Put some effort into understanding perspectives before resorting to derision. Bringing thousands of highly paid employees into a smaller city is often not good for many who already lives there unless they own property. The majority of the new jobs will not go to existing residents, rents will increase, restaurants will get more expensive, traffic will get worse, and everything will get more crowded.
For rich city-dwellers, the above might sound like nothing, but for people who seek smaller cities it will suck because it quickly erodes the character of the city.
I'm not in favor of the city subsidizing a company's growth, even if it does stimulate the economy in the long-run, but I just can't get behind any policy that would prevent a growing company due to something as nebulous as the erosion of the city's character.
That way the city can fit everyone, cheaply.
How many of these folks actually live in a densely populated city? Zoning laws in Manhattan have a different source and downstream effect than some suburb of SF or LA, or some other city with housing cost issues.
It's a huge topic of conversation, but I'll summarize it by offering a few items to ponder before we reduce the problem to "zoning restrictions" and people reply with "100X times this!".
--- Infrastructure is more than housing. And much more expensive. The subway system in NYC isn't scaling to capacity due to the speed of development. It may feel expensive to build a new rental building, but scaling public transportation, education, and more is deeply more expensive.
--- Manhattan isn't dense enough for you? You realize the parent article is about Google purchasing a huge swathe of Manhattan real estate. Are the skyscrapers not high enough? Better yet, maybe we should knock down those 19th century buildings in whatever pockets are left of low density housing in Manhattan and turn everything into a giant concrete reed jungle? Not all NIMBY is mean-spirited, and if you're the traveling type you can understand the need for preservation of architectural character.
--- I live in a part of NYC where zoning laws allow for more building. As it turns out, I even own a building where I could potentially build an additional 1500 square feet, and I could convert my building into six separate apartment buildings. This would add net 4 apartments to a city which has a housing crisis. And I'd love do. However, I'd have to comply with code, which like zoning exists to protect us from ourselves, if for different reasons. To comply with code, so my tenants don't get incinerated in a fire, I'd have to spend so much money that it's cost prohibitive.
Sorry, I'm just tired of reading the same "it's the zoning laws" reductionism by people who know only suburbs.
Manhattan is absolutely not dense enough for me. It has like a couple small areas, with 40 story buildings.
The skyscrapers are not high enough for me.
Here is how things should work. We should pick a single 1 mile square area, and in this area there are zero building height limits. Every single building in this area should be 50 stories tall or higher.
And then we should leave the surrounding area, hundreds of square miles, for the low density people to live in.
Yes, high density buildings are more expensive. But the actual cost of building the building is a small percentage of the total cost of living in an area. The REAL cost is caused by artifical land supply constraints.
You want lower density? Don't want to live in the very small, designated 50 story building area? Great! You can live in the 99% of the US landmass that is low density.
Us people who disagree, and and prefer higher density living should get at least freaking 1% of the land to do what we want with!
Have you had a chance to see the effects on massive, quick development on specifically the mass transit system in Brooklyn (downtown Brooklyn, in particular)?
Look, I'm not saying there shouldn't be density. I'm just trying to point a finger at other elements that should be thought about other than tall buildings. I don't have kids, so I won't even get started on the downstream effects density has on school crowdedness, choices and desirability of areas.
The left hand doesn't talk to the right hand in the vast bureaucracy that is NYC. If development and rezoning were done with consideration for long-term downstream factors, I wouldn't have needed to write these comments.
There is a difference between 'fitting people' somewhere and them being happy.
Living in something dense like Tokyo/NYC is not desirable to people who seek cities like Boulder.
The other option is to keep expanding outward with single family home lots, but prices in the desirable close areas still shoot way up and traffic gets miserable (see LA).
Note 2: Thousands of highly paid employees will cause real estate prices to rise, certainly. But they'll spend on more than just real estate, so the economy as a whole will grow with a lot of incoming money to be spent. As these incoming people are already working for 1 company, their demand for products/services will fall onto the local economy. Which is good for existing residents who participate in that economy. It'll also be good for anyone else who lives (after surviving applicable rent hikes) in the same districts, as the influx of tax money will help local schools, law enforcement, libraries, etc.
A bunch of rich people showing up does not really help most people.
