is less than the current 722 per 6-car gallery, and IDK what Bombadiers have; also I kinda doubt that 100% load will happen in rush, that is, it'll still be >100%) and that they don't raise prices (I also doubt this.) Still, that's a huge funding gap, but should the passengers pay 100% of the required fees, or is some of it expected to come from taxpayers? (There's still a gap of ~$0.9M/yr … per train)
when people don't want to give away (for free or below market price) their share of GOOG nobody calls that NIMBYism. When people don't want to give away their share in a city (drastically increasing density/population does in many ways take away from existing residents without any just compensation) - that is suddenly becomes NIMBYism.
The issue can practically be solved simply - city is to be like a corporation with stock, and any new resident/development has to buy the stock on the secondary market. Density/population increase (i.e. zoning changes) is by issueing new stock to be distributed proportionally like dividends to existing shareholders(residents). That way NIMBYism would just disappear the same way like it doesn't exist when it comes to GOOG. That also would make gentrification into a buyout where people who create a city desirable to live in would materially benefit from it instead of being just kicked out being as poor as when they moved in.
No one is telling a SFH owner that they have to do anything. Instead, SFH are being allowed to have more options for what to do with their property.
In fact giving more options for property actually increases the value of that property.
This may be worth it broadly, but it absolutely enforces our preferences onto the SFH owner.
If we choose to overturn those collective preferences, we need to have principled discussions as to why our preferences should rule over the other groups'.
Geometry is an arbitrary basis for power, not a principled one. There’s no deep reason why the block is too small to decide and the state is too big to decide and the City of Sunnyvale is just right.
The same way with the proposed city stock shares - nobody is going to tell you what you can do with it.
>Instead, SFH are being allowed to have more options for what to do with their property.
no. It is a rich&powerful well-connected developer who is getting zoning changes and only to his properties (similar to the situation when only the major shareholder would get additional stock/dividend issued for free) at the cost to all the other residents and property owners. Privatization of profits with socialization of costs - the main reason for the NIMBY.
>In fact giving more options for property actually increases the value of that property.
Nobody is giving more options. Uniform re-zoning never practically happens. It is always a targeted action for the benefit of specific powerful developer who has already at least got an option on those targeted properties. At least the common stock schema i propose would allow to spread some of those gains toward all the others who also bear the costs, ie. the whole city.
Yup, and that is straightforward, if time and money consuming. Changing zoning isn't enough: making an area denser without appropriate matching infrastructure investment isn't going to go well. If you want the next Tokyo or Paris (or even something significantly smaller), you need Tokyo or Paris' infra.
Then the next problem is that people can't stand each other. People don't want neighbors because neighbors are a pain. It's a problem everywhere, but in the west, the US has it particularly bad. I don't know about Cali, but in a lot of cities the building code is a total joke, and Americans are known to be LOUD. City rules are rarely enforced properly, either. So the only option you have is to prevent neighbors from moving in in the first place. That's easily fixed: better construction quality and clearer, enforced rules that make coexisting easier and nicer, alongside investments to keep the area from going down the shitter.
Do that for a while, and people just won't mind. Having moved from a dense city in another country to a medium sized American metro made me "appreciate" why NIMBYs are such a problem here. Living near people can become a nightmare real quick if you're not lucky.
Noise: All of my neighbors should be able to have active, stomping, marching band in each of their units, and I not hear a single peep. Contrast with reality: In every apartment I've ever lived in normal /quiet/ walking, sink use, and even bathroom fans were audible in other units.
Air quality: Smokers, "Marry Jane" users I think all who don't smoke can agree with; but I also dislike vaping, perfumes, and dryer scents. They make it hard for me to breath and irritate me (I think in both the medical and psychological sense). Scrubbed, negative draw exhausts are required for all of those things. Have a designated smoking room. Also have designated clean air intakes that supply positive pressure to the hallways and units (in that order) and proper door seals.
Also, yes, build a TOKYO grade subway that connects to parking silos in the outskirts. Then go ahead and ban (most) cars from the city. But ONLY in that order. Don't ban the cars first.
> LOUD
Sound is very much the problem. I don't want a huge amount of land, I don't want lawn, I don't want landscaping, I definitely don't want a neighborhood association, but what I do want is good soundproofing and no shared walls (or worse, floors/ceilings). In practice, there's no soundproofing that can substitute for an air gap.
Resilient channels basically work by fixing horizontal metal strips to the studs, and then hanging the drywall on the strips with clips. Because there is purposefully play in the connection, vibrations cannot easily transfer from drywall to stud to drywall.
Why doesn't it work? As soon as anyone nails or screws or otherwise attaches something into the stud through the drywall (say a shelf), the drywall is now mechanically connected to the stud again.
The proper fix is to have a separate frame for each dwelling unit, preferably with fiberglass insulation. This essentially doubles the cost of inter-unit walls, so it is less popular. My parents live in a townhouse constructed in this manner, and if they dial up the volumes on the movie to 11, the subwoofer can cause pictures to rattle on the neighbor's walls, but audible sound is nearly zero.
To clarify, I did indeed mean "no soundproofing in widespread common use", rather than "no physically possible soundproofing". And thanks for the great explanation!
> The proper fix is to have a separate frame for each dwelling unit, preferably with fiberglass insulation. This essentially doubles the cost of inter-unit walls, so it is less popular. My parents live in a townhouse constructed in this manner, and if they dial up the volumes on the movie to 11, the subwoofer can cause pictures to rattle on the neighbor's walls, but audible sound is nearly zero.
That does indeed sound like the correct fix. How would you know if a potential apartment has such construction? How would it be advertised? What would it take to promote a standard/certification for that?
I think that level of soundproofing would make a substantial difference in people's willingness to live in anything more efficient than a standalone building.
There are standards for sound-proofing, but they are construction standards, they require a particular amount of sound isolation, and resilient channel passes the current standards (since it gives "okay" levels of soundproofing at construction time, even though later modifications are almost certain to nullify that).
Sure, there are others, it's always a continuum. But this is probably a significant factor.
Now usually a fascia of some sort is applied to the concrete and what is used affects the sound transmission. If you plaster over the concrete, for example, you get much better sound insulation than if you just paint the bare concrete.
Sometimes drywall is placed over furring strips to leave room for electrical work and this even better.
Another child comment mentioned brick, and all of the above is true for brick as well, though I believe mortared brick conducts sound better than poured masonry, and AAC conducts sound better than either.
As a further hiccup, I live in california, and the earthquake regulations greatly slow the innovation in building. In order for a new construction technique to be approved, someone has to pay the money to demonstrate that it is seismically sound.
But for that infra to make sense, you also need the zoning. Running a subway line through predominately single-family home neighborhoods makes no sense.
Realistically though, you don't need a lot of new infra for going from SFH-only zoning to moderate density housing like fourplexes and townhomes. Better options for walking and biking, maybe more bus routes (bus-only lanes?) would suffice.
Lot of people complain about crazy people on buses, but this might be a US thing, but anyhow, it's not like it's impossible to introduce a simple way to manage this problem. (From simple disturbance fines to simply giving the right to the driver to suspend anyone from travel. Of course watch out for overzealous/racist/anti-whatever drivers.)
That wouldn't fly in the US. The moment you ban someone from anything, someone will find a way to push why it was wrong to do. But yeah, I haven't that issue in other countries.
Another issue with buses are cities with streets that are too small. In some US cities, drivers already have to do miracles to get buses through.
Source: from the Midwest in a very rural area. Someone moved in right next to my parents. They aren't happy, but nothing they could do about it (while remaining a responsible human, a productive member of society, and not a worthless mooch) - they didn't have the money to buy the lot, so it is what it is.
Before people start talking about strip clubs next to schools or factories dumping waste into the aquifers. These neighbors are well within their by-right zoning regulations. They just have a house, and they just happened to buy the lot right next to my parents'. In California, it would have been perfectly acceptable for my parents to tie that development up for 20+ years with all sorts of ridiculousness. But in by-right zoning states, you just get housing built and move on because that's how the real world works.
