ktothemc

Then you might be a great remote worker. The point is to trial them in the environment they're actually going to be working in.

The author is a homeowner whose parents have also owned a house in Noe Valley kitty corner to one of Airbnb founders. He’s a massive beneficiary of the status quo system who also happens to think that it needs to change given that more and more Californians are being born every day and that we should change our land-use and infrastructure to be even more inclusive, not less.

Wouldn't RSUs open employees to a different and more punitive tax regime (income tax) than options (which would fall under capital gains if you exercised early enough)?

Tokyo has a couple things that the Bay Area does not.

1) Zoning happens at the national level in Japan, not the local level so there are no, or at least very weak political mechanisms for neighbors to block projects.

2) There is no Proposition 13, which caps property tax levels for incumbent homeowners. What this means is that transit providers can pay for infrastructure needs through increases in land value created by better connections to transportation. California can't do this because if it improves infrastructure or experiences an economic boom, the incumbent property owners basically get to appropriate all the increases in land value.

San Francisco, and several other American cities, were places for freaks and weirdos in the mid-20th century because of a historical anomaly in which the US federal government deliberately subsidized white, middle-class families into leaving for nearly-created suburbs. This trend began reversing in the 1980s and now land-values in the urban core reflect what is seen in cities all over the rest of the world -- that central areas have higher land and housing costs than the periphery.

It was a great, interesting, trippy twenty to thirty-year period, but it doesn't exist anymore and its loss in the Bay Area was probably accelerated in part because California has such an unusually politicized and unpredictable land-use and development process that has led it to consistently underproduce housing for the last 40 years.

http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/hou...

The "young Gods" you speak of tend to have higher incomes not just because of the tech industry. They have higher costs because the elder babyboomer Californians rigged and created a system that is so constricted that only the wealthiest millennials can afford to participate in it.

Look at the differences in housing cost burdens based on year of birth here: http://www.lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/120

We're in the middle of rewriting our stack to look like this:

- TypeScript web code - Using React - Connecting to a custom, to-be-opensourced reactive datastore written in Scala called LunaDb: https://blog.asana.com/2015/05/the-evolution-of-asanas-luna-... - Using to Amazon RDS (hosted MySQL) and Redis as our primary backing stores - Running on top of kubernetes, docker, AWS

For the nth time, it's not really about that. It's politics. It was an effective symbol for tenants rights activists to latch onto to get attention for eviction protections, which weren't going to momentum otherwise without a nice, sexy controversial symbol that would attract national media.

Yes, that is a very cool future vision. :) Difficult to execute at this particular moment in time, so seeing if people will bite at location-independent leases is a first step.

Despite having listed locations, the team is incredibly mobile. Half are dogfooding.

Again, the price is intended to be across a network. There will be another U.S. location in the next few months, and then more to come after that.

For Ubud, it's a two-dozen unit, newly-opened boutique hotel with contemporary design and architecture, rooftop open space for dance, capoeira and Bahasa Indonesia or Bahasa Balinese language classes, along with an adjacent vegan, raw food restaurant.

If you want to be on your own, find your own Airbnb or have a private home, that's great. There are lots of options in Ubud, and the rest of Bali. People should find the housing that is right for them. The point of this is to have a larger community with events, communal dinners, activities, and involvement with local institutions and leaders. The space is already evolving as is. Have had two dance classes this week, two acro jams, and a capoeira class coming on Sunday. People are working on their own projects and startups, and organizing nights for talks.

The plan is to have the price be fixed initially, but if we discover seasonality in movement across the network, then we might have to adjust prices based on that later. We'd like to keep it flat for as long as possible.

More feedback is obviously welcome though! This is an experiment to see if we can get people to move in groups to less obvious locations, and then to contribute or integrate with local communities. I personally dislike the "nomad" term, even though I've been technically living this way for 10 years.

The price is intended to be across a global network and there are more locations coming. The space in Bali is completely brand new with contemporary architecture, and an adjacent restaurant and open rooftop space where there are regular acroyoga jams and capoeira classes.

If you want to find an individual room or villa to have by yourself, there are cheaper alternatives in the area. But the reality is that the inventory of larger properties -- say 20 to 50 units -- that are large enough to support an internal community, is much smaller across the whole island and the world, frankly speaking. The whole point of the project is community living in multiple parts of the globe, not being on your own or moving day-to-day from different Airbnbs (which is totally fine too!) So it really depends on your personal preferences of what kind of living space you think is right for you. (And lots of people have lots of different preferences, and that's OK.)

It really depends on how your country treats housing. Is it a consumable good or an investable asset? If your country conflates the role of housing as shelter with it being a primary store of wealth, then demand doesn't just reflect demand for housing. It reflects demand for a safe, appreciable asset in a ZIRP world, which is what urban housing becomes because cities will never be able to physically scale their infrastructure or capacity as rapidly as capital can move through their property values.

