Ah, but you see, it is also difficult!

"Dirty streets" and "traffic congestion" are big, messy problems, requiring careful planning, managing projects and contractors, adversarial factors, etc.

By contrast, passing laws that apply to corporations is so easy! They are generally law abiding, so you just tell them "no more free food for you!", and they obey.

Until, you know, they skip town and you are left with nothing. But that will likely happen after my tenure in the local legislative body, so my utility horizon is rather shorter term...

1. Businesses moving out of California, especially NorCal. Sergey Brin already said two years ago that he would not have started Google in NorCal today. He was right. There's a lot more interest in other locations, such as Austin.

2. Remote work, and fully remote virtual offices.

Personally I know a bunch of people who declined offers in the SFBay to avoid the pincer squeeze of impossible housing costs + highest tax rate in the nation. A friend of mine did the math and realized that downtown Manhattan (!) was more affordable for him than the Bay.

This stupid rule will not be the last straw. I do think it will deter companies from starting large complexes in MTV specifically, and SF if it passes this same rule.

It is however a sign of the arrogance and greed of municipalities, and their mistaken belief that they can just keep squeezing big tech indefinitely.

So cities have to raise funding somehow.

(This is also a problem with the way America funds schools. The US needs to figure out how to distribute tax dollars more equally - or at least figure out how to keep most of the country out of poverty while still building infrastructure that keeps city housing costs down.)

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-05/think-car...

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1017590957984735232

There are some worth reading, like Will Wilkinson, J Rubin, and T Nichols. But they're few and far between.

Google is expanding their Mountain View and building a massive new headquarters

https://sf.curbed.com/2017/3/8/14858200/google-headquarters-...

Google is also expanding into San Jose

Apple just recently completed their spaceship campus

Facebook is massively expanding their Menlo Park footprint https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/03/15/fac...

In addition, they signed the largest lease ever in SF https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/14/17353094/facebook-park-tower...

Salesforce recently opened their new 60 story tower in downtown SF http://www.salesforcetower.com/

And I haven't even touched upon continued expansion of Uber, Lyft (which opened a new autonomous division in Palo Alto), Airbnb etc.

Austin is a bit player in the tech scene. The only other alternative right now is Seattle.

Many talented people don't want to relocate for work, and companies are realizing that. Distributed offices are becoming more and more of a thing.

At one time Armonk, NY and Maynard, MA were the center of tech too.

It's will be a long slow death by a thousand cuts.

I'd recommend not moving to Central Texas, by the way. Water availability is going to be a huge issue as the population continues to increase. Cities aren't feeling it yet but the small towns on the fringes definitely are - and the issue will continue to spread.

My point was more that there's probably 8-10 metro areas that fall into the "second-tier", but Austin somehow gets pretty consistently thrown out as some alternative to the valley.

But the numbers play out a bit differently. In terms of VC investments, Austin is yes..second-tier (really 3rd, b/c NYC, LA, and Boston make a case for being the 2nd and everyone else is well behind them)..right there with Miami, Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, etc. In other words...it's just a regular city that has an ok tech scene.

Not to say that VC money is the only metric by which we should judge, but it's a pretty decent barometer.

2. Been hearing that for thirty years, too.

Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t a breaking point, I just don’t think we’re there yet. CA might be willing to amputate a leg or a wing, but there’s too much gold in the goose to kill it all at once.

That's like saying "I was reading about government deficit 10 years ago, and look at it, it's still growing and we're still here and the deficit is even larger!".

It's a growing problem. California grows less attractive as more of these exploitative measures and taxes pile up, and the impact is noticeable. No NorCal location was in the shortlist for Amazon's 2nd HQ, for instance.

> Been hearing that for thirty years, too.

You've been hearing about fully remote virtual teams thirty years ago, before the internet really existed?

Maybe as some future prediction?

Sure, the Mother of all Demos showed off remote collaborative work in 1968.

...and was certainly an exciting futuristic demo, but unfortunately neither practical nor feasible with the actual widely available technologies of its time.

Hahaha. California is a very nice place to live, and very many people want to live here. Last year, California's economy grew so much that it took back its spot as #5 in the world...behind only the US, China, Japan, and Germany, despite having a population less than half the size of any jurisdiction ahead of it.

Most of that GDP is not related to the tech industry, which despite its importance to the Bay Area represents less of the California economy than manufacturing.

NorCal may not have been on the shortlist for Amazon's 2HQ, but LA was...LA and the Inland Empire also have a less severe housing shortage and are far more pro-development.

That's not really saying much given its population AND its land area. It should be performing right where it is.

However you measure it, California is outperforming other states and other nations.

Imagine bowing down to a state and ignoring facts. I never said California wasn't performing well. But in a pro-business country (far more than France), one of its biggest states, with its largest population, that is bigger than most countries on earth, why is it so shocking that their GDP is that high?

