It's time to start acknowledging that this is never going to be fixed. SB 827 died when homeowners protested fiercely, and it doesn't look like any proposed replacements are going to get traction either.
People just have too much of their equity tied up in their homes. I hate it, but I can also see where they're coming from: if you had a savings account that accounted for most of your net wealth and was appreciating at double-digits per year, and someone wanted to cut it by a significant percentage, you'd fight them to your last breath too. And there's always going to be a supply of readymade arguments for why this is actually the good, progressive thing to do: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/04/why-should-pr...
You may need to either live with this, or get out of the Bay.
If they permitted their land to be upzoned, the value of it would rise even faster than it already is, so I don't think financial incentives are the crux of the political opposition. Old home owners in the valley don't want anything to change and resent the change that has already happened.
I commuted 90 minutes each way for a year (120 miles round trip) in SoCal. The time spent driving wasn't that bad; I spent that time listening to books on Audible. The problem was everything else that had to give because I was spending that time driving. I couldn't cook dinner or spend much time with friends. It was tough to stay after work or develop friendships with coworkers because we were so geographically separated. I would not want to do this long term.
Now I work from home. I still listen to audiobooks whenever driving which is still amazing.
I find longer commutes more tolerable if it's by mass transit, so long as you know you will have a seat. There are a lot of ways to be productive or enjoy your time, where as with a car, you are pretty much limited to audio. I see where you are coming from with the interpersonal stuff but at least you still have the weekend.
This was why I never got that much value out of being in Silicon Valley beyond my day job. So much of the hot new startup activity was in SF. I lived and worked in the South Bay. While I'd have liked to attend some tech talks in SF, it was not practical for me to leave work early to get there on time, and then figure out how to get back.
European here. After moving I was commuting for about 105 minutes with public transport, about 70 minutes by car. Was using public transport most of the time though, but I couldn't do this more than a few months. There is so much time and money that goes into commuting, it is insane... Going to the doctor/bank/shopping/etc. was always problematic because then I would have to stay in the company late into the night. When you come home you are just tired and want to rest. Pay wasn't even in the near of being good enough to justify that.
Right now I am working from home which (after some months of experience) I enjoy much more. Also got a substantial pay raise when changing jobs and at the same time save money on the commute.
Still glad I was at my old job since it got me into another field of software engineering and I learned a lot. Don't think I would've got my current job without it.
I was between 1 and 1.5 hours for about 18 months once. It wasn't too bad as I only ended up going in maybe half the time between working from home and travel and being able to take the train if I wanted. The fact that I was working in the city for the first time took some edge off too, especially in the summer.
But I wouldn't have wanted to do it long-term. As you say, it's just too big a chunk out of the day.
I live in Milpitas and work in Sunnyvale, commuting the 10 miles to my workplace on the infamous Highway 237. Having done this commute for 34 years, I can track the state of the economy by the time it takes to get home in the afternoon. During the recession, it was a breeze, 20 minute average. Today, even leaving around 3, 30-40 minute commutes are typical. Trying the same commute an hour or two later can add another half hour. I truly feel for people who have those longer commutes beyond Milpitas on 880, 680, and 580. Those are truly nasty.
Depending of where in Milpitas and Sunnyvale there are some nice bike routes. 10 miles isn't a big deal to bike, especially if you go for an e-bike (and with this latter option it should be less than the time it takes to drive and you don't get your anger worked up for being stuck in bumper to bumper traffic).
I realise new buildings are carbon intensive, but does anyone have the knowledge to do a back-of-the-envelope comparison of carbon emissions if these super-commuters were to move in to high-density housing that enabled them to walk or cycle to their jobs.
That presumes they'd want to live in high-density housing, doesn't it? There is high density housing available with shorter commute times already at costs similar to low dessnity housing further out. Granted, it's not zero commute, but I' not sure how much difference that would make.
Some people choose a lifestyle for their families that differs from what might be optimally efficient, for reasons that other's don't prioritize as highly.
In what sense do large high density housing projects sequester carbon? They’re typically made from a lot of steel and concrete, both of which are carbon intensive.
No one will be building high density housing from recycled timber any time soon.
Large housing projects require less material and construction than low density housing. Why? Because low density housing is essentially doing a relatively giant housing project per person, spread over way more physical distance. People have to live somewhere, so if high density housing isn't made then they have to live in energy and resource wasting low-density housing.
That being said, living in high density will always be more energy efficient as less energy is wasted on locomotion for people, less energy is needed to service garbage pickup/disposal, less electricity is needed for heating/cooling, less material to construct a habitable unit, less energy is wasted transporting people to their work, less energy is wasted getting food to people (one grocery store to serve a whole high density area rather than a large distributed network of grocery stores), less energy wasted on food delivery (delivery driver can just go to one building versus driving the car around the suburbs)... and the list goes on.
From what I understand this is a hot topic in environmentalist organizations. Higher density areas do objectively have a lower carbon footprint per person. I believe this is true without even factoring in commutes, because even things like heating and water (no lawn to water, etc.) are used less when people live in denser buildings. Adding in cars of course only makes this difference bigger. But the old-school environmentalist, classic "tree-hugger" types have been going around for decades with the attitude of basically just saying no to as much as possible, any type of concrete structure or large development to them is automatically bad. Of course all this leads to is more suburban sprawl and a higher carbon footprint per person, but as long as it happens in places they don't see these people seem happy to ignore it.
See for example, the Sierra club in SF which seems to now be basically a NIMBY group devoted to preventing any new buildings from going up because they might partially block views or cast shadows over existing things.
FWIW, this is also true in Boston. I commute from southern NH to Harvard Sq. every day. Unless you have two substantial incomes, or are ok with sub-par schools and a tiny space, it's hard to live close to most economically dynamic cities.
No, this is because you chose to live extremely far away! There are plenty of places in Massachusetts that are closer and affordable, with decent schools. Every employee I've had who commuted from NH to Boston wound up pretty miserable because of the commute.
There aren't that many places left out there between NH and Boston that are on the affordable scale. Do you have a couple towns in mind that are fairly affordable still? I have been looking in the suburbs of Boston and when I switched it up to look at Southern NH it was crazy the changes in prices as well as how long the houses have been on the market.
Depends a lot on your definition of affordable. Assuming a budget of $500K, a desire for 3-bedroom+, a commute to Boston/Cambridge, and access to a strong school system, these are the towns I'd consider:
+ Acton: there are a couple dozen 1,500 sqft. split levels that come on the market per year. Good commuter rail access to the red line. Top 20 state school system.
+ Andover/Burlington/Frankling are all top 50 school districts, have a limited selction of affordable, though mostly much older houses. You're still looking at an hour to boston, but if you want to work at Oracle, iRobot, Philips, etc. you'll be right there.
+ Westford: You'll find a decent stock of older 1,000-1,500 sqft. places. Top 20 state school system. Horrible commute into Boston proper, but not bad if you work on the 95/128 belt.
Medford and Malden are gentrifying, the former more quickly than the latter, but you're making a pretty big trade-off in terms of school quality.
If your office is walking distance to South Station, or North Station, there are some farther flung suburbs with commuter rail access that would be workable. E.g. Newburyport has a cool seaside vibe and a commuter train into the heart of the city, though you're looking at an over an hour of travel time.
Southern NH is iffy. Windham is the main town for families, has reasonable prices and houses go very quickly in terms of sales. Salem, Hampstead, Pelham, Derry, Londonderry, not so much. You could theoretically commute from Nashua, but that seems insane to me.
If you can afford something in the $750K range you'll find ok townhouses in hip cities like Somerville and Arlington. That sum will get your foot in the door of a fixer-upper in tonier towns like Winchester and Lexington.
As you might be able to guess, I'm in the market as well, so if you've got any advice on hidden gems of towns, I'm all ears :)
The other answer is pretty good. I live in Lancaster which is a bit further west still and it's not super expensive. If you get that far out, the trick is to live near commuter rail and/or one of the highways. In my case, I'm a few minutes from the Fitchburg commuter rail and Route 2. It's still a long commute if you work in the city. (I don't.) And it's not that bad to go into the city in the evening though the traffic is worse than it used to be. I'm actually going in in a little to see a play.
Serious question, what towns would you recommend. I don't deny I'm making a consumer choice, and said so in my comment.
When I lived in Houston, I lived in a beautiful flat, a 20 minute walk from my office, and did so making the equivalent of $18/hr. I can't think of many places that'd be possible in the Boston area.
Are you trying to buy, rent, or no preference? Do you have a family? Do you need public schools? Do you want a yard or are you OK with condos? What price range are you thinking? I've in Mass my whole life, I'll try and give advice.
$500K budget. 3-beds. Strong public schools. Condo/Townhouse are fine. I'm looking at Acton, Westford, and Andover. Any recommendations would be great.
My larger point is I used to live in the 4th largest city in the US and could afford a relatively new, relatively nice house for a pittance, a short distance from my office. I could spend more or less for a better school district, or use the savings for a private school.
Boston and SF seem happy saying "Good schools, affordable house, hellish commute - choose 2" to their residents.
> My larger point is I used to live in the 4th largest city in the US and could afford a relatively new, relatively nice house for a pittance, a short distance from my office.
(For what it's worth, I assume that you know most of what I'm about to write but I'm making the point anyway for others who might read.)
You said in another reply that the city in which you used to live was Houston. The key difference between Houston (or Dallas/Fort Worth or San Antonio or almost anywhere in Texas--yes, including Austin) is that it is a relatively flat, geographically plain metropolitan area. In Houston and in Dallas, housing can sprawl for days. I'm from Texas, the Dallas area specifically, and the areas where housing and other development has been built is staggering to me. The entire DFW metro area has developed across a five-county area that's 1/3rd the physical size of the entire state of Massachusetts. I haven't even run the numbers on the Houston metro area but I'd wager it's a quarter again as large.
Meanwhile, Boston is on a harbor and backs up to an area that was pretty urban back when Galveston was the main hub of Texas commerce and Houston was a sleepy town an hour north on the river. Boston--and San Francisco--are constrained by buildable area, geography (all that water, both on the coast and inland), and many, many years of "we build small areas to live in" type of thinking.
My point is that the oft-made comparisons between east and west coast living to Texas are rather unequal. Texas is generally flat, dry, hot, and almost entirely dirt. You can build pretty much anything anywhere you're willing to connect to water and power. (Though that first bit is pretty hard to come by.) But it also means that a lot of those amenities that people really like are super difficult to access without at least two cars per household and the attendant problems of traffic--and where to put the roads[0] and who gets to pay for them[1]--infrastructure (back to that whole "water is getting scarce" thing), and the rest that come along with them.
0 - The Houston metro area is home to the widest freeway in the country, Katy Freeway, which is 26 lanes at its widest point including service roads.
1 - That's one thing Texas was happy to import from the northeast: toll roads literally everywhere. I don't think TxDOT has built a new or even expanded, taxpayer-funded, limited-access freeway in the past decade.
Well, a walking commute like that is probably not going to happen in Boston without tradeoffs. I think extremely few people are lucky enough to have a commute like that in the US. That said, Cambridge has a the highest percentage of "pedestrian" commuters in the country.
Anyway, off the top of my head: Medford, Quincy, Braintree. Schools might not knock it out of the park like Lexington but they're not crap either. A decent MA school is better than a lot of "good" schools in other states. However, a "tiny" house is in the eye of the beholder. I'd consider 1500sqft pretty decent whereas some people would want 2000+ with an attached garage, which is incongruent with urban living. The "real T" access alleviates a lot of commute woes; T delays are blown out of proportion compared to the daily car-crash-induced traffic jam.
