Average travel time to work for workers 16 years and over not working at home, 2006-2010 [link]:
the buses enable people to live in SF while working 35 miles away.
Yeah, those f**kers where do they get the nerve to go to school, develop skills, get a decent job with a company that by all accounts treats itâs workers fairly well and then live someplace that they enjoy.
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If you make 60000/year you canât afford to own your place?
Yes, because if renting was banned and you could only live in a place if you owned it, things would be so much cheaper. Seriously, just ponder it for a few moments. I am a renter. I am really happy to be a renter. I couldnât afford to live where I live without renting. If I couldnât hand over cash to my landlord each month (who is fabulous, fixes everything right away, and lives downstairs), I would be living out in some wretched one room house out past the 'burbs with a crushing mortgage. Thanks, Iâll pass.
See that dot, passing high over your head? Thatâs the point.
@Dr_Awkward wasnât talking about some magical quality of rental properties vs. owned dwellings. The point is simply that, when given the choice between collecting a smaller amount of money for their real estate and a larger one, most owners will opt for the larger one. Tech workers with higher income can afford to offer more and landlords/house owners know they can find a taker at a higher price point.
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Space? Frankly, I think most cities would welcome the job opportunities and tax revenues that success brings. Sure, the nicer properties in the area will command a higher premium, but the people who actually invested in actually moved to own property in an area will greatly benefit. This is not to say that a glut in available rental units wonât lower the overall price of things. Most cities are actually structured so that people can go expand to the outskirts of civilization at a better value. Frankly, the areas that encourage low and middle income people are the ones that can give space to affordable industrial property. Last I heard, most of California suffers from overpriced housing, and this has been a problem before Google was a thing. Low property taxes and minimal zoning restrictions would help the city grow. Adding the right incentives to the tax code to encourage some low income housing can also prevent displacement. Frankly, thereâs just no inherent reason a bunch of upper-middle income folk living in an area would be bad for it. People who can afford it will want to live in nicer accommodations and thereâs just no reason there should not be nicer accommodations available to those who want to spend the money on it. I mean, as a cross point, what entitles people to demand lower standards of living for others due to their lack of productivity? When I sign a year lease, I donât expect to stay there forever. If I buy a piece of property and the value skyrockets, my only problems would be high property taxes and the terror of making bank.
You missed the point that the alternative is to own your living area instead of renting. Who do you think can drop the half a million it would take to a one room unit in SF, poor people or a Googler? The idea that renting increases the cost to live in an area is silly. If you were to ban landlords in SF tomorrow, the place would be cleared of non-tech folks within a decade.
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So does Googleâs private police force where Google Glass?
I wasnât knocking the people individually, just the practice of enabling a huge workforce to live very far from their work. And in the process, altering (for the worse in my opinion) one of the greatest cities in the world.
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This constant complaining about Google and its amenities has got to stop.
Itâs boring and unseemly.
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Not in San Francisco, alas.
The Median Home Price (sales price, not just asking; as of May, sales prices were running at least 10% over asking prices) for a single-family home in San Francisco is now over $1 million, up 32% over a year ago (vs over $500k for the greater Bay Area as of December, if you prefer to commute).
The California Association of Realtors, based on a $705k median Bay Area price as of November, calculates a minimum qualifying income of $144k. Only 20% of households here qualify (16% in SF). And remember, if youâre putting 20% down (not uncommon for larger mortgages beyond the range served by federally-backed mortgage insurance programs), thatâs $140k cash needed just to get in the door. And youâre competing against individual buyers with non-home-backed corporate-sponsored financing already arranged, not to mention international investment funds floating bonds based on future rental income, who can make highly attractive non-contingent offers.
Iâm not a real estate agent, but as a cohousing community organizer here in the East Bay I have observed an enormous influx of people interested in cooperative community living options, some simply for financial reasons; our cohousing-and-cooperatives/intentional communities MeetUp group just passed 2500 members yesterday.
My primary sources:
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Did the gentrification of the 80âs make SF better or worse? This is that same basic battle being fought all over again. What determines where a person gets to live? Should people who live in Oakland be able to commute to SF to work? People in Seattle and Portland donât want people from CA moving up there because they ruin the character of the community, should they be able to stop you? Where does it stop?
Yeah a company pumping jobs and money into the local economy while paying for the infrastructure and ecologically sound methods of transporting the workforce is horrible evil I tells ya. Fuck Google for bolstering a local economy in a environmental responsible way. We must become fascist and stop these outsiders, smash, kill, destroy. Damn Mexicans, opps I mean niggers, opps I mean jews, oh wait no they are just people with college educations. Hmmm sounds kinda like Pol Pot now that I think about it, damn education fucking things up for the working class.
