A Google Gentrification Fight That Doesn’t Involve San Francisco

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/a-google-gentrification-fight-that-doesnt-involve-san-francisco/?ref=technology

by sinemetu11 • 12 years ago

41 61 12 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

irickt• 12 years ago

Brad Feld commented on this article here: http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/12/endless-struggle-boulde...

xiaoma• 12 years ago

Brad Feld wrote a pretty scathing response to this piece, and as someone who lived in the Denver / Boulder area growing up, I have to agree with him.

http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/12/endless-struggle-boulde...

walshemj• 12 years ago

might the racial make up of googles staff have something to do with it?

jseliger• 12 years ago

Nice post. But I left this as a comment:

I'm perplexed that in the midst of a piece about rising housing prices, no one mentions housing supply. The tools necessary to increase housing supply in the face of rising demand have been available since the early 1900s—as discussed extensively here, in The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO)—and yet this endless series of articles doesn't mention the obvious.

The solution to rising prices is to increase the supply of the good in question. Yet reporters rarely seem to mention this, and they treat rising housing prices as some kind of law of nature.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

The strange thing is that the same things that people use to fight rent increases (rent control, etc) wind up creating perverse incentives that reduce the quality and quantity of the housing stock. If you want cheap rent, encourage people to build houses.

davidw5• 12 years ago

Interesting; I'm considering moving to that area. Sad to see this kind of thing, especially considering that Boulder has plenty of room both vertically, and to the east, in which to add housing stock so as to lower prices.

davesque• 12 years ago

No, it doesn't. Much of the area to the east is protected under open-space laws. Also, there have been limits imposed on the vertical height of buildings intended to control the atmosphere of the town.

TulliusCicero• 12 years ago

What's more important, the atmosphere of the town, or the affordability of the town?

davidw5• 12 years ago

This is my neighborhood:

http://goo.gl/maps/uXydu

It's walkable and affordable because it makes decent use of vertical space.

michaeldwan2• 12 years ago

Despite these issues it's a wonderful place to live. I'm happy to answer any questions about the area as you make your decision to move here or not.

raldi• 12 years ago

More of the "I'm in; close the gate!" mentality.

"People who arrived after me are ruining Boulder!"

hkarthik5• 12 years ago

Boulder was like this when I was in college there, well before Google existed. They always capped growth at a ridiculously low percentage because of all the NIMBY behavior.

Housing in the surrounding suburbs of Denver would easily be less than 1/4 the price. Most people who worked in Boulder commuted from a nearby suburb even back then. Thankfully it was the only the city in the area to pick up on NIMBYism, unlike the Bay Area.

jobu• 12 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Boulder is about as gentrified as it gets for Colorado - median home prices are over $500k. (http://www.zillow.com/boulder-co/home-values/)

lexap• 12 years ago

But how do you know that Boulder real estate won't get more expensive if Google moves in? Seems like they'd be adding at least a couple percentage points to the higher income working population, which would have that effect.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

Let's say they say No, and Google moves a town over. What happens then?

nickhalfasleep• 12 years ago

I'm surprised nobody just puts together a new little tech town on the front range where there isn't anything, say just south of Pueblo or north of Ft. Collins. Plenty of foothills to go around.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 12 years ago

Why would anybody want to live there.

davidw5• 12 years ago

The mountains to the west, mostly.

alecco2• 12 years ago

Gentrification tends to make places shiny, boring and dead. Just look at neighborhoods in London and NYC.

Random groups of workers of moving-up industries rarely make a good cultural impact.

nerfhammer2• 12 years ago

Given that people have the right to live wherever they want, what do you suggest?

ca3dmon2• 12 years ago

While cost in certainly an interesting -and perhaps dire- discussion, I'm equally curious about what this will do to the work environment in Boulder.

A have a good deal of my friends in tech here in Boulder, many of who work for big names such at Twitter and Google. However, nearly all of them agree- they wouldn't work at those places if they had to work Silicon Valley Hours.

Boulder has long had a culture of not working 80 hours weeks like the Valley. But if Google massively increases their presence in Boulder, I wonder if that will change the normal work habits here? Or perhaps they will lose the workers that refuse to prioritize work over lifestyle?

I really don't know which way that will go, although I personally hope the latter.

blackaspen• 12 years ago

I would like to think that 1100 people isn't enough of a critical mass for other companies in Boulder to start "requesting" the devotion of 80 hour weeks. As long as it's only one(Google) then employees who move to Google Boulder with the hopes of a non-Silicon Valley lifestyle can find hopefully equally gainful employees at one of the other companies.

If the general world culture here were to become more similar to that of the Valley then I'd leave. Part of the reason I live in Boulder is because of the lifestyle perks (being able to go skiing in 90 minutes). As soon as I don't have time to enjoy that there's much less reason to stay.

michaelochurch4• 12 years ago

Googlers don't work 80-hour weeks. At least, not in New York. You can pull 40 and you'll be fine; 50 if you're going for promotion. That may be an artifact of everyone willing to work insane hours going to hedge funds.

hkarthik5• 12 years ago

It's unlikely because most people move to Colorado to enjoy the outdoors. If you're working 80 hours a week, good luck enjoying the mountain biking, hiking, snowboarding, etc that Colorado has to offer.

