The story here is one where the public finds a man who claims one thing publicly and but does the opposite privately. The man wrote this essay [1] complaining that America needs to build, but turns out he is a NIMBY when it comes to his own home. This, on the same day the man invests in WeWork’s Adam Neumann's [2] new residential real estate company that surely will just make the problems worse, while trying to enrich investors (though the actual company's plans are pretty sparse in detail). What a spectacle of irony.
Forget about WeWork and put ethics aside, the guy turned (pretty much) nothing into billions, they're betting he will do it again. i.e. Neumann has a very high ROI.
He turned 22 Billion of funding into a 4 Billion market cap.
My read is he turned something into almost nothing. Or maybe you can say he scammed long enough for a few to profit off of later suckers. But I'm not seeing value creation at all.
Look at the economics that a16z needs with fund sizes in the billions. Funding small companies won't do it for them unless they invest in a lot, probably more than they can manage duedil or spend time on; they need investments who can deploy a lot of cash. With, obviously, some chance of success.
Hopefully for their LPs Adam learned some lessons.
Why would anyone trust Sean Parker with their money after he ran a music pirating service, got hooked on drugs, acted crazy, and burned out? Well, it worked out okay for Peter Thiel.
I feel like I’m in a different dimension here. I thought this guy JUST raised millions from a16z for some shitty crypto startup, but absolutely nobody brought that up when talking about Flow. So I had to go google it, and sure enough, it did actually happen. This guy must have some Epstein levels of dirt on these VCs to rake in money at this scale for companies that don’t generate any revenue or in the case of Flowcarbon, have any tangible product.
There’s not a drop of irony here. It’s just mindboggling that HN prop these charlatans up like gods. You’re not temporarily embarrassed millionaires - you’re just embarrassing.
The thing about Marc Andreessen is that of all VC-types of people he seemed like one with a modicum of tech legitimacy, given his history/role in the development of the web.
I was at UIUC shortly after he graduated and the general impression was that he basically just stole Mosaic from the University to create Netscape. Not sure that bestows him with any tech legitimacy. He's certainly a good businessman.
he could have been actively involved in creating Mosaic as a university project, and still be accused of leaving the university and stealing the software to create a new commercial product.
Well, Page/Brin's BackRub was basically a science citation index, yet here we're. Add FB into that collection too. Ideas are nothing (we all have a lot of them), execution is everything.
What if that legitimacy is merely a story crafted by his press department? It so obviously will help interacting with his target audience: devs who take pride in technical skills and knowledge.
Why do you give people who can easily afford to have a team craft an image the benefit of believing it? I categorically don't. Not because I am of bad faith, no, precisely because I trust people to do what's in their interest: make sure your fund gets to talking with your audience.
Is it so hard to believe that people with “technical skills and knowledge” can be hypocrites?
The fact is, pmarca’s engineering chops are not a conspiracy invented by non engineers. He did in fact create a brilliant piece of software (Mosaic and, at some greater distance, Netscape), and the technical elites of Silicon Valley saw this and are responsible for much of his wealth and influence.
But the mundane truth is that engineering chops do not automatically translate into virtue, tact, political acumen, investment prowess, or any number of other skills or positive attributes. It is understandable that engineers want to believe they are on a higher plane of human existence but the evidence is inconclusive.
No publicist tricked us into thinking Andreessen was a brilliant programmer, we tricked ourselves into thinking brilliant programmers are necessarily superhuman.
>It’s just mindboggling that HN prop these charlatans up like gods
Link to some examples? My impression is that many HN users are associated with the startup community, and therefore like what Andreessen or PG is doing, but I don't think they prop them up "like gods" or even demigods for that matter. You can like what someone is doing in one area (ie. startups/VC), without thinking they're gods or blindly believing whatever they say.
The power of marketing works best when least expected, and for some reason this data-driven fact-based engineering bunch is either just not (surprisingly!) not cognisant of the mechanics of investors using their brains and are gullible, star struck, almost willfully ignorant (seeing the lengths the innocence of the wealthy is sometimes defended). Or people are cognisant, and then must be participating in the charade, on the basis of greed; not biting the hand that feeds you is good exercise for pitching.
