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Google Fights Bay Area Housing Prices With Pre-Fab Housing (siliconvalley.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup:
With rental costs skyrocketing and homes out of reach for many, Google has hit on a solution that may help it attract workers to the crushingly expensive Bay Area. The tech giant plans to buy 300 units of modular housing to serve as temporary employee accommodations on its planned "Bay View" campus at NASA's Moffett Field, according to a source familiar with the plan. Experts heralded the move as not only good for Google, but as a potential template for others to follow as the high cost of construction combined with expensive real estate make affordable housing hard to come by... Modular housing has the potential to be "a real game changer" for the Bay Area housing crunch, said Matt Regan, senior vice-president of public policy at the Bay Area Council, a business group of which Google is a member...
The Bay Area boasts many sites suitable for modular rental housing, undeveloped so far largely because the cost of traditional building is too high for the rent the facilities could generate, Regan said. With prefab housing costing up to 50 percent less, "all of a sudden sites like that become economically feasible to develop," Regan said.
The Bay Area boasts many sites suitable for modular rental housing, undeveloped so far largely because the cost of traditional building is too high for the rent the facilities could generate, Regan said. With prefab housing costing up to 50 percent less, "all of a sudden sites like that become economically feasible to develop," Regan said.
Google has the right to it, because the government signed a sixty year lease handing it to them to use as they see fit.
That being said, it won't be long until you start seeing JP style coffin hotels start springing up. The main problem with bay area housing and the lunacy surrounding it is NIMBYism at its worst - the majority of places will build high density to handle surging populations and rising rents, but the city fragmentation (the 'bay area' is at least 30 mostly independent cities all packed together each with its own muni code and rules and housing authority) means no significant high density housing will ever get approved (tons of projects are shot down because the locals want to 'protect their own property values', which is a codeword for 'we dont want poor people living near our homes').
So instead we get horrible sprawl, horrible commutes, and the price-out of the support service economy since nobody can afford to be a barista on the peninsula. Google's solution here is to straight up build a company town because mountain view wouldn't let em start building high density apartment blocks
Moffett Field is government owned property.
It is federal property, and thus city and county zoning laws can't be enforced, and the NIMBYs and BANANAs can't just stop everything from being built. Google is building there because it is the only place they can build.
The South Bay is miles and miles of low-rise sprawl, with plenty of room for new housing, new businesses, etc. But it is very difficult to build anything. Liberals hate to hear it, but NIMBYism is a major cause of inequality in America. The lack of growth and sky high prices reduce opportunities for low income people who can't afford to live there, while handing millions to the already well off in the form of artificially inflated property values.
Thank you Google for these 300 units, but SV really needs 300,000.
Would 300 units even make a dent in the problem?
No,
300 units is like throwing a single drop of water into a lake. And, according to one story I've read, the price Google is paying for this works out to $100,000 per unit. For a bunch of pre-fabricated shit boxes that will look like a slum hotel within a year.
Prefab homes aren't necessarily mobile homes. In some cases they are just as good if not better than traditional homes. The way some are made all the framing is made in a factory and trucked in and assembled on site. This allows factory level efficiency and reduced cost but results in a house you can't tell was prefab.
Moffet Field is about 2,200 acres, or 3.4 square miles. If it was rebuilt with the population density of the inner core of Shanghai (~120,000 people per square mile), it could house 400,000 people, along with offices, restaurants, etc.