Google will exit prominent San Francisco waterfront office tower | Hacker News Reader

Google will exit prominent San Francisco waterfront office tower

sfchronicle.com

27 pointstypeofhuman13 comments

Google and Meta both leases way more buildings and millions of sq ft than they could ever afford to fill. Google even had ~10 floors connected to my previous apartment complex that they leased but never built out. WTF!

A land value tax would help solve this unproductive utilization of land.

> land value tax would help solve this unproductive utilization of land

No, it wouldn’t—they’re leasing the land. (And the land is under an increasingly-useless mass of 20th-century office buildings.)

Perhaps it would be useless directly. But perhaps something similar could be used to encourage landlords of under-utilized commercial/residential/industrial space to instead repurpose them as housing, co-working, event spaces, or other uses rather than sitting on massive empty inventories while homeless people and the working poor go without.

This is a Rube Goldberg mechanism to arrive at non market housing. Government can issue bonds, buy at the bottom, and hold for decades, unbeholden to constant demands to increased profits and extraction from potential use cases and tenants.

You won’t encourage landlords to not be landlords. You simply cut them out as middlemen.

You're committing a strawman-red herring here. What government does with bonds is neither here nor there.

Either landlords can make productive use of property within a proscribed set of regular or alternative uses beneficial to the public good regulated and adjudicated by the local jurisdiction, or they can choose to be penalized stiffly for idle inventory, absentee landlord, real-estate speculation that doesn't solve any local problems.

Do you believe that it’s more efficient to try to coax the desired behavior out of private ownership through various layers of bureaucracy and politics vs public possession and control of the resource? My point is: no, it’s not. Financial engineering provided as an example as to how to deliver on this (“how pay?”), nothing more.

I mean, presumably the tax would be passed on in the rent, and so they wouldn't lease the land as it would cost more.

Is your aim to have companies leave ?

How would that be different than property tax, which SF has?

There are already property taxes on commercial real estate in most major cities including SF.

https://www.sftaxappeal.com/post/commercial-property-taxes-i...

The cost of these taxes is passed on in the rent.

The same goes for mortgages/rent etc. on residential real estate.

If you think raising these taxes might increase utilization/optimize revenues, great, but you’re proposing pulling an economic lever, not some genius new system.

The government has many economists and political scientists on payroll to determine optimal and politically acceptable rates, any changes would need much stronger and more detailed argument.

Prior to like 2022, Google was growing at a ridiculous pace. Prior to 2020, almost all workers were in office. Sergey Brin has previously said that he'd like Google to have 1,000,000 employees someday. It takes a lot of time to acquire office space and then make it available for workers. So Google had a lot of office space growth in the pipe for future growth.

Google also makes absolute shitloads of money and, until recently, didn't have a strong focus on reducing costs. "Let's keep that around for the future" made a lot more sense in 2021.

Today, Google has much more flat growth, is pushing its growth to lower cost regions, has a much tighter focus on reducing costs, and has a significant portion of its workers never coming into the office. Suddenly, a ton of this office space is just an expense that can be cut.

https://archive.ph/Ar7tP

Reply on news.ycombinator.com