Yeah, pretty much. I’m saying it’s nothing new, and things are still churning along just fine, whether it is in reference to the deficit or CA. Nothing has changed, CA is still ridiculously expensive, as it always has been. CA taxes the shit out of you, as it always has. And jobs pay better, so one has to calculate if the added expense is worth it, as we always have. Will it ever change? In the long term, yeah, it’s likely. In the short term? I see no evidence that a change is in the making. Those gleefully predicting CA’s demise have been around as long as I’ve been alive, and much like TSLA shorts, they’re probably going to have to wait a while longer.

You've been hearing about fully remote virtual teams thirty years ago, before the internet really existed?

Yes. Remote access to centralized and/or distributed computing resources was a solved problem long before the internet showed up.

Most economists will disagree with you about the deficit :-)

It's not something we tend to think about on a daily basis, but it's a huge, growing problem that already has ill effects and may end in a catatstrophe: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/09/why-a...

Similarly, California got away with squeezing the "rich techies", but it keeps losing some of them, and if it's not careful, that will escalate. I can tell you about a bunch of my friends who all had great offers in Cali, and normally would move there in a heartbeat, but the combination of taxes + housing costs + other crap made them go elsewhere. Once a bunch of companies open HQs in other states (besides Amazon that will certainly not open HQ2 in California), this will become worse.

> CA is still ridiculously expensive, as it always has been.

Not as bad as this. If you lived in California for decades, as you claim, you know it's been growing worse than ever.

> Remote access to centralized and/or distributed computing resources was a solved problem long before the internet showed up.

Same deal: it's a developing process. Folks wanted to do remote offices for a long time now, and technology has improved steadily to enable this. Now we're seeing more and more remote teams. This trend will likely strengthen as the internet gets faster, virtual reality gets better, etc.

Which, I hear, is quickly catching up to Bay Area in terms of cost of living.

https://www.tripsavvy.com/austins-cost-of-living-255111

Now let's do SF!:

> As usual, the result is grim for San Francisco, since, according to CAR, a house in San Francisco now runs over $1.5 million on average.

https://sf.curbed.com/2018/2/15/17016992/affordable-homes-me...

That's almost x4 times more. Austin has some headroom still.

Moreover, don't forget taxes! California state tax for an engineer will be about 10% of gross. 0% in Austin. Quite a difference.

Surely this was foreseeable.

Probably the ones that chose to pick low hanging fruit (cue this article) rather than actually start to plan for long term solutions to big (existing) problems.

Congestion and housing problems solved.

That is not true. The rule applies to all new offices in MTV. The Facebook office just happens to be the first new office that was completed with the intention to provide free food, since the law passed.

(Applying a rule like that to Facebook alone - on what basis, exactly? - would be discriminatory, unusual, and likely unenforceable.)

> The SF rule is on proposal stages and is unlikely to pass.

How do you know that?

It has some serious backers, and similar rules passed in nearby municipalities. What evidence do you have that it will not pass in SF as well?

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/New-Facebook-Offices-M...

They haven't decided whether to expand to cover Google's expansion

For the SF rule, it is only proposed by Peskin and Safai. And Peskin himself said on twitter that this is just a proposal.

> the city prohibits companies from fully subsidizing meals in the Village, and the rule could spread to other Bay Area cities in the future.

So no, it doesn't apply "only to Facebook", it applies to new office complexes, in this particular case the complex called "the Village". It would apply to any companies within that office complex, and potentially any new complexes and offices built in MTV going forward.

> For the SF rule, it is only proposed by Peskin and Safai. And Peskin himself said on twitter that this is just a proposal.

You only need one lawmaker to propose a new law. Plenty of laws in the book were proposed by one or two lawmakers initially.

> Peskin himself said on twitter that this is just a proposal.

Not sure what tweet you're referring to. The one I've seen seemed very serious and even militant:

> Announcing new leg to ensure on-site tech cafeterias don't continue to chip away at our vibrant neighborhood commercial corridors & small businesses. We're not the suburbs, we're an urban city with a vital local economy that corporations say they want their employees to support

https://twitter.com/AaronPeskin/status/1021856608417021952

He's saying it's even more necessary in SF than in MTV...

No, it, based on the except you point to, applies specifically and only to “the Village”, not to new complexes generally (and the Village is not a pure office complex, by a mixed use one, and this rule seems specifically designed to make the Village attractive to restaurants.)

> You only need one lawmaker to propose a new law.

But you need a majority to pass it, and I've not heard any sign that the other Supes have expressed any interest.

Peskin will need a majority from the BoS and London Breed on his side to pass this legislation

With more traffic caused by people leaving their campus more than start/end of day, people will need to account for more traffic. This may cause people to move further out or pay more of a premium for housing in close proximity.

