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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

They've been paying rent on their offices the whole time.

If they went permanent WFH they could sell/lease those spaces and probably save billions.

Not to mention the cost all the employees have to endure for traveling to work, wear on vehicles, gas, repairs, collisions, insurance, medical payouts due to car accidents, etc. Plus just generally the externalities of higher carbon emissions.

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This assumes the presence of enough office demand to replace a Google sized company in the markets they lease in. It’s not clear that this is true.

US vacancies are projected to be 19.4% nationally. On top of that, there isn’t exactly another Google-sized employer waiting in the wings over in Mountain View.

With re-zoning this won't be a problem. Just rezone it to residential. or residential/commercial.

There's nothing Mountain View wants to do less than let anyone live there.

Also, because of Prop 13 those people wouldn't be paying property tax in 10 years, much like how everyone living there now isn't paying any, so Google is paying for everyone's schools and sewer systems as is.

> because of Prop 13 those people wouldn't be paying property tax in 10 years

I'm not sure what you mean. Prop 13 just caps the annual increase at 2%. I've lived in California and owned property here for 30 years. I pay property taxes.

If the annual increase is capped at 2% and inflation is >2% then the value reaped by property tax will eventually go to 0.

Similar to how if you rent the same place for long enough and it's rent controlled your rent effectively gets cheaper even though it's going up.

> If the annual increase is capped at 2% and inflation is >2% then the value reaped by property tax will eventually go to 0.

Asymptotically at infinity, you're not wrong.

I'm probably not living that long though. Meanwhile taxes do go up every year in real money.

Taxes go up in nominal money :)

Can't they game their way around that though by just increasing the assessed the value of the property? That's how my town effectively raises property taxes beyond the statutory limits. Sure you can appeal the assessed valuation but most people don't. It is expensive and time-consuming.

It’s fixed at the original assessment the last time it was sold, I think. It also applies to businesses, with the result that the car dealership next to me pays less taxes than a new condo. Inheritance does not reset it, meaning the state is effectively living under feudalism.

There was an attempt to fix this for businesses just last year, but it failed because homeowners were convinced it was a plot to get them.

No, it's fixed at when the house was built. You'll see "renovations" where the entire house minus one wall is demolished, and the new structure built around it. This allows the owners to avoid reassessment.

and if inflation is under 2% and the city always increases by the maximum of 2%, then eventually the value of the property tax paid will be infinite, right? How is that analysis useful?

If you make property tax a fixed percentage of the value of the property, it automatically adjusts with inflation.

Imagine how much nicer the cities of the world would become with many of the offices turned into residential. There would be a rebirth of local community.

With many of those offices gone, many people simply won't live in those cities. There seems to be an assumption here that people want to live in cities, but that's certainly not true across the board.

How much cost they will endure when their employees start getting insane from all the zoom meetings and working with a monitor instead of a real person?

> working with a monitor instead of a real person

Pre and post pandemic I'm still communicating with coworkers via email and slack, on the monitor. No difference at all.

Well, one difference is I used be able to hear them munch on their snacks a couple cubicles over, but I can do without that part.

Also, erasing the two hour commute, total win.

We both win with WFH.

I have a co-worker (generally a lovely person) who is about ready to explode when she hears someone crunching on an apple.

WFH, I can now eat an apple without self-consciously slow-crunching.

Once an employee has built a report with their team, knows their roll, is fully trained, properly equipped, and demonstrates proficiency at their job..... then I'm cool letting staff work from home. I suspect Google has the leadership, supervision, and infrastructure to do all those things at a large scale. Unfortunately for my crew I find brining everyone in is waaaaay more efficient....carbon emissions aside.

> Once an employee has built a report with their team, knows their roll

Did you mean "rapport" and "role"? Because that sentence was a bit confusing.

Also, "brining everyone in"? They are all going to be very salty after that... :)

That's a model I'd be interested in working under. It's different for everyone, but I find onboarding most efficient in person, and long-term work most enjoyable fully remote.

If the fully onboarded employees are all WFH, what good will bringing in new hires do?

> If they went permanent WFH they could sell/lease those spaces and probably save billions.

To whom? Everybody is moving to work from home.

Does it matter? Even if they have to sell or sublease at a loss, it's better than paying rent on empty buildings.

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