Again not seeing the problem here. You want affordable housing go to some city hall meetings or run for office and straighten out the myriad stupid local zoning laws that are making costs in the city skyrocket. Smashing windows and blaming the people moving into the area is a path to some really really dark territory. Not sure people see this until you slightly alter the context.
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Binghamton New York could use some tech jobs.
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The fact that those people living there neither own the land on which they live nor have an indefinite or lifetime lease on the land, thatâs what.
Property rights are strongest with the owner. If the market will bear more rent than the owner currently gets, the owner will raise the rent. If the current tenants cannot pay that higher rent, theyâll find their lease not renewed and theyâll be forced to move.
If you want rights to the spot on which you live, you need to own that spot. Otherwise, you may well be asked, then told to vacate that spot, and itâs not the ownerâs fault if you canât find another spot nearby to take up residence in.
I donât get whatâs so hard about this for people to understand. Iâve moved once when a landlord gave us more than three months notice (weâre legally entitled to 30 days) that they were reclaiming the house for the next generation of grandkids that were to go to the nearby college. I moved another time because the very polite landlord had already moved out-of-state and was considering selling, even offering to sell to me, but he might have renewed my lease if Iâd really, really wanted to.
I now own, and between where I own in general and specifically itâs very unlikely that my bit of dirt will ever have a problem with eminent domain or any other government condemnation for a changing purpose, and the neighborhood has enough means that itâs unlikely that anyone would even try, not that thereâs a reason to try. So long as I finish off my mortgage and keep paying my property taxes Iâll be able to live here for the rest of my life.
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No one is protesting anyoneâs right to live wherever they want, weâre protesting a massive corporationâs enabling a huge workforce to live in a place that they donât contribute to in any meaningful way. And no matter how many petty digs you make towards Californians, shuttling an entire workforce 35 miles every day is absolutely not environmentally friendly, no matter how you do it.
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You might want to research the concept of Urban Planning. Its not simply what the market will bear. If we left it to the market, San Francisco would be one big strip mall. Thanks to it, we still have neighborhoods gloriously devoid of chain stores.
And it doesnât matter whether you personally agree with the concept or not, enough people do in San Francisco that its a force here, and its what keeps San Francisco one of the great cities of the world.
And to the people who say we should be thankful for the cash infusion from Google, I think youâre forgetting that San Francisco is a rich city whether Google is here or not. We donât need their cash, especially at the price theyâre asking us to pay for it.
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I remember a post-apocalypse SF piece (Harlan Ellison?) about armoured commuter trains to shuttle the 1% from their gated suburbs through the urban slums to their city centre jobs.
(I thought of it as âpost-apocalypseâ when I read it, but it turns out it it was just the âfutureâ)
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The people of San Francisco have been there for a relatively short time, themselves either transplants or the progeny of fairly recent transplants. The majority of residents canât trace their lineage with the city from before World War II, and for those that can, itâs exceedingly unlikely that they can trace roots to before the 1840s.
The point is that populations are transient, people come and go, and every group laments the changes in âtheirâ area, even though those changes are constantly occurring and just about everything they see as permanent is really only just the temporary state that it was in when their eyes were initially opened to paying attention to it. If San Francisco has been a world class city itâs because itâs dynamic rather than static, and it adapts to the changes in culture and society that are thrust upon it. After all, the Haight and the Castro districts were not always the capitals of drug permissiveness and sexual acceptance that they are today, and I have absolutely no doubt that existing residents of those areas in the fifties through the seventies lamented their changes just as much as you complain about the introduction of a few yuppies into your neck of the woods. If anything they had a whole lot more to be worried about, as both of those activities were illegal when they came to prominence in the neighborhoods, as opposed to the introduction of a few upper-middle-class income earners.
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I am reminded of a friend of mine, when talking about Israel/Palestine, arguing that people have been moved about against their will for time immemorial, so why whine about it. I pointed out that people have also complained about that very thing since time immemorial, as well.
The dynamic here is clear - the carefully preserved city will become home to people who work in Mtn View, and the people who work in the City will have to live in undesirable areas, like (for ex) Mtn View. Many more will have to commute 35 miles than do now.
Then, when all the interesting people have to leave the city, the city will cease to be interesting, and will then, finally, turn into a strip mall - but with luxury goods, like NYC.
Sad. If thereâs a solution, one that preserves great cities and the diversity of population which creates/sustains them, I havenât the wit to see it.
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