Google ends deal to build 15,000 Bay Area homes due to "market conditions"

Then, she added perverted(early on)/misanthropic deviant genius to destroy it, a character that lacked even basic verisimilitude by himself, or in context?

While the plot was enjoyable as easy reading, the background to me was like someone took one of those space-age-futuristic (or maybe modern solarpunk) landscapes and wrote "I disapprove" over it in red ink as a form of criticism.

Korea has lots of conglomerate owned construction but they're not just tech companies building apartments. They have some proper engineering branching.

Also Korean apartments are the best in the world, I wouldn't expect Google to create anything near as well planned.

Are you advocating for universal universal suffrage?

As in, everyone can vote everywhere?

I never hear how that turns out and why failing to get there is suboptimal.

how could that be possible? if residents are a financial drain on a city, then where does it get its income? tourism? industry operated by non-residents?

if true, then by not building residences all you're doing is pushing the costs onto the neighboring towns. but that's obviously not sustainable, because eventually those towns would go bankrupt, or they'd also "wise up" and push residents out from their own town, and you'd have some geographically-expanding bubble of financially-sound towns with 0 residents. i don't buy it.

Regardless, You really only need 13k a year to educate a kid. Million dollar house in Santa Clara county funds $44,000 which is 3.3 kids.

Also, separately, Menlo Atherton is a well funded school district.

"You grew up in the Bay Area and had two kids who don't live with you anymore. Did they move in with their in-laws instead? Did you build two homes for them? Oh your parents are still alive in their own home too?"

You seem to want to make this more than the others, but in doing so, you've negated all of the others.

I don't think that people are affected by not going forward with a real estate project. At most, some had an expectation of an outcome that now we won't see if it would happen at all.

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3292089,-121.9010776,3a,70.8...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

"Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005),[1] was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 5–4, that the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner to further economic development does not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment."

...

"The final cost to the city and state for the purchase and bulldozing of the formerly privately held property was $78 million. The promised 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues had not materialized. As of 2021, the area remains an empty lot."

(Private equity is capitalizing on this by buying out local plumbing/electrician/hvac companies to merge them into full service companies with a call center, CRM for customers, tech-enabled scheduling and dispatch systems... which is all good, except they charge 2-3x higher rates compared to your local plumber... so the option is <call PE-owned plumbing company and pay 2-3x the price to have someone show up tomorrow> or <call 10 local plumbers and pray that 1 of them calls you back and actually shows up>)

I imagine house builders and contractors have more reliable networks of workers to draw on compared to the average homeowner. But maybe the availability of workers to build a house isn't what it used to be?

If there is evidence of that I'd love to see it. If this was true then we'd have a huge supply of homes all over America now which I think is not the case is it? All I hear about is undersupply driving up home prices despite demand being low. I live in Austin where this is very true so maybe I'm in a bit of a bubble?

U.S. GDP is north of $25 trillion and has grown 75% since 2009. Annual VC investments appear to be in the $200-300 billion range, from a quick search - presumably not all of it going to unprofitable SaaS companies. I'd go with the statistics over the gut intuition here.

I’d say that the comparatively low inflation rate from 2010 to 2020 [1] qualifies as evidence of this.

> It sounds like a lot of it just went to unprofitable SaaS companies and other virtual endeavors, and not so much to things that exist in the physical world.

A lot of it did, I agree. But it would be strange if somehow no productive equipment at all was purchased based on a low-interest loan.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

I don't view this plan as ever being about "getting into real estate". It was just a way to get cities to agree to office construction, and also ensure that workers were willing/able to live nearby.

Anyway, given the amount of office space Google still owns and manages, they are very much "in real estate" in that regard...

Wow

Apparently it went down in price. But my only comment for the "put it to better use" would be that if a toilet is 1.7m, then anything else will consume 1.7m for just the meetings on what the alternative would be.

For example, a library project is occurring where the developer is getting the land for basically free, and building apartments on the land, but also paying most of the cost of the library.

Also, they got lonely and miss their "friends"

This really. My mid sized city has had an influx of covid restriction refugees and it's just too many people. Traffic is awful, everything is super crowded all the time. Inflation is out of wack and higher than other places. People really need to consider both sides of the coin.

If people don’t want their neighborhood to expand and become “too crowded” with “too much traffic” then they must take a vow of celibacy, or build housing in smarter ways. There are no other options.

the developers are another interesting dimension in that power imbalance.

