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Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

Companies, specially this ones with so much profit and high salaries, will eventually have to accept that there's no way around housing and politics.

It doesn't matter what you do. If moving to your place feels miserable you'll have churn.

Maybe Google can deal with this with some gymnastics for a while but if people around google employees keep getting poorer and more miserable, life for googlers will be miserable too, doesn't matter how many perks and colors their campus has.

I guess FAANG will eventually try to silo people in their campuses with their own housing, but either way it affects the bottom line of the economy, so you'll be affected in many ways.

Housing is not just another problem. Georgists, Piketty & critics, etc.

It will tank the west (and particularly europe).

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The market will never produce below market rate housing.

If you want below market rate housing, it has to be subsidized.

As is the case here...try to find a $99/night rack rate hotel room in Mountain View.

Here, Google is subsidizing well paid workers, not ordinary working poor or even low wage employees of its cleaning contractors.

Weird sleight of hand. You can obviously lower the market rate by increasing supply.

Subsidies on the other hand increase the market rate, below which, correct, you will not get much construction.

When market rates drop, new market rate housing projects stall and die.

They stall and die more quickly than they start as market rates rise.

Because investment syndicates fall apart as anticipated rates of return fall, because bank loans are harder to come by, and because existing revenue streams shrink available funding.

Real estate economics is very unlike widget economics. The amount of land in desirable locations is fixed.

Which is why we should have a very high LVT so stalled projects don't keep land off the market until prices rise again.

The royal family is largest land owner in London.

I am not suggesting you were thinking of London.

I am saying that analogous forces exist elsewhere and are equally resistant to land reform in favor of unlanded peasants.

And by extension that most people are unlanded peasants. Even though they don’t think they are.

The Google hotel is for its unlanded peasants. Not the C-suite. The C-suite doesn’t want those people living in their neighborhood.

Is this comment attempting to say “fixing this problem will upset powerful people?”

I’m aware of that! But that has been true of most of society’s large scale positive transformations.

It isn’t going to happen because you lack sufficient wherewithal to deliver the violence necessary to make it happen.

In the very best case significant land reform happens through the plausible threat of violence. But typically, actual violence is required and military operations are the most cost effective means of land reform at scale.

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