Google gets go-ahead to build 153-acre Bay Area neighborhood by headquarters | Hacker News Reader

Google gets go-ahead to build 153-acre Bay Area neighborhood by headquarters

sfgate.com

40 pointsmji76 comments

In a first for real estate, Google discontinues popular neighborhood. "We just couldn't get billions of dollars out of it and the buildings showed little to no AI" says Google spokesperson Bardy McBardson,

It’s a joke but it has happened when the developer/hoa goes bankrupt.

You joke but they already did that in San Jose. Years of the city fighting to get the project reviewed and approved and Google simply stopped just short of ground breaking and is now “reevaluating” it.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/21/googles-80-acre-san-jose-meg...

That's called failing fast!

Well, that was to build another mega-campus. This development is for housing, mixed-use and some office space. I'm not surprised they are re-evaluating it given the success of remote and hybrid work.

They could also just support remote work and not be such a factor in consolidating so many people that make so much money in such a small area that engineers making $300k [1] are considered middle class.

This seems to be just extending the problem.

1: https://smartasset.com/data-studies/how-to-be-middle-class-a...

All the SVPs and VPs are remote. Presumably these leaders are showing the way of the future?

(ok, so not "all", but there's a lot of "rule for thee but not for me")

$400K/year is the 95th percentile individual income in the Bay Area. That's not middle class.

I suppose, that’s probably what you need to have a middle-class lifestyle up there too

0 chance. That's $270k after tax for a single earner family. A US middle class 4br/2ba 1800 sqft. SFH is $50k/yr to rent within 30 minutes of Google. So $220k in disposable income while US median household income is just $70k.

Sure, but I'd count home ownership in a safe area as a middle class metric. That would at least double the housing costs.

Plenty options <= $1.5m , so $8.2k - $9k monthly PITI. In the worse case, you consider that lost $ and now your disposable is still $162k. But actually, rent is closer to the net housing cost, because owning will reduce your taxes, increasing income ~$1k/mth, another + ~$2k/mth into equity, and another + $2k/mth inflation (loan is chipped away), so you're still looking at $4k/mth actual cost (if not less).

If most of population is poor, median is poor.

US is one of the richest countries in the world. People on average have more land, spacious SFH, and new vehicles.

That’s probably why they also have the highest amount of debt.

$6k+ per month in Mountain View minimum to not live in a shack.

No one is required to live next door to your job, and even if you were, you've only changed the calculus to be $200k disposable income?

Here's a 4bed condo for $4k right next to Google: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/701-N-Rengstorff-Ave-APT-...

Newark or Fremont is within 30 minutes drive (usually within 40 for rush hour) and there's tons at that price point. On the Google side of the bay there's many around $5k.

And honestly, as pointed out, an extra $10-20k on housing doesn't really change the point anyway.

It makes it higher than the median wage he mentioned…

So what? That again doesn't at all change the point of the argument, which had nothing to do with affordability of those rentals for people making median wage or anything else. It only mentioned that median as a comparison to how much disposable income someone making that amount would still have even after paying bay area rents.

Read.

“I suppose, that’s probably what you need to have a middle-class lifestyle up there too”

The point I’m making is that the median middle class income, $70k/year, doesn’t work - which is in agreement with him - pay attention.

You need to read, your argument is all over the place.

“I suppose, that’s [$400k] probably what you need to have a middle-class lifestyle up there [around Mountain View] too”

I showed this to be false. You will be plenty middle class at even 2/5 of that income, $150k, with still $44k disposable income.

It's irrelevant equating your purported housing cost (which was also shown to be false), $70k, is the median middle class income.

This whole thread is about, "you have to make sooo much money to be middle class", and we can debate the merits of that being a certain reasonable X% above median, like maybe each individual making $90k, or a single earner household of $130k. But it makes no sense to talk about what makes someone middle class around Mountain View to inject, "well my overestimate of a local housing cost is equal to median income elsewhere."

What does make sense, is if someone says it takes generating $200k-220k in disposable income to be middle class, to refute that argument by pointing out that income is so beyond the typical middle class American, because they are making 3x the money of a middle class American, if that middle class American had 0 taxes or housing costs, further illustrating how absurd that is.

$110k is the poverty line here. You cannot live here if you’re middle class.

End of story.

End of story? My living expenses are $60k/year. I guess you've settled it, that I'm living in poverty; with my 2 cars, garage, unlimited fresh produce (garden & store), Apple products everywhere, heater, A/C, sushi every week. Good one

I hate to break it to you, but the poverty line in the Bay Area is not my definition.

Your rent price is way off, you’re looking at 6k/month (72k/year) for a 4-bed, at least.

So $200k disposable income then?