For the people who own property, they are choosing laws that best help their finances. You can appeal to some sense of greater good but history would show such a plan unlikely to work.
In the coming months, we’ll continue to work with
local municipalities to support plans that allow
residential developers to build quickly and
economically.
I'm not a fan of the idea of living & working for a corporate overlord in a company town, but I suppose one option to break the back of entrenched NIMBYism is to own all the backyards. Buy up all the things, flatten them, and go vertical.
I only took a quick glance at the article, but seems like Google help may do quite a bit.
> First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes
They are going to repurpose their own lands, which means there will be more space to build housing. They make it possible.
I don't know where are theses $750 millions of land, but that's still more space.
Not sure why they feel like this is a good billion well spent...
And it sounds like they're 'investing' rather than 'spending' the $1 billion - if you take $750m of land and build flats and sell most of them at market rate, presumably you recoup a fair portion of your $750m - they might even make a profit.
That's all I'm saying. Just like the OP said, more private companies building on their lots isn't really going to budge the needle.
https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/09/28/mountain-view-leads...
Unless the whole of Santa Clara county and San Mateo county work together instead of playing chicken with each other, we will make no progress on this problem. MV has been willing to do more but it would be unfair for MV to carry the weight while all the other cities limit housing to maintain the "character" of their towns.
The tech boom is a huge blessing that any city, state, or even country would be lucky to have. However, people wanting it all and NIMBYism are turning an opportunity into a problem.
Could it be that these Sunnyvale developments were just issued permits earlier (2016 or 2017), and we're just seeing it further down the pipeline?
Sunnyvale has been reliably pro-housing since about 2010, which means that a lot of new supply came on the market in 2015 and 2016, which has alleviated the housing supply issue significantly. I left MTV in 2014 after having my rent double in 3 years, from $1400 to $2800; my rent in Sunnyvale has gone up by about $30/month total in the 5 years since, and the 2 BR townhome I'm in now currently rents for less than the 1BR in MTV that I used to live in.
Put another way, restricting housing supply in Mountain View likely impacts rents its socioeconomically similar neighbor, Sunnyvale.
Among likely differentiators: 1.) Traffic. If you're traveling to Google or Facebook Sunnyvale adds an extra 15-20 minutes to your commute. 2.) Schools. They're better in Mountain View, at least for now, though both regions are rapidly gentrifying. 3.) Cachet. Mountain View has the name because of Google. Sunnyvale doesn't really, and also feels like more of a sterile suburb than a lively community. 4.) Shuttle stops. I don't know exactly where they are now, but that'd explain why the downtown areas go for relatively equal expensive rents, while my neighborhood (which AFAICT has no tech shuttle stops anywhere near it) rents for a lot less than other neighborhoods in the area.
I definitely don't have a nuanced enough understanding of the difference in civic liveliness of the two cities - and resulting desirability - they both always felt pretty suburban to me. But I've never lived in either one.
The fact that it's perceived as a sacrifice to build housing is one of the core problems.
And one of the main reasons for this perception is that, for the city, it is true. Due to Prop 13, CITIES LOSE MONEY BY HAVING RESIDENTS. As long as that is true, don't expect much to change around housing in California.
> The fact that it's perceived as a sacrifice to build housing is one of the core problems.
In the short term, increased housing will decrease property values. This has to be the case because rentals are a direct competitor to real estate ownership.
In the long term, increased housing should increase property values; however, few people are willing to place much value on something even 2 years in the future, much less 20.
> Due to Prop 13, CITIES LOSE MONEY BY HAVING RESIDENTS.
I'm not sure how much I buy this. I'm not super familiar with California, so I'm not going to say it's false, but there should be a number of other methods (sales tax comes to mind) for cities to raise revenue from residents.
How? It means you get either a new nice property on a lot, or a lot more properties on a lot. (If density increases.)
Increased density increases demand which draws in services and attention, which increases property values.
Of course there's an inflection point, but the US/Cali/Valley/SF is a looooong waaaay awaaaaay from worrying about slums.
> short term
Yes, people don't like constructions, but that's it probably. After it's done, no one cares.
> How?
If you keep demand constant and increase supply, you will decrease price. This is one of the most basic tenants of microeconomics.
If that's too abstract, just imagine you're a landlord in SF who's used to increasing your rent by 10% per year (no idea what the actual number is) because there are 1% vacancies in the city. Now imagine that all of a sudden more housing came on line so that there are now 20% vacancies in the city. You probably wouldn't be able to increase your price and may have to drop it.
Now imagine that the number of bedrooms in SF increased by a factor of 10 overnight. The price of real estate would crater.
In the long term, the price of real estate will go up with density. All you have to do is look at places like Manhattan, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc. This is because cities tend to draw in new citizens from the surrounding area until it is too expensive or too uncomfortable to live there. However, it takes time for those people to move to the city and fill vacancies.
I'm not following. Prop 13 doesn't apply to new residents. It only applies to existing residents. Building new homes increases revenue.
Or an I missing something?
Also doesn't help that prop 13 limits property tax increases for commercial property. And corporations live forever.
In year 1, yes. Then that revenue is never increased, while inflation goes up.
The alternate use of the land for retail (sales taxes!) and office buildings is far more favorable, especially long term.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you - every single place should want to build more housing! But when has MV said "You know what? take your fancy office complex and move it somewhere else."?
Quick Edit: My point is mainly that all of these Bay Area governments are more than happy to get more lucrative office space built that employs thousands of employees, but suddenly hem and haw about "neighborhood character" when it comes to housing that lucrative workforce.
I know the benefits for being in the bay are substantial, but this problem is entirely brought about by tech companies, not the resident. Employers need to setup shop in less populated places and grow there.
You shouldn't pretend that there aren't negative side-effects from the collection of success and wealth in Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area.
Decentralizing the workforce would help decentralize the problem.
I find that mentality vehemently disgusting. The government is expensive and wasteful, acts in bad faith, disrespects our rights, and steals from us every day. Why people idolize that, I have no idea.
Of course there are bad side effects, but only because we've collectively decided to not solve the housing problem. It's not some obscure issue, we know how to fix it. We just choose not to.
> Decentralizing the workforce would help decentralize the problem.
If it was that simple, they'd have already done it because it would save them money.
Organizationally, there are advantages to physical colocation that you're just ignoring here. It's the triumph of the city.
We can look at successful models like Tokyo or Vienna, but instead of doing that people just throw up their arms and go, "what could possibly be done??" as if this was some novel, inscrutable problem.
There's a reason why companies have large offices in the Bay Area and are willing to pay the exorbitant salaries and rent there.
If they could reasonably relocate to middle America where land and salaries are cheap, they would - they all know how expensive it is to operate in the bay area, yet they choose to do so.
... which is the definition of democracy.
If it's just for long-term landowners, that's a form of democracy, but we tend to not view it very favorably these days.
There's a housing crisis, and yes, many residents are using democracy to stand in the way of fixing the problem. That's bad!
The world doesn't need to be denser, we need some elbow room, we need SPACE. Thanos was right.
What will happen is in many of these same areas they will force rent control upon builders and existing landlords which will do the same work that zoning and political games did before.
California will require a state wide referendum to fix their government created housing problem.
Depends on definition of "possible". There is space, physically. But getting all the paperwork, lining up the money, placating all the NIMBYs and the special interests and politicians may be non-trivial. For Google it may be easier than for other developers, and Google may be more motivated to do it, since galloping housing prices means more salary expenses from Google.
> The people living there don't want that, though, so the laws prohibit it.
In San Jose, there are many multi-tenant developments. Prices are still crazy (compared to any other place outside Silicon Valley).
And there's also a question of infrastructure. Did you ever drive on 101, 85, 87 or 280 in traffic hours? Did you ever drive on adjacent connecting streets? Now imagine there's 3x or 5x people living in the same space. You'd have to start you commute previous day to get to the office by the morning.
Or, you know, build actual public transit
The more housing is built near jobs in Silicon Valley, the LESS traffic there should be there, as people get shorter commutes!
