
'Facebook is taking everything': rising rents drive out Silicon Valley families - NoB4Mouth
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/20/facebook-silicon-valley-housing-crisis-families-pushed-out
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JumpCrisscross
Cupertino, last year, voted in a referendum to maintain a two-story
construction limit. It also voted down multi-family homes. At the end of the
day, Silicon Valley's residents--not Facebook--are telling their lower-income
neighbors "we prefer higher housing prices".

~~~
rayiner
The same folks voting for these laws have always hated poor people and
immigrant families. In the DC suburbs where I grew up, there is tons of coded
racist language around extended-family living situations (because hispanic
immigrants disproportionately tend to have extended family living with them).
They say “we want to preserve the character of the neighborhood” but what they
mean is that they don’t like the idea of living near lower-income families who
might try to afford to live in their neighborhood by having relatives share
the expense. They don’t like apartments for the same reason: apartment
complexes are one of the few ways in which lower-income people can afford to
live in a wealthy school district. (In the snotty DC suburb where I grew up,
people mocked folks who lived in the few apartment complexes in the area. Only
after I grew up did I realize that these were perfectly nice, normal apartment
complexes.)

There is nothing that brings out peoples’ racist character like housing and
schools (check out city-data or the various forums for folks with kids in
D.C.-area public schools).

~~~
jeffreyrogers
It is easy to assume it's about race, but I think it's more a class issue.
They would be doing the same thing if it were poor white people I would
imagine.

~~~
kryogen1c
Took the words right out of my mouth. Assuming this is a race issue is
basically meaningless political grandstanding. It's a class issue, and the
issue is universal. Rich don't want to live around middle class, middle class
don't want to live around the poor, and the poor don't want homeless people
living in their front yard. Humans are simply tribal, and want to be with
members of their tribe.

Landlords want to make money, and as the parent pointed out, low income
housing is clearly not a priority in the area.

~~~
rayiner
People are tribal about race and culture too, not just class. Redlining laws
were aimed at minorities that could afford to live in the white neighborhoods
they were moving into. We've made that illegal now, so people look for other
ways to achieve the same effect.

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mlthoughts2018
I always feel so conflicted about these overly specific human interest takes
on this topic.

\- The rent increases are choices made by landlords, not Facebook.

\- Even as quoted in the article, residents seem to believe that living in a
place for a long time entitles them to continue living in that place longer at
a price they find agreeable. I personally have been priced out of
neighborhoods I loved living in twice in my life, once after living in the
same place for 8 years and feeling a huge sense that it "was my home." It's
sad and upsetting, but nobody is entitled to live in some place just because
their family historically has lived there a long time or they personally have
lived there a long time or theyhave some cultural identity to that place. It's
not a nice part of reality, but that's just how it is. Playing on sympathies
by hearing people say, "but we've lived here 10 years and Facebook doesn't
care" is just an ineffective way to look at it, for all parties.

\- As usual, the group of people most impacted (displaced tenants) is the
group _least capable_ of financially weathering the changing circumstances or
politically lobbying for their preferences to be protected.

\- If I were a Facebook employee, I would feel some measure of resentment
towards the property groups doing this. One reason is because the property
managers know the bad press will be flung at Facebook, not them. Another
reason is that the property managers are essentially looking at the wages paid
by Facebook as something they (the property managers) are entitled to (by
raising rents to adjust for higher salaries). The landlords are not improving
their value-add in any way, just raising prices to capture more of some other
productive person's wages.