What other mechanisms could be at play for this worship?
Anyway thanks for your concise comment; it could not be more on point!
I frankly don’t want housing the kinds of people who can’t afford houses anywhere near me. I don’t say this publicly, but the council candidate who “protects home values” has my vote.
I agree housing affordability is an important problem. I am not willing to have so much as ruffians in the nearby grocery store to fix it though.
Just to give you another perspective, it seems like they're not building low-income housing, they're just building denser housing than is normal for the area ("multifamily overlay zones").
As someone who lives in the Bay Area, guessing that if they went ahead and these were actually built, the housing/rental prices of these units would still be ultra high. Yeah, housing is so bad here, they'd probably just to attract young tech workers or people with at least decent jobs.
I am sure we are relative ruffians to wealthy people. Simply could be the difference between executives and entrepreneurs to whiny employee types like myself.
As a parent I also prioritize cleanliness and low crime over pretty much anything else. The difference between Marc and I is that I don't pretend to not be a NIMBY. If this causes me to be labeled online as a sad frightened person, so be it.
Can understand this, as I own a home in the East Bay, but I fight the urge to be a NIMBY, because I've come to realize, it's not good for the area in the long run.
One of the main causes of our homeless problem is our high-housing cost. At least from what I've read, the Bay Area has such a high-level of homelessness because people who normally can afford apartments can't and are forced on to the streets. We have some of the highest housing costs in the world, and if prices keep going up, homelessness and crime will get worse and worse. We need to bring prices down (or at least keep them from going up like crazy as they have been) so that we can support a range of workers, from cooks and teachers to well-educated techies and business people.
It came as a surprise to me too when I first heard about it, but it kind of makes sense. There are a lot of people living at lower incomes (not necessarily poor, just low), and in the Bay Area, their biggest expense is rent. All it takes is for them to lose their job or incur a big medical expense and they can't afford their apartment. So a lot of people who would normally live in cheaper apartments are eventually forced on to the street.
Yeah, i'm not opposed to high rent costs, but San Francisco is in the top two in the world in cost for renting apartments. This is just insane and it seems better for the city in the long run if this could be brought down.
Are a disproportionate number of those people suffering from addiction and or mental health issues? Yes. But make no mistake, the gap between people apartment shopping and people living on the street is frighteningly small in a housing market as expensive as SF.
>Then who will do the lawn care, cook, and serve? Will they have to commute hours everyday to make coffee and clean floors?
Sure, why not? They can then charge a fortune for these services because of the commute time.
And for restaurants and the like, they can simply charge extremely high prices to eat there, to pay for workers needing to commute so far. And if the wealthy people refuse to pay for that, the restaurants can just go out of business, and the wealthy people can just cook their own food at home.
I don't really see the problem here, except that this wouldn't result in a healthy community, but it seems these wealthy assholes don't actually want healthy communities. So maybe the healthy communities should be elsewhere, and the wealthy NIMBYs can just live in their own enclave and cook their own food and clean their own floors.
I concur. I'd much rather deal with rich people problems (overzealous HOAs, ostentatious sports cars, being judged when I don't have an immaculate lawn) than the ones you describe. Online discourse is heavily biased against openly saying these things, but as we can see, apparently people quietly believe it nonetheless.
They were talking about allowing the construction of ADU's to accommodate "low income" people per the RHNA - Low Income in San Mateo county is a 2-person household making $117k/year or a family of 4 earning $146k/year. I don't think you need to worry about pee on the sidewalks and "smoking".
There are regular employed people who are poor, prople who only male $100k per year and they don’t fit into your neighboorhood? Why not move out if you don’t like that part of the city evolve? Cities change over time, just accept that.
I read that essay and did not get the impression Andreessen was necessarily talking about some ugly steal box to house people (the proposal). Particularly one you'd regulate into existence in someones neighborhood. It was more about inspiring people to want what you want to build.