All good points. My co-worker drives from medford, despite being just a few miles away, it's a 30-40 minute drive. I've never lived in the southern part of MA, but Google Maps still makes it look like an hour-ish drive from either of those towns.
I'm not complaining, just noting that it's the tax of working in cities with a lot of economic activity. The major alternative is moving to a smaller city with fewer job options, but higher quality of life, e.g. Salt Lake City, which only has 3-4 unicorns, but balances that with 5 minute commutes to gorgeous new construction. Pick your poison!
Might feel a bit counterintuitive, but allowing dense cores, at least all the people desiring urban, walkable, lifestyle would get to live near the core. And thus these people would not compete for the suburban homes so the suburban homes might stay a bit cheaper.
The denser the core, the more there is room for suburbia nearer the core, too.
Everybody wants the best of all worlds. I want 100 acres so that I can have fresh milk from my cows every morning (never mind that I wouldn't want to spend the time required to care cows every day). I want my kids to go to school next door. I want it on the ocean for swimming and fishing. I want my job to be 3 blocks away. I want to look out all my windows and now see any signs of other humans. I want ... (you should be able to add at least 20 mutually exclusive desires to this list that are all thing you would actually want in a dream house/location).
Now that we have established you can't have it all, what compromise are you willing to live with? I know people who love their horses enough that they give up everything else to get the room for their horses. I know people who like night life enough that they give up horses so they can get that.
When thinking about compromise, remember that adding density can change the personal calculation. Right now density is expensive - my horse friends pay less for their housing - including the barn - than a much smaller living space in New York would cost. (care for the horses costs more than the night life in NYC) If you can bring the cost of density down it is fair to wonder who would give up the horse lifestyle for the things you could get with density.
Without a good public transportation (either through trains/busses or having the buildings close enough to jobs to walk bike [and counting on enough people to do that]) you're just jamming more people into an already congested system.
I recently had an opportunity to move out to the Bay Area with my current job (I am currently at a satellite office). The commute time combined with CoL and a few other factors made the decision easy to not go. I currently have a 3 minute commute and I would honestly lose my mind if I had to commute 90 mins one way. I have also been seeing a general rise of articles mentioning how many people are leaving, how insane the commutes are becoming, and general unpleasantness of living there if you aren't in the top 10%.
Don't get me wrong, I fully enjoy the area when I visit but unless there are significant changes I don't see myself ever being able to move there.
If people were actually leaving, then these problems would be getting better... not worse.
If you can live somewhere that public transit (by rail) is feasible, then its quite tolerable. Of course this is the US, where that's less common than it should be.
>. I have also been seeing a general rise of articles mentioning how many people are leaving, how insane the commutes are becoming, and general unpleasantness of living there if you aren't in the top 10%.
But if you are in the top 10%, life is amazing here. It's an absolute paradise. Every single time I'm sitting in traffic hating my life, I try to do a pro/con on getting the hell out of here. Every single time I just can't justify it. The weather, the scenery, the ocean, the food, the people, the tech. There is literally nowhere else in the US even remotely on par. LA is pretty close, but the bay is much more "livable" IMO.
People may be leaving in droves, but it's only because they have to, not really because they want to.
I lived in the city (SF) and outside the city. My commute to the Embarcardero wasn't too bad when I lived in Pacifica. Just drive over the hill to Colma, park and take BART. I'd read on the way into the city and walk to work. Probably the best commute I've ever had except working from home.
Pacifica felt like a small town separated from it all. But I lived in the Manor area. Living down in Linda Mar (anything past Sharp Park) and dealing with Hwy 1 traffic would be frustrating.
Hello former neighbor! I used to live on the Bluffs right in the Manor area. I agree with everything you said - but the commute sucked if you didn't have a car or shared a car with a spouse who didn't work in the same area as you.
Why? Because the transit out there is terrible. It's served by one single SamTrans bus line that takes 45 minutes to get from Pacifica to Daly City BART (a 5ish minute drive).
If it wasn't for that I'd probably still be living there. It's just impossible without a car - something that cannot be said for most of the Bay.
I put less than 1k miles on my truck in the 3 or so years I lived in the area. I really enjoyed the hometown feel of Pacifica, the people were super nice too. And we used to go hiking almost every weekend up at San Pedro Park.
My old neighbor in SF and commutes to Cupertino for work. So many people in the company do it, that the company has set up a hotel where employees can sleep if they don't want to head back to SF. His girlfriend is not happy about that arrangement.
Actually when I lived in SF, it took me over an hour to get to work in SOMA. We joke and call the outer Richmond the SF suburbs, because it takes as long to get to downtown from there as from the actual suburbs of most cities.
So like if you go into a building there are signs that say "Max capacity..." So this is only happening because there is no such department rule that applies to entire cities/counties.
Is it not possible to do hub-and-spoke with buses? That would cut the commute drastically without any infrastructure required. Buy the buses, find the optimum routes and go.
How would buses contribute to the problem? Assuming every person who takes the bus would otherwise drive, a single bus would wipe out dozens of cars on the roads.
> Assuming every person who takes the bus would otherwise drive
This assumption is where the problem is. For example, Google employees live in central San Francisco but commute to work in Mountain View because a bus service was added. They wouldn't be attempting that commute in a car in the first place. These busses have added to traffic, not reduced it.
A bus is about 2 to 3 times as long as a car. Unless you're assuming these buses would only have a single passenger, no, they are not a negative.
And even if all of these people lived in walking distance of where they worked, the places they've now vacated would be occupied with people who may drive, and so forth.
The imaginary world you're supposing does not exist, hence the article we're discussing to begin with.
The original assumption is supported by the fact that the buses could only be introduced because a large enough number of people was _already_ driving. I doubt any company started an empty shuttle line to use as a recruiting tool. They must have sufficient number of people with that commute already in the population for the economics to make any sense.
I have more confidence in people riding light rail than taking a bus. From what I’ve read about SF, private busses funded by big tech companies are already an issue.
The sad fact is that long as people are willing to put up with this nothing is going to change. The crazy rents and terrible commutes sound insane to anyone living elsewhere but people are continuously more than happy to continue doing them to work at companies that haven't been priced out yet either. It's not an issue of social mobility either, since people living in the bay area are some of the most socially mobile workforce there is. Housing regulations may not be efficient given the circumstances but it'll only stop when everyone says enough is enough and leaves.
I know I chose to move out here because it was the best career move I could make. Having a FANG company on my resume plus the ridiculous salary and equity while I'm here would be foolish to pass up.
Much more than other places in the US. I keep seeing this type of comment, do the math, 2-3X salary increase, rent 2X increase, but rent is only ~25% of your salary, cost of things around ~25% higher. You are much better of in Silicon Valley as a techy in general.
Besides rent, are other things really 25% higher in the Bay Area? Taxes are a bit higher, but cars, computers are about the same, groceries can even be cheaper. A plane ticket to Tokyo is probably even cheaper than most places.
Now factor in the fact that you spend 15 hours a week driving - not working, jogging, cooking, singing, or making friends. Factor in the gas and maintenance for your car and the medical costs to you for your sedentary time and to society for your exhaust.
Average FANG salary is $200k with roughly another $200k in equity each year spread out over 4 years. So that's roughly $400k per year in total comp. Conservatively 40% of that is going to taxes, so take home is closer to $240,000.
While $240,000 is a nice salary it's not even close to what you'd need to afford a house in SV. And that's just housing. All in all it feels like a bad deal.
While $240,000 is a nice salary it's not even close to what you'd need to afford a house in SV
This cannot be correct. If you are taking home $20,000 a month and cannot have a house in SV the problem is not affordability but availability. Or what kind of house are you talking about.
It can still make sense to live there while you're young, save a bunch, and then move to a lower cost of living area later. I know a few people who did this. Then you can buy a house in a great neighborhood in a smaller city closer to things you like doing. Because of compound growth saving as much as you can when you're young and have few obligations really adds up later in life.
I make ~175k/year cash, and I'm able to put away about 60k/year in savings. If you add in the equity I'm receiving (currently illiquid, but company is one of the mega-corns), I'm able to save an additional 60-100k/year on top of savings from salary.
I live a decent life, 2 annual international trips, own a car, lease a ski house with friends in the winter, if you make over 120k, life in the bay area is quite nice.
You're putting $5k away every month when your take home pay is ~$8k a month?
I assume you must live a VERY spartan life in the Bay. Basically pay your rent (which must be shared or very cheap for the Bay) and utilities and not do much else...
I mean the average Bay area rent is more than the difference between your take home and your savings...
edit: I'm using ADP's calculator, don't know why SmartAsset is different but ADP is pretty legit so I'm going to continue to lean towards those numbers.
If you're single I can see the advantages (beyond the obvious financial savings) of sharing an apartment. Doesn't really work as a couple/family.
I was saving much less per month because as a couple we rented our own single bedroom apartment and my SO doesn't work. However, we still managed to save enough in 5 years (while still not having sold most of the vested equity) to buy a house in the Bay Area. So I agree that the pay is worth the hassle, so far at least.
I'm curious how much you spend for food monthly (including restaurants)? Somewhat surprisingly this is the highest cost for us, after rent/mortgage, and we do cook a lot at home (go out maybe twice a month).
A lot. My expenses (having moved from NZ) are probably 2-2.5x of what my friends back home pay - and I don't live a particularly frugal life. My income is 4-5x (probably even higher) what they make. Tech people on HN in the Bay Area talk about saving $25-50k / yr. The average household income in America is roughly $50k.
*Caveat: I'm unmarried and don't have kids. I don't own a house yet. I think that might change the equation a bit.
I grew up in the Bay Area. Spent several years at a FAANG company. About 2/3 of the time, I lived with my parents. The remainder was with housemates. In my early 30s, I decided that I couldn't continue living with parents, while there wasn't any place in the BA that I cared to pay money to live in.
Now I live in NYC, same salary, but finally have my own place that's not shared with others. I live in a 30th floor studio apartment in Manhattan, take the subway to work, and pay less rent than my friends in the Bay Area who live in 1-bed apartments.
That's a coarse comparison. Most housing in the bay area is multi-room units. Even the relatively new apartments in North San Jose are mostly 2 bedrooms. If you're single and want your own place, there's very few studios and 1 bedroom apartments to go around.
I agree actually. I don't intend to stay here for the long term, but I don't plan to move back to the bay area anytime soon either. I already spent most of my life there.
This is such a tiresome argument. Even if you could suddenly build all of the housing required to reduce prices on a short timescale, you'd have to solve the infrastructural problems that come with it (roads and transit), and convince developers to build into a massive loss (i.e. I am a developer, and you expect me to build and finance at today's costs, and pay for it with tomorrow's lower rents).
Construction is a solution that takes long amounts of time to find a lower equilibrium, because nobody knowingly finances real estate projects into a falling market. In contrast, companies can build branch offices quickly. Spread the love.
Even with a massive drop in rents, rents would still more than cover development costs. The limiting factor isn't the cost to construct high density housing units - it's the difficulty of getting permission to build high density housing units.
Building more housing decreases traffic as people move to shorten their commutes. Building offices without housing is what increases traffic, which is what most cities in the bay are currently doing.
Indeed. If the offices were in the same building as the homes, some of that commuter traffic even moves to the elevators and stairwells, and never leaves the site.
Not really. It changes things, but in the location of the new housing things get busier. The major hiways elsewhere see less traffic and the average is probably better, but the local situation needs to be fixed to handle it.