A bunch of googlers will not support the local coop grocery store, but instead continue using amazon fresh/blue apron, etc. Not to mention the boutique stores they want to shop at probably don't exist yet (depending on the city).
When you have to twist figures so that 1.5 thousand becomes "thousands" (thereby making it sound much bigger), then it means you have no argument at all.
Boulder's population is 108,000. Adding an additional 1500 employees adds 1.5% to that population; not a huge amount.
Back on Google for a moment:
Lets talk neighborhood. The older Google buildings are renovated, small buildings. One of them was a Circuit City that closed. That should already give you a good idea of the area. It isn't trendy downtown, just primarily commercial space.
The new Google building is larger, about 3 blocks away, and located in what was a basically condemned. There's empty, undeveloped lots across from it on one side, and a huge sprawling Whole Foods with a massive parking lot on the other side. Google's new building is flanked by a large Target. Overall, the building is not actually that large. It's 4 floors and built as two halves joined in the center with a bridge.
It isn't the trendy part of town. It's developed a nice building in an otherwise lower-traffic area. I know there's follow-on effects from employing new folks in the area (housing, traffic, etc.), but I don't see how that's overall different from the general influx of folks into Boulder.
Perhaps it's myopic of me, but I don't see "us" (as if us vs. them is a productive use of time) being a negative force. Google Boulder employs lots of folks, and the vast majority of them have lived in Colorado for more than the last few years.
I'd like to know what we're doing to destroy communities and how we can prevent that.
Stop moving into small cities with workers paid significantly above the average of the existing residents. Restaurants open that they can't afford, the limited housing stock gets bid up quickly, good schools get overcrowded, etc.
It's not a pleasant answer, but realistically that's ultimately what upsets a good chunk of the people that complain. If you bring in 2,000 people into any small city who make $200k/year+ when the average is down around $50k/year, it's going to result in a backlash and there is nothing you can really do unless you ban your employees from spending money there. The only real strategy is to pretend you are concerned and wait for the problem to gentrify away.
For every 1k Googlers who move to the city, the city should make damn sure that at least 1k apartments are built by developers.
There is no solution to bringing a ton of people into a small area of land that preserves each person renting the same place for the same price. If you could turn Boulder into Tokyo overnight, it's still going to screw everyone who was there for single family homes and low density.
The solution is to pick a small, 1 mile square area, and make THAT the high density, 40 story, skyscraper area.
A single high density zone could double the size of many cities, while still leaving hundreds of square miles of area for the low density people to live in the surrounding area.
Sure, it would be a comparatively high cost of living to live in the high density area, but that's fine, as it is an extra area that you can choose not to live in.
There are lots of people who love high density living. And I think it is completely fair to give high density dwellers a single square mile of no limits 40+ story tall buildings, for ever 100 miles of area that the low density living people can choose to live in.
High rise costs to build are several hundred per square foot, so the cost to the tenants would be higher. Why would anyone pay several times the cost of a house a block away for a spot in the high rise?
Why? I want you to genuinely think about this question.
Why is it that, non-high density areas, that are near high density areas, increase in price?
Is it perhaps because, high density areas, with tall buildings, are so amazing, so wonderful, so in demand, so useful, and so great to live in, that people WANT to live near them?
The NIMBY argument against high density areas, is that people don't like living there. But it is literally the opposite. High density areas are so great, that low density areas NEAR the high density areas, increase in price because EVERYONE WANTS TO LIVE THERE!
Thats why the price goes up. Not because of the increase in cost to live in the places, but because they places are amazing, and there aren't enough of them, and people are willing to pay a premium amount of money to live there.
So if everyone wants to live in these areas, then why aren't we building more of them?
These areas literally make everything more desireable!
And, because of supply and demand, if we build a whole bunch of these super great, amazing areas that everyone is willing to pay lost of money to live in, then the price will go down, and everyone will benefit.
Your argument is literally that we shouldn't make cities and place to live better, because if the places to live are better, then more people will want to live there.
I am of the opposite. I think we should make the world a better place, and we should make everywhere in the world better to live in.
But even so, the people who want to live in places that suck should absolutely have the freedom to do that. 99% of the land in the US is low density, and people who like those areas should keep it. But the OTHER people, who actually want to live in nice, high density areas, that are good to live in, should get at least 1% of the land to do with as we please. I am all in favor of freedom of choice for the low density people. Why can't they give the same freedom of choice to those who disagree with them?