\- And, of course as others have pointed out, it's largely driven by lack of
new housing or high-rise housing.

~~~
JMCQ87
No one might be entitled to that, but it's definitely helpful to the social
health of an area if there is policy to ensure that the community stays
somewhat stable.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I'm not sure that I agree unless we come up with some definition of "stable".
Usually a neighborhood is healthy when people want to move into it, meaning it
experiences growth, and it can lead to problems depending on how the growth is
managed. But when a neighborhood stagnates and becomes known as a place that
excludes certain classes of other people or makes them "unwelcome" then the
neighborhood's only hope of survival is to contain a bunch of already wealthy
people who entrench the existing classism or ageism or racism, etc.

When the neighborhood is working class _and_ props up "stability" (in the form
of not letting new people in unless they are 'like us'), it's a recipe for
disaster.

This is an extremely hard problem to solve. I had a good family friend who
lost her job as an elementary school teacher because a neighborhood rapidly
gentrified and people moving in did not have children. Over about a 2 year
period, rents rose and school enrollment dropped severely and the school had
to cut staff.

But I also have a friend whose car was vandalized repeatedly in a neighborhood
of Pittsburgh because he was associated with a tech company there that was
popularly blamed for gentrification. He felt scared living there, which he
should not have to feel no matter what the reason (i.e. he does not belong to
any minority groups in terms of race, etc., but deserves to feel safe at his
own home like anyone else does).

The idea of "stability in a neighborhood" is hard to pin down, because things
can range from outright xenophobia to thoughtless gentrification, and market
economics usually just acts like throwing gas on the fire no matter which end
of the spectrum you're in.

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chrisco255
Virtually all of Silicon Valley (MV, Cupertino, Menlo, etc) feels like a dated
suburb to me, coming from out of state. It seems there is a high incentive to
keep everything static and unchanging, to the point where it's sort of an
uninteresting place to live.

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gnicholas
When I saw the headline, I thought this was going to be about FB employees
bidding crazy high on multimillion dollar houses, which is another (albeit
less urgent) problem in Silicon Valley. I’ve seen single-earner FB families
purchase homes at prices that make my head spin.

I would note that this article mis-identified Jesshill Love, whom they call an
“investor”. He may do some investing, but he is first and foremost a real
estate lawyer at a small-ish law firm. I know this because his wife was a
recruiter at a company I worked at for several years. This mistake doesn’t
undermine the general thrust of the article, but it is a little weird to get
this detail wrong. He’s the only person they identify by name, and a quick
google search would show that he’s a real estate lawyer. Searching “Jesshill
Love investor”, on the other hand, turns up nothing of the sort. Not the sign
of a well-researched article — even if the gist of it is undeniably true.

~~~
tqi
I think it was a choice - calling him an "investor" makes it seem like the
tech industry is also benefiting from the rising rents, not just causing it.

~~~
gnicholas
Completely agree. They painted him as a real estate mogul, instead of a
service provider.

~~~
gnicholas
Talked to a former colleague and apparently he may have a real estate
investment company also. Spoke too soon!

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observer12
With all the blame going around how about California government? Some states
have protections to prevent landlords from pricing out current tenants in
order to raise incoming tenants prices.

For example where I live landlords can only raise rent by 10% every year for
current tenants. The landlords can charge whatever they want for new tenants
but they are limited for existing tenants.

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sasquatchHunter
It's not an easy topic; highly conflictual, emotionally speaking.

The market works this way. Facebook is just paying the employees higher than
some people in the area are earning. What's the matter?

I imagine that for those people this situation is annoying and frustrating, so
they are just speaking out of these emotions. I can understand a newspaper
publishing such a emotionally driven, nonsense Bolshevik article to get views
(mission accomplished).

I hope that this article didn't reach the first page just because it contains
the word "Facebook" and some complaining I guess. "Let's all look down on the
new public enemy" If that's the case, we can do better!

PS: I don't work for Facebook and I don't particularly like the company

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pascalxus
If the bay area isn't willing to build more housing then they shouldn't allow
so many new jobs. It's the imbalance between number of jobs and number of
housing that's the source of all these problems.

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i_am_nomad
One way the tech giants could alleviate this problem is to leave. Build
campuses in the Central Valley, the Midwest, in declining Southern cities.
Rents in the Bay Area will drop, and those companies will save huge amounts of
money on taxes and payroll. At worst, they can use those savings to build
truly utopian communities for their workers in otherwise low-population areas.

~~~
dpc_pw
"you first". It's a competitiveness and coordination problem.

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matt_s
San Francisco and surrounding areas are sort of isolated geographically right?
If rents become so high won't that essentially drive lower income people
completely out of the area?

Maybe over time they move away and then how would lower income jobs be filled?
Will wage hikes be necessary, which would then likely drive costs up?

