To chase out low-waged workers, Mountain View is banning overnight RV and van parking

Sure. Turn all the public spaces, parks, forest preserves, and land along the various rivers and creeks wind into modern hobo jungles. Brilliant.

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How will you be able to tell the difference between the hobos and senior developers who just want to live cheap?

I challenge that you will not be able to tell.

Also…

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With the way kids dress in pork pie hats and suspenders listening to old records, it would be impossible to tell.

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Mr. Doctorow, you had an editorial ommission.

“thanks to the sky-high wages commanded by techies, who have gone on to bid up all the real-estate in the region.”

This is simply NOT true. It is convenient to blame tech workers, but they do not set the market rates in the Bay Area. Property owners do. Property owners also, as evidenced in your article, often limit solutions to housing problems in order to defend their rent seeking interests.

There are plenty of examples of tech workers who also live in vans, or in parks, simply because they didn’t pay enough extortionate rent to property owners looking to kill the next golden goose.

In my own case, I was homeless for 6 months when I moved to the Bay, and left there because at no point in my career did I ever say “I look forward to putting in all these hours to learn hard to do stuff so I can hand all of my money over to some greedy dirtbag.”

So please stop framing this as a privileged worker vs unprivileged worker issue. It is a monied class of owners exploiting all workers issue, and has been for a long time in that region.

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You are talking exclusively about Silicon Hills (Austin) which famously has had a housing problem for something like 40 years. What it hasn’t had were laws restricting low income people from using RV parks and campsites. Additionally, the commute from surrounding communities is mush easier than you will find in the bay area. You also seem to be forgetting about the root problem - housing prices. Even when there was a shorttage, you didn’t see 800sq ft homes selling for a million.
The Texas telcom corridor has been home to companies like Texas Instruments, Nortel, and AT&T since the 70’s.

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But Mountain View is where we’re supposed to leave the next RV for Mom to take off for the border in! Hopefully it goes better than last time.

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The terminators are on to your plan.

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Hah! No machine will ever beat a living braething man!

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Thatsaman

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I know California has a reputation for being a liberal bastion, but the best kept secret is that Silicon Valley is a Republican Disneyland.

In case it wasn’t obvious, San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose have a giant bay in between them and they’re surrounded by small mountains, not to mention peppered with tectonic faults, not the least of which is the San Andreas. Basically, if there’s a patch of land that can have a building on it, chances are it already does.

The only way to go is up. And that means tearing down old construction and building taller structures in their place.

However, it’s not that simple.

The people who own property in the area, who bought it cheap in the 1960s and kept in the family since, have seen their $30k flat turn into a $3 million cash cow.

They can slice up their property and rent out suites to the myriad temporary foreign tech workers who have good paying jobs but ne’er a place to live. Slice that flat in half into two separate suites and rent out your converted garage, and you could be raking in $10k a month for practically nothing. You’re renting out to high paid tech workers who will be more than compliant with the law, especially since any trouble could jeopardize their immigration status.

Plus these workers by and large can’t vote. But the property owners can. So every time a city council purposes a solution to the housing problem, it’s filled to the brim with people who’ve made their money for the day (thanks to their tenants) and who want absolutely nothing that could harm their cash cows. That includes RVs, affordable housing, or any workaround to the exorbitant rent prices they can collect. And the property owners are usually the only voices that matter because they’re the only votes in town.

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I lived in an RV park in El Cerrito while I went to grad school in Berkeley. It was the only way I could afford to live in the Bay Area. My neighbors were mostly either retired or worked at Golden Gate Park across the interstate from the RV park.

Just as I was getting ready to graduate, the owner of the park announced he was selling it. I was lucky - I drove my RV back to Northern Virginia and the house I’d been renting out. The retirees and Golden Gate folks were not all so lucky - some are now paying the $5 toll to come to the East Bay from Vallejo to work every day.

The whole Bay Area is out of reach for just about anyone. :frowning:

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people seem to be missing an even more obvious solution.

privatize parking!

auction off the spaces and agree to use the money raised for affordable housing.

capitalism to the rescue!

and when that housing doesn’t get built ( cause it never does ) and living in a van starts to cost as much as living in a more stationary home: start auctioning off the sidewalks.

we can make the rich richer, and make sure everyone else is paying out the nose just like they should.

problem solved.

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cap property taxes and instead tax the f out of high income earners, enact rent control and maybe find some sort of way to legislate resale values, and force companies to find affordable housing for their workers before the position is allocated.

it’ll make everyone angry, but there really isn’t an alternative. market forces don’t function properly when wage disparity is so extreme as it is in the valley.

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30 Minutes away from MV? I hope its not my neighborhood. It still is almost affordable at least. Not that I’m concerned for myself, more so for the others already there. I’ll probably be moving a long way away soon.

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You forgot to include the barbacoa at the end of the street!

More accurate than blaming the techbros, for sure, who are largely uninterested in local politics and uninvested in the community so long as there is a mediocre gastropub nearby. Apartment owners are making an absolute killing in the area and investing some of their hard-earned profits in campaigns to undo rent control.

Worth noting that voting did pass rent control and the city council has put forward safe parking initiatives in Mountain View.

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Oh, cool. We’re going to get to see a Galt’s Gulch experiment unfold in real time!

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I basically came here to make this exact same joke. Enjoy Galt’s Gulch, tech companies.

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Say yurt again. SAY YURT again! And I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker! Say yurt one more time.

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Bummer, but it seems like a small price to pay compared to my Bay Area mortgage.