Of course ideally the local situation would be everybody works within a couple blocks and so the elevators and sidewalks can handle it. Most zoning boards hate this idea though.
It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. If everywhere built housing, traffic would get better everywhere, but no one individually has an incentive to build it because on its own it makes traffic in the immediate vicinity worse.
Not necessarily bluGill. If new housing is built across most of the city or state, there could well be less thru-traffic from the suburbs into the city.
I do agree with you though that if new housing is only built in a small number of areas, those areas could very well see more traffic. A goal of SB-827 was to increase housing across the entire state, particularly near areas well served by mass transit, in the hope it would result in less people commuting by car.
You are mistaking long term with short term. Short term it is impossible to build/rebuild housing. Short term that street is no longer big enough. Short term you will discover unintended consequences that don't work out for you.
Long term we will (as always) re-create the entire city. Long term we will notice that the street is too busy and do something about it. Long term we might even be do something about it people not working close to their home. Long term will will figure out what the true consequences of our decisions are and make further decisions to mitigate them which in turn will result in a new set of unintended decisions.
> Even if you could suddenly build all of the housing required to reduce prices on a short timescale, you'd have to solve the infrastructural problems that come with it
The value of new multi-story units along good commute in the most expensive housing market in the world would be so high that some taxation of that profit would be more than enough to fund building the required commuter rail or subway lines and also new schools. At least in an ideal world.
This is how Tokyo has funded new commuter rail lines. The increase of the land value in the new to-be-build neighborhood covers the cost of serving the neighborhood with a rail line:
I was talking about all of Japan, not just Tokyo. In any case, some of the lines are private, some aren't, and many were privatized after construction. The Tokyo Metro, in particular, was almost entirely built using public funds, and become "private" in 2004:
"Tokyo Metro is operated by Tokyo Metro Co., Ltd. (東京地下鉄株式会社 Tōkyō Chikatetsu Kabushiki-gaisha), a private company jointly owned by the Japanese government and the Tokyo metropolitan government.
The company replaced the Teito Rapid Transit Authority (帝都高速度交通営団 Teito Kōsokudo Kōtsū Eidan), commonly known as Eidan or TRTA, on April 1, 2004. TRTA was administered by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, and jointly funded by the national and metropolitan governments. It was formed in 1941, although its oldest lines date back to 1927 with the opening of the Tokyo Underground Railway the same year."
Fortunately for developers it won't be suddenly. Most land in the city is already occupied: even if the construction and banking industry could rebuild the entire city in two years it takes longer than that to get the current land owners to agree to sell their current house which works just fine for them right now.
Companies only build new offices quickly because they are willing to locate to any new suburb that currently has land. Downtown areas that are already well developed might be more desirable but it takes time to get the land rights. (note they are always re-building something downtown in nearly any city, but it wasn't an overnight thing to decide to do that)
"Fortunately for developers it won't be suddenly. Most land in the city is already occupied: even if the construction and banking industry could rebuild the entire city in two years it takes longer than that to get the current land owners to agree to sell their current house which works just fine for them right now."
Well, yes. That's my point: construction takes a long time to change housing prices. It's not a universal, drop-the-mic response to every debate.
I feel like if you were to build a skyscraper full of condos and apartments in downtown SF, you could get massive rents from it. Especially if you were the only one doing it. The only problem would be if everyone was doing it. I guess nobody has the money to buy a building in downtown SF, and anybody that owns a building in downtown SF doesn't want to tear it down and lose the cashflow for a whole year or so.
To forestall responses decrying "Manhattanization," remember that every borough of New York City (except Staten Island) has a higher population density than San Francisco. San Francisco could add a couple hundred thousand people if just got as dense as Queens. At Brooklyn's density, the population would double.
Very few places on the planet are as temperate and offer so many options to escape into nature as the Bay Area. I agree that something has to change, but trying to convince people that the only answer is to move away is a non-starter for the majority of the population, especially those who want to live here.
The weather is nice, but nature is not really all that close. Sure, there's worse places. But growing up there I thought we had it good on the nature front, while really it was just the koolaid.
I guess it matters what you mean by close. I can get to a redwood Forest in a 25 minute drive from SF, which I consider pretty good for a large urban area.. I agree other, smaller cities have much closer nature.
If they tried Colorado they’d change their mind quick. I always thought I’d end up in the valley, but after ten years here and seeing how bad the Bay Area has gotten, there isn’t enough money to convince me to make the switch.
Actually we really don't get that much snow. In Boulder January and February are cold and snow can stick around for a week or two. But no joke, it can be sunny and 60 a day after a snowstorm.
Now go up into the mountains instead of the foothills, yea, you're gonna get that winter you're talking about.
It's highly subjective, I personally cannot stand temperatures below 15C or so, it's "painful" (yes, I'm a wuss).
I haven't lived in Colorado but I did live in Europe and recently looked at the climate/temperature tables of Boulder to compare to Bay Area. It rather seems to me that it has weather similar to where I lived in Europe (hot summers, cold winters) with a large variation of daytime/nighttime temperature and a bit drier climate (in Boulder at least) because of the nearby mountains. All in all, lots of days in Boulder where temperature average would be <15C so not that good.
I don't know. I've lived all over the country from the east to the west from the north to the south and the midwest and I've found that every area has things to recommend it.
> It's not an issue of social mobility either, since people living in the bay area are some of the most socially mobile workforce there is.
The article focuses on non-tech workers. Who may not be socially mobile.
These areas need non-tech workers just as they need tech-workers. It's tough to have teachers work and live in Sunnyvale, where the median house price is pushing $2M. Many of your Lyft and Uber drivers will be coming in from 90+ minute commutes.
I recommend every CS graduate move to a city like Austin. Austin is a great city at a reasonable cost-of-living.
I don't see why you'd want to start a family and set up roots in a place where property values will eat you alive. You can have a similar programming career in a place where you can actually afford a decent house on a junior dev salary.
Personally, I graduated from a top CS school and I'm in Houston (due to family reasons). I do not envy my peers who went to Silicon Valley.
Oh, tech companies. If only there were a way to have conversations about, create, and transmit computer programs using some kind of long-distance network. Maybe we could break the data up into "packets". Just thinking out loud here. Then maybe everyone creating textual output for a living wouldn't have to transport their physical body to an office.
There are companies out there that are fully remote (like my current employer https://www.sonatype.com/). Though I suppose many of them don't like to hire fresh graduates so you could be in a bit of a chicken/egg problem.
I have a similar setup, but I also live 2 time zones from my employer. to make things easier, I work 6am-3pm. I often go run errands after work before traffic start getting bad, but sometimes, I end up caught in 'rush hour' traffic and I just feel sorry for all of them. (and I live in a small town of 150k people)
I've been remote for 5 years. I know about all the benefits, but I'm always curious how others are dealing with the drawbacks. I've written about it a few times here on HN:
- Social isolation
How do you ensure that your social brain is exercised? If I don't make a conscious & deliberate point of it, I can go an entire day without leaving the house, sometimes multiple days.
Working from home can mean 8 solid hours of programming, but that can be difficult to sustain even if you have the environment for it. Natural social breaks are missing in this environment, it's just you and the code.
I do it by breaking up my work into chunks. Being remote allows me the leverage that isolation to give myself blocks of 100% productivity; I intersperse that with going out and doing things.
I often work outdoors in the warmer months. I've got an office at home, but I've also got a handful of places where I can park my Jeep and either hang my hammock or pull out the back seat and work in the shade, with the background noise of nature and/or traffic depending on my mood. I'll do that for 2-4 hours, then go grab a coffee or go to the park with my kids (we homeschool). After a couple of hours of that, I usually go back to one of my spots and do it again. Other days I'll work at night after my wife and kids are in bed.
My plan is to use after-work activities to make up for the social isolation. Though I'm more on the introverted side to begin with, I figure I'll find more people I enjoy spending time with by doing activities with people who like to do those same activities than I would by socializing with my co-workers. Plus even remote it's not like you can't socialize with co-workers over video and chat.
What's interesting is that I routinely see comments little different from this one. Just as routinely, companies choose to pay whole multiles times as much for engineers in-person instead of remote.
Is it possible that we're missing something in this? And that there might be more to this than companies being unwilling to try remote workers?
I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive.
> Is it possible that we're missing something in this? And that there might be more to this than companies being unwilling to try remote workers?
If open-plan offices are any hint, it's that actual knowledge worker productivity (let alone well-being) is pretty low on the list of things managers look for.
> I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive.
> knowledge worker productivity (let alone well-being) is pretty low on the list of things managers look for.
Alternatively, leadership has decided the price of lower density seating is not worth the increased productivity. Realizing there was no expectation of working at 100% significantly improved my well-being.
I recently moved to low cost city for job. Though we still have cubes but now there are about 40% smaller and walls are lower than last workplace. So in effect it is quite louder for work. However manager cabins are now twice as larger than before.
At the same time management has cracked down on any work from home requests. So somehow management does not care about individual productivity. As long as a crappy HP laptop is hooked on to 2 monitors every developer is good to go.
The benefits of remote work go disproportionately to workers, while the detriments seem to fall toward managers. Since it's managers deciding whether to hire remote or on-site, it's not that surprising that they act in their own interest and hire on-site, even if it's more expensive.
My manager has repeatedly encouraged us to work from home, because we're space constrained (loud), but I have absolutely no desire to do so... why would I want to bring work in to my own home? If the business is fine with my productivity hit, so am I.
Would you be willing to "split the difference" on your commute if they allowed working at home? Instead of driving 2 hours a day, you'd work an extra hour every day?
Maybe if it was structured like this then it would be more win/win.
The article interviews a restaurant manager and a construction site superintendent. Non tech workers are significantly more affected than tech workers, because they cannot afford to live closer to their place of employment, and do not have access to the perks (work from home, shuttles, etc.) that tech workers have.
Yes, I feel sorry for people whose jobs actually require them to go somewhere, and who are stuck in traffic behind a thousand nerds whose jobs arbitrarily demand a commute, and who have to compete with those highly-paid nerds to buy a house.
> whose jobs actually require them to go somewhere
This jobs exist where they are because the "nerds" work there. They could choose not to work at those nerd-service jobs (forcing nerds to buy there food closer to home) or form a union to demand higher pay, or organize and build housing there.
> This jobs exist where they are because the "nerds" work there.
Right. And here's one nerd who goes to lunch a couple times a week in a not-huge town far from the Bay area, supporting the ability of restaurant managers to not live there, either.
> Also, "nerd" is unhelpful trash talking.
I meant it to be humorous but not derogatory. I'm a programmer.
Yes - one of the biggest perks simply being more flexible hours. If you show up 15 minutes late there are penalties in many jobs but the average tech worker won’t even notice unless they’re late for an important meeting or the on-duty admin when something breaks.
>Then maybe everyone creating textual output for a living wouldn't have to transport their physical body to an office.
Remote work hasn't taken off on a large scale because massively successful multi-billion dollar companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/SpaceX were not built with remote workers.
You get (relatively) minor companies touting it such as Automattic and Basecamp. Those smaller businesses haven't achieved enough success to convince business leaders on a large scale.
So to riff on your writing... "if only there were a multi-billion dollar company built on the competitive advantages of remote work."
If that happened, we'd then have Harvard Business Review doing endless case studies on its superiority.
EDIT TO ADD:
There is a limited type of "remote" work that existing successful companies will allow (and even encourage): it's the offsite remote _team_.