It's definitely simple-sounding, as a single cause -- but unfortunately that doesn't make it so.
Any sober analysis of the current housing crisis points to a convergence of multiple, and in some cases highly nuanced factors -- ranging from shifting crime rates and the collapse of urban industrial base; to shifts in government policy (including the near-abandonment of federal support for new public housing initiatives); and a whole bunch of others. And yes there's something known as "zoning" which plays a part also.
But the idea that NIMBYism is the sole important factor - or even the most important factor - just doesn't hold water.
If you're skeptical of this, just ask yourself: "What causes NIMBYism?"
I mean, you could also say, "those tech companies created too many high-paying jobs!!" but last I checked, that's generally what we wanted companies to do, so getting mad at them for it seems pretty weird.
Maybe so -- but as a response it completely dodges the question of whether or it has been a contributing factor or not.
I'm pointing out that even though lots of high paying jobs is obviously an input into the housing crisis, 'blaming' companies for that is clearly stupid, because we want and encourage them to do exactly that, and higher housing prices is a predictable side effect of housing supply being constrained, not some out of nowhere surprise that the tech sector foisted onto an unsuspecting public.
We have met the enemy, and they are us.
Should we make cities denser? Should we force people shoulder to shoulder? I don't know if we should and I never see the "wisdom" of the denser city questioned.
Instead Google and other groups should give money to residents who would be amenable to living elsewhere. $1 billion for freedom of choice instead of perpetuating that everyone must live in the same few square miles.
In the real world, nothing has one simple cause or one "only" solution. The housing problem in California, and elsewhere is complex. This is akin to people who say, "The problem with homelessness there has one simple cause..." and then insert their favorite boogeyman.
There are many factors involved, other than NIMBYs, and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). There is corporate greed, geographic restrictions, land use issues, transportation issues, tax issues, and the list goes on and on...
The loudest among those on HN seem to be BEASTs (Build Everything to Achieve Skyscraper Town). That's not healthy, either.
† Amusing field guide to various types of NIMBYs: https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2015/08/19/a-field-guide...
Skyscrapers should be built where they are economically viable, i.e. where the cost of land is extraordinarily high to offset the much higher per-unit cost of construction. They shouldn't be pursued in places where they don't make sense.
It's pretty obvious that the housing shortage problem is caused by those who oppose building additional houses although demand is skyrocketting. There is no way around it.
Pretty much. When I lived in SF I received fliers in the mail urging residents to oppose new apartment construction literally on the basis that it was too tall.
If you want to see how difficult it is to build there, check out this story[1] of a laundromat owner who spent almost 5 years and $1.4 million attempting to convert to an apartment building.
This is even though it was already zoned for housing, didn't have any units above it (wouldn't displace anyone) and eligible for streamlined approval since it was close to public transit. And yet...
It's true that there is one simple cause, but it's not NIMBYism, it's overpopulation, and it's a planet-wide problem. There are just too many people. They can't all live in the nice places because if they do, the nice places won't be nice places any more.
There really aren't. The fact of the matter is that NYC is a nice place to live (typing this from Brooklyn) and it's 1000x SF's density.
The world produces a caloric surplus (based on a 2k calorie diet) per capita. We're not overpopulated.
What you're saying is that you want your in demand area to remain exclusive and separate.
It's not overpopulation: it's self interest. Preservation of something you cherish.
Which is the textbook definition of NIMBY ideals.
It's selfish to stand in the way of progress simply because you like the unfair status quo.
NYC's population density is 27,000 people per sq mile, SF is 18,000.
The entire NY MSA has a density of 1700/sq mi, compared to 1100 for the SF MSA.
If you look only at Brooklyn, it has a density of 36,000/sq mi.
Worldwide, Manila has the highest density, at 100,000/sq mi
Interesting to note that Mountain View is also trying to pull its weight, per a sibling comment.
I think the easiest solution here would be at the state, rather than local level. Start tying state budgets to housing supply: ie. figure out approximately how much housing need there is in the region and require each city to permit a proportional share of that per year or lose state funding for roads, schools, etc.
Why fight such a huge uphill battle in trying to get housing in the Bay area? Wouldn't it be easier to start from a city or town outside of CA? or at least outside the bay area? Maybe somewhere in the middle of no-where (there's still so much unused land immediately outside the Bay area - even within -> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land), where NIMBYs have no jurisdiction. Then create a high speed train or subway system connecting it to the rest of the world. Since out there land should cost very little, it would be a lot cheaper to create a highly effective transportation system then spending 1.5 million dollars per lot!
I know in the past new towns have failed, but that's because they didn't put employers there first. If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there.
Welcome to Houston!
Seriously, the typical model for growth here has been for a major employer to make a new campus out in the middle of nowhere away from town, then things spring up around it. As a result, we have lots of urban clusters with skyscrapers a long way from downtown. The energy corridor and the med center started out that way. Ditto for NASA and League City. Currently we have Exxon in Spring, Igloo out west of Katy, all of the Woodlands (weird place), etc.
It's not exactly good or bad, but it is a recipe for sprawl.
Land usage inside Houston city limits is mostly controlled through deed restrictions. E.g. I'm technically breaking the law by working from home as my deed is explicitly noncommercial. It's completely inflexible, as it was all set around 1900, but it is a form of zoning, nonetheless. Commercially-deeded lots are in planned areas that made sense at the time the property lines were drawn. There are also deeds that forbid residental development (often due to flooding, but again, it's inflexible).
The key differences are that there aren't any real restrictions beyond commercial / non-commercial. As a result, you'll often see a shipping yard in the middle of a residential district or similarly impractical commercial developments in unlikely areas.
Most of the examples people will dig up of flooding during Harvey that could have been prevented by zoning are actually in cities that _are_ zoned. The real issue is that developers get to dictate what the zoning laws are and get to develop however they want. For example, there's currently yet another development going up _inside_ the reservoirs on the west side of town. It's in a city that's zoned. They changed the zoning to allow the development there literally inside the reservoir, 10 ft vertically below the top of the dam.
I'm not saying that zoning is bad, or that Houston doesn't have problems, but I am saying that zoning here wouldn't help. Developers have infinite political sway and get to change zoning at will. That's the real issue.
In my experience the opposite is true. With relaxed zoning it's easier to live closer to work, and more likely that common destinations like grocery stores will be conveniently nearby.
The terrain in that area would make it quite difficult to build dense housing there - it's even steeper than the very hilly area that Woodside itself is built on. It's not that it can't be done, but it is far more expensive (think about the cost of adding infrastructure like water, sewer, etc), compared to building housing in an already developed area, like infill development on land previously zoned only for commercial purposes.
http://www.coastsidewater.org/production.html http://www.coastsidewater.org/water-supply.html
Unfortunately, no new connections are currently available, but the already sold connections are not all 100% utilized and some are just assigned to parcels without use.
And there are good reasons it's "completely undeveloped." Those include:
* No public sewer. So you'll need septic tanks. And the county regs that took effect a few years ago made it more difficult to install a new septic tank even for a single-family home, let alone whatever high density project you're envisioning.
* No public water. CalWater's Bear Gulch district (aka municipal water) extends only to the town boundaries on the east side of the hill. Skylonda Mutual on the west side of the hill keeps issuing boil-water notices when their (limited) water supply gets contaminated and out of compliance with state law. La Honda was trucking in water, or came close to it, during the recent drought.
* No DSL or cable Internet. Even inside town limits there are some areas that don't have Comcast (low population density, hilly terrain) or AT&T DSL (too far from switch, but you can get POTS). Hope you enjoy wireless!
* Limited access in the winter due to roads carved out of the hills over 100 years ago, not up to modern construction standards, that are prone to landslides. Skyline around route 9 was still one lane control last I checked because of last year's collapse, which was different from the previous collapse.
* Prone to wildfires in the summer--there was a wildfire off of Bear Gulch Road a year or two ago.
* No public transport.
