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I say people complaining about this area are mostly late arrivals. A lot just rent a large home for a family with several that work, or another that shares rooms among several people that work. Is renting the home super expensive, nope. Like 4000 a month, divided among several parties. People come to this valley from all over the world. If you want it a lot cheaper you compute from places more inland or further away. Other places that also attract industry/talent offer way higher population density and similar million dollar homes. Silicone Valley is mostly suburban, not urban. In such we have better lifestyle even with so much industry. Sure You have people coming to this area all the time, and leaving for other areas. No place in this country can remain perfect for all, but it’s a great place to live if you want experience the most diverse cultures, cuisine, entertainment, and technology. :)
Thank god I dont work for Apple and live that life. I own my own property and no longer have a morgage. Thanks to not working for Apple.
 
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They're going to find the country is chock full of talented & skilled college graduates stuck working terrible dead-end jobs not utilizing their strengths, living in the almost universal reality of being unable to afford relocating to the most expensive place on earth, never bridging the gap, and never passing Go. And the colleges pump out millions more each semester.
 
Will be interesting to see what the long term affects of the Bay Area housing price comes to. My guess if more companies push for this, you will see a substantial drop in housing prices…simple supply/demand at work
Then you wouldn't need to pay them as much anymore either.......



Really, Apple should had been doing their own employee housing and build a little "company town".
 
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The alternative is people live elsewhere.

The Bay Area is one of the most beautiful places on the planet and there’s not exactly a surplus of land there waiting to be developed. The idea that housing prices can be substantially reduced there by increasing supply is an absolute pipe dream.
They can always build up!

But then there has to be the thought for the lives and the wages of the people that build and maintain the infrastructure and the lifestyle for the techbros. That means that the construction workers, landscapers, restaurant workers, delivery drivers, etc are priced out of the communities they could live in, and are not likely paid much different than working in other parts of the country.

The apple campus literally should be the apple campus. Subsidized rent, utilities, education, infrastructure, etc. All part of your contract with Tim
 
Cupertino rental prices are probably about 2x what they should be. With a bit of planning and spending on infrastructure, they could significantly reduce the cost of rentals with only a slight increase in taxation. You might not get down to Austin prices, but you could get close and you'd be making the city a far more attractive place to live with all the new infrastructure.

Cupertino is one of the nicest spots in the South Bay and they'll never do any kind of planning or infrastructure. When I went to De Anza as a student and later worked there, I routinely went to the VTA meetings and voiced my opinion on having better bus service in the area so that students would have better access to the school.
#1 complaint from Coop residents? Noise from buses and something about the buses causing MORE traffic and this was eons before the spaceship campus.

Also I don't know of any "market rate" or "affordable" new developments in Cupertino. Everything I've seen has been "Luxury".

They can always build up!

But then there has to be the thought for the lives and the wages of the people that build and maintain the infrastructure and the lifestyle for the techbros. That means that the construction workers, landscapers, restaurant workers, delivery drivers, etc are priced out of the communities they could live in, and are not likely paid much different than working in other parts of the country.

The apple campus literally should be the apple campus. Subsidized rent, utilities, education, infrastructure, etc. All part of your contract with Tim
Take a drive around 5AM out of the South Bay and into the Central Valley or south towards Salinas. Bumper to bumper traffic for all those that make the techie life possible. Luckily I make enough and can live in East Side SJ as a non-techie but I know people that have had to make the move out the Bay and into the surrounding areas but have good paying jobs and family ties to the area.

One of my neighbors on my street is a Telsa assembly worker (real not the fake contract stuff) and he and his family had to move to Los Banos to make ends meet. Luckily for him the Tesla bus makes a stop in Los Banos, and he gets on at 4am sleeps and wakes up at the Tesla plant in Fremont at 7:30.

As much as I hate the whole concept of the Google Village if Apple could make something like that on their ginormous plot of land, by all means make apartments for the workers.
 
As much as I hate the whole concept of the Google Village if Apple could make something like that on their ginormous plot of land, by all means make apartments for the workers.
Absolutely, but Apple is just one company. Even though it's large, it's just a small fraction of high-wage tech workers in the Bay Area. Local governments have approved and continue to approve more and more office space, without making sure that all these new workers, high-wage and low-wage, have a place to live. A good first step is a moratorium on offices in the entire Bay Area, but that's a very hard sell.
 
Absolutely, but Apple is just one company. Even though it's large, it's just a small fraction of high-wage tech workers in the Bay Area. Local governments have approved and continue to approve more and more office space, without making sure that all these new workers, high-wage and low-wage, have a place to live. A good first step is a moratorium on offices in the entire Bay Area, but that's a very hard sell.
I like where you are going with this, but that proposal would result a lot of accounting and construction games to get around whatever laws are passed. And the workers (despite their comparatively generous comp plans) would end up suffering for it. (i.e. shoulder to shoulder work conditions, shifts, no parking, etc)

There really is no single good option to "fix" this, as market conditions will likely change before any effective plan is able to become beneficial. We are stuck with the invisible hand unless the larger employers take housing for their lower level workers in-house as part of their comp plan.
 
