But not the roads of San Francisco.
During dotbomb 1.0, if you worked in Mountain View or Cupertino, you had to really want to live in San Francisco if you were to stomach the commute. The bus system allows these companies to use SF as a sort of dormitory community and as a result brings in a lot of people who perhaps wouldn't otherwise be here. (Anecdotally, you hear about HR departments setting up new employees up in SF apartments on the bus routes.)
The real issue is that the Valley wants to host all these major corporate headquarters, but absolutely refuses to build housing for their younger workers. Perhaps many Google employees would prefer living in Mountain View if they could.
That is a good point.
>Perhaps many Google employees would prefer living in Mountain View if they could.
Most of the googlers I know live in mountain view; and when 'affordable' is defined by a google programmer salary? there is plenty of affordable local housing in mountain view and further south. If you work at google (I mean, as a full employee, and not a contractor doing menial tasks) living in Mountain View is easy and affordable (especially compared to living in SF.)
>The real issue is that the Valley wants to host all these major corporate headquarters, but absolutely refuses to build housing for their younger workers.
Here, it sounds like you are implying that housing is somehow cheaper or more available in SF than in the south bay. The south bay is building more apartments (mostly medium-density three-story apartments/condos, pretty much perfect for those 'young workers' and priced reasonably, for someone on a google salary.)
I mean, yeah, demand is outstripping the rate we build 'em, but we're trying.
It's worth nothing that many different companies run bus services in SF. The busses aren't prominently labeled so the locals refer to them all as "Google Busses".
You can safely blame this on city government. They've flat out refused to allow it any time it's been brought up. One example: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/south_ba...
But doesn't San Francisco benefit from the tech people who live there? They have lots of spending power to support the local businesses, which creates local jobs. They pay sales taxes and real estate taxes, which supports the city government, schools, etc. Since most of the tech workers are young, they pose only a small burden on the school and health care systems. It would seem like a win for SF to have them there.
For instance, just changing 'sign' to 'symbol' in the title would by itself go a long ways towards making the whole article seem more reasonable.
But I do think it's pretty reasonable to complain about Google's tax avoidance activities. We've got a setup here where large companies pay dramatically less in taxes than small companies; Maybe it's just that I run a small company, but that seems pretty unfair to me.