* Distance from employers. I can't think of any large employers west of I-280, so you'd have to cross the peninsula on gridlocked surface streets or join I-280 gridlock north or south. Probably an hour drive to Google or almost that to Facebook.
* NIMBYites among the locals, who already say it's too congested.
* Subject to excessive zoning restrictions if inside town limits. This is only inside Portola Valley, Woodside, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, etc., and it's true that most of the land is county, but some of those town boundaries stretch to Skyline. If you're inside town limits, you'll need something like 5-acre to 15-acre parcels for a single family home. This is the very definition of low-density housing.
* Prone to landslides. The San Andreas fault runs along the base of the hill, and the Pilarcitos Fault and others spiderweb through the hills. This can be solved with the application of funds, but it raises building costs.
* The big one, if they can find a way to screw with you, is the California Coastal Commission, which views every act as illegal "development." And it has a bigger budget than you. You will not win. State law is not on your side. https://pacificlegal.org/commission-creep-rule-dis-functiona...
But good luck!
I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I first moved to SF in 1998, and in my experience it's San Franciscans who moved to the city to work in tech who don't want to see growth. The people who moved there for the culture of art, music, and radical self expression saw the writing on the way pretty early, and have been advocating for affordable, high density housing for decades now.
Only if you've never been anywhere else.
San Diego is the paragon of lovely weather in California, not the Bay Area.
SF is enshrined in a song made famous by Sinatra with the line, "She hates California/It's cold and it's damp."
the 10-15 really hot days we have center around august, with some spillover into july and september. but it's nothing compared to texas heat, for example.
And as a side point, I don’t think people need to travel the world to have a good idea whether they prefer humid 75 degree summers or non-humid 70 degree summers.
And it shows in the steep cost of real estate there, too.
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/5/17/18629809/sb-50-housing-trans...
This implies a bad investment.
wait. why would that be? looking back at cost overruns on transportation projects from LA's metro red line to the Bay Bridge rebuild to California's high speed railway, i don't feel confident at all that an effective transportation system would be a lot cheaper. that has to come out of government budgets and go to government employees and union scale labor. that's expensive. and it might require new taxes. IDK -- are you talking about a bus line on a two lane road or something?
That's silly, there are more than two sides to this discussion. Development without allocations for affordable and public housing is just throwing money at developers and hoping for the best.
If you're in the Valley (or at least a big city), the solution is pretty simple; take a day off, go to interviews and get a job. You don't have to move out and will have a good chance to get a job relevant to your career. The same thing doesn't apply to most of the other areas. The risk is so high that it can effectively end your career, those people with H1B just tend to pay more for living in the Bay.
So in order to have another big campus out of those big cities, there must be a pre-established, significant SWE ecosystem that can guarantee a level of job opportunity. Unfortunately, this cannot be done by a single company.
but you can go pretty far in a day. for example, a one day round trip from LA to San Jose, including time for a full work day, is within reach. people do that routinely.
Arguably I did. Instead of New York or London, I moved to some dusty suburb an hour south of SF just because Google's HQ was there.
Now that I'm no longer on an H1B, but have a house and wife with a job in the area, I'm way less willing to do anything like that.
Traditionally, successful businesses in a region paid taxes, and those taxes were used by the local governments to invest in infrastructure like public transport and urban development.
So in this regard Google usurps the mandate of the community government in favor of using their excess profits to invest in the community that only benefits them (well peripherally it benefits others as Google employees would otherwise burden city services)
What is wrong with that picture is of course that the people without advocates are literally left out in the cold. From the article Google is investing $1B in better housing for their employees and putting $18+3+1.5 ($22.5M toward homelessness which is 2.25% of a billion dollar investment. Contrast that with if Google paid $1B in taxes to the bay area communities where it has facilities, would those governments have the same priorities for those funds?
[1] http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
Literally every Bay area government has regulations (zoning, community review, etc.) that prevent housing to be put in place. On the transit side, we have multiple transit organizations (Muni, BART, Caltrain, etc.) that do not coordinate and operate as one entity; contrast this with NYC where the transit orgs have a common leadership.
What is happening in the Bay is that we are having an infrastructure crisis because a Nimby philosophy is preventing investment in critical areas like housing, transport, etc.
I agree that private industry won't solve this problem correctly because of its self interest, but frankly the problem is that the policy makers have no interest in solving the issue. Their loyalty is to their wealthy vocal residents who have no interest in creating housing or transit. They definitely do not care if underserved and disadvantaged people are suffering.
So while I agree that private industry will not tailor their solution to the disadvantaged (due to self interest), I don't think policy makers will either (due to self interest). Proposition 13 is a perfect example of how the voting population does not care about infrastructure for the poor. Prop 13 was marketed as a relief provision for the elderly, but the bulk of the measure is essentially a tax break for largely white wealthy landowners.
If building more housing in the Bay Area was legal there’d be more housing. If they built enough housing prices would even fall eventually.
Great. The mandate of community government has created $3400 / month two bedroom apartments and I, for one, welcome some additional housing units.
Of course not, because the goal of local Bay Area governments is to make land more expensive, not less.
(a) It sounds like they're just becoming a larger real-estate developer? They didn't say "we're donating all this land plus some capital to a housing non-profit"; they're going to receive revenue from their investments. Are we supposed to say thanks?
(b) How does 20k units compare to their impact on Bay Area housing to date?
This is not my area, and I'm not aware of any region that has this requirement, but here's an idea: In the same way that we require large physical development projects to do an environmental impact study, and actively make mitigating affordances (e.g. setting aside land) to offset those impacts .... should employers who intend to hire large numbers of employees from out of the area (sending recruiters to schools across the nation, etc) be required to do housing impact studies, and actively participate in building the housing stock for the new residents they're pulling to an area?
How quickly would the Bay Area housing situation change if the ability of tech companies to grow headcount was tied to their ability to proportionally build housing?
We already have plenty of people that want to build, that's not the problem. Problem is local regulation and policies that don't align with regional interests.
Local governments love adding corporations. They pay taxes while using few resources. So corporate campuses get approved super easily - sometimes even with tax breaks!
New housing on the other hand is fought against tooth and nail because it brings new residents that require roads, services, and schools. Worse, if all the land has been used up, it requires larger buildings to be built where there used to be smaller houses and commercial strips which upsets local residents with voting power. Local governments sometimes even make residential developers pay extra taxes or make mandatory donations to the community.
It's these local city governments like Palo Alto and Mountain View that allowed Google to massively expand without also allowing developers to build housing to support the employees for that expansion. Hence, why Google is spending its own capital just to get some units built.
At present, companies adopt strategies which require them to undergo rapid growth, including headcount, without planning for or making affordances for the other effects of bringing those people to the area.
Why is unreasonable to suggest that companies should be required to plan for and mitigate those effects at the outset, rather than one or two companies making feeble gestures several years later?
It's unreasonable because industry has already paid for it in taxes, and fairly high ones at that. It's not industry's fault that it's being squandered by local and state government.
There's probably plenty of blame to go all around. IMO companies like Google (disclosure: I work there) caught on to the magnitude of the problem too late, and when they did, they ran into the local political resistance.
Why were they so late to catch on? Well I only have theories, including that it's only in the last few years that the cost of housing has made life difficult even for well paid employees, and those employees have voiced their frustrations.
In some ways I don't think that Google (and other companies that might follow them) deserve so much praise for finally attacking this by the horns at this late stage.
It isn’t the job of a company to provide housing for its employees. In the absence of constraints real estate developers will naturally build to satisfy this demand. However local governments have control over how and if housing is built and have systematically prevented building to meet this demand for decades. The blame is theirs since they are the only entities can and do constrain new housing. This is the part of the system that needs to change.
Which is why, IMO, the praise for Google on this matter is unwarranted. And it's not the political system that is broken, it's the regressive views of the elected officials and the people who have tended to vote in local elections.
> In the absence of constraints real estate developers will naturally build to satisfy this demand.
We don't need a policy that is absent restraints. We need housing policy with sane restraints, i.e. incremental upzoning planned at the regional level to allow more housing density and building employment centers accessible via transit instead of only cars and private bus systems.