My own view is that we should build more, and that new buildings should be of a higher quality than existing buildings in the area. The exception is if the existing buildings is very new, in which case equal quality is acceptable. Furthermore, there's absolutely no lack of low quality areas to upgrade in US. Is the difference between NIMBY and YIMBY simply that YIMBYs disregard quality?
I’ve watched this happen in my own neighborhood which is trying to build in additional transit options and build high density housing to ease the pressure on prices.
We have neighbors vehemently opposed to the transit, convinced that it will bring the “bad elements” to town. Then further fighting the housing complaining of how it would make traffic worse. Note that neither is even close to a problem… I just sit and sigh.
Honestly I think these developments will help our values but they don’t see it that way.
In my experience... public transit in areas with poor transit options is overwhelmingly used by "bad elements" (homeless and petty criminals). People who aren't "bad" (i.e. they are of the same economic class as the homeowners in the city) generally can afford cars in suburban areas. So I can understand why they oppose public transit.
High density housing has no excuse though, if traffic is a problem then streets should be expanded. We need more 5+1 apartments and dense townhomes built.
> In my experience... public transit in areas with poor transit options is overwhelmingly used by "bad elements" (homeless and petty criminals). People who aren't "bad" (i.e. they are of the same economic class as the homeowners in the city) generally can afford cars in suburban areas. So I can understand why they oppose public transit.
So bad public transit systems are mostly used by "bad elements" because "Good" (rich) people can afford to not use shitty transit systems, which somehow means we shouldn't improve bad public transit systems?
If you improve the bad transit systems then suddenly they wont be overwhelmingly used by "bad elements" because many more "good" people will want to use them. The places I've been with good public transportation were never overwhelmingly filled with "bad elements". The trains and buses themselves were never overwhelmingly used by them either.
You really don't have to hold other people down just because you're happy where you are. You can have good public transportation services without turning your city into a slum and have everyone, including yourself, be better off for it.
>if traffic is a problem then streets should be expanded
Quite the opposite. Traffic will expand like a gas to meet the available capacity. You can only make the roads so wide, but never will it be wide enough to abate traffic congestion.
If traffic is a problem it's time to make driving less attractive by building bike lanes, subways/light rail/monorail, and investing in transit.
> Traffic will expand like a gas to meet the available capacity
Yes, but now the roads carry more people. You can't fix congestion, but you can make it so the roads can sustain the local population, even if they're traveling at 20mph during rush hour.
> bike lanes
Sure, but when's someone going to make an ebike that can carry lots of groceries? Or really anything more than 1 large bag. Even a Trader Joe's run for only myself is 4-5 bags, and those portions are small compared to Costco.
Also, bike theft is a huge problem. And coincidentally the places with the best transit and bike lane buildouts have the worst policies towards property theft.
> subways/light rail/monorail, and investing in transit
Until disruptive people are banned from transit (so everything doesn't smell like piss and weed) and light rail is permitted to go faster than cars by NIMBYs, transit will never be an appealing option vs. cars. BART travels at 20mph next to 65 mph freeways sometimes.
I'm all for transit and bikes if these problems can be fixed. But they are political problems, not engineering ones. So I have little faith they will ever be fixed.
> Sure, but when's someone going to make an ebike that can carry lots of groceries? Or really anything more than 1 large bag. Even a Trader Joe's run for only myself is 4-5 bags
Because you need to go less often due to the effort/cost of traveling to buy groceries. Here in Sweden almost everyone manages to get groceries with a backpack or a small cart, a few days of the week when needed. It's a 10-15 min walking distance for most people living in any part of a city.
Even then, 4-5 bags is completely doable on a bike with some panniers or a large cargo backpack. There are also cargo bikes if you ever have the need to carry larger loads often so there is your answer to when someone will make a bike that can carry loads of groceries. They exist but for most people who actually use a bike day-to-day, in the places we live we don't need to pack a full trunk-load of groceries because we can purchase groceries conveniently and do it more often.
> Also, bike theft is a huge problem. And coincidentally the places with the best transit and bike lane buildouts have the worst policies towards property theft.
