Marc Andreessen and Ultra-Wealthy Neighbors Thwart Housing in California Town
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
4 hours ago, 111 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32489076
[1] https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/15/a16z-to-invest-in-adam-neuma...
My read is he turned something into almost nothing. Or maybe you can say he scammed long enough for a few to profit off of later suckers. But I'm not seeing value creation at all.
They expect to resell it at a profit to a bigger sucker before the whole thing collapses.
Hopefully for their LPs Adam learned some lessons.
Unfortunately it seems to be quickly evaporating.
http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
My impression has been that UIUC is/was jealous and wanted the IP / recognition. They admit he built it, but wanted a cut.
So simple. And yet sublime. Given a million years, I'm not sure I could have come up with that solution.
Why do you give people who can easily afford to have a team craft an image the benefit of believing it? I categorically don't. Not because I am of bad faith, no, precisely because I trust people to do what's in their interest: make sure your fund gets to talking with your audience.
The fact is, pmarca’s engineering chops are not a conspiracy invented by non engineers. He did in fact create a brilliant piece of software (Mosaic and, at some greater distance, Netscape), and the technical elites of Silicon Valley saw this and are responsible for much of his wealth and influence.
But the mundane truth is that engineering chops do not automatically translate into virtue, tact, political acumen, investment prowess, or any number of other skills or positive attributes. It is understandable that engineers want to believe they are on a higher plane of human existence but the evidence is inconclusive.
No publicist tricked us into thinking Andreessen was a brilliant programmer, we tricked ourselves into thinking brilliant programmers are necessarily superhuman.
It is not, just as it is not that PR departments know how to appeal to hypocrites.
Link to some examples? My impression is that many HN users are associated with the startup community, and therefore like what Andreessen or PG is doing, but I don't think they prop them up "like gods" or even demigods for that matter. You can like what someone is doing in one area (ie. startups/VC), without thinking they're gods or blindly believing whatever they say.
I frankly don’t want housing the kinds of people who can’t afford houses anywhere near me. I don’t say this publicly, but the council candidate who “protects home values” has my vote.
I agree housing affordability is an important problem. I am not willing to have so much as ruffians in the nearby grocery store to fix it though.
One of the main causes of our homeless problem is our high-housing cost. At least from what I've read, the Bay Area has such a high-level of homelessness because people who normally can afford apartments can't and are forced on to the streets. We have some of the highest housing costs in the world, and if prices keep going up, homelessness and crime will get worse and worse. We need to bring prices down (or at least keep them from going up like crazy as they have been) so that we can support a range of workers, from cooks and teachers to well-educated techies and business people.
Just my two cents.
It's absurd. Communities are most healthy with a mix of income levels intermingled.
Sure, why not? They can then charge a fortune for these services because of the commute time.
And for restaurants and the like, they can simply charge extremely high prices to eat there, to pay for workers needing to commute so far. And if the wealthy people refuse to pay for that, the restaurants can just go out of business, and the wealthy people can just cook their own food at home.
I don't really see the problem here, except that this wouldn't result in a healthy community, but it seems these wealthy assholes don't actually want healthy communities. So maybe the healthy communities should be elsewhere, and the wealthy NIMBYs can just live in their own enclave and cook their own food and clean their own floors.
I’m not sure it’s the same population.
Are a disproportionate number of those people suffering from addiction and or mental health issues? Yes. But make no mistake, the gap between people apartment shopping and people living on the street is frighteningly small in a housing market as expensive as SF.
Yeah, i'm not opposed to high rent costs, but San Francisco is in the top two in the world in cost for renting apartments. This is just insane and it seems better for the city in the long run if this could be brought down.
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-cities-worldw...
NIMBYism doesn’t require ownership to succeed. Just that the existing population resist.
As someone who lives in the Bay Area, guessing that if they went ahead and these were actually built, the housing/rental prices of these units would still be ultra high. Yeah, housing is so bad here, they'd probably just to attract young tech workers or people with at least decent jobs.
Unless someone supports paving Dolores Park, they’re a NIMBY.
Income? Yuck. There goes the neighborhood
/s
how near is near? Should they be placed into a ghetto? or taken off the planet?
>I am not willing to have so much as ruffians in the nearby grocery store to fix it though.
To me it sounds like being poor is already a crime according to you.
Also, just because someone makes the wrong choice or says the wrong things does not make them a charlatan?
You're either 100% good or 100% bad, no in between.
And of course there is no 100% good, only the 100% good who have yet been discovered to be 100% bad.
What other mechanisms could be at play for this worship?
Anyway thanks for your concise comment; it could not be more on point!
