Hmm. How many acres? For 15,000 new homes with a density of 75 units per acre, this would need to be 200 acres of land. At a value of $750 Million this would work out to $3.75M per acre. That seems low. Something is off between the two numbers that were given. 75 units per acre is very dense and would need a lot of city infrastructure improvements.

All homes are not created equally.

Pack N Stack housing may suit some, but I would like to see improvements in transit from places like Morgan Hill and Gilroy to Silicon Valley.

Saying that, Google is doing the right thing here.

Say Google is using 200 acres that "would have been offices" to instead create housing. It might need to be more to get 15,000 units. But each acre in offices has about 500 workers. So Supposedly they are saying they will actually hire 100,000 fewer workers. There's something fishy about this. They must have been hoarding more office land than they would ever need. This could all be a distraction, if they end up adding 500,000 more workers. What fraction of their land is involved?

'Adding Up' touches on a valuable point. With all the burden that Google is already adding to the local communities the cities and county should be looking for upgrades or funds to improve water treatment, water distribution, sewer upgrades, road / public transit and other improvements. Right now it seems that their 'housing' plans only benefits their campuses and not the community at large to which they impact and belong.

$1B divided by 20,000 = $50,000 per housing unit. Divided by construction costs of 400 per square foot means that each unit would be 125sf.

Google's pledge is just a subsidy/incentive for other investors to build the housing. Google is not going to build much of this housing, if any, on its own.

First lets look at some facts:

$1 Billion divided by 4 cities is really only $250,000,000. Now if it costs $425,000 per unit based on the Terner Center study from Berkeley (Web Link to build you will only result in 588 units.

Also $1 Billion is a very small amount of money to “promise”. This is because it had a NET PROFIT resource here (Web Link provides 2001 to 2015 and this resource here (Web Link for 2016-2018. The sum total comes to $155.17 Billion. This $1 Billion comes to only 1% of the total profit it has made. But this will be a loan so it will not come out in only 1 year of business. Simply put, it is a pathetic amount to promise given the resources they have.

Finally, it is just a pledge, there is so far no money at all yet provided.

Lisa Matichak said:

“I appreciate the tech companies stepping up to provide resources to address the housing needs in the Bay Area,” Matichak said. “It’s a sizable investment that we will likely be able to leverage.”

No it is not, and it doesn’t add up either. Simply put 588 new units, they call homes will not even come close to what the City needs. And by the way the use the word “homes”, so are they going to build houses?

Please plan for the necessary "amenities" that will be needed to support all this new housing. Additional housing doesn't do much good if children are packed in overcrowded schools and there's no grocery store people can access.

20,000 homes? A “home” is likely to be a studio or tiny 1br apartment. Assuming an average of 1.25 people per unit, Google is pledging to build out housing for 25,000 people. As we have seen before in MV, Google will only agree to fund housing if the cities agree to any of their office space demands. So, assuming it takes five years to build this housing in the Bay Area for 25,000 people, will they promise not to increase their staff by 25,000? (That includes contractors, which makes up at least half their global workforce!). Of course not! Google and other large tech companies will continue to do what is best for their business and grow, grow, grow.

This will make the imbalance worse, not better.

I understood them to be saying that they would provide the land based on their having already locked it down for previous planned use as offices.

A lot depends on how long ago they bought the land and just what they mean. If it's a ground lease, that lease might be an ongoing cost for the housing. If they got a good deal this could be very valuable as all their purchases have driven up the cost of land in many different areas, particularly around downtown San Jose. Land there was likely acquired by Google at a steep discount from the value today.

If I had to guess, I would say a lot of this plan for housing is in downtown San Jose and in Sunnyvale, where they tied up a lot of land around Lockheed and Yahoo in an office park that was developed low density back in the 1970's and has only had light redevelopment. This is really very close to their main site in Mountain View and it is bridged by deals they have with NASA for land at Moffett Field.
The land in Sunnyvale may have also been bought at a steep discount from the present value. $3.5 Million per acre as an average price would be astoundingly good.

20.000 homes that people will own or 20,000 overpriced luxury ghetto apartments?

Google is not your friend.

Socialism is not the solution.

What if $1 billion was spent on setting up land to allow RVs and tiny homes/modular that are also more mobile, with wrap-around services to make them appealing. In Las Vegas, Zappos has created a tech community around RV homes with their CEO living in one: Web Link

$1 billion can go so much further when supporting land that retains the future agile ability to be developed into something else.

We don't neeed more hosusing - we need fewer jobs. Move amy Google jobs to some other part of the US, please.

I am using a work system, I am registered.

What a joke!

The Google announcement stated:

“Google will, over the next 10 years, REZONE $750 MILLION WORTH OF ITS PROPERTY, most of which is currently zoned for commercial and office space. That means Google could knock down existing offices to enable housing.

NONPROFITS FOCUSED ON HOMELESSNESS AND DISPLACEMENT WILL GET $50 MILLION, AND $250 MILLION WILL GO TOWARD AN INVESTMENT FUND FOR DEVELOPERS SPECIFICALLY TO BUILD AFFORDABLE HOUSING.”

Thus only $300 Million will be given to the 4 Cities, thus each will get $75 Million, and only $62.5 Million to new housing. If an apartment costs $425,000 per unit than there will only be 146 new units built. BUT IN TEN YEARS.

Lisa, what were you thinking regarding your claim this was a big investment in the city?

I think you should be more careful regarding your assessments.

This City has been acting like an old western.

They don't do anything to fix the problem they made in the first place.

Then expect a "lone ranger" to ride into town and magically solve their problems.

Our city council resembles the town in Blazing Saddles.

"You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers These are people of the land The common clay of the new West You know...."

That's all 