
Living In A Van in Google's Backyard - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-21/silicon-valley-s-shame-living-in-a-van-in-google-s-backyard
======
hasmolo
This is a very interesting thing to see here as a resident. I bike a lot and
am amazed by all of the little signs and regulations neighborhoods around here
have posted clearly aimed at these van dwellers. A lot of places have limits
on vehicle heights for parking long term, and I see signs that say 'no
vehicles over 7ft tall overnight' among other things. One of my coworkers who
owns a home here bought his own RV, and he has to deal with cops knocking on
it's door and trying to tow it even though it's in front of a home he owns.

For what it's worth, after 5 years the wife and I have decided to leave the
area. Even though we are able to save 100% of one of our incomes, there
doesn't feel like there will be a time when purchasing makes any sense to us.
If we put down 300K, we are still looking at a roughly 150% higher monthly
mortgage payment than rent for a house that needs work. And looking at the
interest paid over the life of the loan is dizzying, almost a million in
interest.

------
hedora
This article fails to mention that Mountain View has been blocking improved
transit to service the office parks in the area for at least a decade.

Starting a private bus service wasn’t Google’s “plan A”. Their preferred
approach was to get the city to set up adequate service between the Mountain
View train station and surrounding office parks.

Although a bit of new housing is finally going in, it’s clearly too little and
too late.

Anyway, needing to ban shanty towns usually means you suck at being mayor (at
least in city simulators). Maybe they’ll take the housing and transit
shortages more seriously moving forward.

~~~
maxmax
If only the company that would benefit from this subsidy would contribute in
some way...

~~~
mav3rick
Google has done a lot for Mountain View.

~~~
cityzen
Like?

~~~
craftinator
Autonomous self driving surveillance cars roaming the streets?

------
peter_d_sherman
"Every increase in the real wealth of the society, every increase in the
quantity of useful labour employed within it, tends indirectly to raise the
real rent of land."

-Adam Smith, "The Wealth Of Nations"

Book I, XI. Of the Rent of Land, Conclusion

[https://www.bartleby.com/10/111.html](https://www.bartleby.com/10/111.html)

~~~
idlewords
"We will pretend to be a suburb in 1957 forever"

—Mountain View and Palo Alto zoning board

~~~
Dirlewanger
Yup. As much as I love federalism here in the US, the housing crisis is
directly caused by local NIMBY governments who refuse to accommodate housing
needs. The only way I see this changing in the US (since it's afflicting every
growing city), is some sort of federal subsidy for dense housing.

~~~
conanbatt
If the federal government adopted California housing policy it would spread
the disease everyone.

At least this way california loses residents to other states that dont have
such regressive policies. What will change this in california is an economic
crisis.

------
PixyMisa
If only there were some way for people to work together without having to be
in the same physical location.

Guess it will never happen. Oh well.

~~~
malms
If only people would move to other places when there's no space somewhere. Oh
well.

~~~
mochomocha
No space? Yet I'm driving on 280 every morning and all I see are green fields.
Yet 75% of San Francisco land has zoning rules that prevent buildings of more
than 2 stories. What you really meant is: _no space for you, I got mine_

~~~
thorwasdfasdf
This.

580 Westbound is jam packed to a slow crawl, on a 7 lane highway! With people
making commutes 100 miles every day! You would think there'd be sky scrapers
everywhere, at least close to the highways. Nope. NOt a single building or
house for miles and miles, nothing but green and yellow slopes of nothingness.
It's such a waste.

With commute distances x10 more than normal and most global C02 coming from
commuting, I can't even imagine how terrible this is for the environment.

~~~
mochomocha
Oh but don't worry, Cali boomers think about the environment: they're forcing
all new constructions (not their own properties, mind you) to have solar
panels on their roof - another thinly disguised NIMBY policy to make
construction harder and more expensive, under the pretense of helping the
environment... When increased density would be a much more efficient solution
to this problem too.

------
chelmzy
I understand the people that have been living there since before the boom. But
what about the security guard and other such people that moved there knowing
they would need to live in a van? There's 100s of cities to choose from so its
not necessary to put yourself through that.

