Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the new Google modular home
Every now and then a story appears in the national media that causes a lightbulb to start flashing incessantly in my head. For me, such a story came to my attention today and relates to how Google is manufacturing housing for some of its employees due to the ridiculous cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Here’s a summary from The Verge:
Google’s employees can’t find affordable housing in Silicon Valley, so the company is investing in modular homes that’ll serve as short-term housing for them. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has ordered 300 units from a startup called Factory OS, which specializes in modular homes. The deal reportedly costs between $25 and $30 million.
Modular homes are completely built in a factory and assembled like puzzle pieces onsite. This method of construction can reduce the cost of construction by 20 to 50 percent, the Journal reports. These apartments can also be put up more quickly to address dire housing needs. In one case the Journal cites, tenants saved $700 a month because of reduced construction costs.
Earlier this year, CNBC published a piece that detailed the difficulty tech companies have in trying to convince possible employees to move to San Francisco, especially when they live abroad. In response, some startups are establishing offices in other cities, like Chicago and Seattle. The other option is to out-tech the housing crisis, as Google appears to be doing with its modular home investment.
First, let’s get a couple of things out of the way. Yes, I understand that San Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live in the world, and yes, I get that nobody is forcing anyone to work for Google or live there. Yes, I understand that this is probably intended for entry level employees. Yes, I understand that revolutionary new ways of building homes using technology is the future, and the ability for such techniques to reduce costs is a positive thing. Yes, I understand all of that, yet I still think this development is a sign we are getting closer to some sort of breaking point.
The middle class in America has been getting squeezed for a long time, and the societal, political and ethical ramifications of this development cannot be overstated. In fact, I’ve been so concerned about the U.S. transformation into a neo-feualism serf economy, I’ve dedicated much of the last decade to writing and warning about it. What’s going on will Google employees unable to afford housing is a sign that this corrupt, fraud economy is now starting to affect even the fortunate amongst us.
Google is one of the most successful companies the world has ever seen, and if its employees are struggling to find a place to live (I don’t care what city it is), something’s really not working. To me, this is a clear glitch in the matrix. A sign that some sort of reckoning is near. How that reckoning manifests I have no idea, but most companies don’t have the luxury of just buying homes to put their employees in. If this is happening to Google, consider it some sort of canary in the coal-mine.
The entire economic system is a rent-seeking, corrupt scam in which financial oligarchs and assorted other parasites suck more and more life out of the economy until it breaks completely. The fact that Google employees are now feeling the repercussions of this, tells you all you need to know. Even a terribly corrupt system can continue until it consumes itself. It is now consuming itself.
Good. I hope they have to sleep out in the street and available to ‘dreamer’ rapists.
Why should Google move its operations somewhere that is more liveable and desirable such as Boise Idaho?
That’s a pretty good point there, Mike. If Google is really as wealthy as it’s reported to be, why not build these company towns the way mining companies and textile mill companies did in the late 19th and early 20th century? Why not just declare that the money exists for such a thing, and spend it?
If Google is really as huge and wealthy as it’s said to be, why aren’t their employees able to just outspend any rivals for housing wherever they work?
Why? I’ll tell you why Ed. What Google wants to do what many other companies are doing , especially where there are housing shortages. They want to recruit mostly foreigners and put them in housing compounds. So they have complete control over them.
We’ve entered into a new age. The author is right about Neo-Feudalism. The attitudes of the young have changed due to their expectations. And their expectations have been brain washed into them. For example, how many of us in our 50s went out to eat other then on rare special occasions? If once a year at that. Let alone would buy such a thing as Starbucks Coffee?
If they’re too stupid to avoid Starbucks and to make their own sandwich, they’re beyond help. Fuck em.
Krieger says he gets that people don’t have to live there and don’t have to work there – but then rails pointlessly about the choices people make. Populations are like brewer’s yeast. In fertile environments (nice weather, beautiful scenery), they grow until they’re stifled by their own growth – choking on their own effluent. They could probably live comfortably in Topeka running a septic line business, sending their kids to good public schools, going to football games on Friday nights and church on Sunday morning. They choose what they choose. Soon they’ll choose 100 sq ft apartments. Whatever. I guarantee that any “solution” would be worse than the “problem”.
1 – people are allowed fewer and fewer choices. Even the well educated.