Some examples include IBM's team to build the "personal computer" down in Miami instead of working in the New York offices. Amazon (Seattle hq) has Lab126 (Silicon Valley) working on the Kindle. Google wanted a rewritten Javascript V8 engine and hired Lars Bak from Denmark. From the story I remember, Lars Bak made it a condition of employment to not relocate to California and because he already had the reputation, Google agreed. At first, he worked out of his home in Denmark but then he opened a Google office and his programming team then worked in that office.
Those semi-remote scenarios are about as far as you're going to get until other businesses with full remote employees working from home proves to the business world that "remote working" is a competitive advantage.
Remote office with an onsite team in that remote office -- yes. Remote telecommuting from home on a large scale? Not yet.
Isn't that the same for any new/fringe idea though? Working non-remotely has been the status-quo since before it was possible to work remotely.
More curiously, I'd like to see if remote work was responsible for preventing a company from reaching milestones like being a multi-billion dollar company.
> Working non-remotely has been the status-quo since before it was possible to work remotely.
As a farmer, I like to think of it as the original working remotely career. Especially in history where your entire land-base and home were one in the same. Working in an office away from home is the 'new fangled' way to work.
It's a double standard though. I was at one of the big companies mentioned. I was the only one on my team in my office. Everyone else was remote in a time zone. My manager wasn't on site. But I couldn't work from home, and my desk space was reduced several times during my time there.
Maybe it was about their home not being a good environment to work (spouse running a daycare operation for kids, whatever), not about the company policy.
Not GP, but many companies have a policy allowing employees to live in remote places, but if you live in the same city as the office, you're not allowed to work from home.
The idea seems to be that remote employees are expected to establish a little mini-outpost of that company within their own home, while local employees who "work from home" are more often than not really handling errands or lounging or whatever. It's a double-standard, but a very common one in my experience.
maybe in theory, but every company I've ever even heard of has been more than happy to throw together almost any random group of people regardless of culture (or even language) as long as they had the right credentials and expect for culture issues to sort themselves out and good quality to appear. But if consistent culture is the important thing... it's a lot easier to find a homogeneous culture in Hyderabad, India than it is in San Francisco, CA (of all places).
Red Hat and Canonical have achieved great success with a lot of remote workers. Heck pretty much the entirety of Linux and its ecosystem is remote.
All I hear is excuses and lack of willingness to work remotely, coped with lack of experience on how to make it work. From all sides.
The secret is following the procedure and working remotely even if the person is sitting next to you. (I don't mean get into a video chat if the person is sitting next to you) but:
- Procedures for idea exchange. You might talk to the person next to you or through a private PVT channel but make the ideas circulate.
- "Oh Slack/IRC/etc is distracting", do you know what else is distracting? My colleague next to me. Deal with those.
>Heck pretty much the entirety of Linux and its ecosystem is remote.
I'm a full 100% remote worker and I would never bring up "Linux development" as evidence for businesses to adopt remote work. If remote work evangelists want to argue for the benefits of work-from-home, please do not use Linux as an example because it undermines credible business thinking. As I've said before[1] and paste again here:
Open source development as "obvious" proof of remote work superiority is often brought up but proponents don't realize they aren't the same.
E.g. open source project like Linux kernel where volunteers choose what they want to work on, with little or zero effects on careers for missing deadlines has different dynamics than businesses.
If we want to convince businesses to adopt remote work, the Linux kernel is not a relevant example. Businesses have:
1) finite budget
2) deadlines
3) pressure to innovate for marketplace acceptance or go bankrupt
We need a better explanation for why business-related success of Google Pagerank/Bigtable, Apple iPhone, Facebook, etc comes more from teams in the office rather than remote workers on Skype. The Linux project -- even though it is "successful" -- is not that explanation.
>Compared to any business project, the kernel is behemoth.
The Linux kernel's ~26 million lines-of-code[1] is much smaller than the proprietary code bases at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. E.g. Google had 2 billion LOC in 2015.[2] MS Windows is ~50 million LOC. All those companies have faster commit velocities to their repos than the Linux project.
>E.g. open source project like Linux kernel where volunteers choose what they want to work on
The vast majority of Linux kernel contributors work for companies who pay them to work on the Linux kernel. Many of those developers do have some flexibility in what they spend their time on but it's not like they can do whatever they feel like.
>The vast majority of Linux kernel contributors work for companies who pay them to work on the Linux kernel.
Sorry for not being clear, the context was "building" a product. E.g. rewind the clock to 1991 when Linux Torvalds and volunteers and hobbyists are "working remotely" via USENET and exchanging emails. The Linux kernel they iterated on is an astounding achievement but that collaborative process is a totally different dynamic than a business that has to spend real money and get a product out.
>Developers in open source companies do have finite budgets,
Yes, the employees of companies at Intel, RedHat, and IBM contributing to Linux work within a finite budget (paid salaries) but The Linux Kernel itself does not have a budget. If Intel/RH/IBM all stopped funding programmers to work on Linux, the Linux project would still continue with volunteers. It may continue at a slower pace but it would continue nonetheless.
The point remains: Linux kernel remote workers cannot be used as a case study for businesses to adopt remote telecommuting.
I'm a programmer. "Creating textual output" is only a small portion of what I do for a living. A huge amount of my job is discussing ideas with coworkers which is simply easier to do in person.
Videoconferencing introduces friction in to the process. Those meetings must be planned and scheduled. There are no serendipitous hallway or kitchen conversations that flow easily when people are colocated
There is also the friction of the software itself. Whiteboarding and freewheeling discussion is possible but it doesn’t have the same feel to it
Also, you can pick up on the body language of people. When I want to discuss something with one of my colleagues, I can glance over at their desk and see if they're focused on something or just staring out of the window, waiting for something to compile. That way I don't have to rip him out of his focus like I would usually have to do with Slack etc.
I'm remote, and have largely fixed the Slack issue by keeping it silent on my desktop - no notifications. I have a very small set of filters for notification on my iPad, like if someone mentions me by name or certain people DM me. Otherwise, I tab over to Slack when I'm waiting for something else.
But consider the costs of that colocated time. 3 hours out of a worker's day is a lot - they could either do more work (boo) or be less stressed while they work (yay) without that commute. They'd also have fewer sick days (colds don't do TCP).
And the flip side of serendipitous conversations is distracting chatter. Which one affects productivity more?
Oh yeah, and office space costs a lot.
Remote work isn't all roses. But colocation is extremely expensive. The question is whether it's worth it.
Yes if everyone were commuting 3 hours then that would tilt the scales toward telecommuting in a big way.
But 3 hrs daily commute time is still an outlier, even in the Bay Area. Especially since many major companies have shuttles that allow people to use their commute time productively.
My current team is mostly remote. We are much more effective than the fully local team of my previous employer.
I think it really just boils down to hiring talented people you can trust. Paying them plenty. And fighting off all the unnecessary project management nonsense that makes politics and therefore in person meetings important.
Once there are unlimited remote jobs, the theory is they can live next door to the restaurant and construction site again. At least over the long term. In the meantime - that is playing out in smaller towns where remote employees are living.
Not literally "next door." Closer than a 90-minute commute. It's strange that you would read it that way. (What if the restaurant weren't on a residential street, or the two houses next door to it were already rented?)
Actually many construction workers I've met on the road have RVs so yes they do ;) Not the kind of construction you're thinking of though - pipeline construction.
They're not. But if all the nerds spread themselves out over the rest of the country, the restaurants and construction projects wouldn't all be crammed up in Traffic Jam City, either.
Not everyone can work remote. In fact I'd wager a majority, including many of those who think they can work remote, cannot. And teams dealing with remote workers is also a source of friction.
Remote work is only part of the solution. Urbanism, prioritizing transit & deprioritizing cars, increasing density are also parts
As many mentioned elsewhere, there's a halfway point that are remote offices - or coworking spaces or whatnot.
It is a source of friction, sure, but it also has a lot of positives.
I'm pretty sure there's an equilibrium point for on-site vs remote, but I also believe we're nowhere near that right now - and technology might keep bridging the gap to swing it even more towards the remote side.
Well, the main problem is that creating textual output is a small part of the process of creating value for the customer (which is ultimately what most businesses do). This is a host of processes that go way beyond text manipulation, and they require collaboration. This is best done by getting in the same room (still!) and is not likely to change (unless of course someone develops some work collaboration application on top of VR).
Fortunately not every company is that close-minded.
I work in a remote office, and I collaborate every day with my team in Dallas (and most company members are distributed mostly all through the U.S. but also Canada, the UK and India).
There's a LOT of collaboration tools, we use Slack (well, we were forced on Microsoft Teams now), Jira, Skype, e-mail, WhatsApp...
I still appreciate meeting in person, they flew me once to meet most of the team.
Videocalling is decent, but still no substitute, but all those tools I outlined do enable us to create value :) .
I would not really call that close-minded. It's established practice that has worked very well when building many, many non-trivial, innovative, technologically complex things.
There have been ginormous cost overruns, not to mention real technological problems and delays getting to market when collaboration has not been close. For example, the Airbus A380 (and to a larger extent the Boeing 787) were both massively delayed and over budget because far-flung suppliers of various major components faced big issues coming together on many details. A counterexample (mentioned in a book by the 'father of the 747', Joe Sutter) is how the 747 program was endangered in a big way when the Boeing company considered moving production (of the 747) to Walnut Creek, CA.
Similar problems happen on a routine basis in many software shops; only routine, well-scoped work has been successfully carried out by offshore teams.
From personal experience, I disagree. You're assuming we cannot carry out non-well scoped work just because we're remote?
The project I'm currently leading definitely gives lie to your assumption, and I'm a member of an offshore team.
I'm not saying that projects with substantial manufacturing components don't benefit from proximity. Also, those project you mention had huge political issues (not great examples).
And yes, the ideal situation is to have everyone on-site. But the disadvantages are that you have to pay them ridiculous wages to offset cost of living, and compete with a smaller subset of talent, or they have to do 90 minute super-commutes.
Many people can't move to the Bay Area for various reasons. Does a top developer that leaves the U.S. magically become worse? Or is a top developer bad just because he hasn't tried hard enough to get into the U.S.?
Even YCombinator believes that founders don't have to be physically present if it doesn't make sense.
Your personal experience may have been different, but it does not change the fact that almost no major commercial product has come out a fully-distributed company.
Individual anecdotes that support one case or another are easy to dig up, but you would be hard-pressed to find large pieces of really innovative software products developed without people in close proximity (you could claim that the Linux Kernel is a big project but that's an open source software that is not really a commercial product).
Everybody can not move to the Bay Area, and good developers do not become bad by moving away or not being there, but the simple fact remains: there are no (financially) large and successful software companies have been fully distributed from the ground up.
You're mixing up two claims, I mostly agree with one and strongly disagree with the other.
Claim I agree is there are no (financially) large and successful software companies have been fully distributed from the ground up.
Which is very different from the claim I strongly disagree with which is: only routine, well-scoped work has been successfully carried out by offshore teams.
I DO agree that there's an advantage to on-site work.
Or they just need to move to cities that have room to grow.
I'm in Houston and I bought a gorgeous townhouse-style home in my favorite part of town near downtown, and it was in the $300k range. Can you buy a patch of dirt in the Bay Area for that much?
I grew up in a suburb on the outer edges of the bay area where my father commuted over an hour every day. I also had two jobs that required me to commute over one hour. These experiences led me to vow that I would never take a job where I had to commute longer than 30 minutes. I'm sitting at ~20 minutes now and looking to shorten it, and it has made my life so much better.
