Uber shakes up real estate market with massive lease in Oakland | Hacker News Reader

Uber shakes up real estate market with massive lease in Oakland

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140 pointsbrendannee121 comments

I'd heard this was going to be a Google office. Oh well.

I wonder how much "not driving over the fucking bridge" is worth to people. Uber salaries tend to be pretty good (partially to make up for the stock being so high), and they have a great team, plus are clearly on a rocket ship trajectory, and are easy to explain as a product to anyone.

Offering $150-250k cash, great overall packages, AND being able to buy or rent at almost-reasonable (i.e. 2011-2012 SF) levels is going to make them a really annoying competitor in hiring. Oakland for city people, the less-used Fremont to Oakland BART for the other people, or driving from places like Moraga for more rural people.

As someone who used to do the "reverse commute" from SF to Oakland for a couple years, I'd add that it's pretty attractive for SF residents who like a slightly less crazy pace as well. I mean, you can actually go places for lunch and get in, and not pay $14 for a sandwich. And going the opposite direction of traffic (or taking the opposite BART) sure beats sitting on the 101.

But most people I worked with were definitely in the boat you describe - East Bay dwellers who really, really didn't want to deal with trying to fight their way into SF. And who can blame them? I think this is a great move for Oakland and Uber.

Plus, you can take the ferry over. That's a sweet commute.

The broken internal-to-SF and internal-to-Oakland transit systems make that a bit complex, I think. I guess if you biked?

I used to bike to the Ferry building from the Mission and then onto the office across the street from the Sears building. It was much better than taking the coach down to the Peninsula, that's for damn sure.

Why wouldn't you just take BART?

The scenery from the ferry is a hell of a lot nicer than the inside of a BART car?

Also less crowded, I think. I take the bus, for both reasons.

This is on my to-do list. I have friends who take the ferry and it looks quite enjoyable compared to the other options.

Much more pleasant ridership, unless you enjoy listening to whatever's playing out of that guy's cell phone.

I live in Oakland (10m walk from the new Uber office, but 3m from a 580 onramp), and my office is basically at AT&T Park. The commute has gotten markedly worse over the past 15 months. :( And it's not even a particularly bad east bay to sf commute; I know people who drive from Moraga.

Last year, my 95th percentile commute at 10am was 35 minutes door to door, and the median was about 25-30. This year, the 95th is more like 45, and the median is more like 35 at that time. To arrive at 9am, it's dramatically worse -- basically an hour 95th, and sometimes up to 90m (once or twice a year), and the median is about 45m (BART is 50m door to door, but is absurdly crowded at that time, and I'm uncomfortable walking around with a laptop bag at 5-7pm in Oakland after 2 people got their laptops stolen in front of me in one week).

I usually try to go in really late and wfh in the mornings so it's 20-25m, but it's still usually 30-40m on the way back at 7-8pm. If I have to be in at 9am, I have to leave at 7:45 to be comfortably on time with high confidence. And the traffic basically starts between 0530 and 0600, so being early is almost impossible; it's full-bad around 0630-0700.

Just curious, but how does someone get away with stealing a laptop during rush hour? I've lived in Oakland for about 6 months and I haven't seen anything like the crime you describe. Your description of congestion is spot-on, though.

Away from the station. On the sketchy block of Harrison between Grand and the Whole Foods. In the first incident, someone came running at me at full speed holding a laptop bag across his chest; I thought for about 300ms as he ran toward me about putting him on the ground because I thought he was running at me to attack me, but I moved to the side behind a pole and he kept running, then a (very very slow) security guard ran after him, and then some sad looking middle aged guy as well. Second time was someone running across a street and then disappearing down 23rd. Easy to identify people with laptops from a distance, with probably 75% accuracy.

I'm convinced 4-7pm Fridays is a great time to steal laptops from commuters; they're tired, it's relatively low traffic, OPD's response times are...not impressive, etc. It's really a 5-10 block area behind the stupid Auto Row and some sketchy semi-SRO housing in the area which is a problem. (Pro tip for cities: auto dealers are horrible for foot traffic.)

https://www.betabrand.com/blog/34270/make-your-laptop-invisi...