It never changed the culture in the 90s when Sun, IBM, and Qualcomm all opened offices in the area. And it's unlikely to change now.

However, the big downside is that if/when the tech sector has a crash, the Colorado offices are some of the most affected because it's tough for them to match the output of the Bay Area HQ.

The early 2000s were really rough on the area and many people left because of all the layoffs. I was living in Denver until 2003 when my company J.D. Edwards got acquired by Oracle (after our stock took a beating) and they reduced the workforce by around 70% through layoffs and attrition.

nilkn• 12 years ago

Boulder has always been quite expensive because of the abundance of nature that it basks in. This might add to high real estate prices, but certainly would not be the root cause of it.

It's actually traditionally been quite an educated and engineering-focused city, so it's really nothing other than NIMBYism for current residents to oppose this. Does it really matter if some of the new residents are software rather than petroleum engineers?

Pxtl• 12 years ago

Why do they always locate in places that have these screwed-up housing markets. There are many, many urban centres in North America with ample university grads pouring out of local institutions, a plethora of amenities, and cheap housing. Any former-industrial city fits the template just fine and would be ecstatic to have a gentrification "problem".

subdane• 12 years ago

Google's looking to attract top talent, talent is looking for "Quality of Life" and those driving factors correlate strongly with said "screwed-up housing markets"

nerfhammer2• 12 years ago

arguably this was the bay area 30 years ago when all of this started, both SV and the NIMBY regime

michaelochurch4• 12 years ago

Why do they always locate in places that have these screwed-up housing markets.

Large corporations don't care about housing market issues, and the prestige of locating in a brand-name city is worth the (slightly) higher salaries that they have to pay.

That said, I've heard good things about Boulder, and it seems like an excellent place to live, but it's not exactly a brand-name city (and I sure as hell can't see why it would be so expensive to live in a place that's not land-constrained like Manhattan.) It's not Manhattan or DC or Boston or Chicago. It's not even San Francisco (in terms of brand-name; I am sure it's a better place to live than SF).

TYPE_FASTER2• 12 years ago

It's land constrained on the west by the mountains. The farther east you go, the cheaper the housing is.

michaeldwan2• 12 years ago

Anyone who describes Boulder as undergoing gentrification has clearly never been here. Upper class whites have been pushing out middle class whites for 15 years now. Comparing this to the situation in SF seems irrelevant.

Edit: I've split time between Boulder and SF for the past few years and have experienced both.

ChrisNorstrom2• 12 years ago

Change the tax code to a "Colonizer's Locked In Rate" so that people who originally started or live in a town pay the same property tax as long as they stay in that town / city / zip code / within _ mile radius of their original home.

● That way original residents are not forced out.

● Low income residents can afford to stay without further special subsidies. Tax payers don't have to pay for low income housing.

● Residents will have the incentive to improve their communities without fear of it raising their taxes.

YokoZar2• 12 years ago

They're not afraid of taxes, they're afraid of rents. Locking property tax rates is exactly what California does and it only makes housing supply worse by giving a very strong incentive for incumbents not to leave.

ChrisNorstrom2• 12 years ago

I stand corrected. What's a realistic solution then? Acceptance that times change, cities change and nothing is permanent and any attempt to create permanency almost always comes with some kind of consequence?

michaelochurch4• 12 years ago

That is a horrible idea. California tried it ("Prop 13") and it made the NIMBY/takers-vs.-makers problem even worse.

Property tax increases are minor compared to asset appreciation. If your house goes up from $300k to $500k and your property tax rate is a typical 1.25% per year, then you made $200k for doing absolutely nothing, but you're paying $2500 per year for it. If you don't like it, sell your house and make a clean $200k (ok, slightly less due to transaction costs) and downsize or move.

What I would support is a law that allows retirees of low income to keep a locked-in property value, on the provision that the house must be offered for sale at that price upon the owner's death (and can't be handed down, though next of kin may bid on it). If there's competitive bidding, the government takes the excess. This would prevent low-income old people from being pushed out by property taxes; everyone else can either move or pay the higher taxes.

robotic• 12 years ago

What a luxury these people have to complain and be worried about high income jobs coming to their town. The town I live in would fall all over itself to have Google build a campus here.

TYPE_FASTER2• 12 years ago

Real estate has always cost more in Boulder than neighboring towns. There's a height restriction on building, and the local government (I've forgotten if it was the county or city) bought a lot of open space from private landowners.

Supply and demand...people want to live in Boulder because it's nice because there is open space. Google builds in places where people want to live.

A Google Gentrification Fight That Doesn’t Involve San Francisco

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