~~~
erentz
Moving away from your home where all your friends and family and network are
is actually an incredibly difficult thing to do. These things are very
valuable to a lot of people.

~~~
mav3rick
But they knew the consequences ? The guard says she wants to save more and
doesn't want to live in an apartment for that reason.

------
jedberg
A big part of this is prop 13 and tax policy. My anecdote is not unique: My
mom inherited my grandfather's condo when he died. Because of Prop 13 (and
it's follow ups) she gets to keep his original tax rate from his original
home, which was set in _1978_. She makes about $500/mo profit on the condo
only because her tax rate is about $500 less per month than if it were
purchased new. If we didn't have Prop 13, it wouldn't make a ton of sense to
keep that condo, and instead we would probably sell it.

And for a lot of people, they're making a whole lot more on that arbitrage.

On my street is my house and three others that are all basically the same (4
bedroom, 3 bath, about 1750sq ft, give or take). My neighbor, who has been
here for 40+ years, pays X in property taxes, my other neighbor pays 2X, I pay
10X and the last house pays 20X. All of our houses would sell for about the
same amount. So basically the city is starved of resources for transit and
subsidized housing. Things that would actually make this place affordable for
people who make less than $150,000 a year.

And then to make matters worse, a local developer is trying to tear down our
old mall and build "more housing" on it, but if you look closely, what they're
really building is a huge office park with the bare minimum of housing to call
it a housing project. They want to put in space for 15,000 workers and 4,000
people to live. That will not solve any housing problems. The city is trying
to stop them, but they are using the CA state law that was supposed to fix
this problem to get around the city. But the law was so poorly written that
they will be able to create a housing deficit using a housing bill!

We need to get rid of Prop 13 and figure out a better way to stop the elderly
from being priced out of their homes (which was the original purpose) and we
need to move to a Japanese zoning model, where someone could buy (or tear down
their own) single family home and replace it with a fourplex. Yeah, my
neighborhood would loose it's "character" if a couple of these houses were
replaced with quads, but at least some servers and maids and city employees
and construction workers and teachers and .... could live here.

~~~
pcwalton
> And then to make matters worse, a local developer is trying to tear down our
> old mall and build "more housing" on it, but if you look closely, what
> they're really building is a huge office park with the bare minimum of
> housing to call it a housing project. They want to put in space for 15,000
> workers and 4,000 people to live. That will not solve any housing problems.

A lot of the Vallco project will be affordable housing, which was necessary to
qualify for SB 35, funded via the office space. Adding to the market-rate
housing deficit is a problem, but subsidized affordable housing is so
desperately needed, and funding for it is so scarce, that I think Vallco is a
win on balance.

~~~
jedberg
> A lot of the Vallco project will be affordable housing

This is not true. The majority is market rate, with the bare minimum of
affordable housing to just meet SB35 (and they played games with the SB35
calculation by including parking lots in the "housing" square footage, which
the City Attorney pointed out and then was fired for "unknown reasons" right
after). The developer is super shady and is using legal tricks to make
themselves tons of money at the expense of the community. They don't care one
iota about affordable housing.

There are plenty of other ways for them to be both profitable and provide
below market housing without building millions of square feet of office space.

~~~
pcwalton
> The developer is super shady and is using legal tricks to make themselves
> tons of money at the expense of the community.

The developer bent over backwards to please the "community" only to see Better
Cupertino torpedo the whole process out of rage at having to live by poorer
neighbors. SB 35 is precisely the "legal trick" that was needed to force bad
actors like Cupertino to do their part.

> There are plenty of other ways for them to be both profitable and provide
> below market housing without building millions of square feet of office
> space.

Cross-subsidy of affordable housing with office space is how affordable
housing gets built. There is almost no funding available. Look at how long it
took to get a paltry 211 units of affordable housing built in Oakland:
[https://twitter.com/LibbySchaaf/status/1128872869771980800?s...](https://twitter.com/LibbySchaaf/status/1128872869771980800?s=19)

Anyway, Vallco is an embarrassing blight on the South Bay. Virtually anything
would be better than the decaying mall that's there today.

~~~
jedberg
> The developer bent over backwards to please the "community"

I was part of those meetings. Not a single thing the residents asked for was
offered in their plans.

Furthermore, if you look at their track record, it's terrible. They don't
deliver on anything they promise. Did you know that there was supposed to be a
park at Main Street? They somehow got the City Council to approve a variance
after the project went forward (and coincidentally raised a bunch of money for
one of the city council members). I suspect they would do the same with that
park roof they suggested, which every engineer you ask will tell you is most
likely impossible to build.

The crux of the issue here is that there was some major corruption between the
city council and the developer, which seems to have been solved with the most
recent election, and now someone needs to clean up the mess.

> Cross-subsidy of affordable housing with office space is how affordable
> housing gets built. There is almost no funding available.

That's fine, but how about building less office than housing, and then put in
an amount of affordable housing commensurate with the income from the offices?
Or how about no office at all, and instead put an extra tax on the retail
businesses to pay for affordable housing? There are lots of other options
besides building a mega office park that would create a housing deficit. That
solves nothing.

> Anyway, Vallco is an embarrassing blight on the South Bay. Virtually
> anything would be better than the decaying mall that's there today.

It's only decaying because the developer wouldn't renew the leases of the
people who were in there, so they could push the "abandoned" narrative. It
sucked for the business owners who were forced out. Yeah, a lot of them were
behind on rent, but that was because the developer put no resources into the
mall. They manufactured its accelerated demise for their narrative.

So yeah, I agree, it's a blight now, but a blight the very same developers
brought upon us.

Oh, and did I mention those developers break city ordinances all the time with
seemingly no consequence? They were doing construction at 3am on Sunday at one
point. How do I know? They banged so hard my kid was scared awake. I have
video of them bulldozing at 3am on a Sunday. I called to police, who said they
couldn't even identify if they had a permit. But they were at it again the
next weekend!