When the results are so bad, maybe the system needs some tweaking, don't you agree?

It isn't that the residents don't want the changes, it is that they are not as politically active as their competition.

Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.

I'd say that local representatives could ignore the residents' wishes in the case that housing costs are too high, coupled with a desire to have a city where younger people can move in and raise families to also expand their tax base. But it's a tenuous argument with a lot of assumptions attached to it.

That said, I am skeptical that many of these cities in the Bay Area are actually representing the residents' wishes. Or perhaps the residents have too much power to stall housing development at local hearings where they are allowed input into what developers do on their own land. And the residents who exercise this power don't always represent the broader consensus in the city. But, I'll admit I am pretty ignorant about how things actually work at this level of local politics, and I know it's going to operate differently in every city and county.

How does this idea interact when the things being decided include whether other people can become members of the deciding group? If a neighborhood has authority over themselves, and votes for no new housing and no sales (bear with me for the thought experiment), have they then effectively locked that land down from the rest of the public that might want to live there?

What about when it's restricting things based kn race or income class? It's just the extreme of the above, so allowing a community to control the area absolutely would definitely lead to situations like that in the absence of larger jurisdictions with laws that override the local ones.

And very often that requires city policy that is the opposite of what current residents want, but is what other people across the country/state want.

E.g. if current residents don't want growth, but lots of other people want to live there, there's nothing about democracy that says the current residents' preferences take precedence over people who want to be residents.

The entire point of a nation is that it's able to coordinate and redistribute internally, for the good of the country, often against the wishes of a small minority (e.g. the current residents of a city).

Can you imagine if every neighborhood and town and city had veto power over everything? Where would you put landfills? Everyone needs them, but nobody wants them nearby to them.

So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.

Housing policy is the same thing. People widely support "cheaper housing" as a concept. If you magically halved the cost of all houses in the bay area, a lot of people would jump for joy and move to larger/nicer houses. On the other hand, roundly reject the things necessary to accomplish that - eg big housing complexes next door to them. It's the role of elected representatives to balance those desires.

That's where the moral authority to override a specific local desire comes from.

From the same place the "residents" derive it? Governments act for the good of the governed and via their consent. Those towns are in the State of California, the United States, etc... There's no absolutist principle that says that the "most local enclosing government" wins (in fact the Federal constitution clearly says the opposite).

For example, why draw the circle around these residents instead of thinking that the CA state legislature, as reps of the people of the state, should be entrusted with making all zoning decisions and such with a bird's eye view of what benefits the whole state? You can make a reasonable case why that's suboptimal, but at that point, we wouldn't be talking of "moral authority"

"Moral authority" doesn't really seem compelling to me, personally, as like a concept for judging government actions, and to the extent it does, I don't share the normative premise that "democracy" is supposedly an intrinsic or unadulterated good such that the most "democratic" proposition should win over others.

Since housing prices and construction have a significant effect on both immediate residents and the rest of the population, it's up to higher levels of the (still democratically elected!) government to resolve the tension—which is exactly what's happening with state-level regulation like RHNA mandates!

This high price of living is also another cause of lower birthrates among young people today, because everything is harder and more expensive.

Source: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KWdMMY0Tnf46H6Oy

i should have been more specific: capitalism will not solve the problem of housing. it had it's chance to build housing to meet demand during the low interest rate environment and yet it didn't provide. this underbuilding happened in places with both lax zoning and prohibitive discretionary zoning. all the while, rents keep raising in the free market due to low supply. capitalism will not build to meet the needs in a high interest rate / high inflation environment because the payoff won't be worth the risk. there needs to be some government intervention on the scale of the new deal if we want to solve our housing crisis.

can somebody give a good argument why capitalism will solve our housing problems, with an emphasis on how it will work in a high interest rate inflationary environment? i'm genuinely curious to hear an argument for that. and use examples where it addressed problems in an area with both lax zoning and bay area-like zoning, since imo reforming zoning regulations is only one part of the puzzle.

but really, that's some data worth examining, thanks for sharing! i didn't say that building housing won't solve the problem, that's literally a universal truth for housing advocates. i'm suggesting that the government needs to intervene, especially since private developers have underbuilt during the best low interest rate opportunity of our lifetimes. i'm skeptical that trickle down economics will work for housing, especially in a high interest rate inflationary environment where it's too expensive to build profitably.

basically, we need government to help add supply since private developers dropped the ball during the amazing opportunity of a decade+ of low interest rates.