If these companies knew ahead of time that this was not allowed, they may not have built their campuses so sprawling or may have avoided these areas altogether.

As far as I understand, the prevailing policy is doing the exact opposite on all those three.

They still get the tech voter and now they will endear some small progressive cause.

But, yes, it's utterly incomprehensible. It's reductionist. Like I said before, ban Uber, ban MUNI, they are taking jobs away from Pedicabs and Taxi drivers...

Anyway, it's not Robots (yet) prepping food at the company canteen, they have to hire workers to do the cooking, serving, etc. So it's more or less a wash. Only diff is probably company cafeterias mostly try to ensure workers have a legal right to work in the US.

It's true that basically all elected officials in SF are Democrats, but in practice there are two semi-official parties: "progressives" and "moderates." The supervisors pushing this, Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safaí belong to the progressive wing, which recently got a majority on BoS with Rafael Mandelman taking Scott Wiener's old seat.

While pretty much united on national political issues, the two groups differ on housing policy (generally, moderates want to build more, progressives less), homelessness, and the proper attitude toward the tech industry (the progressive wing tends to blame it for many of SF's problems).

How did the people who oppose pretty much all progress, came to be named "progressives"?

I'm sure this shot to the top of the priority list not out of some moral imperative, but because someone somewhere was losing a buck, or could make a buck if this passed.

I don't know Peskin and there are many honest hard working politicians, but safeguards like disclosing conflicts of interest aren't terribly burdensome for good politicians but can help generate legal consequences for the bad ones.

This is just skimming low hanging fruit and a free distraction from real problems they either cannot fix or don't consider worth their time. plus they win if the "elitist" complain about having to give up their free lunch

I can understand why some are outraged but this is the old adage of, I didn't speak up when they came for the .....

Businesses within the Area paid $7.6 million more in payroll tax in 2013 than they did in 2010. While some increase would be expected because of the economic recovery, the Area generated $7.1 million more in payroll tax than it would have, if it had grown at the same rate as the rest of the city from 2010 to 2013.

Also based on payroll tax filings, there were 61 more businesses in the Area in 2013 than there were in 2010. Again, some increase would be expected, but there were 32 more than there would have been if the number of businesses in the Area grew the same rate as the rest of the city from 2010 to 2013

Taxable sales, which reflect the health of neighborhood-serving retail businesses, grew more slowly in the Area than the rest of the city from 2010 to 2013—a 10% increase as opposed to a 25% increase in the rest of the city. Had taxable sales in the Area grown at the same rate as the rest of the city, an additional $90,000 in sales tax would have been generated.

An examination of trends in commercial rent, residential asking rents, and housing values in the Area revealed that, while increases have been rapid since the exclusion took effect, similarly rapid increases were seen in the rest of the city, and there was no appreciable difference between the Area and the rest of the city in the growth of commercial and residential rents, and housing prices.

On the flip side of your rage are people who run local businesses having to shutdown, so local officials of Mountain View saw a way to respond to this.

But, yeah this is stupid.

As a Bay Area resident this should be par for the course in terms of the stuff coming from the municipal governments in the area.

Except it's actually an example of crony capitalism gone...well, perfectly according to design, actually.

There's nothing even remotely progressive about restricting all other businesses just to boost business for a particular industry.

Whatever it is, it isn't addressing the important basics to improve our quality of life.

This just means the next massive campus complex will not open in Mountain View. Big profitable companies and their hordes of tax paying employees will go elsewhere, and definitely will not be supporting MTV's local businesses.

Welcome to the wonderful world of unintended consequences!

"We don't serve free food to our employee, we charge $0.000001 per meal".

Plus it can't be the exact same entity, so they'll have to "partner" with some vendor to create and operate the restaurant.

Access control is vital in a location like a tech company's headquarters. With hundreds of random food trucks coming and going every day, such control will become impossible.

Finally, food trucks are notorious for cutting corners when it comes to food quality, especially any health concerns. I would now want myself or my employees eating from food trucks all day, every day.

But when The Village was zoned, it was explicitly done with street-level retail for a wide variety of restaurants. There are over a dozen restaurants within a 5-minute walk of Facebook's offices, plus a Walmart, Safeway, Whole Foods, and produce market, all of which have ready-to-eat meals.

Something that's left out of a lot of the news coverage of this: it's not a law but a development condition attached to the particular property that Facebook is occupying. When a real-estate developer wants to develop a piece of property, there's a complex negotiation with the local municipality (or county, if it's in unincorporated land) that includes things like contracting for water/sewer/garbage services, how to ensure there's adequate police & fire coverage, how the town will build new roads to handle traffic generated from the property, what's the impact on schools & community services, and what types of dwellings & permitted uses are available for the property (you can't build a skyscraper in the path of SJC airport, for example, nor can you build a chip fab on residential land). Written into that contract is the cafeteria clause under discussion here. While I have some doubts about whether this is a good thing (I've got another comment here where I expressed mixed feelings), it's a contract and not a law, and obviously Facebook has felt that the restriction is not too onerous for the building to be worth occupying.