~~~
pcwalton
> I was part of those meetings. Not a single thing the residents asked for was
> offered in their plans.

Because Better Cupertino refused to work with the developer in any way. It is
impossible to negotiate with a group that is operating in bad faith;
conspiracy theories and accusations of "corruption" are a hallmark of bad
faith debate. The goal was simply a wish to prevent any housing whatsoever
from being developed. There is inconsistency in your very post about whether
you want affordable housing (which you have not proposed a funding mechanism
for) or retail on the site. Steven Scharf made his intentions very clear when
he made a disgusting joke about building a wall around Cupertino and making
San Jose pay for it.

There isn't anything more I can say on the topic of Vallco that hasn't been
already written by others. Suffice it to say that that the NIMBYism of
exclusive suburbs like Cupertino is not a good look to ordinary Californians,
which is why SB 50 for example polls so overwhelmingly well.

~~~
jedberg
I'm the least NIMBY person you will find. I think they should build 30 story
towers of housing on that property and make 1/2 of it affordable.

I'm not at all against housing on that site. I think it's critical that we put
housing there.

I'm against _that developer_ putting _offices_ on the site that would create a
housing deficit.

> There is inconsistency in your very post about whether you want affordable
> housing (which you have not proposed a funding mechanism for) or retail on
> the site

I proposed a tax on the retail to fund the affordable housing.

> which is why SB 50 for example polls so overwhelmingly well.

I'm a huge supporter of SB 50.

------
ElectronShak
> “You guys need to take care of it, like ASAP,” he said, lecturing the young
> couple living in the vehicle. “I’m not going to tow it today, but tomorrow
> if I come out here and it’s like this, it’s getting towed!”

As he delivered the ultimatum, a self-driving car rolled past.

~~~
francisofascii
A nice retort would have been, "You guys need to build more affordable
housing, like ASAP".

------
jerkstate
Startup idea: convert traditional multilevel parking lots in urban centers to
RV parks. Run power, water, and sewage to each space. Build a shared
gym/kitchen to charge access to. Even install car elevators to really pack ‘em
in! You could also lobby for enforcement and fines to go up in your local area
to increase your customer base! Not dystopian at all!

~~~
nwsm
I think you just invented apartments, which would need residential zoning,
which is already the problem.

~~~
jerkstate
No, I’m disrupting zoning laws. Paradigm shift!

~~~
blotter_paper
Twist: rather than rent out the spaces, just post the parked RVs on Airbnb!
Can we divide an RV into a duplex? As long as it still has wheels, how big can
an RV get before it's legally an apartment building?

~~~
jerkstate
Hey, how about instead of parking, they’re self-driving and they just drive
themselves around the block all night? I think we just solved the housing
crisis!

~~~
blotter_paper
Needs more blockchain... with Bee Token! Man, this is all coming together.

------
idlewords
There's a huge RV park at San Francisco Airport, too, in a lot near I believe
the United hangar. Some of the vehicles look like they've been there for
decades, and all of them look abandoned. I've often wondered what the story is
there.

~~~
rtkwe
It's a group of LAX employees. It's been a while since I watched this [0] doc
about it or read [1] about it but there's some pilots in that group too iirc.
Some more recent posting about it on a forum seem to indicate they're trying
to just quietly snuff it out by not accepting new 'residents' and will
eventually shut it down.

[0]
[https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000004630021/long-t...](https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000004630021/long-
term-parking.html?src=vidm)

[1] [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jul-20-me-
lax-c...](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jul-20-me-lax-
colony20-story.html)

------
conanbatt
Just remember when talking about this topic that public employees like
Firefighters and policemen make 300k+

[https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=firefig...](https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=firefighter)

~~~
tomjakubowski
Those figures (which include benefits) are like, what a junior software
engineer costs in the bay area. They don't seem outrageous to me.

I've also seen three entries for "Thomas G McKenzie" on the first few pages of
this source.