Not only has Vancouver built a lot, it simultaneously cultivated immigration programs to bring external capital into the local housing market. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616718.2015.111...

Other countries, like Japan & Germany, treat housing as a consumable good or even something that depreciates. So even though Tokyo is one of the most developed cities in the world, housing actually goes down in value. http://freakonomics.com/2014/02/26/why-are-japanese-homes-di...

Unclear.

Jane Jacobs has a section in her seminal book on American cities about "gradual" and "cataclysmic" money, which can wipe out a delicate neighborhood ecosystem.

Central planning of the US economy & powerful big government (1930s & beyond) was a Progressive Era initiated reaction to the era of robber barons & crony capitalism (1870s-1910s).

Gaius, you could defer the payment of the tax until the sale so that the homeowner retains the right to stay there as long as they wish.

Again, what's important to remember is that the Ravenswood School District and East Palo Alto were created by racialized housing practices that confined African Americans moving to Silicon Valley the 1940s through 1960s to a subpar, excluded neighboring suburb across the highway. African Americans were not allowed to own property in Palo Alto and other parts of the region because of racialized restrictive covenants that existed until the 1968 Fair Housing Law, and this set in place a permanent set of wealth and home valuation differentials that persists to this day.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/10/east-of-palo-altos-eden/

Hi stvswn: I think a really important thing to take into consideration is that California caps property taxes under 1978's Proposition 13. At the same time, Palo Alto has a particularly strong "residentialist" ideology that prevents additional development. What that means is that landowners are able to accumulate supra-natural returns in on their holdings, while doing nothing on their land. It incentivizes property owners across Silicon Valley and California to sit on parcels and ride the price appreciation without redeveloping the property. That in turns imposes a sort-of tax on innovation and productivity in the region as a larger and larger share of income-generated merely goes back into the land, instead of to other productive uses. http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/03/wealth-i...

It's hard to argue that the prices that exist in Palo Alto are "market rate" in this context, since supply has been so consistently restrained since the 1970s.

Countries with strong social democratic movements like Germany, Austria and some of the Scandinavian countries are able to provide a very decent quality of life with high education levels. However, they also have other variables like smaller population size (which makes it easier to reach a political consensus) and more ethnic homogeneity.

That's, uh, what we've been doing since the early 1980s, at least ideologically speaking.

No, but seriously, cities at this point require a large base of low-wage service labor to function. Ever-rising land and housing costs keep accelerating beyond their marginal wages and compensation.

We already went through this a century ago during the last Industrial Revolution. Jacob Riis photographed all the many people living in the tenements. Society decided this was a terrible thing and that we wanted to at least provide a basic standard of living in America's richest cities. Hence public housing came into being.

Unfortunately it was never properly funded. It used cut-rate materials to do a literal poor man's version of Modernist architecture. Exclusionary zoning meant it could never really be co-located with middle-class or even wealthier areas, so the children of these families never got access to the same quality of public services or schools. When the demographic composition of public housing shifted from poor white families to poor black families, public support for it was just decimated.

What birth lottery did you win?

Price controls are generally considered to be inefficient purely from an economic perspective.

However, the free market has generally been a terrible provider of low-income housing solutions. There's a long, long history to this from shanty towns to tenements. That's why basically all developed countries have some type of social housing component from demand-side subsidies to public housing or regulated stock.

When we lose permanently affordable units, it is invariably extraordinarily expensive to replace them given land costs and the size of subsidies that are needed. Contemporary homelessness emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s in both San Francisco and New York as both cities started to lose single-room occupancy hotels or SROs.

Much of SF's urban planning and restrictionist attitude toward change is Jane Jacobs' work taken to its illogical extreme. (That's the book you just cited in [0]).

Jacobs led a reaction toward Modernist top-down planning practices and urban renewal, which eradicated vibrant and lively communities in places like her home neighborhood of West Village. She celebrated the chaos and the street ballet cultivated by a mix of building, business and resident types that organically layers in a complex ecosystem of behaviors over many, many decades. But today, many of the neighborhood she would have been proud to call home are exorbitantly expensive. What is West Village today, if not, another insanely expensive neighborhood gentrified many, many times over? What middle or lower-income family could call it home?

Likewise, the progressive left thought leadership here has taken Jacobs' ideas to such a protectionist extreme that it has exacerbated a pre-existing housing shortage over the past 40 years. Not more than a decade after her book was published, there were the Freeway and urban renewal resistance movements of the mid-1960s. They later evolved into a Skyscraper revolt of the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1970s, the entire city passed strict rezoning laws to preserve existing residential densities and architectural styles.

There's a decent history here: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/san_francisco.htm...

They considered that financial disincentive for new construction when rent control was implemented in 1979. It does not apply to new housing units built after 1979.