Uber shakes up real estate market with massive lease in Oakland (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Largely they do.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

*51bn company.

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

Compared to Fremont, I guess...

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.

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

Where have you seen the cleaning services?

What are those reasons?

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.

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

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.