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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

Lot's of negative sentiminents in these comments towards Facebook which is understood but the way I look at it this is a symptom and not the root cause.

We are having a really bad housing crisis in coastal cities, and obviously the Bay Area is leading the pack. NIMBY voters and short sighted government officials are stagnating developers from building more units. Just a few weeks ago the city council in Portland rejected two housing projects that would've generated thousands of units and hundreds of affordable housing units.

When the public sector cannot solve the housing problem it is no surprise that the private sector will step in and play a bigger role. It's not surprising to see tech companies leading the way because their HQs are in the Bay Area. If potential employees don't wont to work for you because the area that the office is in has an astronomical COL that is an existential threat to your company.

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When the public sector cannot solve the housing problem

s/cannot solve/actively created/

Developers would build 100,000 housing units this year in the Bay Area, that would sell for double the national median housing price, if it were legal for them to do so.

Zoning and land use restrictions are the cause of high housing prices in the priciest cities. Those are legal, not market or technological, restrictions.

Agreed. This comes down to a battle between homeowners and renters + new arrivals. Facebook/Google are moving to deal with the complaints they're hearing from their workforce that the municipalities have consistently ignored for years. I don't think people care if company towns are the result, as long as they get manageable rents/commutes. This all strikes me as a lot less "black mirror" than general selfishness and tragedy of the commons.

That's an altruistic lens applied over a more likely scenario -- 20-40% of salaries are lost to rentier cadres. Throughout history they have been a blight upon humanity and they have always been formidable, and furthermore Facebook actuaries likely calculated that rental costs are only going to keep going up unabated. There will be a point where Facebook will have to move headquarters and that will come with a multibillion dollar pricetag.

In this hypothetical scenario, they will have to take steps to ensure this doesn't happen again, which comes with a hefty pricetag in itself, so provided this data there is only one question -- where to relocate the HQ?

There is no better place than the SF Bay Area, so logically it stands to reason that they take the same steps to progressively expand their current HQ rather than relocate.

Not only that but this new FB community can be a testbed for applying the same pernicious digital surveillance mentality to the physical world. Truly, it will be the place to measure how much privacy people will give up for real-life benefits (eg: rent).

With the housing challenges in SF I think you will see more and more companies questioning the “there’s no better place than SF” mindset.

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