Google to Invest $1B in Residential Development in SF
Yesterday Google announced they'd be investing $1B in San Francisco real estate to create more housing in the area. I would love to hear your takes on this especially in contrast to the recent legislation passed in NYC.
Thoughts?
I read Sundar Pichai's announcement. It's short on details, but Google has a lot of smart people so I assume there must be more to the story than what they've presented so far.
I don't think the $1 billion is a real game-changer on its own. The Bay Area is not short on housing for lack of $1 billion in potential development equity. There are plenty of groups who would be willing to make huge investments there, but the real issue is NIMBYism and the resulting slow, difficult entitlements process.
There was a thread about this announcement on Hacker News, and someone suggested that Google could get the most housing bang for its buck by devoting the whole billion to bribing/lobbying government officials to make development easier. Unfortunately that may be correct.
I agree with you. One caveat is that they actually own a lot of their real estate and are planning to lean on local municipalities and communities to have the land around their campuses upzoned to allow for denser development. Effectively saying Yes, in our backyard.
Yes - I drew the same conclusion. It also makes sense as many Google employees will ultimately move into the 15,000+ homes/units Google has proposed thus reducing traffic (another issue in the Bay Area beyond housing).
I'd think of it as a place to park corporate cash / minimize tax as much as anything else.
I grew up kind of out that way. I have friends that live and work there for a very long time. They said the end game is build high density mid to high end housing for a lot of their employees. We'll see.
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