Hah! No machine will ever beat a living braething man!
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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. 
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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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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.
This. As a tech worker that worked in SV for many years, I sure as fuck couldn’t afford to live there. I drove 40 miles each direction every day. I moved to the Seattle area and it’s the same shit here. I want to move somewhere bigger but I can’t afford anything close to work and I’m not willing to commute anymore.
The real solution is to have a company and team culture that supports remote workers. Collaboration tools have grown to a level of maturity where locally clustered teams should no longer be a necessity (other than dealing with time zones).
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Yurt welcome.
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Those “mountains” could be completely developed and covered with buildings, just like they are in the city of San Francisco itself. Everybody loves forests, but the idea that the Bay Area is “full” is absurd. Land use is political choices and public policy, not natural law.
The real solution is to build enough housing for everybody 
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It’s a nice thought but there’s only so much housing you can build in an area. If you take away the need to have everybody clustered around HQ just because it’s there, the problem goes away. Telecommuting, remote offices, touchdown spaces, and so on all can contribute to changing this dynamic.
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There was a camper built using a Citroen 2CV van as base, for those French hippies.
For more modern vans there are Camper conversion kits for Citroen Berlingo https://www.simplecampervans.com/shop/citroen-berlingo-camper-van-conversion/
https://www.campermarostica.it/citroen-berlingo-van
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This. Heck I did it for years even at a proper desk 12+ years ago as everything the team supported was in a data center 30 miles or 50 miles from me. My team mates were all over region and we didn’t sit next to each other anyway so it was not any wonder the boss said to everyone GO HOME. Between us being dispersed and there not being any available desk space to sit us all together anyway it was cheaper to have work pay for comcrap internet for us than the facilities fees for an on site desk.
We had a weekly in person staff which was good for all the social interaction and the meeting proper got all the required ethics and other training out of the way for us as well.
Seriously if the servers are in a data center or in ‘the cloud’ you are working remotely already.
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