A Google Gentrification Fight That Doesn’t Involve San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

A Google Gentrification Fight That Doesn’t Involve San Francisco

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41 pointssinemetu1161 comments

Boulder was like this when I was in college there, well before Google existed. They always capped growth at a ridiculously low percentage because of all the NIMBY behavior.

Housing in the surrounding suburbs of Denver would easily be less than 1/4 the price. Most people who worked in Boulder commuted from a nearby suburb even back then. Thankfully it was the only the city in the area to pick up on NIMBYism, unlike the Bay Area.

I was thinking the same thing. Boulder is about as gentrified as it gets for Colorado - median home prices are over $500k. (http://www.zillow.com/boulder-co/home-values/)

But how do you know that Boulder real estate won't get more expensive if Google moves in? Seems like they'd be adding at least a couple percentage points to the higher income working population, which would have that effect.

Let's say they say No, and Google moves a town over. What happens then?

Google moving a town over would be the same as choosing a town like Longmont or Broomfield. Which is likely to be just fine, and provides just as many jobs for graduates in the area, without getting mired in Boulder politics.

That's exactly what Sun and every other big tech company did in the 1990s when they had a footprint in Colorado.

Being the Devil's advocate - does it still push up Boulder's home prices?

And also, for people who purport to care about urban sprawl, is pushing things farther out and increasing commutes a good answer?

The only way to decrease sprawl would be to increase density, and frankly few Coloradoans would go for that. Few cities outside of Denver have tall buildings because people don't like their mountain views obstructed. And public transportation is pretty limited. Many people live in Colorado to enjoy the outdoors, and to do so, you need your own transportation. Once you have your own transportation, there's very little incentive to take a bus or train on a regular basis.

Ok, but Boulder is supposed to be fairly liberal, environmentally conscious and so on. They seem a bit out of touch with reality: they don't want to increase housing stock, but they don't want higher prices either.

Highly unlikely. Boulder's incentive is also to keep the prices reasonable so that there is enough affordable student housing for the 31,000 students that live in the town. Students make up 30% of the population of the entire town. The student population doesn't care much for things like public school and property taxes that tend to drive housing prices up or down. For them, it's purely about cheap rent, good access to the bus system, and walkability.

Brad Feld wrote a pretty scathing response to this piece, and as someone who lived in the Denver / Boulder area growing up, I have to agree with him.

http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/12/endless-struggle-boulde...

might the racial make up of googles staff have something to do with it?

Nice post. But I left this as a comment:

I'm perplexed that in the midst of a piece about rising housing prices, no one mentions housing supply. The tools necessary to increase housing supply in the face of rising demand have been available since the early 1900s—as discussed extensively here, in The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO)—and yet this endless series of articles doesn't mention the obvious.

The solution to rising prices is to increase the supply of the good in question. Yet reporters rarely seem to mention this, and they treat rising housing prices as some kind of law of nature.

The strange thing is that the same things that people use to fight rent increases (rent control, etc) wind up creating perverse incentives that reduce the quality and quantity of the housing stock. If you want cheap rent, encourage people to build houses.

Why do they always locate in places that have these screwed-up housing markets. There are many, many urban centres in North America with ample university grads pouring out of local institutions, a plethora of amenities, and cheap housing. Any former-industrial city fits the template just fine and would be ecstatic to have a gentrification "problem".

Google's looking to attract top talent, talent is looking for "Quality of Life" and those driving factors correlate strongly with said "screwed-up housing markets"

arguably this was the bay area 30 years ago when all of this started, both SV and the NIMBY regime

Why do they always locate in places that have these screwed-up housing markets.

Large corporations don't care about housing market issues, and the prestige of locating in a brand-name city is worth the (slightly) higher salaries that they have to pay.

That said, I've heard good things about Boulder, and it seems like an excellent place to live, but it's not exactly a brand-name city (and I sure as hell can't see why it would be so expensive to live in a place that's not land-constrained like Manhattan.) It's not Manhattan or DC or Boston or Chicago. It's not even San Francisco (in terms of brand-name; I am sure it's a better place to live than SF).

It's land constrained on the west by the mountains. The farther east you go, the cheaper the housing is.

Boulder has always been quite expensive because of the abundance of nature that it basks in. This might add to high real estate prices, but certainly would not be the root cause of it.

It's actually traditionally been quite an educated and engineering-focused city, so it's really nothing other than NIMBYism for current residents to oppose this. Does it really matter if some of the new residents are software rather than petroleum engineers?

More of the "I'm in; close the gate!" mentality.

"People who arrived after me are ruining Boulder!"

What a luxury these people have to complain and be worried about high income jobs coming to their town. The town I live in would fall all over itself to have Google build a campus here.

Brad Feld commented on this article here: http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/12/endless-struggle-boulde...