90 minutes is now a "super commute"? hahaha.... HAHAHAHA... bwaaaaahahahahahahahahaha gasp haaaaahahahahahahahahaha.
a few years back, when i was working in palo alto and living in SJ/milpitas it regularly took me 90 minutes to make the 20 mile commute home.
needless to say, i quit that job, moved to the alameda county and found a job a mile from my house. now i actually have a SUPER commute, which means i can take the bus, ride my bike or walk depending on my mood. :)
It takes me about 2 hours and 10 minutes from the door of my apartment to the door of my office. I live a 10 minute walk from the train station in PK and work a 10 minute walk away from Grand Central.
There are probably a few hundred people at the train station every morning, from much farther away than I am, who probably have to take another subway to their job once they get to Grand Central.
It's bananas and the only reason I'm doing it is because my fiancee is in school in Poughkeepsie. I always wonder what the other people's reasons are.
An hour commute is normal within NYC. My commute on average was 50 minutes for the last 20years, door to door. 10 mins walk to a train or a bus, 30 mins ride, 10mins walk to the desk.
Now I have a house in Staten Island and it’s still 50 minutes - though I can cheat a bit by driving to the bus. It’s actually a 15 mins walk, but I don’t mind it.
My commute ranges anywhere from 35 minutes to 90 minutes. It used to be pretty consistently under an hour to mostly anywhere in Manhattan south of Central Park, but the past few years have been pretty terrible (thanks MTA).
This is increasingly common in the Boston area as well. Cambridge/MIT is a massive biotech hub, meanwhile we have huge companies with many large offices in the downtown or in surrounding suburbs. Many workers live in RI, NH, or Central Mass, and getting to work for 9 am consistently will involve leaving at 730 for many, many workers due to congestion, construction, and the god-awful mess that is Boston infrastructure.
For those who aren't aware, many of Boston's intersections and squares are terrible intersections, remnants of the crossings due to actual cow-paths. There's also a massive amount of old housing property and relatively little new housing stock. There are high density apartment or condo buildings sprouting up here and there, but by large, you're going to be paying over 1 million for a small/old house in/around Boston, possibly 2 million depending on the location. If you're willing to commute 1.5 hours, you can get a fixer upper in a semi-rural area for around 300-400k. If Amazon came to Boston, it would be compound this problem exponentially, though whoever owns property currently would definitely make a good return.
This is the exact reason I don't commute by car. I live in Jamaica Plain and work in Kendall Square. Driving takes 45 minutes to go 4 miles. Taking the T takes 40 minutes. I ride my bike and my commute is 17 minutes each way, no matter the hour, traffic, or weather.
Ah, nice! I lived in Arlington and my commute to Cambridge was literally 2X faster on a bike than any other possible method. It's crazy to ZOOM down the bike lane at 15 mph while the cars are idling at 0mph waiting for the very slow traffic cycles to progress.
What I find amazing is companies insisting on being located near Kendall or the Seaport District (and paying massive amounts of money for the privilege) to be "innovative."
Why aren't more companies in New England going to where the commercial real estate and housing are cheaper?
A lot of tech (outside of biotech) in MA is still outside Boston. After all, when Teradyne moved out (in the 90s?), they were at that point pretty much the last tech company in Boston. A lot of the new tech offices are the west coast company satellite offices.
My company does have an office in the Seaport but it's in Boston specifically because it makes more sense to have a customer briefing center there. Most MA employees are about 45 minutes west.
ADDED: And when biotech started going into Kendall Square that area was pretty much old warehouses. Of course, now it's some of the most expensive real estate in the Boston area. I know someone whose company moved out of Kendall Square to move to the Finance District because it was cheaper.
Part(s) of problem is A. access to employees with the right skill sets and B. their respective commutes and desire to live closer to the city.
So, you could choose to locate a company in Worcester (or even closer in, say, Framingham), but many of the 20/30 somethings will have a tough time getting to these locations and these towns themselves don't have people with the necessary skill sets.
It's criminal the train from Boston to Worcester is slower today than it was in 1950. But that's another topic.
Correct regarding the 9am comment. I live 30mi west of Boston and it is essentially an automatic 90min if I were to leave my house at 730am. For reference, it is 35min w/o traffic. Natick, MA seems to have become the "I can't afford Newton and Wellesley" town. Prices are crazy.
I thought the removal of physical toll booths from the Mass Pike would help. I have seen absolutely no benefit.
I've had a bit of experience with Route 9 in Framingham. You have this one light near a Whole Foods which causes a massive backup, it can go for miles. The reason? There's another street that comes in at around a 30-40 degree angle to route 9, and it gets its own light cycle rather than having an on-ramp.
Big problem in RI, if you've ever driven down to the south county beaches on Rt 1, you'll actually be on a "highway" that has 6-7 lights. Why not just have off/on-ramps? Infrastructure is hard, apparently no one wants to spend on that.
Anecdata: I signed the contract yesterday for a small Somerville single-family, near the Cambridge line, for just over $700k. I'm expecting to put $200k+ into it. If a developer got their hands on it, they would expand the square footage to the maximum possible extent, put in the trendiest appliances and finishes, and flip it for > $1m. That seems to be the economically rational thing for them to do in this market.
But I lock in a 20-25 minute bike ride (or 50-minute walk + public transit ride in winter) to work in the Seaport. I saw I-93 at rush hour once, and I shudder at the memory.
At least part of my reasoning was, "What if Amazon does choose Boston? Do I move my family into a second or third floor condo with no yard at all?"
Yup. I commute into Cambridge from the middle of NH (~60 miles away). It takes me an average of 90-120 minutes to get to work. People who live "in" the city still take an hour and they have a fraction of the distance to travel. Getting around in Boston is a nightmare, even more so if the weather isn't perfect.
Getting into the city has gotten significantly worse over the past handful of years. As you say, the congestion is such that even coming into the city from the west where I live after work is sufficiently slow that I've cut back on doing it.
>If Amazon came to Boston, it would be compound this problem exponentially, though whoever owns property currently would definitely make a good return.
The proposed location (Suffolk Downs) is sort of an odd one from a housing perspective. It is on the T but that's all very blue collar neighborhoods around there, some of which have gentrified a bit but still not places your typical software engineer would normally choose to live.
A lot of companies have been moving to LA/SD recently for this reason. There are plenty of cities that offer more than the Bay Area without the NIMBY attitude toward building new housing.
unfortunately, I can assure you that NIMBYism is alive and well in LA too. Maybe not as bad as SF (I don't know how to compare), but even if that's true, unless regulation occurs this is just kicking the can down the road
The picture in the article is from the I-580 exit in Dublin/Pleasanton about 5 minutes from my house.
The real estate here is booming as many people have settled here due to BART proximity and the fact that it's one of the few communities building lots of new housing. All the FANG companies are also sending their shuttles here.
It's also a way better commute for more lower income folks coming from Stockton, Modesto, etc since it's on the way to San Jose so you can actually have a labor force to staff restaurants, hotels, hospitals, schools, etc.
However, there has been a recent wave of NIMBYism coming through as the development has been unchecked and they haven't built enough public services (like schools) to support the housing growth. Many locals also do not like the efficient land use through zero-lot-lines and multi-story townhomes that the developers are flattening hills to build. I hear a lot of jeers calling my neighborhood "an eyesore" full of "cookie cutter homes". My hope that this all gets resolved in the next few years as people come to their senses but it's clear that Californians really have no idea how to plan urban development to match their growth.
Part of me is still trying to understand why the housing shortage in the Bay Area is so severe. I understand NIMBYism from the homeowner's perspective, but there are a lot of renters in the SF Bay.
SF is 63% renters, and should be able to outnumber NIMBY homeowners easily to have a lot more dense housing built. Alameda County is in 2nd place at 47% renters [1], so only a small percentage of homeowners need convincing that this housing shortage is bad for everyone in the long term.
Its still difficult to understand, even if one is under rent control, it is still beneficial to push for more housing units. Additionally, single family homes do not fall under rent control in Alameda County, where nearly half of the housing units are rentals.
Wow this law is so ridiculous, it basically applies to most the stock.
I don't think most people enjoy this benefit of rent control, it wouldn't make sense to rent out properties. I wonder what is the effective rent control rate (that which has affected price significantly). Maybe a rental turnover rate would hint at a solution.
rent control is what's keeping san francisco, barely, san francisco. it isnt going away. its also whats keeping my landlord from doubling my rent, thank you very much.
Though, I don't think this is "rent control" in the NYC sense of the term where rents are kept way under market rate.
Rather, it seems to be a set of ordinances around what landlords can and can't do, largely pertaining to rent increases: http://sfrb.org/rent-ordinance
Because renters dont vote. They either dont have residency, are foreigners, or live transiently.
I think it is a terrible strategy to try to convince homeowners that its best for them to forego clear economic benefits for blurry future profits. The solution is land value tax: just remove city sales taxes and add a tax on land. That will make low density units more expensive, the tax burden is relieved from the renter and lands on the homeowner and renters see their income increase immediately.
Renters do vote (I'm a renter, rent a house in Oakland, before that rented a place in San Francisco for 13 years). Buuuuuuuuuuut, that place was rent controlled. So it didn't seem like an issue to me. SB827 would have made my Bart commute worse but it seemed like the right thing to do.
Well, you can't just throw up condos all over the place and assume that alone fixes the problem. You have to build schools and other infrastructure changes, such as water and electricity to support the influx of a population.
Activism to push change requires a lot of energy and time. Most of the people who live here are busy with their jobs and families and do not have time to invest in it. So the activists who have the time to push usually want radical changes, such as 100% low income housing or homeless shelters. These are fine ideas, but for communities of upper middle class families, the change is scary and usually unwelcome. So then those families suddenly find the time to show up and protest and that's where you meet NIMBYs.
Change like this really requires the will of the local governments to make progress. Yet I think they get elected on other platforms such as, building better schools, or improving roads or downtown small businesses. YIMBY seems to be the first political wave of politicians actually running on a platform of more housing.
I think the key that legislatures should focus on is up-zoning industrial lots near transit with large state tax incentives (i.e. capital gains tax exemption) for owners of 100 acre industrial lots near transit if multiple land owners sell at the same time to make room for high density schools, etc.
granted im working with a small sample size, but i live in NYC and everyone know that commutes in, and i mean everyone, drives to a train station and takes a train it, parking in midtown as high as 600/month, it makes no sense to actually compute it.
My sample size is probably similarly limited. I lived in NYC for close to two decades, then in a bedroom community for a number of years.
Those suburban people drove or took a NJ Transit bus because trains were not available. Some even formed neighborhood van pools, kicking in to rent a van and pay for insurance and parking.
But the fact that there are vastly more bus routes going into and out of the city is pretty firm evidence that roads are more comprehensive than rails.
This article points out the challenge of asymmetric wages on communities. Engineers, managers, and executives living close to work and wait staff, support services, teachers, etc commuting in from far afield.
It isn't sustainable, and it will crash back to earth. One of the houses near me recently sold for way more than expected, and I pointed out that the development it was in had been build during the dot.com boom, what was more nearly all of the houses in that development had fallen out of escrow (the buyers walked away) when the crash hit because their source of wealth (stock in technology companies) essentially evaporated over 6 months.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadPeople just have too much of their equity tied up in their homes. I hate it, but I can also see where they're coming from: if you had a savings account that accounted for most of your net wealth and was appreciating at double-digits per year, and someone wanted to cut it by a significant percentage, you'd fight them to your last breath too. And there's always going to be a supply of readymade arguments for why this is actually the good, progressive thing to do: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/04/why-should-pr...