In other news: Fat man says eating less reduces weight and sells pizza
They say things to sound they are challenging Status Quo but behind the scenes - it's business as usual.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-16/adam-n...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwilliams1/2021/11/05/118-...
It's almost as if spouses aren't always of one mind when it comes to politics.
https://www.zdnet.com/index.php/article/india-anti-colonial-...
Maybe its time to stop listening to Marc Andreessen.
The horrible thing is if your neighbour gets rezoned but you don't.
In denser countries you can take public transit/ walk yourself to places you wont to go long before you get a drivers license.
You can’t have a society where everyone owns a single family home of 4000sqf. Infrastructure and public dollar can’t sustain all the roads, aqueduc, transit, for such low density. If some people have the money for it, fine, but we can’t have the whole population of North America living that way. It was always a lie of the American dream.
The American Dream didn't give everyone a 7-bedroom manse. It did give them something they owned. Which now costs like the mansion once did.
We have neighbors vehemently opposed to the transit, convinced that it will bring the “bad elements” to town. Then further fighting the housing complaining of how it would make traffic worse. Note that neither is even close to a problem… I just sit and sigh.
Honestly I think these developments will help our values but they don’t see it that way.
High density housing has no excuse though, if traffic is a problem then streets should be expanded. We need more 5+1 apartments and dense townhomes built.
Quite the opposite. Traffic will expand like a gas to meet the available capacity. You can only make the roads so wide, but never will it be wide enough to abate traffic congestion.
If traffic is a problem it's time to make driving less attractive by building bike lanes, subways/light rail/monorail, and investing in transit.
Yes, but now the roads carry more people. You can't fix congestion, but you can make it so the roads can sustain the local population, even if they're traveling at 20mph during rush hour.
> bike lanes
Sure, but when's someone going to make an ebike that can carry lots of groceries? Or really anything more than 1 large bag. Even a Trader Joe's run for only myself is 4-5 bags, and those portions are small compared to Costco.
Also, bike theft is a huge problem. And coincidentally the places with the best transit and bike lane buildouts have the worst policies towards property theft.
> subways/light rail/monorail, and investing in transit
Until disruptive people are banned from transit (so everything doesn't smell like piss and weed) and light rail is permitted to go faster than cars by NIMBYs, transit will never be an appealing option vs. cars. BART travels at 20mph next to 65 mph freeways sometimes.
I'm all for transit and bikes if these problems can be fixed. But they are political problems, not engineering ones. So I have little faith they will ever be fixed.
A couple of large pannier bags will hold that. I cycle to the shops now for me and my partner and thats what I do.
You can also get cargo ebikes, but they cost a lot. Might as well just use the car if you need more space, but most of the time a couple of pannier bags works for me.
Because you need to go less often due to the effort/cost of traveling to buy groceries. Here in Sweden almost everyone manages to get groceries with a backpack or a small cart, a few days of the week when needed. It's a 10-15 min walking distance for most people living in any part of a city.
Even then, 4-5 bags is completely doable on a bike with some panniers or a large cargo backpack. There are also cargo bikes if you ever have the need to carry larger loads often so there is your answer to when someone will make a bike that can carry loads of groceries. They exist but for most people who actually use a bike day-to-day, in the places we live we don't need to pack a full trunk-load of groceries because we can purchase groceries conveniently and do it more often.
> Also, bike theft is a huge problem. And coincidentally the places with the best transit and bike lane buildouts have the worst policies towards property theft.
Bike theft happens with bad locking practices: a bad lock (cable or small sized chains) and not properly locking your frame through the back triangle to a thick pipe/metal column. If you leave your bike unattended for a whole night with a bad lock you run the chance to have it stolen almost anywhere in the world. Get a good u-lock and learn the simple trick of properly locking your bike...
Clearly you don't live in the SF Bay Area. Thieves here have portable electric angle grinders and will cut through even the tough steel U-locks in 15 seconds. Not to mention if they can't steal your bike they'll steal your wheels, your seat, and your handles. Anything that's not bolted down is stolen. Not even exaggerating, ask anyone that lives in SF and they will tell you.
You cannot have a system where bikes are widely used when this kind of behavior happens.
Yeah and then the city grows and you are back to square one, with insufficient road capacity to support everyone driving.
Widening roads is a bandaid fix, treating the symptoms and not the cause.
The real solution is to treat the root cause by making it easier for people to not drive.
Countless people here in Tokyo do this every day on regular bikes and e-bikes. They even transport their kids on their bikes (with groceries).
Your earlier still argument applies: higher density housing is cheaper, and brings in "bad elements" - people lower on the socio-economic scale who can't afford to buy or rent the less dense homes present currently. It's class warfare.