Anyone who describes Boulder as undergoing gentrification has clearly never been here. Upper class whites have been pushing out middle class whites for 15 years now. Comparing this to the situation in SF seems irrelevant.

Edit: I've split time between Boulder and SF for the past few years and have experienced both.

While cost in certainly an interesting -and perhaps dire- discussion, I'm equally curious about what this will do to the work environment in Boulder.

A have a good deal of my friends in tech here in Boulder, many of who work for big names such at Twitter and Google. However, nearly all of them agree- they wouldn't work at those places if they had to work Silicon Valley Hours.

Boulder has long had a culture of not working 80 hours weeks like the Valley. But if Google massively increases their presence in Boulder, I wonder if that will change the normal work habits here? Or perhaps they will lose the workers that refuse to prioritize work over lifestyle?

I really don't know which way that will go, although I personally hope the latter.

I would like to think that 1100 people isn't enough of a critical mass for other companies in Boulder to start "requesting" the devotion of 80 hour weeks. As long as it's only one(Google) then employees who move to Google Boulder with the hopes of a non-Silicon Valley lifestyle can find hopefully equally gainful employees at one of the other companies.

If the general world culture here were to become more similar to that of the Valley then I'd leave. Part of the reason I live in Boulder is because of the lifestyle perks (being able to go skiing in 90 minutes). As soon as I don't have time to enjoy that there's much less reason to stay.

Googlers don't work 80-hour weeks. At least, not in New York. You can pull 40 and you'll be fine; 50 if you're going for promotion. That may be an artifact of everyone willing to work insane hours going to hedge funds.

It's unlikely because most people move to Colorado to enjoy the outdoors. If you're working 80 hours a week, good luck enjoying the mountain biking, hiking, snowboarding, etc that Colorado has to offer.

It never changed the culture in the 90s when Sun, IBM, and Qualcomm all opened offices in the area. And it's unlikely to change now.

However, the big downside is that if/when the tech sector has a crash, the Colorado offices are some of the most affected because it's tough for them to match the output of the Bay Area HQ.

The early 2000s were really rough on the area and many people left because of all the layoffs. I was living in Denver until 2003 when my company J.D. Edwards got acquired by Oracle (after our stock took a beating) and they reduced the workforce by around 70% through layoffs and attrition.

Interesting; I'm considering moving to that area. Sad to see this kind of thing, especially considering that Boulder has plenty of room both vertically, and to the east, in which to add housing stock so as to lower prices.

No, it doesn't. Much of the area to the east is protected under open-space laws. Also, there have been limits imposed on the vertical height of buildings intended to control the atmosphere of the town.

What's more important, the atmosphere of the town, or the affordability of the town?

I imagine that if you live and own property there, the atmosphere is more important. Everyone likes it when their property values rise.

Nope, not when property taxes are tied to property values.

If you intend to stay where you are for the long term, you want your property value to stay exactly where it is. If your valuation rises, you might be forced to move by taxes. If it drops, you lose services and the place starts to get grubby.

I don't know how property taxation works in Colorado. I do know that the quirks of property taxation in California have contributed greatly to gentrification in the Bay.

> If your valuation rises, you might be forced to move by taxes. If it drops, you lose services and the place starts to get grubby.

Or, if you live in SF, Seattle or Portland, your taxes go up but you still get poor quality services and everything is still grubby.

Not SF. In California, property isn't re-assessed like it is most places.

I beg to differ. I get re-assessed every year.

It's reassessed, but the increase is capped.

This is true in Virginia. Property values are reassessed annually and taxes are pegged to value. If I knew for sure that I'd retire elsewhere, I'd love for values to skyrocket. But, more than likely, I'll stay in the area, so vales going up doesn't do me much good.

>If you intend to stay where you are for the long term, you want your property value to stay exactly where it is. If your valuation rises, you might be forced to move by taxes.

Hail the direct democracy of CA in general and Prop 13 in particular!

Unless the marginal property tax rate is over 100%, It's almost always going to be worthwhile for the property value to go up. At the very worst you could borrow against the extra equity, pay off the tax, and recoup when you do finally sell. Or die.

Think for a moment about the justice of a tax that requires someone to secure a loan in order to pay it.

In the case of property taxes, that's a strong hint that your property is badly underutilized. That isn't an injustice.

What YokoZar was describing wasn't that, though. YokoZar was describing a way to turn a profit on increasing property values.

Nope, not when property taxes are tied to property values.

NIMBY fascists whine about property taxes because they want things both ways (see: Prop 13). That said, they usually benefit when property prices go up. Let's say that you bought a $300k house and it went up to $500k, and that your property tax rate is 1.25% (that's fairly high for the US). You're up $200k in home equity, but paying $2500 more annually in taxes. Even though interest rates are low now, you can get 2% on a 5-year CD, and possibly much higher rates in bonds or stocks. So, you come out ahead.