You may need to either live with this, or get out of the Bay.
Perhaps a way out of this NIMBY induced housing crisis is make more of them aware of this fact?
This is such a weird YIMBY theory on NIMBY motivation. Removing zoning restrictions would make their property values go up, not down.
Now I work from home. I still listen to audiobooks whenever driving which is still amazing.
Right now I am working from home which (after some months of experience) I enjoy much more. Also got a substantial pay raise when changing jobs and at the same time save money on the commute.
Still glad I was at my old job since it got me into another field of software engineering and I learned a lot. Don't think I would've got my current job without it.
But I wouldn't have wanted to do it long-term. As you say, it's just too big a chunk out of the day.
Some people choose a lifestyle for their families that differs from what might be optimally efficient, for reasons that other's don't prioritize as highly.
Additionally high density housing and cities are vastly more energy efficient than sprawling suburbs based on at least one simple factor: cars.
No one will be building high density housing from recycled timber any time soon.
Large housing projects require less material and construction than low density housing. Why? Because low density housing is essentially doing a relatively giant housing project per person, spread over way more physical distance. People have to live somewhere, so if high density housing isn't made then they have to live in energy and resource wasting low-density housing.
That being said, living in high density will always be more energy efficient as less energy is wasted on locomotion for people, less energy is needed to service garbage pickup/disposal, less electricity is needed for heating/cooling, less material to construct a habitable unit, less energy is wasted transporting people to their work, less energy is wasted getting food to people (one grocery store to serve a whole high density area rather than a large distributed network of grocery stores), less energy wasted on food delivery (delivery driver can just go to one building versus driving the car around the suburbs)... and the list goes on.
New buildings sequester carbon
Carbon sequestration is usually meant to mean carbon emissions are locked up in something, typically CO2 pumped in to a stable geological formation.
Whereas my point is that new buildings are carbon emissions insensive.
See for example, the Sierra club in SF which seems to now be basically a NIMBY group devoted to preventing any new buildings from going up because they might partially block views or cast shadows over existing things.
+ Acton: there are a couple dozen 1,500 sqft. split levels that come on the market per year. Good commuter rail access to the red line. Top 20 state school system.
+ Andover/Burlington/Frankling are all top 50 school districts, have a limited selction of affordable, though mostly much older houses. You're still looking at an hour to boston, but if you want to work at Oracle, iRobot, Philips, etc. you'll be right there.
+ Westford: You'll find a decent stock of older 1,000-1,500 sqft. places. Top 20 state school system. Horrible commute into Boston proper, but not bad if you work on the 95/128 belt.
Medford and Malden are gentrifying, the former more quickly than the latter, but you're making a pretty big trade-off in terms of school quality.
If your office is walking distance to South Station, or North Station, there are some farther flung suburbs with commuter rail access that would be workable. E.g. Newburyport has a cool seaside vibe and a commuter train into the heart of the city, though you're looking at an over an hour of travel time.
Southern NH is iffy. Windham is the main town for families, has reasonable prices and houses go very quickly in terms of sales. Salem, Hampstead, Pelham, Derry, Londonderry, not so much. You could theoretically commute from Nashua, but that seems insane to me.
If you can afford something in the $750K range you'll find ok townhouses in hip cities like Somerville and Arlington. That sum will get your foot in the door of a fixer-upper in tonier towns like Winchester and Lexington.
As you might be able to guess, I'm in the market as well, so if you've got any advice on hidden gems of towns, I'm all ears :)
I'd agree with that. A friend of mine basically gave up on Malden a couple years back, sold his place, and moved to Winchester.
When I lived in Houston, I lived in a beautiful flat, a 20 minute walk from my office, and did so making the equivalent of $18/hr. I can't think of many places that'd be possible in the Boston area.
My larger point is I used to live in the 4th largest city in the US and could afford a relatively new, relatively nice house for a pittance, a short distance from my office. I could spend more or less for a better school district, or use the savings for a private school.
Boston and SF seem happy saying "Good schools, affordable house, hellish commute - choose 2" to their residents.
(For what it's worth, I assume that you know most of what I'm about to write but I'm making the point anyway for others who might read.)
You said in another reply that the city in which you used to live was Houston. The key difference between Houston (or Dallas/Fort Worth or San Antonio or almost anywhere in Texas--yes, including Austin) is that it is a relatively flat, geographically plain metropolitan area. In Houston and in Dallas, housing can sprawl for days. I'm from Texas, the Dallas area specifically, and the areas where housing and other development has been built is staggering to me. The entire DFW metro area has developed across a five-county area that's 1/3rd the physical size of the entire state of Massachusetts. I haven't even run the numbers on the Houston metro area but I'd wager it's a quarter again as large.
Meanwhile, Boston is on a harbor and backs up to an area that was pretty urban back when Galveston was the main hub of Texas commerce and Houston was a sleepy town an hour north on the river. Boston--and San Francisco--are constrained by buildable area, geography (all that water, both on the coast and inland), and many, many years of "we build small areas to live in" type of thinking.
My point is that the oft-made comparisons between east and west coast living to Texas are rather unequal. Texas is generally flat, dry, hot, and almost entirely dirt. You can build pretty much anything anywhere you're willing to connect to water and power. (Though that first bit is pretty hard to come by.) But it also means that a lot of those amenities that people really like are super difficult to access without at least two cars per household and the attendant problems of traffic--and where to put the roads[0] and who gets to pay for them[1]--infrastructure (back to that whole "water is getting scarce" thing), and the rest that come along with them.
0 - The Houston metro area is home to the widest freeway in the country, Katy Freeway, which is 26 lanes at its widest point including service roads.
1 - That's one thing Texas was happy to import from the northeast: toll roads literally everywhere. I don't think TxDOT has built a new or even expanded, taxpayer-funded, limited-access freeway in the past decade.
Anyway, off the top of my head: Medford, Quincy, Braintree. Schools might not knock it out of the park like Lexington but they're not crap either. A decent MA school is better than a lot of "good" schools in other states. However, a "tiny" house is in the eye of the beholder. I'd consider 1500sqft pretty decent whereas some people would want 2000+ with an attached garage, which is incongruent with urban living. The "real T" access alleviates a lot of commute woes; T delays are blown out of proportion compared to the daily car-crash-induced traffic jam.
I'm not complaining, just noting that it's the tax of working in cities with a lot of economic activity. The major alternative is moving to a smaller city with fewer job options, but higher quality of life, e.g. Salt Lake City, which only has 3-4 unicorns, but balances that with 5 minute commutes to gorgeous new construction. Pick your poison!
The denser the core, the more there is room for suburbia nearer the core, too.
Now that we have established you can't have it all, what compromise are you willing to live with? I know people who love their horses enough that they give up everything else to get the room for their horses. I know people who like night life enough that they give up horses so they can get that.
When thinking about compromise, remember that adding density can change the personal calculation. Right now density is expensive - my horse friends pay less for their housing - including the barn - than a much smaller living space in New York would cost. (care for the horses costs more than the night life in NYC) If you can bring the cost of density down it is fair to wonder who would give up the horse lifestyle for the things you could get with density.
Don't get me wrong, I fully enjoy the area when I visit but unless there are significant changes I don't see myself ever being able to move there.
If you can live somewhere that public transit (by rail) is feasible, then its quite tolerable. Of course this is the US, where that's less common than it should be.
But if you are in the top 10%, life is amazing here. It's an absolute paradise. Every single time I'm sitting in traffic hating my life, I try to do a pro/con on getting the hell out of here. Every single time I just can't justify it. The weather, the scenery, the ocean, the food, the people, the tech. There is literally nowhere else in the US even remotely on par. LA is pretty close, but the bay is much more "livable" IMO.
People may be leaving in droves, but it's only because they have to, not really because they want to.
So while many are leaving it's not like they aren't being replaced!
Nor for SF itself, "San Francisco had a 2017 net domestic migration of -2,332." according to https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/Bay-A...
http://www.sfweekly.com/news/san-francisco-hits-new-all-time...
I totally agree. I wouldn't be in the top 10% if I moved out there even _with_ a relatively good tech job.
Pacifica felt like a small town separated from it all. But I lived in the Manor area. Living down in Linda Mar (anything past Sharp Park) and dealing with Hwy 1 traffic would be frustrating.
Why? Because the transit out there is terrible. It's served by one single SamTrans bus line that takes 45 minutes to get from Pacifica to Daly City BART (a 5ish minute drive).
If it wasn't for that I'd probably still be living there. It's just impossible without a car - something that cannot be said for most of the Bay.
I put less than 1k miles on my truck in the 3 or so years I lived in the area. I really enjoyed the hometown feel of Pacifica, the people were super nice too. And we used to go hiking almost every weekend up at San Pedro Park.
Plus, best Taco Bell in the world! ;-)
Actually when I lived in SF, it took me over an hour to get to work in SOMA. We joke and call the outer Richmond the SF suburbs, because it takes as long to get to downtown from there as from the actual suburbs of most cities.
I would think a tunnel or railway alongside a highway would reduce traffic.
This assumption is where the problem is. For example, Google employees live in central San Francisco but commute to work in Mountain View because a bus service was added. They wouldn't be attempting that commute in a car in the first place. These busses have added to traffic, not reduced it.
If none of those people would drive instead, or even if only a couple of them would, then the massive bus is a negative.
And even if all of these people lived in walking distance of where they worked, the places they've now vacated would be occupied with people who may drive, and so forth.
The imaginary world you're supposing does not exist, hence the article we're discussing to begin with.
I think that's an unfounded assumption. I know plenty of people who do in fact drive daily from SF or Oakland down to MV/SJ.
Well so was the original assumption!
So - how much of the "ridiculous" salary is left after subtracting living costs and taxes, actually?
The super commuters tend to be lower paid workers.
While $240,000 is a nice salary it's not even close to what you'd need to afford a house in SV. And that's just housing. All in all it feels like a bad deal.
This cannot be correct. If you are taking home $20,000 a month and cannot have a house in SV the problem is not affordability but availability. Or what kind of house are you talking about.
Glassdoor shows Google software engineers make a base of $127k cash plus $75k bonus and stock:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm
Senior software engineers make more, but there seem to be many fewer of them relative to software engineer.
I live a decent life, 2 annual international trips, own a car, lease a ski house with friends in the winter, if you make over 120k, life in the bay area is quite nice.
I assume you must live a VERY spartan life in the Bay. Basically pay your rent (which must be shared or very cheap for the Bay) and utilities and not do much else...
I mean the average Bay area rent is more than the difference between your take home and your savings...
edit: I'm using ADP's calculator, don't know why SmartAsset is different but ADP is pretty legit so I'm going to continue to lean towards those numbers.
https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#RZ3V1...
Sharing an apartment isn't "spartan", it's "normal"
I was saving much less per month because as a couple we rented our own single bedroom apartment and my SO doesn't work. However, we still managed to save enough in 5 years (while still not having sold most of the vested equity) to buy a house in the Bay Area. So I agree that the pay is worth the hassle, so far at least.
I'm curious how much you spend for food monthly (including restaurants)? Somewhat surprisingly this is the highest cost for us, after rent/mortgage, and we do cook a lot at home (go out maybe twice a month).
It may be "the new normal" in the Bay Area and other hyperstressed markets.
But it's not a living standard most people aspire to.
From my perspective, as the sole income earner of a family of four, that's a pretty shocking statement.
I feel like I've built a very comfortable life for myself and my family, and I make quite a bit less than that.
*Caveat: I'm unmarried and don't have kids. I don't own a house yet. I think that might change the equation a bit.