~~~
conanbatt
> what a junior software engineer costs in the bay area

What. Not even close.

> I've also seen three entries for "Thomas G McKenzie" on the first few pages
> of this source

The incompetence of Transparent California is the incompetence of the state.

------
falcolas
A lot of sentiment here around "housing is the root of all these problems",
but isn't it also the problem of these companies creating offices in
communities that can't support them?

Given there are a lot of places that offices could be built that could support
the employees, I think some of this responsibility lies with the companies who
consciously keep their offices in locations that may cause their employees
(not to mention facilities contractors) to be homeless.

~~~
esoterica
Companies put their offices in expensive cities because that’s where most of
the people who work for them want to live. If Google decided to move their HQ
to rural Kansas tomorrow, most of the company would quit overnight.

~~~
onemoresoop
But why wouldn't they have a smaller branch in Kansas? (maybe not Kansas but
there are a lot of places in the US other than NY and CALI). And smaller
offices all over the US?? It would be cheaper too, employees would maybe
consider moving to a smaller hub where they could actually buy a home, local
economies would benefit as well, etc..

~~~
esoterica
Big companies do have satellite offices all over the place.

------
bayareanative
The bigger problem is the classism, hate and othering used to heap upon and
smear people who can't or don't want to afford fixed housing. So much for
"tolerance" and "liberalism," if many people even remember what these words
meant, because it looks a lot like fascism, judgement and discrimination to
me.

------
docker_up
To all those that say "build more housing" will solve all our problems, I
don't think they've actually been looking at the housing markets.

All of the new housing in the Bay Area is at a premium price. All of it. There
are tens of thousands of condos slated to be built in SF. They are all top of
the end condos. They haven't and they won't dent the prices. Building more
homes will just let more rich people move to the Bay Area and it will sustain
prices.

Supply will increase at a much, much lower rate than demand when it comes to
housing. Unless you literally create ghost cities like in China, you won't get
the effect that you want.

The only way to curb prices is to reduce demand. Force Facebook, Google and
Amazon to build outside of the Bay Area. I guarantee that will be the quickest
way to curb demand and to throttle house prices. Have Google build in Kansas
City instead of San Jose. Have Facebook build in Detroit. There's enough money
to sustain an entire ecosystem and it will help increase house prices in other
areas and dampen demand here.

~~~
tlb
You're mixing up two things. When a lot of new premium housing is built, you
might indeed see the reported "average sales price" go up, since there are
lots of sales of new fancy new houses.

But the price of older housing goes down. Because people who bought a new
premium house, therefore did not buy an older house, which reduces demand for
older houses.

There are lots of nice older (1940-1990) houses in SV that are good to live
in. Before the tech boom they were perfect for middle class families: pleasant
and affordable. They could be affordable again (and they're still pleasant) if
the supply of premium housing were increased enough.

~~~
rtkwe
That depends on somehow not having the extra supply on the high luxury end
being soaked up by foreign investment parking their money in real estate.

~~~
tlb
Supply and demand works there too. There's a finite amount of people with a
finite amount of money they want to invest in US real estate. If you create
enough (by $ value) real estate for them to buy, they can't buy any more.

For a city to have its real estate bought as investments can be troublesome,
but at least it doesn't increase road traffic. So you can have tall, dense
skyscrapers with condos all owned by foreign trusts, without it creating
parking or traffic problems.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Yards_(development)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Yards_\(development\))
seems like an example of this.

If you don't create investable condos, then the foreign money buys single
family homes that some family could otherwise live happily in.

------
douglaswlance
When full self-driving hits, all of these vehicles will go off and recharge
their batteries during the day while people are at work.

~~~
idlewords
So much for the 2-hour window during early afternoon when the 101 is drivable.

~~~
douglaswlance
Automated traffic can drive much, much faster, more densely, and without
stopping.

It will be a net positive.

~~~
atomical
Self driving cars won't arrive for at least another 20 years.

------
ptah
#vanlife

------
VikingCoder
The community can do something:

* Build more housing.

The tech companies can do something:

* Build offices in more places

That's it. That's the whole plan.

~~~
PixyMisa
Local and state regulations have the housing market locked down. That leaves
option B, and I really don't understand why more companies aren't doing that.

~~~
somatic
We humans are remarkably solipsistic creatures. Why not build more elsewhere?
Probably because leadership isn’t feeling the squeeze.