You're not offering anything profound here. You are just admitting that a high density area can't just be built in the middle of a small city without affecting the prices.
>and so great to live in, that people WANT to live near them?
Of course people that love dense cities want to live in or near dense cities. People who like that will buy up the surrounding houses and keep pushing the prices up until they are on parity with the cost of the city itself. However, you know who doesn't want to live there? People who deliberately chose not to live in a dense city in the first place.
>increase in price because EVERYONE WANTS TO LIVE THERE!
That's not how supply and demand works. They increase in price because of limited supply and a large enough pool of people who like cities to outstrip supply. Expensive != everyone wants.
>and people are willing to pay a premium amount of money to live there.
Some people are. Some people are also willing to pay a premium amount of money to have a helicopter. It doesn't mean everyone wants or can afford a helicopter.
>Your argument is literally that we shouldn't make cities and place to live better, because if the places to live are better, then more people will want to live there.
No it's not. You're either being deliberately obtuse or you have never interacted with people that choose to live in small cities. Adding more density, increasing the cost of housing per square foot, increasing traffic, etc are all awful turnoffs for people who seek small cities.
>and we should make everywhere in the world better to live in.
And there is a good chunk of the population in smaller cities that would be happy for you to go ruin someone else's area with your idea of "better".
>But even so, the people who want to live in places that suck
Don't be vacuous, you have to fathom that that people like different lifestyles.
>should get at least 1% of the land to do with as we please.
There is plenty of empty land in the US for you to build your dream cities. You don't need to wreck a small city to build more dense cities. If everyone wanted to live in density like you claim, you could make billions building out cities wherever you want. Just stop screwing up existing communities.
>Why can't they give the same freedom of choice to those who disagree with them?
You have the choice, just build the density somewhere else. If you displace an entire community that likes small cities don't expect them to thank you for fundamentally altering their way of life for the worse (in their eyes).
No Googlers are forced to live in Mountain View either. That doesn't change the fact that Google employees fight for houses in Mountain View.
People with means who do not like commutes will buy closer housing. And guess what, most people don't like commutes.
My old church is located under the old Citigroup Center skyscraper at 601 Lexington, which is also an entire block; Citigroup used to have both that building and the block across the street, 399 Park, for a couple of decades. When they moved out of those buildings to another neighborhood in Manhattan, that caused a drop in noon mass attendance but that was really about it. Their presence didn't destroy the neighborhood, let alone the city, and their move didn't destroy it either.
The fact that NYC is capable of handling Citigroup-sized companies and Google-sized companies moving in and barely even noticing is one of the deep reasons I like living in NYC. I wish more other cities would do the same, because I don't think there's anything unique to NYC about the ability to do this. Maybe population - although the Denver-Aurora-Bolder metropolitan area, at 3M, isn't that much smaller than NYC (8.5M). The internet is telling me the Google Boulder office can support up to 1,500 employees. You shouldn't give them corporate welfare, but also you should just be able to accommodate them without that, they're not that big. It should just be a building, and you should have lots of those.
That's a repulsive suggestion to many people who live in Boulder. Living in a city of <250k people is a feature, not a bug. Boulder is not cheap, if people wanted density they could already move to Denver for the same price and climate.
If Boulder wants to be Ann Arbor of the Mountains, that's fine. But I suspect that's not what Boulder really wants; people who live in Boulder want to have a competitive employment market with multiple options for where to work and little risk of being forced to relocate out of town if their job doesn't work out. That's a basket of benefits that you can't humanely get while holding density constant.
So it's not a case of wanting things both ways, it's a case of the city choosing economic expansion over the subset of people that want to keep things affordable and uncrowded.
Interestingly, the modern liberal position seems to be that everyone is welcome here, just, you know, not actually here here. Somewhere else, here. Not where I live, here. We talk about this in terms of immigration, but my experience is that, in actual practice, people don't even want Ohioans to move to their town.
Hm, most of the people I know who live in the "coastal elite" cities did not grow up in those same cities; they grew up in places like Ohio.
(Which, again, is fine if Boulder wants to be a steady size forever - make sure enough people are moving out to bigger towns to cancel out population growth, by making sure they don't have too many job opportunities locally.)