I upgraded from a very obvious laptop sleeve on strap to http://www.pacsafe.com/intasafe-z500-anti-theft-backpack.htm...

Steel wires through the straps, and looks like a backpack. I'm also big enough that unless it is rip and run, or a clear and unambiguous threat to my life, I'm not as concerned, so having a strap which won't break is enough.

Ugh please stop. So much fake going on. Oakland is just like any city in the last 20 years. Just fine but still remembered for their past.

Currently #2 in US. Hardly the past.

http://lawstreetmedia.com/crime-america-2015-top-10-dangerou...

I'm not even arguing that Oakland as a whole is dangerous; it's specific blocks in the good/high-traffic areas, and then large areas (Oakland is huge geographically) which are bad-but-no-one-goes-there. There's some street crime on top of that, but not actually much more than similar areas in SF. Way more than, say, Salt Lake City, though.

Most of the serious crime in Oakland is in places you won't accidentally go (although there's a sketch area a few blocks away from downtown, and on the other shore of Lake Merritt), by and against poor people, often one or more involved in gangs/drug entrepreneurship/whatever. Same as most cities.

Except most cities aren't on that list. SF has similar places where "good rich people" avoid -- but it still isn't in the top 10.

I also don't like this implicit because it's "poor against poor" then somehow that's ok and we can ignore those statistics. Poor people are people too. Talk about gentrifying.....

It isn't that it is ok -- but having rich people and businesses move to Oakland, pay taxes, and thus better fund things like schools, police, and other jobs will help with poverty. Because the violence isn't uniformly distributed and thus isn't targeted at them, it is less of s deterrent.

Also, a lot of that current violence is due to war on drugs and after effects, so the best way to address it is to wind down the war on drugs.

10 miles on a electric bike could be 40 minutes. (In Europe they are limited to 15.5mph). Depending on your physical fitness you could get it down to 30 minutes but you'd need a shower at the other end ;)

The new part of the Oakland Bay Bridge has a bike lane, but only out to Treasure Island; there's no bike lane from Treasure Island to SF.

That has to be by design.

there isn't a design, which is the problem. it's two bridges and people in the Bay Area are lucky to have one of them in-the-can. There's been a lot of argument over the design of the western spans; I despair of ever seeing them built before one of the faults underlying the area renders the argument moot.

They're two separate bridges built decades apart. They put a bike lane on the new eastern span despite it not being very useful at the moment so that whenever a new western span is built it won't run into the exact same issue (and there's some ideas being thrown around for adding a bike lane to the current bridge, but they're all hideously expensive).

Thank you for providing a least-hypothesis that is even more probable than "ordinary racism/classism". :)

Yes, I wish more legit companies would move to Oakland

Not sure if a $40B company that generates staggering losses and faces brutal competition globally can be considered a rocketship any more ...

*51bn company.

> faces brutal competition globally

There is no competition to Uber in Toronto. It's so cheap and accessible it's almost competing with public transit at this point.

They are facing a ton of competition in their 3 largest markets. USA (Lyft 1bn+ funding), China (Didi 3bn+ funding) & Ola (couple 100mm's).

plus the impending lawsuits for wrongly classifying their employees as contractors... thats going to take years to play out and could hit their profitability really hard.

Ola?

IIRC it's OlaCab, in India.

That isn't exactly a counter to the OP's point. Just because they don't have competition in one global location does not mean they do not have global competition.

Depends on your interpretation of the word globally. I took it to mean 'everywhere' or 'pertaining to the whole world' like 'global variable'.

Can you explain "Uber salaries tend to be pretty good (partially to make up for the stock being so high)" ? :)

If the stock is high, then stock options are unappealing. Basically just illiquid cash.

This is assuming they won't grow much past $50bn right?

That's a given, isn't it? They are nowhere even worth that much today. Private company valuations aren't based on rationality, they are based on emotion.

Uber's current backwards valuation is capturing all speculation about future robot fairies that'll save them in the 5-year future (which always seems to be 5 years out, doesn't it?).

