They're pitching this as being a benevolent gesture, but
(a) It sounds like they're just becoming a larger real-estate developer? They didn't say "we're donating all this land plus some capital to a housing non-profit"; they're going to receive revenue from their investments. Are we supposed to say thanks?
(b) How does 20k units compare to their impact on Bay Area housing to date?
This is not my area, and I'm not aware of any region that has this requirement, but here's an idea: In the same way that we require large physical development projects to do an environmental impact study, and actively make mitigating affordances (e.g. setting aside land) to offset those impacts .... should employers who intend to hire large numbers of employees from out of the area (sending recruiters to schools across the nation, etc) be required to do housing impact studies, and actively participate in building the housing stock for the new residents they're pulling to an area?
How quickly would the Bay Area housing situation change if the ability of tech companies to grow headcount was tied to their ability to proportionally build housing?
Local governments love adding corporations. They pay taxes while using few resources. So corporate campuses get approved super easily - sometimes even with tax breaks!
New housing on the other hand is fought against tooth and nail because it brings new residents that require roads, services, and schools. Worse, if all the land has been used up, it requires larger buildings to be built where there used to be smaller houses and commercial strips which upsets local residents with voting power. Local governments sometimes even make residential developers pay extra taxes or make mandatory donations to the community.
It's these local city governments like Palo Alto and Mountain View that allowed Google to massively expand without also allowing developers to build housing to support the employees for that expansion. Hence, why Google is spending its own capital just to get some units built.
> It's these local city governments like Palo Alto and Mountain View that allowed Google to massively expand without also allowing developers to build housing to support the employees for that expansion.
There's probably plenty of blame to go all around. IMO companies like Google (disclosure: I work there) caught on to the magnitude of the problem too late, and when they did, they ran into the local political resistance.
Why were they so late to catch on? Well I only have theories, including that it's only in the last few years that the cost of housing has made life difficult even for well paid employees, and those employees have voiced their frustrations.
In some ways I don't think that Google (and other companies that might follow them) deserve so much praise for finally attacking this by the horns at this late stage.
Blaming or praising Google is irrelevant. This is simply a response to a broken political system where regional housing supply is wildly inadequate relative to demand.
It isn’t the job of a company to provide housing for its employees. In the absence of constraints real estate developers will naturally build to satisfy this demand. However local governments have control over how and if housing is built and have systematically prevented building to meet this demand for decades. The blame is theirs since they are the only entities can and do constrain new housing. This is the part of the system that needs to change.
> This is simply a response to a broken political system where regional housing supply is wildly inadequate relative to demand
Which is why, IMO, the praise for Google on this matter is unwarranted. And it's not the political system that is broken, it's the regressive views of the elected officials and the people who have tended to vote in local elections.
> In the absence of constraints real estate developers will naturally build to satisfy this demand.
We don't need a policy that is absent restraints. We need housing policy with sane restraints, i.e. incremental upzoning planned at the regional level to allow more housing density and building employment centers accessible via transit instead of only cars and private bus systems.
Even public agencies like BART have had to fight at the state level to be allowed to develop housing on their own property.
This isn't really an issue of restraints vs no restraints but rather what the restraints optimize for, and currently they optimize for increasing property values and not providing sufficient housing supply.
That makes it sound like local governments should just fight harder against companies growing more?
At present, companies adopt strategies which require them to undergo rapid growth, including headcount, without planning for or making affordances for the other effects of bringing those people to the area.
Why is unreasonable to suggest that companies should be required to plan for and mitigate those effects at the outset, rather than one or two companies making feeble gestures several years later?
This sounds a lot like Trump's rhetoric, America for Americans, San Francisco for San Franciscans.
It's unreasonable because industry has already paid for it in taxes, and fairly high ones at that. It's not industry's fault that it's being squandered by local and state government.
Haha, having to do onerous amounts of environmental impact studies and various community impact studies/hearings, is exactly why we're in this situation to begin with.
We already have plenty of people that want to build, that's not the problem. Problem is local regulation and policies that don't align with regional interests.
(a) It sounds like they're just becoming a larger real-estate developer? They didn't say "we're donating all this land plus some capital to a housing non-profit"; they're going to receive revenue from their investments. Are we supposed to say thanks?
(b) How does 20k units compare to their impact on Bay Area housing to date?
This is not my area, and I'm not aware of any region that has this requirement, but here's an idea: In the same way that we require large physical development projects to do an environmental impact study, and actively make mitigating affordances (e.g. setting aside land) to offset those impacts .... should employers who intend to hire large numbers of employees from out of the area (sending recruiters to schools across the nation, etc) be required to do housing impact studies, and actively participate in building the housing stock for the new residents they're pulling to an area?
How quickly would the Bay Area housing situation change if the ability of tech companies to grow headcount was tied to their ability to proportionally build housing?