Obviously, NIMBYs don't like to publicize the fact that they're actually making bank, because people would hate them more than they already do.

A valuation drop, on the other hand, is unambiguously painful for an owner. Many of the foreclosures in 2008-10 came from people realizing that they owed more on a house than the thing was worth, so they walked away.

Unfortunately, the upper class of the town think the former.

I know a prominent member of the local government personally, and we've discussed this problem at some length. The fundamental trouble- and hypocrisy IMO- is that many of the people in the town bitch and moan when prices go up and interesting local businesses/artists/features have to leave. But these same people refuse to allow greater density and constantly try to also push the students out.

I'm fine with Google moving in to town if we can get smaller, more affordable units in greater number. However, due to the planning decisions being pushed by various groups, there aren't any studio sized apartments being allow to develop in the city, and the affordable neighborhoods are often 'historic', turning into student ghettos.

Most of my friends are high payed tech folk and don't have trouble with rent. But many others, like myself, are designers, photographers, writers and so forth. We don't have the money to rent a 2 bedroom apartment for ourselves, or buy a condo to sublet. The only other option at this point is to live with 3-5 roommates in a house, for 600+ a month.

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have an reasonable, clean, modern 1 bedroom studio like I had in Copenhagen. But that just doesn't exist in Boulder, and most attempts to make such things are blocked.

In the end, I think Boulder could address the housing and cultural concerns while still preserving the Open Space around the town. But we'll HAVE to accept greater density, better transit (which needs density) and the fact that sometimes in a city you'll see things you dislike. Without change on these fronts, I suspect we'll quickly go the unfortunate way of Silicon Valley...

I remember living in Boulder (now in SF) in the late 80's. They had laws banning more than 2 unrelated people living together - making roommates kind of impossible.

Affordability is possibly a key component of atmosphere, so I'm not sure you can answer one way or the other.

If a place to too affordable, it likely suffers from major issues that make it undesirable (lack of employment, pollution, etc).

But, assuming you value some level of diversity, a certain level of affordability is required to maintain that diversity.

This is my neighborhood:

http://goo.gl/maps/uXydu

It's walkable and affordable because it makes decent use of vertical space.

Despite these issues it's a wonderful place to live. I'm happy to answer any questions about the area as you make your decision to move here or not.

I'm surprised nobody just puts together a new little tech town on the front range where there isn't anything, say just south of Pueblo or north of Ft. Collins. Plenty of foothills to go around.

Why would anybody want to live there.

The mountains to the west, mostly.

Gentrification tends to make places shiny, boring and dead. Just look at neighborhoods in London and NYC.

Random groups of workers of moving-up industries rarely make a good cultural impact.

Given that people have the right to live wherever they want, what do you suggest?

It depends on the person. I'd only go to a tech hub for a bucketload of money and comfy job. Why would I want to waste my best years stuck in a random job in a boring place with a ratio m/f 2/1 or worse?

Change the tax code to a "Colonizer's Locked In Rate" so that people who originally started or live in a town pay the same property tax as long as they stay in that town / city / zip code / within _ mile radius of their original home.

● That way original residents are not forced out.

● Low income residents can afford to stay without further special subsidies. Tax payers don't have to pay for low income housing.

● Residents will have the incentive to improve their communities without fear of it raising their taxes.

They're not afraid of taxes, they're afraid of rents. Locking property tax rates is exactly what California does and it only makes housing supply worse by giving a very strong incentive for incumbents not to leave.

I stand corrected. What's a realistic solution then? Acceptance that times change, cities change and nothing is permanent and any attempt to create permanency almost always comes with some kind of consequence?

Yes. Times change, communities change and if a middle class area or even a slum becomes a wealthy neighborhood that's not such a bad thing.

That is a horrible idea. California tried it ("Prop 13") and it made the NIMBY/takers-vs.-makers problem even worse.

Property tax increases are minor compared to asset appreciation. If your house goes up from $300k to $500k and your property tax rate is a typical 1.25% per year, then you made $200k for doing absolutely nothing, but you're paying $2500 per year for it. If you don't like it, sell your house and make a clean $200k (ok, slightly less due to transaction costs) and downsize or move.

What I would support is a law that allows retirees of low income to keep a locked-in property value, on the provision that the house must be offered for sale at that price upon the owner's death (and can't be handed down, though next of kin may bid on it). If there's competitive bidding, the government takes the excess. This would prevent low-income old people from being pushed out by property taxes; everyone else can either move or pay the higher taxes.

Real estate has always cost more in Boulder than neighboring towns. There's a height restriction on building, and the local government (I've forgotten if it was the county or city) bought a lot of open space from private landowners.

Supply and demand...people want to live in Boulder because it's nice because there is open space. Google builds in places where people want to live.

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