For some reason, the funding geniuses behind Uber seem to assume no other company on the planet can mass produce shared purpose autonomous vehicles at scale? That's just crazy thought. There are four companies today that could entirely wipe out Uber if they wanted to, but other companies are playing a longer game.

Don't compete where the market is, compete where the market is going to be. First mover advantage isn't a thing anymore. First to sustainable scalability combined with emotional grounding is the new advantage.

I was with you until the thing about four companies that could wipe out Uber. Which companies and how?

Lyft, Sidecar, Haxi?

Tesla, Google, Apple, ? somebody else.. oh that company that retrofits self-driving kit onto existing cars maybe?

Moraga is rural? In what sense?

Compared to Fremont, I guess...

Listen. Pandora is two blocks away, so I can say it: this is a bad move for Uber.

* Oakland isn't cool anymore. We were here before it was cool. And we are barely cool.

* Attrition is terrible. Coworkers either get shot or are poached by Clorox. I heard we lost a Glass developer to the dock worker's union.

* Mass transit at that particular location is astounding: the free green bus, the ferry, BART, an AC transit hub. What I'm saying is that it's too ironic for Uber to be there.

* The best milkshakes are at True Burger, the best banh mi is in Chinatown, and the best parking is at YMCA. Does any of that make sense? No, of course not.

Avoid Oakland at all costs. The real hot spot? Hayward.

Reminds me of my two favorite bumper stickers:

If you love Kauai, send your friends to Maui.

and

Surfing sucks, don't try it!

As someone who lives in Hayward (and owns real estate there) I hope you are right. Do you know of any companies moving to Hayward?

I saw teo people shot not far from here, the windows of Obama's campaign HQ smashed in with hammers down the street, and a homeless man crap on the steps of city hall in broad daylight. Welcome to Oakland Uber.

I guess it'll smell just like SF then.

The alternatives for similar real estate in SF would be near Twitter/Mid-Market (which is worse than Downtown Oakland IMO; probably on par with the shitty areas of San Pablo near 30th-35th St, but better than particularly bad parts of West Oakland or East Oakland, true), or Bayview/HP (also on par or worse). We're not talking about Pacific Heights or the Oakland Hills here :)

Oakland downtown/uptown has property crime and some violent crime but it's not particularly bad compared to other areas. Most crime in both SF and Oakland (as it is anywhere) is poor people hurting other poor people.

No difference from just around the corner of the Twitter building.

This isn't a homeless man crapping problem, it's an insufficient bathroom infrastructure problem, and yes most mid to large size American cities have it. Which is exacerbated by laxative type drugs. 'Hello Alcohol, Hello Heroin, I'm talking to you two.'

Heroin, like pretty much all opioids, is actually the exact opposite of a laxative. Imodium (Loperamide), a common anti-diarrheal, is actually an opioid like heroin, and works by binding to and activating your body's opioid receptors. It just only binds to receptors in your large intestine, so it doesn't get you "high" like other opioids.

This might be a nice way to comfort yourself about living not only in CA but in either SF or Oakland, but it's not real life. I've worked in the downtowns of multiple major metropolitan areas, and have never seen anyone defecate in public, nor have I witnessed a robbery.

I was once pressed to buy crack in the Crossroads District of KCMO, but that's pretty much it. I used to walk from Crossroads to Crown Center for lunch and back again every day. Second most eventful walk: a couple of birds swooped down and tried to take some of my hair.

Apparently you've not lived or worked in the Tenderloin or deep SOMA.

In a 2 year period I saw/experienced:

- defecation, urination, and masturbation in broad daylight on the sidewalk

- heroin injection

- a half full 26er of vodka fly out of a window and hit me at my feet

- packs of men with assless chaps and various states of undress and arousal in line at a Subway (it was the Folsom street fair week) , one holding his slave by the collar while ordering a BLT

- half naked people stumbling out of minivans with crackpipes

- two incidents of modest riots / bonfires in the middle of Market street (the Giants won)

- various gunshot murders (one being a sawed off shotgun assassination attempt at the Gas station off Harrison and ...5th?) that I thankfully missed but glimpsed the aftermath of

It's like parallel universe Disneyland. None of this really affected me - more bemusing than anything, but it can be shocking to those unaware.

