NB: I have no stake in this, I like in Ireland.
2. Angry mob or your opinions should not dictate where people choose to live.
I could offer many suggestions as to how you should live YOUR life to better suit MY goal and ideas, but I don't because that would be stupid.
You should choose a place to live that suits YOU the best and you should offer the same curtesy to others.
The "occupy Google bus" movement is straight-up bullying.
Google employees are competing with all the other big companies in the South Bay(EBay/Apple/Facebook amongst others) plus the yearly influx of interns that takes a bunch of apartments off the market for 6 months at a time.
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1) 6-figures is middle-of-the-road when it comes to meeting living expenses in SV. You will never own an urban house (and will likely not own a suburban house) on that salary in the area.
2) Have you, like, ever ridden in a big bus before? They're pretty nausea-inducing and tend to get stuck in the same traffic that every other ground vehicle gets stuck in. Their only advantages are traffic reduction and (maybe, if you can fight the nausea) the ability to catch up on email during your commute in.
3) I did the commute-down-the-peninsula thing for a couple of years. It was also pretty miserable and not very cheap (but far cheaper than owning, parking, and maintaining a car). I can't argue that Caltrain is worse than these buses, but I can argue that they're both pretty miserable.
Google isn't trying to encourage people who work at Google to live in San Francisco: they are trying to encourage people who live in San Francisco to work at Google.
It's the same reason they have such a honkin' big office in the middle of Manhattan. They could much more cheaply have an office park out in western New Jersey, but having the office in Manhattan captures a large number of employees who want to live in New York City, and would end up working at a hedge fund to support their NYC-habit.
Likewise, they probably found themselves interviewing a lot of great people who turned down the job because they lived in San Francisco and couldn't deal with the commute, and would rather find a different job than leave San Francisco. (Or employees who were commuting by car/rail and were quitting because they couldn't handle it any more.) The buses were probably a cheaper / more satisfactory solution than setting up a new office.
It is a bit funny to hear people say that the lives of Google employees do not revolve around their employer enough already.
People get on the backs of companies like Foxconn for corporate housing, but that is essentially what they are proposing that Google employees endure. And why? Because as "non-natives", Google employees somehow become some sort of second class citizen in the minds of these fools. They have as much right to live in those neighborhoods as anybody else.
Whether the remaining options are owned by Google, or a limited set of independent corporations and landlords is of little consequence. The result is that the employee is forced to live closer to work instead of where they please, serving as a constant reminder that their life truly does revolve around their employer.
What he is suggesting is dehumanizing.
In answer to the original query: "Why not live closer to work?"
Because that is not where they fucking want to live. They should be permitted to live anywhere that they have the ability and means to live. De-facto zoning of residential areas as off limits to employees of particular companies is insanity.
If you ask those aboard the Google bus, you'll get various answers, like "I don't mind the commute" or "I love SF, there's so much to do here."
> Why not live in San Francisco?
Tech workers in Mountain View will give you "I'd rather spend time with my family than on the road" or "I don't really want to live in a large city" or any number of totally individual, valid, human reasons.
I don't see any dehumanization here.
Not at all. What makes you think that? The only thing I'm advocating is that if your non-work life is important to you (like it is with most people), eliminating commute time is one obvious way to expand that part of your life.
1) Maybe they got the job at Google half way through their year lease in SF and are relying on the bus to get to work for 6 months until they can move.
2) Maybe they are fresh out of college and still live in their family home in SF and are only using the bus to get to their new job while they save up enough to move closer.
3) Maybe they live in SF because it is equal distance from their job south and their partner's job north or east.
4) Maybe they are in that group of people that thinks jobs come and go but your home is your home. These people don't move closer to their job.
That said, nobody HAS to live in SF. A fair number of people actually commute INTO SF.
Those who live in the city proper have plenty of financial incentives to not live there; I can't imagine that they'd suddenly move en masse to the suburbs just because Google took their double-decker WiFi-enabled buses away.
This is because in a free market, housing is like any other good. Some people happen to be particularly affected when competition drives up the price of a given good. But it is not for individuals to try to mitigate this effect. The most efficient and fair outcome is for the government to redistribute money, and for the poor to spend their money however they feel is best.
This is not libertarianism, it is basic economic theory that is shared by moderates on the left and right.
So Google has no moral obligation, or indeed any good reason, to discourage their workers from living in SF.