Buying a Home Near Nvidia's Headquarters Is Nearly Impossible Right Now | Hacker News Reader

Buying a Home Near Nvidia's Headquarters Is Nearly Impossible Right Now

wsj.com

30 pointsbookofjoe32 comments

This is such a click-baity headline, the subject line is "Blame Santa Clara’s inventory and relative affordability—not the company’s stock run-up—for creating such a competitive market".

Essentially "let's use nVidia's name to get attention for this non-related issue."

Was about to say the exact same thing. Housing constraints are not limited to "near Nvidia HQ". It's the entire Bay Area.

For those not from the area, it's city after city after city in the Bay Area. 60 miles up the peninsula (from San Jose to San Francisco), and 60 miles up the East Bay, the vast majority of which has inventory and affordability challenges.

That reminds me, I once heard a talk by journalist at a hacker conference... I think it was HOPE a long time ago. He said that journalism is a good profession for people with a disposition for hacking. I wonder if that same trickiness hackers use to make/break great software is at play in headline-making...

Santa Clara finally caught up with Palo Alto, Cupertino & Sunnyvale. It's not really that surprising considering all the other big companies - literally the entire FAANG - within a few miles of Nvidia's HQ.

I don't think you absorbed the gist. Santa Clara has NOT caught up.

It's not a trendy suburb. The Cupertino school district (includes some of SJ and Saratoga) is a much bigger draw for young families than a short commute.

Broadly speaking, the further east you go in the Valley, the lower the prices get.

Cupertino and especially Palo Alto are still more expensive, but Santa Clara isn’t much cheaper than Sunnyvale anymore, with homes near Apple HQ hitting $2k per square foot.

Apple HQ is near Sunnyvale and in Cupertino. It's near 280, not 101.

Are you just looking at the web, or do you live here?

It also borders Santa Clara; the housing immediately east of Apple Park is Santa Clara. North Santa Clara is cheaper than the southern half yes, but not really cheaper than the neighboring north Sunnyvale.

Why do you keep arguing? You have nothing better to do?

We're done here.

Cupertino schools are a draw for young families that can afford a $2.5M+ house, which is not every family in the area. I live in the area and bike to work past Nivdia HQ every day. Santa Clara used to be "cheap" and unsurprisingly it's becoming more expensive, like the cities it borders. The details on "downtown" Santa Clara are irrelevant as everyone simply drives to San Jose, Mountain view, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, etc, etc to get dinner or go hang out anyway.

Santa Clara's house prices have been trending up for many years because it's a short commute to many companies full of highly-paid people. Nvidia's recent market cap surge has little to do with it. https://www.redfin.com/zipcode/95050/housing-market

> Nvidia's recent market cap surge has little to do with it.

we're agreed on that, anyway.

Lower-cost areas that are very near higher-cost areas will almost always come up in value. People priced out of the Cupertino school district will decide Santa Clara isn't so bad after all.

https://archive.ph/EjzjY

This is basically the same everywhere in South Bay, isn't it?

Yes. Prices don't settle much* at all until you're east of 87 or south of Almaden Valley (Almaden used to be a bit cheaper but the houses and lots there are bigger and this isn't really true anymore. Now you need to almost get to Morgan Hill ... but wait, all the new construction in Morgan Hill is also luxury and expensive, so you're essentially pushed to Gilroy for something cheaper.).

* For varying sensitivities of "much". I'm speaking in general terms of affordability, not trying to claim Cupertino prices are identical to Evergreen or Campbell is more expensive than Sunnyvale. All these places are roughly equally unaffordable and have ridiculously low inventory.

Same story as buying a home near Microsoft during their heyday. MS did somewhat alleviate the problem by having a geographically spread-out campus but hour-long commutes were the norm.

MSFT's stock price is higher than ever and seems Microsoft is everywhere, even on Linux computers nowadays. If today isn't their heyday, when was, and why?

Their sheer dominance of literally all technology is a lot less pronounced now that so much of computing is in the cloud (Linux) and on mobile phones (iOS and android). Huge swathes where Microsoft has terribly little monopoly power or high-margin products. Even Office is eaten into by gsuite and a long tail of solutions like Notion.

Microsoft is clearly a very major company, they're very profitable, and their stock has done very well for the past decade or so. But they're also very clearly not the dominant player that was poised to sweep everyone else aside as many saw them as being at one point--in part because open source at that time was sort of a niche thing and cloud computing didn't really exist.

The 90's when Apple was almost dead, and Linux wasn't quite a thing. I agree though that now is a great to be at Microsoft, arguably better than the 90's since no one seems to hate them like they did back then.

Yeah, in the 90s, with probably the notable exception of Sun, pretty much every major computer maker was at least planning for an eventuality where Wintel dominated everything. There were alternatives--in the Big Iron space and where other companies like MIPS had windows of success--but Microsoft was very dominant in business computing and of course rules the mainstream desktop.

A smaller piece of a much, much bigger pie.

I like how you can pay $40 per month for the highest tier Apple One bundle, which advertises access to News+, which headlines its offering with access to Wall Street Journal, and then you try to open a wsj.com link in the News App, and it says “this article is not available”.

Try this: https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/luxury-homes/nvidia-headquar...

N.B. I subscribe to the highest tier of Apple One Bundle like you; I opened the app and found the story, which is there in its entirety. I wonder what you're doing differently than me...

Interesting, that link did open in the News App. Although, it was able to be read in Safari too without the News App.

Edit: I tried the OP link again, and while it does not let me read in Safari, this time it did open in News App. So I don’t know, but this isn’t the first time I have gotten the “this article is not available” message when trying to open a wsj.com link in News.

"Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result." By that criterion, the internet is insane.

I guess this explains why I've been flipping this coin for an hour but keep getting heads.

>Scientists Destroy Illusion That Coin Toss Flips Are 50–50

https://archive.ph/LMU4Z

Consider archive.ph your browser for paywalled articles.

Nearly always for big sites, the article is already archived by someone else.

Archive stops me with infinite captcha things, I assume due to using iCloud private relay or something?

Can't help with that, sorry. I use plain vanilla Brave, no VPN.

Do you use Cloudflare for DNS? See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38232014

I mean. You can definitely buy a place. It's just going to be $3m+ for a 2000 sq ft house.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com