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.

Comments

That makes me MAD!

[OYAHHH]

Moffett Field is government owned property. Google has absolutely no right to it. It is home to a significant population of burrowing owls, which are an endangered species.

Now these people are gonna turn it into a frigging trailer park for silicon valley trash.

Re:That makes me MAD!

[FireballX301]

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

Re:That makes me MAD!

[Beau1080p]

I live in Hayward, just across the bay from Facebook and Google. If I were offered a job at either of them I would consider turning it down solely because of the commute problem in this area. In nominal conditions I can make it to Stanford Hospital in about 43.6 minutes. In commute conditions without access to the commuter lane that can stretch to 2 hours or more.

Would 300 units even make a dent in the problem? The Google lunch area alone (been there) accommodates several times that number. At best this would be temporary accommodations.

And the problem with temporary accommodations is that they tend to turn into permanent accommodations. And it is rarely very pretty.

Re:That makes me MAD!

[rudy_wayne]

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.

Re:That makes me MAD!

[interkin3tic]

99.99% of "poor people" are "poor" due to irresponsible behavior.

Quite the opposite.

I don't know what the current number is but 4 years ago Google had almost 12,000 people in their Mountain View headquarters. That's almost one-sixth of the entire population of the city, from just one company, in an area that's not equipped to handle that many people. Fuck that.

The bay area has been absurdly overpriced single unit zoning for decades. If they don't like it, they could have started building up. Homeowners, as they always do, said "no, That'll reduce my property value and increase congestion unles we build up the BART and I don't want that either." The whole "I got mine, FU" blows back on them? Great. I hope they build the ugliest prefab houses and it halves the home values in the area.

trailers for techies

[turkeydance]

same thing done for mill workers back in the day.

Meaningless dribble

[onyxruby]

This is meaningless dribble. Prefab housing will never be built in numbers large enough to be anything other than green-washing. If Google wanted to do something meaningful about housing prices it would do one of two things:

Set up shop in a place where housing isn't already undergoing a huge shortage.
Lobby to remove height based restrictions for housing.

These are the only two real world options. You have to either change the supply (remove height restrictions) or you have to change the demand (set up shop elsewhere).

You cannot circumvent the laws of supply and demand. Even though government after government has attempted to do so over the years.

Re:The working Poor of California.

[rudy_wayne]

Or move somewhere else, where you make $75,000 a year and own a nice home and live a much better life.

Solving the wrong problem

[JeffOwl]

Or they could maybe build a facility somewhere else and expand there. Somewhere the engineers AND the janitor can get a place to live within a 30 minute drive. And the people who provide the services that allow a community to exist, like firefighters, teachers, food servers, etc... It doesn't have to be out in the boonies either. It will still need to be an area with a relatively high average education to supply and attract the right talent, so there will still be some affluence, but it isn't difficult to be better from a housing and traffic situation than what they have now. Otherwise this modular housing is just a waste of time and money, they should be building an arcology on their main campus.

Re: Google Trailer Park

[richardellisjr]

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.

The trouble isn't the tech workers

[rsilvergun]

they make enough to afford housing, albeit barely. The trouble is they want services, and that means low paid people. Police, Fire, Emergency responders for a start. Then cooks, laundry, taxis and for some of the better off (who can afford kids) teachers. All of these are at best middle class jobs. Nobody likes paying for them to have nice homes in expensive neighborhoods, but they sure want the services.

This is entirely a government-caused problem.

[jcr]

All we need to solve this is a free market for housing, without all these fucking NIMBYs using their local city councils to prevent new construction.

-jcr