Even public agencies like BART have had to fight at the state level to be allowed to develop housing on their own property.
This isn't really an issue of restraints vs no restraints but rather what the restraints optimize for, and currently they optimize for increasing property values and not providing sufficient housing supply.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-single-fa...
The California housing crisis is a political choice and fixing the politics that caused it might be more effective long term than stop gap patches like this.
Maybe this young upstart has already tweeted something in their more free-spirited days, just waiting to be scrolled onto.
Much more effective to pump money into the political parties directly. They're going nowhere.
* Want to fully choke out competition on salaries, while leveraged against it by taking in the rent money those salaries provide for?
* Why not invest in housing, when you're the company that is vastly increasing the home values? It seems like you'd end up actually make a killing since you then control the market
Maybe someone more clever than I can come up with more things - it feels like a neo company town model, where you don't own everything, but you have all the control and all the levers.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/One-housing-proj...
How do you factor for that?
This has been tried before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueseed
EDIT: Oh, you mean as residences! There are people who live in the marinas. There is some gatekeeping for that.
A high speed high tech ferry running between SF and the South Bay would be dandy.
edit: but I should mention, we have waterways reaching into the city. Being old Europe.
The only way to get the issue fixed is with a state amendment and even then it would be years in court. It really comes down to two real reasons, they do not want those people in their city and second it makes so much money for all involved the longer nothing changes.
1) you would have to set aside a good number of units for low income residents 2) all work would have to be done by union member organizations 3) you would need to have multiple environmental impact studies to include traffic to and from the location 4) you would also have to appease groups concerned with the affect such a ship would have on naturally occurring views; this has been used against new construction as well as shadows cast 5) Plus a litany of politically associated special interest groups would have to be appeased, this is the primary method of wealth building among the political class.
1 is required only for developers seeking zoning changes. Low-income housing allowances aren't required if a development falls within existing site zoning, which is something that LA developers have used to great effect.
2) This is completely false, anti-union FUD.
3) This wasn't true before CA law was changed to simplify the approval process. You only need 1 comprehensive environmental impact study, and if you're close enough to another planned development (generally within 1 block), you can incorporate parts of their EIS into your own.
4) Views are not protected in CA...Appeasement not required.
5) Both cynical, false, and also misunderstands where the political class gets its wealth from (lobbying, not real estate).
https://sites.google.com/a/trinity.edu/snow-crash-fall-2016/...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/startups-aboard-...
I don't know what's happened to it after 2014, though.
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/05/11/tech-company-st...
Oh yes, no one has thought of that before. It has even been implemented.
Why don’t government stimulate and encourage corps who promote full time (not 1 day a week for good behavior) WFH policies?
There is absolutely no need for 2/3 of all high tech employees in Bay Area to drag their physical bodies into their statically assigned corporate chairs. Lots of meetings, conf calls and work can be done remotely.
That’s the solution that doesn’t require $1B and will take very little to implement and could have REAL impact.
when you separate work location from living location, that opens up people to live farther away from work. so you end up with more people living in places with less housing because its "cooler". like san francisco. even though tons of people work at businesses outside the city.
I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle.
Investing $1B into housing in the Bay Area seems nice at the surface, but maybe if we stopped demanding everyone be willing to relocate to one of a handful of cities to work in our industry, we'll solve the root cause of the problem.
And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing.
Fringe benefit: Less payroll overhead since the cost of living in rural areas is much lower.
> that's not an easy problem to solve.
The solution is simple, it's just getting people to actually do it that's hard.
> And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing.
I don't know enough about California's politics to provide insightful commentary, but from what I have heard, none of it was good or sane.
What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions?
> Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers.
Same question for that perspective, except I do have a few ideas of a cynical answer to that question from the company's perspective.
The advantage is that on the path in-between now and the perfect future where all companies are remote-first( that we are not sure will ever happen), you will not be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to job prospects. I don't think that many people would be willing to heavily limit their job prospects (not even taking into account all the other advantages that come with living in a densely populated coastal city) while waiting for that "bright all-remote future" that may never come.
But given a ceteris paribus comparison of the two, my question is what is inherently superior about the onsite position over the remote position?
[citation needed]
It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.
[citation needed]
It's clearly important enough for Amazon, Facebook, and Google to invest heavily in already established tech hubs where it's incredibly expensive to build, so they can have their engineers working in the same physical location(s).
Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."
I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed.
These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet face-to-face. Emotion is particularly poorly conveyed over email or VC, and sometimes to convince somebody of something, meeting them in person is the best way to do that.
I'd contend that you're not considering the impact of sunk cost fallacies on business decision-making. Or if you have considered it, you've probably discounted it far more than is warranted.
It could be the case that, out of all the people currently employed by these companies, the majority believe they thrive in an onsite role rather than a remote one. Years of self-selection (especially if exacerbated by a lack of diversity in their employment experience, since these companies tend to hire out of colleges) could lead to a feedback loop.
Just because they're smart people doesn't mean they're impervious to human cognitive distortions.
How many of these companies have even trialed 100% remote positions, even if only for a year?
It's not about incompetence, it's about not willing to introduce difficult changes and admitting they are wrong. See: open plan offices.
There's tons of successful, fully distributed companies.
Jobs are about relationships.
Humans can (and should) get their social needs met anywhere, not only at their place of employment.
I've worked both onsite and remote throughout my career. I'd never advocate for forced remote work (because some people want to get their social needs met through their employer).
Rather, I'd argue that it should be considered as an option.
I agree that not all roles require this sort of thing. There are employees who can come to the office, work 8 hours, and go home, all without speaking a word to another person. There are probably thousands of employees at Google who could probably be just as effective working remotely. That said, having worked there, I think that's not true for the vast majority of SWE work.
There are a lot of shades of gray there, like, if someone commutes for 2 hours through stressful SF traffic to get to a campus where they jump on a Google Hangout since their team members are spread across 3 buildings... yeah, I don't think productivity is going to get much of a boost. However, our team is in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio where you can live within 30 miles, get here in 30 minutes and have dirt-cheap housing. I'm having a hard time coming up with collateral to support my "modern" viewpoint on the benefits of remote workers.
Southwest is the fun airline. What would american airlines have to do to become a fun airline? They would have to fire 2/3 of their staff.
To echo the refrain others have said in this thread, "Hire remote, hire remote, hire remote."
I would love to see HN's monthly Who's Hiring prioritize/bubble up fully remote jobs to the top of the list first. Give an advantage to those who are helping the situation. This is no different than roads. You can't just keep building roads forever. You have to destroy demand for local habitation once it reaches a point beyond which equilibrium can ever be reached, and the Bay Area is beyond that point. Let people work from places where they can afford to live better lives.
EDIT: @aerophilic: Agree entirely with your comment.
I'm way more likely to ask a co-worker over to my desk to show them something or have a discussion if they're a few feet away within sight and earshot. In an open office I also overhear a lot of pertinent information -- I'm aware of issues that might be relevant to me as they develop, I don't have to wait hours or days for someone to communicate them in an email, issue tracker, or meeting.
There's a cost in terms of readily available heads-down concentration time to be sure, but if I want to mess around with math formulas or something I pop on the headphones, go to a quiet room, or do it at home. It's much harder to replicate the benefits of an open office environment in a closed one than the reverse.
Why does it make sense to optimize for the former instead of the latter? The benefits must be studied in context of how overall productivity and bottomline is affected, not just easy it is to start talking to someone.
I have found that what is in general most effective is that EVERYONE on the team is remote, or everyone is co-located. You can do hybrids, remote work with an on site team if the remote folks are strong communicators and/or people that are more task oriented (Assuming you have someone to manage them) but there is a tax on doing so, and often they won’t feel as connected.
Even in the above hybrid example, there are specific things you need to “plan in” to be effective (things like an office buddy, regular sync up times, clear responsibilities/action lists, etc).
Perhaps I'm weird, but I'm not interested in working remote. It's isolating socially and politically, and I work slower over the medium term.