Yes, and generally speaking, if they liked Ohio, they would've stayed there, because you can still make a very nice living as a coder in middle America. That means they're going to be even more upset about Ohioans closing in, because they'll feel like the culture they left behind is sneaking back up on them.
Or, sure, they can decide that being a 100K-person town is what they want their city to be, and use zoning to actively resist any single employer having over 1K people in the town. But this isn't a Google-specific problem, and if you try to address it with Google-specific solutions (either "Take special measures to invite Google because they'll bring in high-paying jobs" or "Take special measures to exclude Google because they'll destroy your city"), you'll be in trouble when some other, possibly non-tech, employer comes along in the future.
Definitely gives off a different vibe.
That's not fear. That's pattern recognition.
> Fast-growing technology sector is fueling a housing boom in cities across America
https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/fast-growing-techn...
The only real problem here is shitty local governance and NIMBYism that refuses to acknowledge reality and build more housing. In the end, it doesn't stop people from moving there, it just drives up costs and drives out natives and people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. If you want affordable housing markets, you have to build housing in response to demand.
Regardless, we're talking about NYC here, so the fact that Google is buying some building instead of leasing like they have been is a total non-story. It'll have zero effect on NYC.
Once housing prices skyrocket and the cheapest buy-in starts at $700k+, nobody is in a rush to build housing for low-income demographics. New development is always just as unaffordably priced, and will continue to be until the current bubble bursts and a recession happens.
Another issue with the "just build more" philosophy is that it takes no account of the added infrastructure stresses that drive up other prices (gas, electricity, water, traffic, public transit, medical/police/fire) in the community and can detract from the quality of life previously enjoyed by the natives.
The purpose of building more houses, is not to make new houses for the existing, poor residents to live in. The purpose is to prevent the NEW rich residents from displacing old residents.
For every million dollar condo that is built in the marina SF, that is 1 less family in the mission that will be displaced.
Second, economic growth has been incredibly uneven and concentrated to just a handful of urban centers of the nation. This creates real problems. Economic inequality is amplified, and those sections of the population are separated from each other, insulating each other from the economic differences. Families, the poor, and the unexperienced simply don't have the leverage required to safely move away from their support structures into completely new cities without facing major issues. Why should economic growth be so constrained to such small areas just so big corporations benefit from cheaper labor?
Also, existing citizens who own and live in these locations take priority over people who want to move in. No one is entitled to additional housing when tech companies foist externalities of additional workers (workers who could work remotely!) on a geographic region.
NYC at least decided to take the first route decades ago, and has survived lots of industries moving in and out.
Yep, wealthy land owners, clearly the group that needs protecting.
Actually, can anyone name a major US city where most of the growth came from itself, rather than an influx?
Wealthy land owners = citizens who have most of their personal wealth/retirements savings tied up in the equity of their home that has slowly appreciated over years or decades.
How terribly different than tech companies and employees using copyright (source code) and vast quantities of data to reap enormous returns and salaries (respectively).
This isn't David vs Goliath. This is New Boss vs Old Boss. Big Tech needs to get over itself. It's the new bad guy.
I'm not disagreeing that this is New Boss vs Old Boss. I'm disagreeing that Old Boss needs empowerment.
An interesting example is comparing Venice, CA to the "classic" gentrification: In Venice, most of the people responsible for the local culture (aka, why tech wants to be here) also own their homes; thus, as the property values rose dramatically, they benefitted. Contrast with "typical" gentrification, which just screws renters.
Hence why I'm on you about landowners versus "locals". There's a difference, and it's significant.
How does a city improve itself without bringing in new jobs and tax revenue?
Should a city just let buildings sit there and rot instead of selling them to a company that wants to create hundreds or thousands of jobs?
If you're a going concern, affordability should not be an issue. Otherwise, you're straining infrastructure and housing with marginal benefits to the host city. Hire remote instead.
You don't throw gasoline on a fire. You slow stoke it while continually adding fuel.
Man, if only Google left this lot condemned and abandoned, along with the defunct car dealership across the corner which is just an empty lot. Boulder would be so much better off.
You can verify all this with the satellite photos and street view.
That's the problem: WF and Target pay minimum wages, and that seems to be OK with the OP. Paying more than minimum wages is the problem. S/he wants everyone to be poor.
Resist googlers if you can, they destroy communities.