So bad public transit systems are mostly used by "bad elements" because "Good" (rich) people can afford to not use shitty transit systems, which somehow means we shouldn't improve bad public transit systems?
If you improve the bad transit systems then suddenly they wont be overwhelmingly used by "bad elements" because many more "good" people will want to use them. The places I've been with good public transportation were never overwhelmingly filled with "bad elements". The trains and buses themselves were never overwhelmingly used by them either.
You really don't have to hold other people down just because you're happy where you are. You can have good public transportation services without turning your city into a slum and have everyone, including yourself, be better off for it.
His wife is the daughter of Silicon Valley's all time most successful property developer.
Let's say you own a large amount of real estate in a city, much acreage in the wealthy part, much acreage in the middle class part, and much acreage in the poor part of town. As such, you have a good bit of influence at city hall, your development projects employ so many people and the taxes you pay sustain the school system.
The city wants to build an airport, everybody agrees it is necessary for growth, you agree, the labor unions agree, everybody. Where do you recommend building it? Should you build it uptown and destroy the property values in the wealthy part of town? How much lower would the property values drop in the poor part of town? See where this is going?
The model doesn't have to have one person owning all of this property, it's just easier to see that way, where one person makes the tradeoff, but the market will make the same tradeoff if instead, it could all be owned by individual people, or it could all be owned by a progressive socialist government: you still don't build the airport near the nicest real estate, you build it by the most distressed real estate where it will have little effect on prices. If you want to let the market solve this problem, auction off the right to build the airport to the resident stakeholders. The poor people will jump at a lower price than the other classes of people.
So, advocating for an airport (or more housing) and then saying "but don't build it here" is not hypocritical, it's something I like to call rational.
Now, should poor people be subjected to all the worst ills, the sewage treatment plant, the power plant, the airport, etc? Regardless of where you stand on that, the solution to improving the lives of poor people is still not building the airport in the best neighborhood. If your socialist government wants to confiscate the rich neighborhood so the commissars have places to live, they still don't want an airport there. If your govt confiscates it and rents it out to proles who want to pay more for housing and dress in rags, vs the proles who want nicer clothes in a shabbier apartment, it still does not make sense to destroy that value.
Property value is not the only trade-off being made.
> the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.
Andreessen has vocally argued (for years) that we should build more housing. Then when the opportunity comes to do it where he lives - he and his wife NIMBY their way out of it.
Pretty simple point to understand.
new airport != new housing is my entire retort to your argument.
Just go through the motions, talk to builders and try to get permits.
Then you will understand.
The fact that this keeps coming to the front page of HN goes to show you how scummy this behavior from Andreessen is.
I think the bigger issue is that the cities were the future just a few years ago, and now that future isn't as certain.
when covid came around every single one of these entrepreneurs was spamming twitter with how they're doing their part in saving everyone, yet at the end of the day it was the pharma sector and governments who actually did it.
Even within the software sector it's largely companies like Microsoft or Apple, preceding the Andreessen generation who genuinely build things. Including here on HN in particular there needs to be a critical re-evaluation of the entire 'startup economy' and how much of it is just digital rent-seeking on top of physical infrastructure that other people build.
a16z argues that crypto are "digital assets", whatever that is.
I will concede that more homes in the city should be a priority, but they are needed everywhere.
Useless, vacant land v.s. new neighbors + taxes paid to the city.
The benefit is obvious when you put aside your prejudice against those from different walks of life.
I’m gunna be honest, if we’re making broad generalizations now, silicon valley snobs are by far the most selfish, inconsiderate, lack of empathy having, inflated ego persons in the entirety of the country. Texas and Arizona needs to be bussing those immigrants to SF area and not NY.
And your comments about SF people are absolutely true, and I live here.
Yes, you might have to face discomfort so that others can afford to put a roof over their head. There is a housing affordability crisis in North America for which it is necessary to build (on top of many other efforts required).
Yes, it's completely rational for you to be a selfish actor in this instance. But I don't believe it's rational for government to continue to support NIMBY'ism for the long term health of its society.
I’ve lived next to low income + “project” housing. It’s physically dangerous, in the form of gun violence. Sucks but it’s true. When you’re in your 20s it’s whatever, what are the odds that you’ll be hit by a stray bullet?
When you’re pushing 40 and have kids? Fuck that. Build your housing elsewhere.
Treat others how you'd like to be treated. I'd rather live next to a decent guy who's a truck driver than a rich idiot. I'd also hate to live in a bubble. Look at London - you have places like Camden with multi-million pound town houses opposite council estates.