This factoid detracts from the argument; When the op is about a (or several) company individually worth about a trillion dollars.
For what purpose specifically?
On one end you have work where someone gives you well defined specs and the tools you need, and you just go crank out some code on your own. That works well for remote work.
On the other end there are plenty of software positions that require people who can understand and develop requirements, possibly by talking with disparate groups like customer support, finance, sales, marketing, and so on who are not at all technical. These people may not understand the costs of different options so subsequent conversations about costs/benefits for different groups are needed. Sometimes these discussions might be contentious, as resources are finite. Sometimes there's a lot of back and forth involved, as the software person tries to understand the business - and vice versa.
Seriously though: It'd be great if apartments were better sound-proofed. My only gripe with apartment living was inadequate privacy and being woken up at 3 AM by a lead-footed upstairs resident.
Even if face-to-face is important for specific positions it's even more rarely a daily requirement. Most of the country is so much less expensive than the Bay Area that you could fly someone in one day a week and it would still cost less.
Software is dematerialised, which means, perversely, it tends to concentrate to a far greater extent. Much as local and regional entertainment, constrained by material proximiy to audience, gave way to Hollywood.
So you may have a liberating force in the way jobs have changed, but that works both ways.
People are moving to the big coastal cities. The big coastal cities (and states) are doing a piss poor job of accommodating this - actually they’ve taken active measures to worsen the housing problem with zoning and tax rules.
I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit.
Hah - see my comment elsewhere.
Local politicians are definitely the choke point that doesn't allow the market to function properly.
However, local governments are still the ultimate deciders and many of them are opposed to new housing, such as in the SF Peninsula.
Other parts of CA are less resistant to new housing. In LA's downtown, for example, almost 50,000 units of new housing are being brought online between 2016-2021. In both Korea Town and Hollywood, more than 5,000 new units have come online in the past 3 years (and they're already the densest neighborhoods). In Marina Del Rey and Playa Del Rey, roughly 2500 new units have opened/will open up in 2018 and 2019. Along the Metro Expo Line, more than 25,000 residential units within 4 blocks of a station are planned or already under construction. Inglewood will see somewhere between 500 and 2500 new apartments in the neighborhood around the Sofi Stadium, not including other residential development. Even Santa Monica will see roughly 2000 new apartments over the next 2 years.
Edit: these are just the developments that I'm aware of. There are plenty more. If you're interested in following LA-area development, there are several Facebook groups devoted to this subject.
That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company.
The large house with an acre of land gives you other opportunities, but if that one specific dimension is what you care about then it falls short.
...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord.
If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.
Why would they do that? They only pay as much as they do in Silicon Valley to offset the cost of living.
The relevant statistic to compare is actual housing cost vs actual compensation in both types of places. For many types of tech jobs, the number still favors big cities, if not in percentage terms, then in absolute numbers.
And when it comes down to a real life decision, there are plenty of other factors (financial or otherwise) besides that one statistic.
It's not trivial to do this calculation. Some things will surprise you:
You can get cheaper electricity bills in Seattle than where I live (Naples, FL), but you don't need air conditioning in Seattle. Living in Florida without AC is ill-advised.
$12000 doesn't mean the same thing when you consider the cost of living difference between the urban and rural areas.
$12k goes way farther towards purchasing goods and services in the rural area, so naturally it seems like an awful lot of money there, but it purchases far fewer goods and services in a big city. This is similar to how household incomes between different countries aren't directly comparable until you adjust for Purchasing Power Parity [1].
That doesn't mean that all big city dwellers are better off. Some undoubtedly are, and some are definitely not.
We actually agree here. I think we're speaking past each other.
I'm arguing that "only $12,000" is dismissive of how impactful a difference that makes to the lives of people who don't live in a big city.
But the $12k in question isn't a fungible $12k. It's specifically the difference in housing costs between urban and rural in the example given earlier.
If the point is that many people in rural areas are economically struggling, then yes we agree, just as many poorer urban dwellers are (and to whom a random $12k received would also be hugely impactful), but that has nothing to do with example proposed.
> If the point is that many people in rural areas are economically struggling, then yes we agree, just as many poorer urban dwellers are (and to whom a random $12k received would also be hugely impactful), but that has nothing to do with example proposed.
My point was that the OP's use of the phrase "only $12,000" is offensive, classist language in the context it was written in. That point is unrelated to the rest of the discussion.
I don't get why anyone would want to double down on defending this language, especially since you weren't the person who used it. But here we are.
But hey, if $12,000/year is peanuts to anyone reading this thread: https://www.patreon.com/ciphpercoder
OP wasn't talking down. They used "only" to compare the difference in housing cost to the much higher difference in wages between rural and urban areas, as in $12K housing cost increase < $40k salary increase, not to imply that $12K is inconsequential in an absolute sense.
$12K out of most people's pockets is a lot of money (including if it were out of mine), but the OP wasn't implying that it isn't.
They were making a simple observation that:
big city salary - big city housing costs > rural salary - rural housing costs
Looks like they even responded below stating precisely that.
There's real classism out there, often expressed across the rural/urban divide, but this isn't an example of it.
Unfortunately I haven't seen many roles in, say, Dallas or Atlanta where the pay is only 20-25K or so less than my current, total-comp wise. It'd be a bigger drop, usually. The rent gap is steep, but the comp gap can be larger.
In education, both schools and universities, Chicagoland would compare very favorably with Bay Area (stepkid went to schools in both; entirely unimpressed with BA schools).
In job opportunities at FAANG-type companies Bay Area obviously comes out ahead,but for the vast majority of people both in and out of high tech Chicago both has jobs and is actually affordable and salaries are lower by a far lesser amount than the cost of living, at least if you believe all of the comparison sites like Numbeo. In my personal experience I've had much more money left over in Chicago, working for as Chicago company than working for one in Sunnyvale, and that's even before adding up intangibles of better (well, for the USA, anyway) public transit, better museums, theaters, etc. etc.
On climate BA might win on paper, but personally I like to have actual seasons.
Nice, I've lived in both and Chicago winters made me want to kill myself. If all else was equal I'd pay significant sums to live in the Bay Area simply because the weather.
Of course if I had the same living conditions in Chicago as in Bay Area and had to dig the car out every morning, I'd think differently, too. But of course in Chicago one can afford a nice place with a garage in a hot area for less money than a cardboard box in SV.
- Good schools
- Lots of like-minded people to befriend
- Lots of places to eat, activities, venues, etc.
- Several higher and continuing education opportunities
- Good (well, better than almost all mid-sized cities, at least) public transit options
I definitely understand the appeal of living out in the country, but, for reasons I don't entirely understand, on many threads like this, people seem to completely overlook all of the myriad ways that living in a city is actually great.
It's not all grim concrete jungle hellscape. If I lived out in the sticks, I could afford a couple of acres and a +2,000 square foot home. But I couldn't afford a zoo, aquarium, bike trail, running path, music venue, movie theater, personal chef, playground, and coffee house to go with it.
The fundamental tenet of urban density is that by giving up some personal space, we all get access to a much greater variety of shared spaces.
Perhaps if you live adjacent to a major national park or forest, or marine preserve, but most easily habitable rural areas are not that, and instead are industrially farmed or extracted from - essentially factories. Sure, there are exceptions, but not enough to accommodate the number of people that it would take to make a difference in cost of living in urban areas, not without ruining the access to wildlife viewing that makes those places unique in the first place.
> bike trail, running path
The environment doesn't provide either of these. They are created by many people either re-using the same route routinely, or by some institution building and maintaining them.
Don't forget housing is stupid expense in NJ as well. I wouldn't call NJ "desirable".
It's been a while since I've read cyberpunk novels like Cryptonomican, but I feel like the reality of corporations becoming villages and societal entities is slowly getting there anyways.
Your move, We.
Snow Crash is storage units.
I am not aware of any sci-fi story that predicted people living in ISO shipping containers prior to its real-world occurrence.
I think you might mean Snow Crash though :)
Interesting investment decision but to their defense they might be diversifying.