You seem to have misread the parent comment as saying they haven't seen this stuff in SF - they said they haven't seen this stuff where they have worked, in other major cities.

I read that. But they said "it's not real life". It is, and not just in SF/Oakland. Plenty of weird experiences to be had in New York or Toronto, for example.

Ah, you interpreted cookiecaper as saying "this problem doesn't happen, period". In which case, your response makes sense - "of course it happens in these parts of SF under discussion".

I read that comment as more narrowly disputing "most mid to large size American cities have it". Revisiting, I do think my initial reading was correct. If cookiecaper was denying the problem existed, why would imagining it be "a nice way to comfort yourself about living [...] in either SF or Oakland"? The comment makes substantially more sense as asserting that 1) the problems in SF are not problems elsewhere, and 2) a view that they are problems everywhere (and thus maybe not solvable) is not reality based, so SF and Oakland must be "Doing It Wrong". I don't agree with that comment - as you can see from my direct response to it - but the logic of it is coherent in a way it would not be if it were supporting the other point.

You're limiting yourself to specific areas of SF then. Every time I've visited there has been human shit everywhere. It smells different from dog shit.

I've never witnessed a robbery, in either SF (where I currently work) or Oakland (where I have lived for a while). Obviously that doesn't mean it doesn't occur - but neither does your anecdote mean that Oakland and SF are necessarily worse than where you've been working. They may be, but that's a question of looking at actual numbers.

http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/

While this line of thought may make you feel better about living in SF, it's just not true. Having been and lived in a number of mid-to-large sized American cities, I can honestly state that SF is by far the most urine and feces covered.

If you want to see someone defecate in public, SF would be by far the #1 place to visit. You're unlikely to see that behavior tolerated in NY, Chicago, KC, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Phoenix, Denver, or any other city you'd care to mention.

Uber & Twitter are next to each other, beside the tenderloin. A block away from the tenderloin is nastier than 19th st oakland BART and lake merrit.

That never happens in San Francisco.

As a non-American that has spent time in both SF and Oakland, but has no allegiances to either, SF's much dirtier.

I'm originally from Chicago and have lived in many American cities including NYC in the 1990s. Can confirm, SF is bizarrely filthy especially given how much money is available and its reputation

Eh, sounds like Venice.

If Uber really wants to earn goodwill in Oakland (which is worth thinking about because the local anarchists are probably planning their protests already), it would be worth renovating the exterior of the building too. A lot of buildings in downtown Oakland have beautiful art deco facades that were covered up with ugly concrete facings in the 1950s in a misguided attempt to look more modern. Bringing out some of Oakland's original business history would garner a ton of long-term community goodwill.

I suspect Art Deco is already popular with Uber's leadership for other reasons :)

What are those reasons?

He's referring to the German connection. A leap but also undeniable that many Americans do not have positive associations with the word "uber. Still the era was not Germany's worst... But the worst was born in it (the Weimar Republic) where reactionaries took root and exploded.

Ayn Rand liked it, her book covers, etc. Uber is known for liking Rand.

Honestly, I'm not sure it's worth the effort for them. They're already attracting a lot of hate for being a VC-fueled company that undercut an established business and employing mostly white dudes. What value can they expect to gain from showering money on a community already hellbent on hating them?

This is in addition to their new giant HQ in SF?

Uber has an awful lot of overhead for a taxi company.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/uber-new-hq/

Uber has low overhead for a $50bn company.

They've already won vs taxis. Now they're going for courier services, buses, food delivery and even cleaning services. They aren't part of the sharing economy, they're trying to be the sharing economy.

Where have you seen the cleaning services?

Rumor, but: https://twitter.com/om/status/444681883083735040

No no they aren't a taxi company. They are a marketplace that matches people selling space in their car with people who need space in a car.

Until they get their self driving cars, and then the are a transportation and logistics company.

