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.