Housing, transit, schooling.. these all seem interconnected. Just increasing supply of one just strains the rest of the system, no?
This is not necessarily a bad thing as a decent number of those high salary Google employees will not participate to the housing market thus reduce the upward pressure.
Pols in the bay area suck. All of them. They are against affordable housing and against families. But, they love money more than they hate families. So way this approach will help and pave the way for the other major companies to do the same.
That’s a horrible argument that has no basis in fact. Multiple cities, like Mountain View, Oakland, San Jose and Foster City, just to name a few off the top of my head, are putting in affordable housing. Alameda County Transit has vastly expanded their bus fleet, something the tax payers chose on the ballot!
You might hate your elected officials, but not all of us do.
"the town and its design were... a paternalistic system that took away men's rights as citizens, including the right to control their own domestic environment"
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1030.html
Happy that google is making this investment; it's worth a shot even if it is far the ideal way to build housing. Hopefully the NIMBYism that defines this area won't kill it.
This nails the root cause of the housing "crisis" in the bay area.
Watch this video - it's eye opening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
However, if the political consensus could be developed there are possibilities, e.g. "Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days"
22 units, four stories, four days.
> This new 22-unit project from local developer Patrick Kennedy (Panoramic Interests) is the first in the nation to be constructed of prefabricated all-steel modular units made in China.
> Kennedy notes that the cost of trucking to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong.
> But the savings haven’t been as great as expected, he said. “Sixty-five to seventy-five-percent of the construction costs are still incurred on the site. In addition to the usual trades, we have crane operators, flagmen, truckers and special inspectors.”
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl...
(Reminds me of Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion House. Factory built prefab homes that were to be delivered by helicopter, installed onto masts built onsite and containing the power/comms/water/sewage hookups.)
You can easily see the underutilized density on the satellite view, by how green it is compared to surrounding cities:
A quick check of property values shows that these are estates in the $5M - $20M range:
To be less facetious about it, there is some irony in this project being promoted by Google executives, who live in chateaus and mansions in Atherton, Los Altos Hills, Woodside, etc, with an acre of land to their name, when this investment is of course to house the labor that got them those mansions to begin with. The execs who sponsor the housing projects obviously won't sell or give up their own land to make room for the new apartments.
Random Atherton listing on Trulia: https://www.trulia.com/p/ca/atherton/87-patricia-dr-atherton...
Dublin has doubled in population in the last 20 years. That sounds like an area that is pro-growth, where a company could have a useful impact without getting shot down by NIMBYs every step of the way.
I'd dig up stats on the biggest employers in Dublin, but can't seem to find any, so we'll go with Pleasanton as a proxy - Kaiser, Safeway and Oracle. Wew. We got one. Too bad most of tech doesn't even know the East Bay (much less the parts of it past the hills) even exists.
There are options to deal with the housing problems, even staying within the bay. Companies simply aren't pursuing them.
Many of my neighbors are FANG employed, equally as mystified as to why none of those haven't opened a satellite office here.
But until cities solve the issues of smell and noise, I'm not interested in living in a dense area. Keep it clean and quiet. Invest in urban forestry. Then it starts to look appealing.
You can be much denser than the Bay Area while still having trees and feeling "residential".
Yes, yes it is. Somerville mades me go to NYC when I want a quiet vacation. The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, but the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it. When houses are built in cardboard with no space between the walls and the sidewalk, and someone walks home drunk, you'll get woken up something quick.
My experience of Somerville has been very different from yours: I've never been woken up by noise coming in from the street, and I've lived in two very typical wood-frame houses (first a triple-decker in East Somerville, now a two-family near Davis).
But it's also worth separating "what should you build a house out of to avoid noise infiltration" and "what sort of neighborhood densities can you have with low levels of ambient outdoor noise".
To give a counterpoint to my own initial post, suburbs have their own noxious smells and noise: leafblowers, lawnmowers, cars galore.
The reason there’s no affordable low income housing isn’t because that specific type of housing isn’t being built, it’s because they’ve made it nearly impossible to build anything BUT luxury.
"The owner of blog.google has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website."!!
Generally it's not up to the owner of property how it should be re-zoned...
1) open more large centers in other states. having a single supercenter with good jobs in one place only is bad for that place and country as a whole
2) encourage and promote remote work
And people who already live in the area should absolutely have a right to direct it’s future.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating: you don't have to live in California.
For $1B, you could probably build enough houses for every single Google employee in a place like Detroit, or most other states (Arizona? Nevada? Colorado? etc. etc.) and then have those employees live there on campus. In fact, with the savings on cost of living and the like, which would mean those workers don't need as high wages, you could probably do the math that this would _save_ you money in the long run.
(...then again someone probably _did_ do the math and determined that the investment in these 20k homes, with current market rates increasing at a crazy pace, would probably be a higher return, but I digress.)
People can complain about NIMBY's / supply side all they want, but the fact that the demand side (the labor market) refuses to correct itself more strongly (there is _some_ growth in places like Austin, Boulder, Chicago, Boston, etc., but not enough) is bonkers to me. And if I owned a home in the Valley, my incentive would be to never change that market dynamic.
Hypothetically if you were planning this as Google you wouldn't make the 1-1 scaling of lower salaries, but if you as employee would pay 80% less rent, could buy a massive home after working for <1 year, and still have more left over than you would ever have working in the bay, the trade-off would at least look somewhat appealing.
It gets pushed aside because it's a bad argument, and it's often asked in bad faith.
"Hubs" for various industries pop up all the time. Hollywood for movies, NYC for finance, etc. There are very real advantages to the strong ecosystems created by gathering so many specialists in a single area, both for companies AND for workers; working for Google making a Google salary in a small office in Topeka instead of SF sounds great until you think about whatever happens if you lose your job somehow, and suddenly you have no local options for jobs of that tier.
Plus, most of the NIMBYs are trying to avoid density to preserve suburban sprawl-type neighborhoods, which themselves are anti-environment and classist. Pushing people out to metros where they'll contribute to yet more sprawl is A Bad Thing.
I think you just argued against your point. A lot of blockbuster movies and popular TV shows are being shot in other places because other places are cheaper and they offer better incentives.
Last year a scant 7 percent of the 100 top-grossing live-action movies were shot here,
What you've linked to is the equivalent of arguing that the bay area and Seattle aren't that big for cloud computing because hey, there aren't that many big datacenters there.
The citation I linked to was right in line with my argument.
And, I know for a fact that you can not only get into “cloud computing” without going anywhere near Seattle, AWS hires SAs, TAMs, etc in many major cities and most of the third party Amazon Partners aren’t anywhere near Seattle....
No. The wider argument we were having was about whether Hollywood is the center of the world for American movies. It definitely is, showing where movies are physically shot doesn't change that.
> And, I know for a fact that you can not only get into “cloud computing” without going anywhere near Seattle, AWS hires SAs, TAMs, etc in many major cities and most of the third party Amazon Partners aren’t anywhere near Seattle....
Of course you can, just like there's plenty of finance outside of NYC. That doesn't change the fact that NYC is the main finance hub for America.
I don't even know what your point is here. "Hub" doesn't mean "contains literally everything related to [industry]".
Okay, and most money people spend on movies is nowhere near LA. That has nothing to do with whether LA is a hub for movie development, though.
A huge proportion of cutting-edge cloud platform development for the big cloud companies happens in the SF bay area and Seattle. That's the big thing that makes them cloud tech hubs. Not where consulting and implementation of going to the cloud happens. Like consumers spending on movies, that just happens where the customers are.
But if you are in the “cloud industry” you don’t need to be anywhere near Seattle to either find a job, find funding, or find “smart people”. I don’t know the movie industry but I do know the cloud industry from the consulting side. The cloud consulting industry is much larger than the development industry.
The ecosystem of tech is partly built upon the idea of decentralization - as long as you can connect to the internet, you should be able to do what you need to do from anywhere. Otherwise tools like "video conferencing software" would tank quickly, as we might as well just fly to visit everyone we need to meet, right?