Now I live in NYC, same salary, but finally have my own place that's not shared with others. I live in a 30th floor studio apartment in Manhattan, take the subway to work, and pay less rent than my friends in the Bay Area who live in 1-bed apartments.
Average rent in SF - $3,558
I don't know your situation but NYC is basically in the same boat (just with a better rail system).
For a more precise comparison, see: https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/new-yor...
As of this writing, rent for a one bedroom apartment is 30% more in SF than in NYC.
My rent is $2640. I know people in Pacifica, Palo Alto, and Mountain View paying anywhere from $2700 to $3200 for a 1 bedroom.
Or, alternatively, when enough people start voting in politicians who would allow building lots of new homes in central locations.
Manhattan has 3.9× the density of San Francisco. At Manhattan density, the City of San Francisco could house 2.5 million more people.
Construction is a solution that takes long amounts of time to find a lower equilibrium, because nobody knowingly finances real estate projects into a falling market. In contrast, companies can build branch offices quickly. Spread the love.
But if the gatekeepers aren't willing to grant permission, then that cost is ∞
Citation needed. You might also want to tell the construction finance industry of your discovery.
Of course ideally the local situation would be everybody works within a couple blocks and so the elevators and sidewalks can handle it. Most zoning boards hate this idea though.
I do agree with you though that if new housing is only built in a small number of areas, those areas could very well see more traffic. A goal of SB-827 was to increase housing across the entire state, particularly near areas well served by mass transit, in the hope it would result in less people commuting by car.
Long term we will (as always) re-create the entire city. Long term we will notice that the street is too busy and do something about it. Long term we might even be do something about it people not working close to their home. Long term will will figure out what the true consequences of our decisions are and make further decisions to mitigate them which in turn will result in a new set of unintended decisions.
The value of new multi-story units along good commute in the most expensive housing market in the world would be so high that some taxation of that profit would be more than enough to fund building the required commuter rail or subway lines and also new schools. At least in an ideal world.
This is how Tokyo has funded new commuter rail lines. The increase of the land value in the new to-be-build neighborhood covers the cost of serving the neighborhood with a rail line:
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...
But I am not sure whether California has the will and skill to tax those profits, and to direct that money for those purposes.
Japan also runs a massive defecit relative to GDP (~250% vs our ~100% value). They spend like drunken sailors on public infrastructure.
"Tokyo Metro is operated by Tokyo Metro Co., Ltd. (東京地下鉄株式会社 Tōkyō Chikatetsu Kabushiki-gaisha), a private company jointly owned by the Japanese government and the Tokyo metropolitan government.
The company replaced the Teito Rapid Transit Authority (帝都高速度交通営団 Teito Kōsokudo Kōtsū Eidan), commonly known as Eidan or TRTA, on April 1, 2004. TRTA was administered by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, and jointly funded by the national and metropolitan governments. It was formed in 1941, although its oldest lines date back to 1927 with the opening of the Tokyo Underground Railway the same year."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Metro
Most Japanese cities' subway systems are not private, and even many of the "private" train lines were built using extensive public subsidy.
Companies only build new offices quickly because they are willing to locate to any new suburb that currently has land. Downtown areas that are already well developed might be more desirable but it takes time to get the land rights. (note they are always re-building something downtown in nearly any city, but it wasn't an overnight thing to decide to do that)
Well, yes. That's my point: construction takes a long time to change housing prices. It's not a universal, drop-the-mic response to every debate.
Paris: 2.9× density, Barcelona: 2.2×.
Now go up into the mountains instead of the foothills, yea, you're gonna get that winter you're talking about.
I haven't lived in Colorado but I did live in Europe and recently looked at the climate/temperature tables of Boulder to compare to Bay Area. It rather seems to me that it has weather similar to where I lived in Europe (hot summers, cold winters) with a large variation of daytime/nighttime temperature and a bit drier climate (in Boulder at least) because of the nearby mountains. All in all, lots of days in Boulder where temperature average would be <15C so not that good.
Funny how different people are.
The article focuses on non-tech workers. Who may not be socially mobile.
These areas need non-tech workers just as they need tech-workers. It's tough to have teachers work and live in Sunnyvale, where the median house price is pushing $2M. Many of your Lyft and Uber drivers will be coming in from 90+ minute commutes.
I recommend every CS graduate move to a city like Austin. Austin is a great city at a reasonable cost-of-living.
I don't see why you'd want to start a family and set up roots in a place where property values will eat you alive. You can have a similar programming career in a place where you can actually afford a decent house on a junior dev salary.
Personally, I graduated from a top CS school and I'm in Houston (due to family reasons). I do not envy my peers who went to Silicon Valley.
We can dream.
I live in a pleasant medium-sized town, I bought a house for less than a Bay-area toolshed, and I can commute myself downstairs to make a sandwich.
If every worker were remote, can you even imagine how hard you'd have to work to justify a physical office to the CFO and potential hires?
Even to the US's outsized standards, 150k is a mid-size city, not a small town.
- Social isolation
How do you ensure that your social brain is exercised? If I don't make a conscious & deliberate point of it, I can go an entire day without leaving the house, sometimes multiple days.
Working from home can mean 8 solid hours of programming, but that can be difficult to sustain even if you have the environment for it. Natural social breaks are missing in this environment, it's just you and the code.
I go play with my friends and family after work, sometimes also at lunchtime.
I often work outdoors in the warmer months. I've got an office at home, but I've also got a handful of places where I can park my Jeep and either hang my hammock or pull out the back seat and work in the shade, with the background noise of nature and/or traffic depending on my mood. I'll do that for 2-4 hours, then go grab a coffee or go to the park with my kids (we homeschool). After a couple of hours of that, I usually go back to one of my spots and do it again. Other days I'll work at night after my wife and kids are in bed.
Is it possible that we're missing something in this? And that there might be more to this than companies being unwilling to try remote workers?
I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive.
If open-plan offices are any hint, it's that actual knowledge worker productivity (let alone well-being) is pretty low on the list of things managers look for.
> I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive.
Sure but the same can be said of office work.
Alternatively, leadership has decided the price of lower density seating is not worth the increased productivity. Realizing there was no expectation of working at 100% significantly improved my well-being.
At the same time management has cracked down on any work from home requests. So somehow management does not care about individual productivity. As long as a crappy HP laptop is hooked on to 2 monitors every developer is good to go.
Maybe if it was structured like this then it would be more win/win.
This jobs exist where they are because the "nerds" work there. They could choose not to work at those nerd-service jobs (forcing nerds to buy there food closer to home) or form a union to demand higher pay, or organize and build housing there.
Also, "nerd" is unhelpful trash talking.
Right. And here's one nerd who goes to lunch a couple times a week in a not-huge town far from the Bay area, supporting the ability of restaurant managers to not live there, either.
> Also, "nerd" is unhelpful trash talking.
I meant it to be humorous but not derogatory. I'm a programmer.
Remote work hasn't taken off on a large scale because massively successful multi-billion dollar companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/SpaceX were not built with remote workers.
You get (relatively) minor companies touting it such as Automattic and Basecamp. Those smaller businesses haven't achieved enough success to convince business leaders on a large scale.
So to riff on your writing... "if only there were a multi-billion dollar company built on the competitive advantages of remote work."
If that happened, we'd then have Harvard Business Review doing endless case studies on its superiority.
EDIT TO ADD:
There is a limited type of "remote" work that existing successful companies will allow (and even encourage): it's the offsite remote _team_.
Some examples include IBM's team to build the "personal computer" down in Miami instead of working in the New York offices. Amazon (Seattle hq) has Lab126 (Silicon Valley) working on the Kindle. Google wanted a rewritten Javascript V8 engine and hired Lars Bak from Denmark. From the story I remember, Lars Bak made it a condition of employment to not relocate to California and because he already had the reputation, Google agreed. At first, he worked out of his home in Denmark but then he opened a Google office and his programming team then worked in that office.
Those semi-remote scenarios are about as far as you're going to get until other businesses with full remote employees working from home proves to the business world that "remote working" is a competitive advantage.
Remote office with an onsite team in that remote office -- yes. Remote telecommuting from home on a large scale? Not yet.
More curiously, I'd like to see if remote work was responsible for preventing a company from reaching milestones like being a multi-billion dollar company.
As a farmer, I like to think of it as the original working remotely career. Especially in history where your entire land-base and home were one in the same. Working in an office away from home is the 'new fangled' way to work.
The idea seems to be that remote employees are expected to establish a little mini-outpost of that company within their own home, while local employees who "work from home" are more often than not really handling errands or lounging or whatever. It's a double-standard, but a very common one in my experience.
It's only might be necessary if you want a large, single family house.
Which is fortunate for any US or European citizen who hopes to ever find employment again.
Culture is an issue (both from the contractor and the hiring sides), quality is another (in some places).
maybe in theory, but every company I've ever even heard of has been more than happy to throw together almost any random group of people regardless of culture (or even language) as long as they had the right credentials and expect for culture issues to sort themselves out and good quality to appear. But if consistent culture is the important thing... it's a lot easier to find a homogeneous culture in Hyderabad, India than it is in San Francisco, CA (of all places).
All I hear is excuses and lack of willingness to work remotely, coped with lack of experience on how to make it work. From all sides.
The secret is following the procedure and working remotely even if the person is sitting next to you. (I don't mean get into a video chat if the person is sitting next to you) but:
- Procedures for idea exchange. You might talk to the person next to you or through a private PVT channel but make the ideas circulate.
- "Oh Slack/IRC/etc is distracting", do you know what else is distracting? My colleague next to me. Deal with those.
- Have good tools and follow procedures.
I'm a full 100% remote worker and I would never bring up "Linux development" as evidence for businesses to adopt remote work. If remote work evangelists want to argue for the benefits of work-from-home, please do not use Linux as an example because it undermines credible business thinking. As I've said before[1] and paste again here:
Open source development as "obvious" proof of remote work superiority is often brought up but proponents don't realize they aren't the same. E.g. open source project like Linux kernel where volunteers choose what they want to work on, with little or zero effects on careers for missing deadlines has different dynamics than businesses.
If we want to convince businesses to adopt remote work, the Linux kernel is not a relevant example. Businesses have:
1) finite budget
2) deadlines
3) pressure to innovate for marketplace acceptance or go bankrupt
We need a better explanation for why business-related success of Google Pagerank/Bigtable, Apple iPhone, Facebook, etc comes more from teams in the office rather than remote workers on Skype. The Linux project -- even though it is "successful" -- is not that explanation.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15047805
The Linux kernel's ~26 million lines-of-code[1] is much smaller than the proprietary code bases at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. E.g. Google had 2 billion LOC in 2015.[2] MS Windows is ~50 million LOC. All those companies have faster commit velocities to their repos than the Linux project.
[1] https://phoronix.com/misc/linux-2017/index.html
[2] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...
The vast majority of Linux kernel contributors work for companies who pay them to work on the Linux kernel. Many of those developers do have some flexibility in what they spend their time on but it's not like they can do whatever they feel like.
Sorry for not being clear, the context was "building" a product. E.g. rewind the clock to 1991 when Linux Torvalds and volunteers and hobbyists are "working remotely" via USENET and exchanging emails. The Linux kernel they iterated on is an astounding achievement but that collaborative process is a totally different dynamic than a business that has to spend real money and get a product out.
And yes, they do often work for upstream projects as part of their jobs, pushing for changes they need for their deadlines.
Most of open source work is done by companies. And yes, a lot of them with remote workers.