2- wealth/income inequality WILL turn any country into a banana republic.
3 – a social contract is desirable. It has to start with economic freedom. We
have less and less of it.
Whuffo I wanna sign no damn social contract fo’, huh? Whuffo?
Social contracting is so shoal contacting that it busts hulls wide open. More reading, less writing, authoring, ruddering, foundering…as in, each sailor is the reader of life, including his\hers, not the author. But words are tricky, either way. Sailors drown, either way. Surfers, too. But my board still ain’t ever gonna’ be called “rousseau.”
I find it rather coincidental. That housing shortages will dovetail with rising property taxes as the governments need more taxes.
I guess if the more you tax something, the less of it you get. The landlord passes the cost on to the tennent. But the landlord likes scarcity of new development. How else could he pass on the increase in proprty taxes?
I don’t care.
I don’t care either. Also, I am not fat
and never was.
It is all about sunny California
and installing Indian and Paki workers.
Guess what? Elvis Presley was a Jew.
His mother was anyway. Just trivia.
“It is now consuming itself.” Ouroboros is always now. All that varies is rate. Which is actually two rates converging – like head-on collisions. Heads eat tails, but tails also infiltrate, spirochete-like, the heads. Will it go round in circles? Yes, yes it will.
You are at least nine different kinds of weird.
Nine ain’t nearly so nein as heads & tails gloving each other. Or is that more im\properly fisting each other? Neither a burrower nor a swallower be…cannibalism leads to prions, & mad cows. Not to mention CAFO’s(ocial contracts).
A “mill village”…wow. Do they get paid in Google scrip?
Kannapolis, CA.
I lived and worked in San Francisco and Southern Marin for many years. Having a zip code that began with a 94 was prestigious even if you were just a small fish in a very exclusive koi pond. My father, on his rare visits from D.C. said it was a place for young people. He was right and unless you are rich ( and I mean several million dollars rich) you can’t have a family here. Making $200,000 per year just doesn’t work if you want more than a small apartment.
I used to warn people to looking to move to San Francisco to check the street cleaning times in the neighborhood they were moving to unless they wanted to get up at 6:00 AM to move their car on Saturday morning along with everyone else along the street and try and find a new parking place. Small wonder Uber started here. Owning a car is difficult in San Francisco even if you have a garage. My mother did and if she used it she would often find herself blocked in between a sidewalk tree and a car hanging a foot or two over the driveway entrance. Leave the car in the driveway to prevent that and you got a ticket for blocking the sidewalk. To prevent commuters and tourists from hogging what street parking as there was you had to get a city sticker to park your car on the street for more than a couple of hours. This was twenty years ago. I imagine it has only gotten worse as homes are shared by multiple adults or subdivided into tiny apartments.
The geography of the region makes traffic horrible. The same Golden Gate and Bay Bridges that handled a Bay Area of 1,500,000 people in 1940 have to accommodate 4,500,000 today plus the enormous tourist industry and the exo suburbs that reach all the way north to Napa and East to the Central Valley. Rush Hour is a misnomer in San Francisco as the roads are always clogged going in or out of the city.
How much longer tech workers are going to put up with the conceit of their billionaire bosses is a good question. The CEO’s can afford to live in Los Altos or Pacific Heights but not even their underlings can.
San Francisco Area Sheds Jobs/Workers
If not for government zoning restrictions, hundreds of thousands of additional units of housing would have already been built. If not for the Federal Reserve easy money policies, massive price inflation in housing would NEVER have happened. If not for government subsidies and contracts that flow to the Silicon Valley, far less money would have been available to drive up housing costs. As ALWAYS, blame government.
$1,500 for a 1 BR doesn’t seem too bad.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/apa/6170441336.html
Read the ad. It’s not $1500 for a one bedroom apartment, it is $1500 for a bedroom and bathroom (at least it’s not a shared bath) in an apartment with an unknown number of bedrooms rented by other people.
My bad.
If you got rid of all the illegal aliens in the Bay Area housing prices would collapse and Google Employees and anyone else would again be able to buy a house.
But NO, lets just leave the borders wide open which anyone with half a brain has to understand will only increase the demand for housing which drives up the price.
And don’t give me that shit we need these illegal aliens to pick fruits and vegetables. the Bay Area is no longer an agricultural area.