Bike theft happens with bad locking practices: a bad lock (cable or small sized chains) and not properly locking your frame through the back triangle to a thick pipe/metal column. If you leave your bike unattended for a whole night with a bad lock you run the chance to have it stolen almost anywhere in the world. Get a good u-lock and learn the simple trick of properly locking your bike...
> Bike theft happens with bad locking practices: a bad lock (cable or small sized chains) and not properly locking your frame through the back triangle to a thick pipe/metal column
Clearly you don't live in the SF Bay Area. Thieves here have portable electric angle grinders and will cut through even the tough steel U-locks in 15 seconds. Not to mention if they can't steal your bike they'll steal your wheels, your seat, and your handles. Anything that's not bolted down is stolen. Not even exaggerating, ask anyone that lives in SF and they will tell you.
You cannot have a system where bikes are widely used when this kind of behavior happens.
>Yes, but now the roads carry more people. You can't fix congestion, but you can make it so the roads can sustain the local population, even if they're traveling at 20mph during rush hour.
Yeah and then the city grows and you are back to square one, with insufficient road capacity to support everyone driving.
Widening roads is a bandaid fix, treating the symptoms and not the cause.
The real solution is to treat the root cause by making it easier for people to not drive.
> Even a Trader Joe's run for only myself is 4-5 bags
A couple of large pannier bags will hold that. I cycle to the shops now for me and my partner and thats what I do.
You can also get cargo ebikes, but they cost a lot. Might as well just use the car if you need more space, but most of the time a couple of pannier bags works for me.
Your earlier still argument applies: higher density housing is cheaper, and brings in "bad elements" - people lower on the socio-economic scale who can't afford to buy or rent the less dense homes present currently. It's class warfare.
This is sort of how it's playing out where I live now. The city has opened up densification in an area that has historically been suburbs. Old bungalows from the 50s/60s are being bought out by developers and turned into mini 6-unit condo buildings. So on one hand, densification, yay! On the other, starter homes suitable for young families are being lost and replaced with smaller apartments suitable for young couples, boo? Any potential family looking to buy those properties is completely outbid by the developer. The sale of 6x units covers the purchase price, tear down and new build with a healthy profit margin, the single family never had a chance. It seems like the middle is falling out of the market and developers seek profit in one of 2 ways. Mcmansion that maximize square footage on a single lot, or condos that maximize the number of small-as-possible units in one building. Then the government wonders why the birthrate is decreasing..
6 families live on that land instead of 1. It’s a net benefit for society. You’re talking as if families are being screwed by developers. What I see is 5 mores families getting a home.
You can’t have a society where everyone owns a single family home of 4000sqf. Infrastructure and public dollar can’t sustain all the roads, aqueduc, transit, for such low density. If some people have the money for it, fine, but we can’t have the whole population of North America living that way. It was always a lie of the American dream.
The zoning prohibiting the 6-unit housing is in essence limiting the supply to five parties in order to reduce the price to a single party fur buying a bigger home. This is no different than raising taxes and handing the money to people buying single-family homes. The only difference is that the zoning does so indirectly which hides it and makes it politically viable because the masses aren't economically literate enough to understand.
Living in a 3 bedroom apartment is a luxurious experience in much of the world and preferable to homelessness or extreme precarity, imo. 3 bedrooms doesn't have to mean cramped and miserable, it only means that right now because we don't build enough and landlords in cities frequently split up 1 or 2 bedroom apartments into 3 with architectural slight of hand (or just by lying).
What do you mean by the experience of those living in it? The experience of living in a 3-bedroom apartment in the middle of a walkable and lively city is pretty comfortable.
In tech (and here on HN) we embrace the mythos of the founder, and everyone is 100% comfortable with a founder having 80x more equity than the first engineer (who writes the very first prototype) and 800x more equity than the 10th engineer, and we cheer them when they ("one of us") becomes a multi-billionaire... while at the same time, we're aghast at the immense wealth inequality everywhere else ("that greedy wall street!") and we're offended by Marc Andreessen wanting to protect his personal riches.