Also, news to me since I'm in a $4.2k/mth rental, and feel free to view all the <= $4k 4-bed within commuting distance:

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_rent/?searchQueryState=%7B%...

I was making a reference to this study: https://smartasset.com/data-studies/how-to-be-middle-class-a.... It's 300k not 400k, I'll fix my comment.

>It's 300k not 400k, I'll fix my comment.

It's not $300K, it's $243K household income in San Francisco and $252K household income in San Jose in your own link and that's the upper bound of some arbitrary "study". Please don't spread misinformation as it makes this site look poorly educated.

Uh, ok? Are classes not judged by household income? Are you assuming every tech worker is married to another high income earner?

Someone having a perspective, which is based on data, that you disagree with does not qualify as misinformation. I lived in the aforementioned cities and am not in a relationship with someone who is a high income earner. I think it's fine to point out how problematic it is that whether it's 250, 300, or 400k being the bar for middle class is pretty far down the line of problematicness.

I guess I’ll spell it out for you.

An individual making $400K is rarer than a household making $400K so if the upper bound for a household is $250K, the individual upper bound is far lower, which is nowhere near $400K.

The claim that someone that makes even $300K is “middle class” anywhere is hilarious. That person becomes a millionaire in their 20s while living a very cushy life. You’re incredibly out of touch.

I don't think you really understand what that study is saying nor the guidelines of this website.

I was single living in that area on roughly $300k. My effective tax rate (state + federal, post Trump's tax changes) was around 34.64% and my rent was 3.6k per month for a two bedroom duplex in San Jose. I'm not sure how you gander that adds up to being a millionaire in any soonish timeframe. The last time I ran Monte Carlo on my income I'd, maybe, make my first million in my late 40s.

You're sitting here telling a story about two people who are married making 400k. Optimizing for married people when folks are forced to commute and only telling that story is a tad disengenuous when millennials are known to get married mostly in their 30s.

I have a feeling you're mixing up middle-income and middle-class, which are not the same thing.

> That’s not middle class.

It’s not middle income, but, insofar as income correlates with economic class, its quite consistent (if, as here, it is labor income) with middle class (petit bourgeois), since the worker with that income likely has substantial capital investment and income (or at least accumulation if they aren’t realizing income), but is not independent of renting their labor or applying it to that capital for support.

Middle income isn’t middle class, and people at that income level are generally firmly in the working class.

$30,000 is 95th percentile in the world. I’m not sure what your point is.

https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i

Pretty sure this is a move to support remote work. They are trimming down their existing campus to build more homes in the bay area, which is in dire need of that.

Big tech has lots of real estate for their mega campuses. It is gonna take a while to unwind that.

Squinting at this map: I think the new residential places are mostly replacing existing Google office buildings. Thus it fixes (tongue firmly in cheek) two problems at once: too much office space, and not enough housing.

I grew up a couple miles from Pullman. They were nice houses; still in use.

https://www.nps.gov/pull/learn/historyculture/the-strike-of-...

I just did some similar squinting by comparing satellite view with the map on the SFgate article. Development is mainly between 101 and Charleston Rd. I see lots of Google office buildings in that area.

Also I chuckled a bit when I realized I was using Google maps to make this connection

Assuming that this doesn't devolve into a company town, Google deserves credit for taking on such a large housing project. The housing problems in California (and especially the Bay) require efforts from public and private actors. It's especially heartening to see them take aim at car centric development. I can only hope that others will follow their example.

Wasn't the area around Google contaminated? Not sure why would anyone willingly live there all the time.

A lot of the bay area is due to old chip manufacturing plants. I want to say it has one of the largest concentrations of Superfund sites in the US, but don't quote me on that.

Edit: Don't quote me, quote the Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silic...

I'm not sure this is so much a company town as Google is trimming its mega in-person office footprint.

The bay area is in dire need of housing so I'm all for more homes getting built. 15% set aside for low-income housing too which is a good thing.

Are they just going to build a single family home suburbia for rich execs though? To attract people and convince them to move to CA?

The plan is for 7000 units, a lot of office space, and a bunch of other things. It needs to be midrise apartments to fit that many people. Which is exactly what they should be building.

7k units / 153 acres, so 45 units per acre. Decently dense. Suburbia is more like 10 so huge increase over most of bay area.

This site is helpful to visualize units / acre. https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visua...

that's a super useful visualization. thanks for sharing.

You're welcome!

It’s wild to me that someone making 300k/yr would want to live in an apartment building.

I’m assuming they’ll be constructed like every other apartment in the past decade with paper thin walls and little consideration for natural light.

I guess I’m the outlier but I would never consider living in one of those ever again.

Would you prefer 3 hours of freeway commute instead?

I prefer WFH.

I would prefer literally anything else over living in a McMansion in a liminal suburb. Only thing they could improve is putting some mixed use/retain in there.

Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

I also dislike living in McMansions in suburbia, I’m more of a rural dweller type.

I’ve wondered if it’s an introvert/extrovert thing. Maybe it’s just unique to the individual with no correlated personality trait.

I get there’s trade offs to each living situation and we all just assign different weights.

It probably won't make you more extrovert. In studies, behavior has been pretty consistently found to be linked to personality and vice versa, so it's always tricky to differentiate the two.

You would be hard-pressed to afford an SFH near Mountain View on one $300k/year income, unless you've worked for at least 5 years (probably more) to save up a down payment. Even then, that's the low end - any house you can buy with that income will probably be small (1500 sq ft max), built in 1960s at the latest, and in need of $100k-$200k of renovations to bring it up to modern standards. You might be able to buy a townhouse that's decently modern, but that will charge you $500/month in HOA for very minimal amenities (not even a pool in many cases).

With these options, unless you're starting a family and need the space, these apartments seem like a good deal for younger people working for Google. It will be priced to be within a Google engineer's budget and will have much better amenities than any SFH for sale that costs below $3m.

That all makes sense to me. I don’t live in California so I guess I’m just really out of touch with the housing situation there.

I guess if you really want to work for Google, and they’re moving away from WFH options, this is as good an option as any as you point out.

I think it is all about what you can afford close to your work. If you are early on in your career in the bay area you are very likely living in an apartment building. Maybe you get a few friends together and rent a house.

I've lived in both poorly built apartments and very nice new concrete walled ones where you can't hear your neighbors at all.

To your point, under engineered buildings are a serious concern. Ex: I lived in library gardens in Berkeley before they had the balcony collapse in 2015 which killed 6 students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_balcony_collapse

> Decently dense.

Is densely living a virtue in itself? Seems so odd.

I mean, if you like to live near a ton of people you should be allowed to do so. But if you do not, you should also be allowed.

Not a virtue in itself. But if you live in the bay area you are priced out of living less densely. You can of course move away to a more affordable area. And now with remote work being more accepted that is a viable option for white collar workers, definitely not for blue collar though.

But if you have kids, family, friends, in the bay area then that is a difficult decision to say the least.

Low income housing is a failed idea. Make rent affordable by building market rate units until supply outstrips demand. Or raise Section 8 to track the market rate. But creating a lottery system for a few lucky people to win a temporary government housing subsidy is not a solution to anything.

I have a theory that including any number of affordable units discourages development to some extent, so on net, it's counter-productive.

I've heard this before too and it is a concern. I'd like to see some study or some kind of evidence for or against it though.

I agree it is def not the only thing to do to tackle the housing problem, but I think it can be a good tool to help get these projects passed. NIMBYism in the bay is so rampant that neighbors pretty much oppose all high density housing developments.

I agree with you that the main problem is supply and demand. We need more homes to keep prices affordable and the only way to do that in the bay is more density.

I don't think it has to be an either or situation. We should subsidize low-income housing so ppl with lower incomes have somewhere to live right now, and also build more market rate units so everyone has a place to live at an affordable rate long term.

If you thought the support was bad when you get locked out of your email account just wait until you lose your keys.

And so Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake tech campus vision begins. It’s frightening to think that as the world becomes increasingly hostile and inhospitable, especially in California, that company store villages like this will become sanctuaries made possible from the insane value derived from the masses’s data.

Reminds me of the factory towns that existed in the 19th and 20th centuries. At least in this case its to make expensive housing less expensive for talent who doesn't want to come to your hq because the region is an overpriced mess. Also, it is a good inflation hedge.

Project map: https://www.mountainview.gov/home/showpublishedimage/857/637...

the linked articled includes this map

Google already owns a substantial amount of real estate, both office and residential, around the bay area. REWS is a large business unit, just not one with a lot of public exposure.

Dang, this post has already fallen to 100th on HN, way off front page. The algo is pretty rough...

The opt-out village? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY

So kind of like Austin's Domain development?

So we're back to building company towns?

Well the actual towns aren't building much anything, so...

I wouldn’t be shocked if they came back. It’s so hard to build that being a large company gives you both the opportunity and incentives. It’s normal to want a short commute. If you can offer employees an affordable place to live near your office, you might even get away with lower salaries: if the difference would disappear to rent anyway, why not live in Googleville with complimentary YouTube TV?

Yeah and I don’t think it’s a terrible thing. It’s not a fantastic thing, but they are building public spaces and they are building affordable units. Sadly the best we can get at the moment.

If you read Octavia Butler, you know where we're headed.

As long as they pay in real money rather than scrip and the local institutions don't discriminate based on whether you work for The Company, I wouldn't think it would be worse than any other new neighborhood in the same area.

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