Though I agree, I don't expect an iPhone to be made remotely though, hardware is complicated.
Yes, the employees of companies at Intel, RedHat, and IBM contributing to Linux work within a finite budget (paid salaries) but The Linux Kernel itself does not have a budget. If Intel/RH/IBM all stopped funding programmers to work on Linux, the Linux project would still continue with volunteers. It may continue at a slower pace but it would continue nonetheless.
The point remains: Linux kernel remote workers cannot be used as a case study for businesses to adopt remote telecommuting.
There is also the friction of the software itself. Whiteboarding and freewheeling discussion is possible but it doesn’t have the same feel to it
But consider the costs of that colocated time. 3 hours out of a worker's day is a lot - they could either do more work (boo) or be less stressed while they work (yay) without that commute. They'd also have fewer sick days (colds don't do TCP).
And the flip side of serendipitous conversations is distracting chatter. Which one affects productivity more?
Oh yeah, and office space costs a lot.
Remote work isn't all roses. But colocation is extremely expensive. The question is whether it's worth it.
But 3 hrs daily commute time is still an outlier, even in the Bay Area. Especially since many major companies have shuttles that allow people to use their commute time productively.
I think it really just boils down to hiring talented people you can trust. Paying them plenty. And fighting off all the unnecessary project management nonsense that makes politics and therefore in person meetings important.
Yes, because construction sites remain under construction for 10-20 years. /s
Not everyone wants to find a new home every month.
We're getting there.
I'm about to go vote for taco makers to have the pleasure of not living in a big city right now.
Remote work is only part of the solution. Urbanism, prioritizing transit & deprioritizing cars, increasing density are also parts
It is a source of friction, sure, but it also has a lot of positives.
I'm pretty sure there's an equilibrium point for on-site vs remote, but I also believe we're nowhere near that right now - and technology might keep bridging the gap to swing it even more towards the remote side.
I work in a remote office, and I collaborate every day with my team in Dallas (and most company members are distributed mostly all through the U.S. but also Canada, the UK and India).
There's a LOT of collaboration tools, we use Slack (well, we were forced on Microsoft Teams now), Jira, Skype, e-mail, WhatsApp...
I still appreciate meeting in person, they flew me once to meet most of the team.
Videocalling is decent, but still no substitute, but all those tools I outlined do enable us to create value :) .
There have been ginormous cost overruns, not to mention real technological problems and delays getting to market when collaboration has not been close. For example, the Airbus A380 (and to a larger extent the Boeing 787) were both massively delayed and over budget because far-flung suppliers of various major components faced big issues coming together on many details. A counterexample (mentioned in a book by the 'father of the 747', Joe Sutter) is how the 747 program was endangered in a big way when the Boeing company considered moving production (of the 747) to Walnut Creek, CA.
Similar problems happen on a routine basis in many software shops; only routine, well-scoped work has been successfully carried out by offshore teams.
The project I'm currently leading definitely gives lie to your assumption, and I'm a member of an offshore team.
I'm not saying that projects with substantial manufacturing components don't benefit from proximity. Also, those project you mention had huge political issues (not great examples).
And yes, the ideal situation is to have everyone on-site. But the disadvantages are that you have to pay them ridiculous wages to offset cost of living, and compete with a smaller subset of talent, or they have to do 90 minute super-commutes.
Many people can't move to the Bay Area for various reasons. Does a top developer that leaves the U.S. magically become worse? Or is a top developer bad just because he hasn't tried hard enough to get into the U.S.?
Even YCombinator believes that founders don't have to be physically present if it doesn't make sense.
Individual anecdotes that support one case or another are easy to dig up, but you would be hard-pressed to find large pieces of really innovative software products developed without people in close proximity (you could claim that the Linux Kernel is a big project but that's an open source software that is not really a commercial product).
Everybody can not move to the Bay Area, and good developers do not become bad by moving away or not being there, but the simple fact remains: there are no (financially) large and successful software companies have been fully distributed from the ground up.
Claim I agree is there are no (financially) large and successful software companies have been fully distributed from the ground up.
Which is very different from the claim I strongly disagree with which is: only routine, well-scoped work has been successfully carried out by offshore teams.
I DO agree that there's an advantage to on-site work.
I'm in Houston and I bought a gorgeous townhouse-style home in my favorite part of town near downtown, and it was in the $300k range. Can you buy a patch of dirt in the Bay Area for that much?
a few years back, when i was working in palo alto and living in SJ/milpitas it regularly took me 90 minutes to make the 20 mile commute home.
needless to say, i quit that job, moved to the alameda county and found a job a mile from my house. now i actually have a SUPER commute, which means i can take the bus, ride my bike or walk depending on my mood. :)
It takes me about 2 hours and 10 minutes from the door of my apartment to the door of my office. I live a 10 minute walk from the train station in PK and work a 10 minute walk away from Grand Central.
There are probably a few hundred people at the train station every morning, from much farther away than I am, who probably have to take another subway to their job once they get to Grand Central.
It's bananas and the only reason I'm doing it is because my fiancee is in school in Poughkeepsie. I always wonder what the other people's reasons are.
Now I have a house in Staten Island and it’s still 50 minutes - though I can cheat a bit by driving to the bus. It’s actually a 15 mins walk, but I don’t mind it.
For those who aren't aware, many of Boston's intersections and squares are terrible intersections, remnants of the crossings due to actual cow-paths. There's also a massive amount of old housing property and relatively little new housing stock. There are high density apartment or condo buildings sprouting up here and there, but by large, you're going to be paying over 1 million for a small/old house in/around Boston, possibly 2 million depending on the location. If you're willing to commute 1.5 hours, you can get a fixer upper in a semi-rural area for around 300-400k. If Amazon came to Boston, it would be compound this problem exponentially, though whoever owns property currently would definitely make a good return.
Why aren't more companies in New England going to where the commercial real estate and housing are cheaper?
My company does have an office in the Seaport but it's in Boston specifically because it makes more sense to have a customer briefing center there. Most MA employees are about 45 minutes west.
ADDED: And when biotech started going into Kendall Square that area was pretty much old warehouses. Of course, now it's some of the most expensive real estate in the Boston area. I know someone whose company moved out of Kendall Square to move to the Finance District because it was cheaper.
* No T access or...
* Other transit stations don't have existing office buildings or are equally built out, losing to other advantages as...
* No "scene" - Kendall and the Seaport have a "feel" to them that you don't find at, say, Alewife
So, you could choose to locate a company in Worcester (or even closer in, say, Framingham), but many of the 20/30 somethings will have a tough time getting to these locations and these towns themselves don't have people with the necessary skill sets.
It's criminal the train from Boston to Worcester is slower today than it was in 1950. But that's another topic.
I thought the removal of physical toll booths from the Mass Pike would help. I have seen absolutely no benefit.
Big problem in RI, if you've ever driven down to the south county beaches on Rt 1, you'll actually be on a "highway" that has 6-7 lights. Why not just have off/on-ramps? Infrastructure is hard, apparently no one wants to spend on that.
But I lock in a 20-25 minute bike ride (or 50-minute walk + public transit ride in winter) to work in the Seaport. I saw I-93 at rush hour once, and I shudder at the memory.
At least part of my reasoning was, "What if Amazon does choose Boston? Do I move my family into a second or third floor condo with no yard at all?"
>If Amazon came to Boston, it would be compound this problem exponentially, though whoever owns property currently would definitely make a good return.
The proposed location (Suffolk Downs) is sort of an odd one from a housing perspective. It is on the T but that's all very blue collar neighborhoods around there, some of which have gentrified a bit but still not places your typical software engineer would normally choose to live.
The real estate here is booming as many people have settled here due to BART proximity and the fact that it's one of the few communities building lots of new housing. All the FANG companies are also sending their shuttles here.
It's also a way better commute for more lower income folks coming from Stockton, Modesto, etc since it's on the way to San Jose so you can actually have a labor force to staff restaurants, hotels, hospitals, schools, etc.
However, there has been a recent wave of NIMBYism coming through as the development has been unchecked and they haven't built enough public services (like schools) to support the housing growth. Many locals also do not like the efficient land use through zero-lot-lines and multi-story townhomes that the developers are flattening hills to build. I hear a lot of jeers calling my neighborhood "an eyesore" full of "cookie cutter homes". My hope that this all gets resolved in the next few years as people come to their senses but it's clear that Californians really have no idea how to plan urban development to match their growth.
SF is 63% renters, and should be able to outnumber NIMBY homeowners easily to have a lot more dense housing built. Alameda County is in 2nd place at 47% renters [1], so only a small percentage of homeowners need convincing that this housing shortage is bad for everyone in the long term.
[1] http://www.towncharts.com/California/Housing/Alameda-County-...
That sounds like too much.
I don't think most people enjoy this benefit of rent control, it wouldn't make sense to rent out properties. I wonder what is the effective rent control rate (that which has affected price significantly). Maybe a rental turnover rate would hint at a solution.
Though, I don't think this is "rent control" in the NYC sense of the term where rents are kept way under market rate.
Rather, it seems to be a set of ordinances around what landlords can and can't do, largely pertaining to rent increases: http://sfrb.org/rent-ordinance
I think it is a terrible strategy to try to convince homeowners that its best for them to forego clear economic benefits for blurry future profits. The solution is land value tax: just remove city sales taxes and add a tax on land. That will make low density units more expensive, the tax burden is relieved from the renter and lands on the homeowner and renters see their income increase immediately.
Activism to push change requires a lot of energy and time. Most of the people who live here are busy with their jobs and families and do not have time to invest in it. So the activists who have the time to push usually want radical changes, such as 100% low income housing or homeless shelters. These are fine ideas, but for communities of upper middle class families, the change is scary and usually unwelcome. So then those families suddenly find the time to show up and protest and that's where you meet NIMBYs.
Change like this really requires the will of the local governments to make progress. Yet I think they get elected on other platforms such as, building better schools, or improving roads or downtown small businesses. YIMBY seems to be the first political wave of politicians actually running on a platform of more housing.
The Fremont Warm Springs project had few complaints from neighbors about overcrowded schools, etc. because they Lennar is building a new school. https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/03/17/fremont-approves-lenn...
The Google San Jose will be transformative as up until now all of the FANG offices have been planted in suburban office parks with horrible access to transit. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/10/google-says-its-getti...
If you can just nap or get work done while commuting you might not mind a 90-minute commute as much.
On the other hand, if you can’t afford an autonomous car and have to commute it will be even more hellish...
Some people who work in the city live in Pennsylvania.
That isn't really saying much. Easton, PA is almost exactly 90 min from NYC (though it has tolls).
I'm talking about people who commute from Bethlehem - 180 miles away. Or from Oxford, CT - over three hours each way.[0]
Back in the 80's, NJ Transit had some bus routes that took a minimum of two hours (194, 195). I don't know if they're still running, though.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/realestate/extreme-commut...
Most of the road warriors drive. Only a lucky minority live near where the trains run.
Those suburban people drove or took a NJ Transit bus because trains were not available. Some even formed neighborhood van pools, kicking in to rent a van and pay for insurance and parking.
But the fact that there are vastly more bus routes going into and out of the city is pretty firm evidence that roads are more comprehensive than rails.
It isn't sustainable, and it will crash back to earth. One of the houses near me recently sold for way more than expected, and I pointed out that the development it was in had been build during the dot.com boom, what was more nearly all of the houses in that development had fallen out of escrow (the buyers walked away) when the crash hit because their source of wealth (stock in technology companies) essentially evaporated over 6 months.