If you as an employee want to price in the substitutability of your job search as the demand side of the market, fine - as a homeowner, I would recognize that inelasticity and price my rent accordingly. There is no "bad faith" there - just rational economics, where one market understands that the other refuses to correct itself.
A "Google Salary" doesn't mean anything if you take home a small fraction of it, and what's left is eaten up by higher prices of the same goods; anywhere else, you can take home more, and those remaining $dollars can get you more. It's at the point now where I recommend to my employees / friends / colleagues that they shouldn't move to the valley unless they're getting 2.5x their salary, as that _might_ get you the same standard of living vs. our current spot.
Now I don't live in the Valley, but I somewhat empathize with the homeowners argument to _some_ extent: It's not necessarily classist or anti-environment for homeowners in a community, who _own_ the land, to band together and dictate what should go on in that community: how it should look, what would be the best for their investment, etc. And the point that talks past them is "this pushes people out to metros." The easy response is: it only pushes those out to metros _who feel like they have to live there._ Otherwise you price that into your decision to move there along with all the other factors at play.
It doesn't have to be bad faith, sure. It's just been my experience with the people putting the argument forth that they're making it in bad faith. Or maybe intellectually lazy is a better descriptor: they give the impression that it's a serious suggestion, but upon questioning it becomes clear that they haven't applied the least thought to it; it was just a reflexive "I don't want them here" masquerading as a policy proposal.
> as a homeowner, I would recognize that inelasticity and price my rent accordingly. There is no "bad faith" there - just rational economics, where one market understands that the other refuses to correct itself.
No idea what you're talking about here. Nobody's disputing that if demand is high and supply is low, it makes sense to charge high rent prices. At least, I'm certainly not arguing that.
> A "Google Salary" doesn't mean anything if you take home a small fraction of it, and what's left is eaten up by higher prices of the same goods; anywhere else, you can take home more, and those remaining $dollars can get you more.
Whether this is true depends on what those goods you want are. If you want to dump your money into international travel, seeing shows, buying cars and electronics, then high cost/salary places make more sense than low cost/salary places. If you want to own a big house with a lot of land, then the cheaper places are better.
> It's at the point now where I recommend to my employees / friends / colleagues that they shouldn't move to the valley unless they're getting 2.5x their salary, as that _might_ get you the same standard of living vs. our current spot.
It sounds like you're engaging in a common fallacy of assuming people value the same things you do, which is probably a big home, since otherwise needing 2.5x the salary wouldn't make any sense, as there are few other major goods that are impacted that hugely by cost of living (well, there's also childcare).
> It's not necessarily classist or anti-environment for homeowners in a community, who _own_ the land, to band together and dictate what should go on in that community: how it should look, what would be the best for their investment, etc.
It doesn't have to be, but it generally is, because the decisions they reach are generally anti-environment and classist.
What do you think it does when you mandate single family homes on big plots of land? Poorer people can't afford that, ergo they can't afford to live there, ergo poorer people are kept out of living in that neighborhood. And you're saying that economic segregation is not classist, because...?
Similarly, that style of zoning is also energy inefficient and results in people cutting into nature because you need more land per person. Pretty simple. But it's not anti-environment, because...? You haven't actually explained why.
> The easy response is: it only pushes those out to metros _who feel like they have to live there.
Who cares? I'm talking about the actual impact. The impact is encouraging suburban sprawl.
Well, it would surprise me :-)
According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in.
Next tier, still not senior, clears $250k/year. That's more than $20k/mo pre-tax. Even at an outrageous $5k rent on a single income and with no roommates, you're still talking about $6k or so >>monthly<< surplus for living your life and saving.
Is that really enough to afford to live? Is that housing cost accurate?
A programmer at Google making $180k/yr salary brings in about $9,315.58 in after-tax income (according to PaycheckCalculator). The average house within 10 miles of Google's HQ currently costs about $1.5 million dollars according to Zillow's current month averages. (That's $9,745/month in after-tax costs per month, assuming 0% down on 30yr mortgage).
Like, maybe if you are single and live off of ramen and you pick the shittiest housing you can find, those numbers can work. But I personally couldn't afford to live in California on that salary (despite it being, under normal circumstances, an amazingly high salary).
Yes. I mean, of course it is. How is that in question even? I live in Manhattan, not the Bay Area, but the sum of my non-housing expenses are less than $4,315 (edit: your $9315 number minus my $5k lol rent) a month and I'm not exactly living that fresh-out-of-the-dorm lifestyle. Remember, this is the new grad number.
> Is that housing cost accurate?
Nope! It's high, obviously. I picked it out of thin air by picking a number we would be unwilling to pay as a two-earner household in NYC and then did a perfunctory check on Zillow to make sure there were Bay Area rentals at that price, which there are.
Yes it's "unfair" in some sense that someone earning that much money can't afford to buy property, but you're moving the goalposts. My point was that a baby Googler could certainly prosper financially, not that Bay Area housing prices were fair.
I still don't get why all this concentration is needed in the bay area in the first place and don't buy the argument that they need to be all in the same area.
There could be multiple bay area like places throughout the US. All these problems would suddenly disappear. Other areas would flourish, more people could own property at acceptable prices. I can't stop thinking that some are profiting from this bubble and want to keep it this way but it's going out of hand..
- ed
I'm busy and distracted and realised after I posted how obvious and unenlightening a post this was. Sorry!
You won't even need to vote. They will already know how you feel about the candidates. Much more efficient!
This doubles their investment if the average home price net of costs is 100k. It seems likely the number will be way above that, just glancing at median home prices.
Or these companies can move. If you take successful STEM related businesses and move them to better area's the talent will follow. There is more than 1 answer to this problem, most people just want to change laws because its easier for them.
The diaspora from the Bay Area will keep happening the way it has been: at the economic margins. Over time, people outside of tech who aren’t subsidized by prop 13 or rent control will get priced out. There will be a perpetual underclass living in trailers and garages, and the landed aristocracy will be further entrenched.
How much less productive would these workers be if they were moved to Salt Lake City or Henderson, NV or Syracuse, NY?
If you lost 20% of the productivity but could pay 30% less that would be OK, wouldn't it?
The most you'll see is something like what Amazon (sort of) tried with creating a "second HQ".
None of this is to argue that big tech companies shouldn't be more distributed. They probably should and it's happening to some degree naturally as they grow. But trying to move already employed people wholesale to a new city, especially one that many will see as relatively unattractive, will cost you a significant percentage of your workforce.
There are too many people who feel like they _have_ to live there (or NYC / insert overly populated city here) to have a career, that any sort of correction will take decades.
I'm asking this to find out your definition of overpopulation. Because the people that want to move here don't think that's the case, and I certainly don't think that's the case given how low population density is throughout the Bay Area.
And since high density walkable neighborhoods are healthier for people and the environment than car dependent sprawl, I think that we are actually underpopulated.
As far as expand elsewhere goes, google has many staff in many countries and cities all over the world.
Yes, in 20 years, you end up with sprawl, but thats better than crashing someone elses hood and wanting it to morph into Manhattan.
These people probably arent getting fired. They’re flighty, pursuing to dollar, self-actualization, doing good, whatever. Which is perfectly fine and reasonable until they all want to live in the same handful of zipcodes. I just dont understand why society needs to accomodate that anymore than why Jackson Hole should accomadate my need for a $250k 2-bdr condo with ski-out.
What you're not bothering to grapple with is: why are these companies trying to expand headcount in areas that are somewhat hostile to them, and also much more expensive? Hell, even in Europe, Google's big offices are in the most expensive cities. There's a reason for that, and it's not because they enjoy lighting money on fire.
Once you've figured out the 'why' there, you can work on coming up with a fix or workaround. Until then, just blithely saying "well they're just too lazy to do this other thing" itself just smacks of intellectual laziness. It lets you slam them without having to analyze the very real issues keeping companies in expensive tech hubs.
And big companies already do have lots of engineering offices, it's just still beneficial to have a big main hub, there are costs to fragmentation.