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Comment by bonn1 | Hacker News Reader

> City Fears Being Overrun

What does the city exactly fear?

From the sounds of the article, they fear that their citizens will control the government. I mean, I don't live in Silicon Valley, I don't work for a west coast tech company, I have no stake in the game here. But the SF cities really need to figure out what they want. If you want to relieve traffic, you need to get people closer to where they work. If you don't want people working there, you shouldn't have given Google permits to build there.

A "Google voting bloc" is just a codeword for "people who live and work here". Trying to keep people out of your city because you don't like their politics or the company they work for reeks of discrimination.

That's an unfair characterization. When it comes to Mountain View, there are three sets of people being discussed in the article: former council members, new council members, and the general public.

The new council members (e.g. Lenny Siegel) are _all_ in favor of adding new housing near Google. The City Council is now 6-1 in favor of building new housing, whereas it was 4-3 against prior to the 2014 election. The person who was afraid of a "Google voting bloc", Jac Siegel, is a former council member is no longer on the council and no longer represents the views of the council or the citizens.

As for the people, while there are a certain set of long-time Mountain View residents who don't like change, most seem to accept that change is inevitable (which is why we now have a 6-1 majority in favor of new housing).

(Long-time Mountain View resident, voter and homeowner here, FYI).

I have known enough software development professionals to believe that we will never be a credible threat to any local government anywhere, right up until the point where 90% of local government jobs are obsoleted by computer automation, at which time it will be far too late to do anything about it.

Right now, I can't be arsed to even read the minutes from the meetings of my city council. I would much rather spend that time keeping my technical skills current. Mountain View politics will, like most local governments, still largely be controlled by smallpond-bigfish, loud activists, and retirees, unless it becomes a noticeable problem that requires fixing.

The one thing you do not want to do in a community of technically-minded people is to be categorized as a problem.

Denying building permits for the 5000+ units of housing that will be required--that's a problem. Not building schools, crime and fire protection, utility corridors, and roads to service that housing--that's a problem. Not building commuter infrastructure for the employees who can't live in town because you won't let them--that's a problem.

There are plenty of communities outside of the silicon valley area who would kill--literally commit multiple murders--to get Google to relocate headquarters there, while also offering zero local taxes on the business for a decade or more. Those communities would also complain loudly about all the young people coming in with no investment or engagement with the existing residents. But then they would float some bonds, up the mill rate, build like crazy, and immediately start pitching to other technology-intensive businesses. Money may not solve all the problems, but it is one heck of an analgesic for the ones that it can't solve.

Just cash the check, Mountain View. Cash the check and get to work.

That was my first thought as well, and my first answer to the question of "What do they fear exactly?" was "Democracy".

I find it equally preposterous that the mass of Google employees operate as some sort of a hive-mind too, abandoning their own personal politics in favor of their employer's, but at the same time, would be foolish not to acknowledge that Google employees are likely going to favor Google-centric endeavors like Google Fiber, self-driving cars and that sort of thing at polling stations.

They have figured out what they want. Unfortunately, that's turned out to be getting all the money from tech employment while not letting the tech employees have any say.

Really? And your insight is based on what? MV isn't exactly Chicago or some other large city with a problem of corruption ( yet )

This is pretty much how the politics have played all over the Bay. Non-tech residents are happy to have the tax revenue of tech workers, but don't want to change anything to meet the wants or needs of tech workers. SF is the clearest example.

Most of the non-tech workers see the only "benefit" of tech workers as higher rents and higher cost of living. Your average worker at Target isn't getting paid a lot.

Sure the business owners and landowners are loving it - but those are the minority. In MV, even Googlers are showing up at housing meetings complaining about the high rent.

This is going to sound callous and compassion-free.

The average worker at Target is benefiting by continuing to get paid at all. They're also benefiting from the continued level of funding to city services from the tax revenue of tech.

The tech industry is one of the big reasons that SF didn't suffer economically as badly as many other big cities did.

> This is going to sound callous and compassion-free.

A good sign that you should check what comes next. Because it probably is callous.

> The average worker at Target is benefiting by continuing to get paid at all. They're also benefiting from the continued level of funding to city services from the tax revenue of tech.

Yeap, you are right: callous.

> The tech industry is one of the big reasons that SF didn't suffer economically as badly as many other big cities did.

One little problem with the hypothesis: non-tech workers have stagnant wages. So non-tech workers would have been better off with the tech industry shrinking so that housing prices would drop ( or at least flatten out ).

From what the article says, the city fears losing control over its local government because Google employees would outnumber the rest of the voting citizenship. They seem to want to handle this addition of houses and infrastructure slowly, but if Google employees have a majority in the vote for local issues, they could move ahead as fast as Google wants, since it's in their best interest to keep their employer growing.

Good. Most of the peninsula is currently held in the grip of NIMBYs who hate trains, hate dense housing, and love freeways and environmentally damaging sprawl. Part of the reason SF costs so damn much is because it's so hard to have an urban lifestyle anywhere but those 49 square miles (and Berkeley and Oakland, which I quite like)

There is a reason to hate "trains" when it's fucking Caltrain with at-grade crossings and retarded federal rules about fucking horns all night long. Half the fucking Peninsula is unusable for sleeping as it is.

If Palo Alto/etc would get off their asses and support an economically feasible grade separation plan this could be fixed in under a decade.

Oh you mean the horns that this mother ignored? http://www.ktvu.com/story/28181718/caltrain-service-shut-dow...

The horns are used to try to get people to not get killed.

Perhaps people who are driving could consider not driving around the railroad gate (which was working when the idiot in that article decided to commit suicide).

There are remarkably few good ways out for humans in our society, so this kind of spectacle is often what they end up resorting to.

There is no indication that this mother intended to commit suicide.

I actually was thinking of CAHSR, but then again the streets are at-grade and nobody seems to mind those. I do sympathize about the horns, though.

I agree. The duality of the "Let's preserve surburbia" while still wanting low rental/mortgages is a little staggering.

If you don't up the supply, the demand is just going to keep getting more intense.

Yes, Google employees have never held different views than their employer </s>

Basically, they are afraid the majority of the people they represent may actually make their voice heard in government.

What's next, complaining that if we build too much senior living, the old people might vote for what they want?

You're assuming that a lot of Google's employees live in Mountain View, and that "a lot" is potentially a political vote majority. I'm not convinced it's a valid fear, if what that councilman said is a generally held sentiment. I've only lived in the bay area a few years, but it seems to me people commute quite a lot, and it's not unheard of for San Jose residents to work in S.F. or any point between, in the east bay, etc.

Even so, the other fear, which I distill to a sentiment of fear that Mountain View will become a city that is more business and less residence/public space, is one that has more merit.

Commuting to the Googleplex from Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and large parts of San Jose isn't that far.

10% of Mountain View residents are Googlers.

This is a good thing. Maybe if there is a google voting block, they can build high density housing, and extend BART into San Mateo County and make BART ring the bay.

This is true of any small town near a giant corporate campus. Look at Fayetteville AK and WalMart - the old town is a few broken-down houses and shops, next to rows of 1500-person condo units that march across the corn fields like dominoes.

What to do about it? Sell out, move I guess. Google wants your land after all.

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