Between pumping and dumping shitcoins associated with dubious crypto projects and this nonsense, A16Zs brand has been completely destroyed among my circle of programmers. And it isn't just Andreesen. Chris Dixon, and some of the other younger associates are also acting like grifters when it comes to crypto. And this is coming from someone that has held bitcoin since 2015. I'm not someone who is against crypto by any means, but this BS with pushing crypto projects to poverty level retail investors has to stop.
This is the most interesting part of this story! Everybody going on about how Marc is a hypocrite, but to me it smells of a house divided, since we don't know for certain who penned the letter, or whether Marc himself even ever saw it. To disavow it publicly though would be a personal betrayal of his wife. What I wouldn't give to be a fly on that wall.
Yep! A lot of Stanfords campus is named after him and before he died he was due to build a public gym in Palo Alto. Seems she's got the same interests as him with their recent letters!
no, he's not hypocritical. Now, I don't like MA himself, so this is not a defense of somebody I like, this is a defense of basic Econ 101.
Let's say you own a large amount of real estate in a city, much acreage in the wealthy part, much acreage in the middle class part, and much acreage in the poor part of town. As such, you have a good bit of influence at city hall, your development projects employ so many people and the taxes you pay sustain the school system.
The city wants to build an airport, everybody agrees it is necessary for growth, you agree, the labor unions agree, everybody. Where do you recommend building it? Should you build it uptown and destroy the property values in the wealthy part of town? How much lower would the property values drop in the poor part of town? See where this is going?
The model doesn't have to have one person owning all of this property, it's just easier to see that way, where one person makes the tradeoff, but the market will make the same tradeoff if instead, it could all be owned by individual people, or it could all be owned by a progressive socialist government: you still don't build the airport near the nicest real estate, you build it by the most distressed real estate where it will have little effect on prices. If you want to let the market solve this problem, auction off the right to build the airport to the resident stakeholders. The poor people will jump at a lower price than the other classes of people.
So, advocating for an airport (or more housing) and then saying "but don't build it here" is not hypocritical, it's something I like to call rational.
Now, should poor people be subjected to all the worst ills, the sewage treatment plant, the power plant, the airport, etc? Regardless of where you stand on that, the solution to improving the lives of poor people is still not building the airport in the best neighborhood. If your socialist government wants to confiscate the rich neighborhood so the commissars have places to live, they still don't want an airport there. If your govt confiscates it and rents it out to proles who want to pay more for housing and dress in rags, vs the proles who want nicer clothes in a shabbier apartment, it still does not make sense to destroy that value.
If you’re going to impose costs on poor people by building an airport where their housing used to be - you should build replacement housing in better-off neighborhoods like Marc’s so they can benefit from what they’re supplying to the rich.
Property value is not the only trade-off being made.
> the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.
Andreessen has vocally argued (for years) that we should build more housing. Then when the opportunity comes to do it where he lives - he and his wife NIMBY their way out of it.
Pretty simple point to understand.
new airport != new housing is my entire retort to your argument.
He does not think it's a moral imperative to build more housing, it's you who thinks that. He thinks it's a good idea for the economy, and I explained the economic argument to you. Apartment buildings in a mansion neighborhood will, as an airport does, decrease property values, it's not a great leap to understand.
What I don't understand about the bay area is why they don't just dedicate an area away from these NIMBY neighborhoods- say north of 101, between San Carlos and Santa Clara and let them build lots of skyscrapers with lots of housing and roads to help 101 divert some traffic. I see tall office buildings there so its def not earthquake or environmental. Affordable housing and urban lifestyle for the young and SFH and space for the family folks in Atherton.
so much politics here. seems like a bunch of issues, including putting lower income people into wealthy neighborhoods, which is an explicit goal of many elected democrats, urban sprawl, which no one seems to worry about these days, housing shortages, which is a big issue. honestly I don't know why people are so focused on marcs opinions, he can afford to lose property value or leave, bit certainly he has every right to fight for his little suburban dream.