But they definitely aren't a taxi company

Of course they are, everything else is just PR at the moment. That said, they are (the first?) global taxi company. No one is surprised that global retailers, like e.g. H&M, have huge headquarters.

They're a company you can contact to dispatch a car to take you where you want to go that charges you by distance traveled. If that's not a taxi, I don't know what is.

A taxi is a vehicle for hire that you can lawfully hail on the street.

You've just described every taxi dispatcher on the planet, modulo a couple of rounding errors about medallions.

"A taxi company" typically serves one city. Uber is more like 300+ taxi companies. Do they have over 300+ times the overhead of a normal taxi company?

The gentrification of Oakland is now well and truly under-way after the great job gentrification did in San Francisco displacing thousands of people from their homes.

The truth clearly hurts some people, as evidenced by the color of your comment. Ask anyone who isn't in tech in San Fran how easy it is to make ends meet in that city. Then ask them what their commute's like.

I know a guy in Oakland who complained about all the techies moving in.

Then he said he's had three raises in two years.

Remember kids, Oakland is actually closer to Market St/Mission than most of SF.

Now if only Uber Pool would go to Oakland.

Looks like the VC's are spearheading the move to Oakland. Chamath Palihapitaya from Social + Capital is planning a developers village apartment complex in Oakland with the goal of luring more Midwest coders to the West coast.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/17/chamath-palihapitaya-on-ins...

Seems overly optimistic to think that anyone from the midwest would be dumb enough to think that $80k was a livable salary for that area even in Oakland.

As a Midwestern coder, I could definitely see peers making that mistake - 80k seems like a lot when you're used to rent in the low hundreds. That said, where are you getting 80k? I didn't see it in either the GP link or the original story, and would expect Uber to be hiring at higher salaries than that given other comments in this thread re: the cash/stock split.

Low hundreds? Not even in the middle of no where in the midwest will the low hundreds get you a half-decent place.

Sorry, I should have clarified - I'm thinking of a few friends in particular who would be fresh-out-of-undergrad developers coming from shared apartments where they were paying $300-$350/mo. The change from 8k debt/year to 80k income/year is significant enough that there are people who wouldn't question the 80k number as a far-more-than-enough wage.

In my last year of grad school, I splurged and got a three-bedroom apartment in the guest house behind the mansion of an auto industry magnate, with utilities paid for $745. This was an amazing apartment, too (though maybe it was only amazing in comparison to the cookie-cutter apartments I had stayed in before).

I think it's quite possible to find rent in the low hundreds for a place that is "half decent".

Summer in Ann Arbor, I was paying $450 for room and board...

It's in the TC article linked in the parent comment to mine. They are talking about reducing costs by reducing living expenses via VC provided company housing for employees to the point were 80k seems like a viable salary.

"You need to tell that engineer from the University of Michigan that he can live here on a salary of $80,000."

I'm from the Midwest as well, you're probably right it is a mistake a new grad would make I certainly remember being surprised that my starting salary, though above average for students from my university according to the published stats didn't go quite as far as I imagined it would in a more expensive metro area than I was used to.

80k would be fairly bearable if you live walking distance/didn't have a car, and paid $2k rent.

This is going to go very, very poorly for Uber.

You should explain why.

Oakland is already an attractive new location for tech companies. It is my sincerest hope that the policy-makers in Oakland see what happened in SF with housing, and are proactive in controlling rent to avoid displacing low-income people and most importantly, the people who contribute to the city's culture.

Because tech workers clearly fail to "contribute to the city's culture."

Largely they do.

Culture is usually neither better or worse. Some subsets of cultures promote one thing over another and sometimes some outsiders fetishize some of those things (i.e. non-mainstreamers might fetishize upward mobility, consumerism, etc, mainstreamers might fetishize grit, hard-knock lives, etc. Some mainstreamers believe their culture is fraudulent, as if any culture can be classified as "genuine". Only ossified cultures can be genuine. And Non mainstreamers will, naturally seek to enter the mainstream but with a wish to hold on to the familiar (ie. culture)

People with straight hair want curly and curly haired want straight hair.

