Cupertino, last year, voted in a referendum to maintain a two-story construction limit. It also voted down multi-family homes. At the end of the day, Silicon Valley's residents--not Facebook--are telling their lower-income neighbors "we prefer higher housing prices".
I always feel so conflicted about these overly specific human interest takes on this topic.<p>- The rent increases are choices made by landlords, not Facebook.<p>- Even as quoted in the article, residents seem to believe that living in a place for a long time entitles them to continue living in that place longer at a price they find agreeable. I personally have been priced out of neighborhoods I loved living in twice in my life, once after living in the same place for 8 years and feeling a huge sense that it "was my home." It's sad and upsetting, but nobody is entitled to live in some place just because their family historically has lived there a long time or they personally have lived there a long time or theyhave some cultural identity to that place. It's not a nice part of reality, but that's just how it is. Playing on sympathies by hearing people say, "but we've lived here 10 years and Facebook doesn't care" is just an ineffective way to look at it, for all parties.<p>- As usual, the group of people most impacted (displaced tenants) is the group <i>least capable</i> of financially weathering the changing circumstances or politically lobbying for their preferences to be protected.<p>- If I were a Facebook employee, I would feel some measure of resentment towards the property groups doing this. One reason is because the property managers know the bad press will be flung at Facebook, not them. Another reason is that the property managers are essentially looking at the wages paid by Facebook as something they (the property managers) are entitled to (by raising rents to adjust for higher salaries). The landlords are not improving their value-add in any way, just raising prices to capture more of some other productive person's wages.<p>- And, of course as others have pointed out, it's largely driven by lack of new housing or high-rise housing.
Virtually all of Silicon Valley (MV, Cupertino, Menlo, etc) feels like a dated suburb to me, coming from out of state. It seems there is a high incentive to keep everything static and unchanging, to the point where it's sort of an uninteresting place to live.
When I saw the headline, I thought this was going to be about FB employees bidding crazy high on multimillion dollar houses, which is another (albeit less urgent) problem in Silicon Valley. I’ve seen single-earner FB families purchase homes at prices that make my head spin.<p>I would note that this article mis-identified Jesshill Love, whom they call an “investor”. He may do some investing, but he is first and foremost a real estate lawyer at a small-ish law firm. I know this because his wife was a recruiter at a company I worked at for several years. This mistake doesn’t undermine the general thrust of the article, but it is a little weird to get this detail wrong. He’s the only person they identify by name, and a quick google search would show that he’s a real estate lawyer. Searching “Jesshill Love investor”, on the other hand, turns up nothing of the sort. Not the sign of a well-researched article — even if the gist of it is undeniably true.
With all the blame going around how about California government? Some states have protections to prevent landlords from pricing out current tenants in order to raise incoming tenants prices.<p>For example where I live landlords can only raise rent by 10% every year for current tenants. The landlords can charge whatever they want for new tenants but they are limited for existing tenants.
It's not an easy topic; highly conflictual, emotionally speaking.<p>The market works this way. Facebook is just paying the employees higher than some people in the area are earning. What's the matter?<p>I imagine that for those people this situation is annoying and frustrating, so they are just speaking out of these emotions. I can understand a newspaper publishing such a emotionally driven, nonsense Bolshevik article to get views (mission accomplished).<p>I hope that this article didn't reach the first page just because it contains the word "Facebook" and some complaining I guess.
"Let's all look down on the new public enemy"
If that's the case, we can do better!<p>PS: I don't work for Facebook and I don't particularly like the company
If the bay area isn't willing to build more housing then they shouldn't allow so many new jobs. It's the imbalance between number of jobs and number of housing that's the source of all these problems.
One way the tech giants could alleviate this problem is to leave. Build campuses in the Central Valley, the Midwest, in declining Southern cities. Rents in the Bay Area will drop, and those companies will save huge amounts of money on taxes and payroll. At worst, they can use those savings to build truly utopian communities for their workers in otherwise low-population areas.
San Francisco and surrounding areas are sort of isolated geographically right? If rents become so high won't that essentially drive lower income people completely out of the area?<p>Maybe over time they move away and then how would lower income jobs be filled? Will wage hikes be necessary, which would then likely drive costs up?
I often hear from people working for Google, Facebook that housing near company offices is more expensive than actually renting a property in the city centre. How just is that?
In the picture from the article I see what is basically a lot of swamp around Facebook.<p>If they were allowed to build let's say 10 20 story buildings there would be no need to evict current renters.
I don’t blame the tech giants for this but I’d like to see more done by them about the families living in RVs near their campuses, just from a community perspective.