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Such will NEVER happen in a free country that is USA.
people think it’s free here, but the government keeps bailing out the mega corps. apple has so many tax “incentives“ they really don’t care. the problem with the bay area and many other over priced areas is the fact that our children will never be able to afford the cost of living.
 
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people think it’s free here, but the government keeps bailing out the mega corps. apple has so many tax “incentives“ they really don’t care. the problem with the bay area and many other over priced areas is the fact that our children will never be able to afford the cost of living.
Maybe overtime Apple will be forced to hire more remote employees because within 40km there will be insufficient amount of people available to hire, and these overpriced areas will have fewer and fewer people.
 
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What will Apple do with that $100B or so campus?
They can just building housing near the campus for their employees and rent it for them

Another solution would be for the gov. to force smaller businesses and offices to leave meanwhile maintaining the heavy weights that has built multi-billion campuses like Apple.

I also do not get it, why are they all building in SV why don't you move to a place like Omaha I bet everything is much cheaper there and after all you are a tech company so mostly your stuff is done online.
 
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people think it’s free here, but the government keeps bailing out the mega corps. apple has so many tax “incentives“ they really don’t care. the problem with the bay area and many other over priced areas is the fact that our children will never be able to afford the cost of living.

Why don't people just move to cheaper cities or states?
 
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Apple is clueless. Is not about HCOL why people don't want to work in Cupertino.

Most experienced bay area engineers I know won't work for Apple because HQ are way down in cupertino and Apple just doesn't have reasonable WFH options and a very office centric culture. Even pre-covid most experienced folks will balk at being forced on 90+min buses each way to make it to the office. It was working in Steve Jobs days, when people were willing to pay the price for work for them, but the allure is gone. There are so many more options now out there that Apple is not to bothered with.
 
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This last year has shown that remote work actually works for IT. My employer is having issues retaining people now that employees have found other companies that let them work from home.
Conservative companies are losing their most valuable people to others that offer remote. I've noticed is usually the best folks that want full remote. I can't understand why companies are not being more flexible with them.
 
Absolutely, but Apple is just one company. Even though it's large, it's just a small fraction of high-wage tech workers in the Bay Area. Local governments have approved and continue to approve more and more office space, without making sure that all these new workers, high-wage and low-wage, have a place to live. A good first step is a moratorium on offices in the entire Bay Area, but that's a very hard sell.

Another good step is rethinking housing construction regulation and red tape. You can’t build this way, you can’t do this without that and that and that, you can’t build there, you can’t build up etc etc etc etc. Housing is like anything market related, supply and demand will be a big factor in cost. The lack of trying to meet supply in favor of other, ahem, priorities has been significant and going on for many years. (Upward building I n Silicon Valley is semi hampered by SJ Airport being toward the valley’s middle).

It caused a huge outsurge of house buying up 680 then eastward down 580, even reaching Tracy/5/Manteca, up Vasco as well as on the other side of the valley down 101 to Morgan Hill and Gilroy and beyond. Traffic gridlock hell is what I called it.
They want to maintain the green belt then emphasize big tax incentive options to builders to build upward. Lord knows they’ve tax incentivized Cisco, Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Ebay, Facebook(they picked up Sun Micros sweet bayfront old campus) and likely many others.
 
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Apple employees complain about coming back to work and Apple puts out word that they are willing to hire outside of Cupertino. I don't see Apple as being on the hook here. If the employees want to try to force Apple to alter their long held operating philosophy, they might find they don't have the leverage they think they have.

Well, Apple can’t exactly replace an experienced engineer who knows their software inside and out with an outsider who will take 6-12 months to become comparably proficient and not miss a beat.
 
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Right after Tim Cook’s takeover, Apple eliminated the majority of their remote contracted employees. This included a lot of people that worked for Apple; whom didn’t live in specific California areas. Upper management claimed this was to decrease security leaks, but it was basically used to get rid of speciality projects that didn’t fit with the narrative of new management. Apple lost a lot of talent: when they basically asked said, “move to the valley, and take a job here; or find employment elsewhere“. Interesting to see them come full circle; as the cost of living and established lives, were a common reason used back then. Apple lost some very talented people because of those choices, shame this took them so long to realize.
And they went to Google, Amazon etc. Smart move Apple.
 
My experience working in Silicon Valley has taught me that the entire area needs to be closed, leveled, and converted to a parking lot or better yet, a wilderness. There is nothing more bizarre than living and working in that environment. Enormous amounts of money are spent on the most amazingly wasteful and non-business-related baubles, while employees are unable to keep up with the extravagant living expenses to reside near their jobs. Homelessness is out of control there, as is congestion and environmental damage. This is all not to even mention the destruction that much of Silicon Valley imposes on our culture and society by their manipulation and control through the social media platforms they own.

Apple would do well to move out, and many others would do well to shutter themselves and embark on a self-assessment on a mountaintop somewhere.
Nice idea and thoughtful. But what will they do with the $6-$10 billion spaceship monument? That's a billion dollars question 😂!
 
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