I think the bigger issue is that the cities were the future just a few years ago, and now that future isn't as certain.
so called modern "tech" can't build anything that isn't made out of bits. After that essay, a16z went on to fund a digital nightclub for nerds (clubhouse), tons of crypto schemes, and now apparently the next iteration on landlording. So pretty much anything that doesn't involve building something in the physical world.
when covid came around every single one of these entrepreneurs was spamming twitter with how they're doing their part in saving everyone, yet at the end of the day it was the pharma sector and governments who actually did it.
Even within the software sector it's largely companies like Microsoft or Apple, preceding the Andreessen generation who genuinely build things. Including here on HN in particular there needs to be a critical re-evaluation of the entire 'startup economy' and how much of it is just digital rent-seeking on top of physical infrastructure that other people build.
To be fair to big tech/software, it was the thing that me work from home, for some people (like my mother) that probably saved their lives. Not to mention all the digital services I relied on to keep some semblance sanity. I was stuck in a 300sqft apartment with my girlfriend for months but was able to talk with friends, family, watch movies and play games. None of that would have been possible without tech. You’re right that pharma ended up saving us, but it’s a bit pithy to totally dismiss what tech gave us.
The term NIMBY was originally intended to refer to people like this: A liberal who wanted all sorts of services—but not in _my_ back yard! That was to distinguish them from conservatives who were open about not wanting services at all.
Is there anyone that genuinely wants people a few steps down financially from them living near by them? If you make $150k being an decent but not fantastic engineer and you get into a nice enough neighborhood, are you really that excited if the vacant land down the street is being turned into low income duplexes for tow truck drivers? Honestly?
Most that answer with a categorical “yes” (I want that) haven’t lived what you are suggesting.
I’ve lived next to low income + “project” housing. It’s physically dangerous, in the form of gun violence. Sucks but it’s true. When you’re in your 20s it’s whatever, what are the odds that you’ll be hit by a stray bullet?
When you’re pushing 40 and have kids? Fuck that. Build your housing elsewhere.
Jesus. Go more extreme then. Do you want to live next to the barely employed, social services using, bike stealing crowd? Are we really pretending nicer safer areas aren't more desirable than areas of low income housing?
So let me get this straight, in your mind, every person making below, say, 35K, is a barely employed, social services using, bike stealing bum?
I’m gunna be honest, if we’re making broad generalizations now, silicon valley snobs are by far the most selfish, inconsiderate, lack of empathy having, inflated ego persons in the entirety of the country. Texas and Arizona needs to be bussing those immigrants to SF area and not NY.
I think you're free to use your money to buy yourself out of discomfort and into a nice place for your family, but to gate-keep others out of the freedom you enjoy is wrong.
Yes, you might have to face discomfort so that others can afford to put a roof over their head. There is a housing affordability crisis in North America for which it is necessary to build (on top of many other efforts required).
Yes, it's completely rational for you to be a selfish actor in this instance. But I don't believe it's rational for government to continue to support NIMBY'ism for the long term health of its society.
Lol. My dad was a janitor. It's hard work but he wasn't some kind of different species of human and he didn't rob our neighbors during his time off. What exactly is wrong with living next to a tow truck driver?
honestly yeah, I like living in density with other people around. It generally leads to more local businesses too: even if the number per-capita is the same, you get more choice, better opening hours etc.
In cities like Atherton and Woodside if you earn $150k you're the person a few steps down and just a low income computer guy! Consider that next time you write that sort of comment - there's always a bigger fish.
Treat others how you'd like to be treated. I'd rather live next to a decent guy who's a truck driver than a rich idiot. I'd also hate to live in a bubble. Look at London - you have places like Camden with multi-million pound town houses opposite council estates.
This wasn't about me, I wasn't the one I described. And I totally understand why people in Atherton wouldn't want people like me as their neighbor. I'm not goofy enough to think we'd be best buds if only given the chance.
Marc was wrong to promote YIMBY, and should be roasted for opposing neighborhoods defending and defining their character and culture. Nothing wrong with wanting a say in your neighborhood's development. We should let everybody who owns their own home to NIMBY, not just rich people and investors.
4 hours ago, 111 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32489076