Perhaps originally they thought they could inspire enough of a public outcry like that seen in this thread to get the rules relaxed eventually... with their recent PR troubles that probably won't happen.

It does make more sense for a development like the Village, but I'm still concerned about the encroaching and escalating intrusion of local lawmakers in a benefit employers wish to provide their employees.

It is just that they are paid by Google instead of individual employees.

As for lunch, my company only provides it once per week. On the one day we do provide it, it is catered, and thus requires local labor. On the other days, I go out to get it. My favorite sandwich shop just closed; my coworker's favorite Korean place closed with them. If I had to guess, I would suspect they simply couldn't sustain themselves with the rents as they are. Their prices were decent. Other nearby eateries with more of a, for want of a better word, hipster feel to them charge significantly more for less food; I avoid eating there because over the course of the entire year, it represents a non-trivial amount of money. But if it comes to it that they're the only ones that can survive, I'll probably just abandon eating out altogether.

As it is, I'm making plans to abandon SV altogether primarily due to the issues mentioned by your parent: the ever declining quality of life in the Bay Area. Will that be a boon to the local market?

Google pays a lot less to provide an employee with a nutritious, healthy meal than the same employee would be paying for a less healthy meal in your typical local restaurant.

So this law will create more local jobs in the short term... except the next Techplex will not be built in MTV, which will lose it far more local jobs than it gained.

Employees should be allowed to bring food from home to eat at their desks if they want, and that is obviously terrible for jobs in local cafes and restaurants.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Facebook-cafeteria-worke...

People cheating on their income taxes to the tune of thousands of dollars a year each in free lunches are now more likely to comply with the law. This seems like a step in the right direction.

Still, it's unlikely that food service and retail workers in these cities are having an easier time making ends meet. The article you linked acknowledged that the cafeteria workers were making well above CA minimum wage - do you think the same can be said for all the restaurant/shop employees in the bay? Is there a reason we should be more concerned about some service industry employees over others?

Do you have a source for your claim that people are cheating on their income taxes to the tune of thousands of dollars a year?

Hit the nail on the head.

All this concern for a relatively tiny number of tech cafeteria workers who are actually in much better shape than the vast majority of food industry employees. McDonalds pays the absolute minimum to its legions employees, and has to give them booklets that try (and fail) to do the math of how they can survive on their meager income. Meanwhile, bit tech pays their workers much better, but let's pick on them since they're evil!

they pay well, better than restaurants, and they have better hours and benefits

So... vote when you can!

This will continue to be a thing as long as the upper-middle class isolates themselves through Uber / Lyft, fancy restaurants, and private shuttles. What's ironic is there are lot of upper-middle class people who live this lifestyle who aren't in tech but still shit on tech. Tech gets the bad wrap because it's the narrative. We have to start proving people wrong.

It doesn't help that the most visible techies, like Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla, abuse their tech-derived riches in blatant attempts to remake California into their own fantasy playlands. (This is a problem unique to tech--non-tech billionaires tend to do things like build museums.)

That might be because

1. Not as many people move there right out of college to work in the tech industry. This is true in the Bay Area, which means you'll find most of your friends at work

2. The tech industry population just isn't as large in those places (bar maybe NYC). You kind of have to consider a wider friend pool.

Having said that, I'd love to make friends in the Bay Area outside tech - I just don't know how. I'm not sure many people make new friends at restaurants or coffee shops though, so I don't see how this new legislation makes tech workers "engage" with the community or whatever. The only engagement happening is between the tech worker's wallet and the restaurant's till.

I've given money to and advocate for Moderates and I was an elected Hillary Clinton Delegate.

Personally I encourage you to let @AaronPeskin know how you feel on this matter. He is the "progressive" who introduced this nonsense.

This policy is just the public relations part. It’s particularly designed to appease local small business owners without having any measurable effect on the corporate profits.

This is as moderate as it gets. There’s nothing “progressive” about this nonsense. This is exactly the kind of nitpicking contortions moderates perform when they are trying to address social disparities without social solutions. The issue is systemic and the solutions must be as well. The only decent solutions here are broad corporate regulations like anti-trust for prevention and much higher taxes on the wealthy.

This is precisely a result of politicians appeasing local business owners with a public display of affection rather than a real progressive agenda. What could be more moderate than that?

San Francisco's "progressivism" has really turned me off because there is just so much failure of policy here. And while we should be talking about anything other than tech cafeterias, we are talking about cafeterias.

Primaries!