~~~
jonathanyc
I don’t see how the SF Bay Area is more geographically isolated than other
regions in the US, could you elaborate?

Rent driving lower income people out of the area is possible, but these
articles can paint an exaggerated picture of what’s happening. The areas where
techies are moving in en masse are not everywhere; SF and Mountain View are
neither the entirety nor representative of the SF Bay Area, they’re just what
you’ll see articles on here about most often.

~~~
bittercynic
I live in Silicon Valley, and of the people I know well enough to discuss
these things, every one who doesn't own their home is experiencing some level
of distress about rising housing costs. My anecdata isn't proof that the
article isn't exaggerated, but the article is pretty consistent with my
experience. Just sayin'.

~~~
jonathanyc
I grew up in the East Bay. Techies aren’t the entirety of NorCal’s population,
and the areas populated by techies aren’t the entirety of NorCal.

Rising housing costs are a real problem for the kind of people we might meet
at work or networking (assuming you’re also in the tech industry). But this is
a very biased sample.

As soon as you go a little out of the peninsula there is farmland, for Pete’s
sake.

------
Jobjobbing
I often hear from people working for Google, Facebook that housing near
company offices is more expensive than actually renting a property in the city
centre. How just is that?

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21
In the picture from the article I see what is basically a lot of swamp around
Facebook.

If they were allowed to build let's say 10 20 story buildings there would be
no need to evict current renters.

~~~
i_am_nomad
It’s not swamp, it’s muddy tidal area. It would be very difficult to build on
it, and probably protected by a number of laws and regulations. Plus, it
smells.

~~~
quotemstr
Fine: it's a salt marsh. Still, it's a titanic waste of valuable real estate.
Building there is just an engineering problem, and it won't smell once it's
filled, paved, and turned into buildings.

~~~
rconti
That's what they did in Redwood Shores. Likely the tidal land here is owned by
Cargill. The park just a half mile to the north (Bedwell Bayfront) is built on
a landfill.

I'm sure it's been considered.

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adultSwim
I'm reminded of Starbucks buying massive swaths of land in Ethiopia.

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dxxvi
It's incorrect to blame Facebook for the rising rents. The landlords' greed
must be blamed.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _landlords ' greed must be blamed_

Generally speaking, if a fragmented group ( _e.g._ Silicon Valley land owners)
is behaving in a cohesive way, greed probably isn't to blame. In this case,
it's supply and demand. If rents were capped, we'd instead be talking about
housing queues and quotas.

~~~
TeMPOraL
What is then the proper name for market participants causing problems by doing
what all homo economicus are doing, that is maximizing the amount of value
they can capture instead of leaving some money on the table for others to
take? Because I think this is what is meant when someone accuses of greed a
large group of people.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Human nature? Emergent behaviour? Natural consequence of the region's housing
policies?

Calling someone "greedy" works when it can shame them into submission. (For
example, shaming a drug company's executives for dramatically raising a
patented drug's price.) It doesn't work when the blame can be shared away.

The other difference between demand driving prices versus sellers "greedily"
increasing them is the risk of shortages. If the drugmaker from my prior
example reduces prices, it probably won't cause a shortage. Capping housing
prices in the Bay Area, on the other hand, would result in queues and quotas.

Calling the Bay Area's landowners "greedy" isn't only ineffective, it's also
inaccurate. If someone bought a house recently, they probably need to charge a
high rent to cover their mortgage and property taxes.

~~~
TACIXAT
The people preventing new construction are greedy. They are dictating what
others can and can't do with their land in order to protect their own
interests. They get million dollar home values and everyone else is stuck with
$3000+/mo rents.

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fullshark
I don’t blame the tech giants for this but I’d like to see more done by them
about the families living in RVs near their campuses, just from a community
perspective.

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deadcast
Dang, I thought farcebook was supposed to bring communities/world together.
Haha yeah.... /s