I don't know anyone who works 60 hours a week and also participates in the kind of community that Oakland has. People actually know each other there! They talk to their neighbors and strangers on the street, and it brightens everyone's day to have that little touch of human connection. They go to parties and talk about things other than their jobs. They paint and draw and play music and plan events and fundraisers that are good for the community. I know techies who aspire to that kind of life, but thinking like you want to do something and actually doing it are very different things.

I work in tech, work reasonable hours, live in Oakland, and do all those things. I also have many neighbors who work in tech and outside tech (healthcare, law, skilled trades) and work reasonable hours, and do all those things.

I think doing all those things is a function of whether someone is in a particular industry. It is a function of whether one has a desire to be involved in one's community.

Having kids is a stronger predictor of community involvement if you are looking for one.

And also build enough housing.

Instead of controlling rents, wouldn't it be better to adopt a housing policy which increases supply for everyone? For example, the office space is projected to house 3000 employees in 2 years. Why not plan on building about 3000 housing units in that same time frame?

Because that would decrease housing prices. What will happen is homeowners will talk about the need to keep Oakland's character, which is codeword for stopping development of housing to increase home values.

And the renters (like me) will complain that the city (well, the permitting process they approve) is only promoting units for the financially relatively better off and is not subsidizing enough low rent units. So they scuttle low income housing to spite middle income housing.

Why should a city subsidize housing? That seems like something the market should drive primarily. For that same reason, I'm skeptical about whether zoning and permiting are a good thing in general.

Well, if cities control the zoning, they then have to ensure for the welfare of the housing market. If you, for example, block developers from adding more housing (cough San Francisco), you are supporting raising housing costs and pushing lower income citizens out of your city.

If the market should drive the equation and the municipality meddle with either side of it, it's not a market in the way one normally infers.

Zoning and permitting are a good thing. It means a city can have long term planning and allocate resources and budget things accordingly. Mishmosh cities have existed and do currently exist in emerging economies, they tend to be chaotic and crime ridden messes.

That said, I think zoning needs to be updated to reflect more modern economies. Mixed use, company housing (it's had a stained past, but still it can work, if governed properly), and the permitting should be less political and very much so more pragmatic. I rather detest the politization that has overtaken infrastructure building when it involves private investment.

With regard to subsidized housing, I think we need it to allow the poor to afford a place to live. Now, I don't think anyone has a "right" to live in a particular place, but you also should want to facilitate people of all sorts of income levels to live in a given municipality.

I'm not claiming diversity of vibrancy or any other pseudo reason people like to list, as they are based on feel good emotions. In addition, there are plenty of places that are very monocultural and are very vibrant (Tokyo) but at the same time we should try to include a diversity of strata and allow for people to move into the mainstream stratum, as most seek to achieve, in the fist place.

There's no zoning in Houston. Crime is pretty intense though

No city zoning, but my understanding is HOAs control the zoning instead.

Rent control is what led to the mess in SF. I sincerely hope that Oakland works to adopt sane housing policies.

Oakland has rent control, with rates of %1.5-%3/yr. If it's a condo, house or 4-plex or under, normal rent control does not apply. Even then, the max is %10/yr, with a max of %30/5yrs.

So if you have a $800/month tenant, it will take over 15 years to get their rent up to the current market rate of ~$2200/yr.

Let's build more housing in Oakland. Way more space than in SF. And unfortunately Oakland is not building as much as it should https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/want-to-know-why-the-bay-ar...

I do not understand the rationale, a government program fails disastrously creating literally the opposite effect desired. And the suggestion is to have _more_ of said program?

"You're just not doing it hard enough!"

You must understand that government is the opposite of a typical business. For example, NASA's space shuttle unexpectedly blows up, so congress immediately gives them a bunch more money under the rationale that they failed because they are "underfunded". If a business faced the same failure, they would lose business, their stock prices would fall down and they would have to work hard to persuade their customers that they had a mistake but they are fixing the problem.

Just do a cursory search for the word "underfunded" in an article describing some government agency's failures and you will see this argument is quite common. There are countless examples.

Why was this downvoted?

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