The author is a homeowner whose parents have also owned a house in Noe Valley kitty corner to one of Airbnb founders. He’s a massive beneficiary of the status quo system who also happens to think that it needs to change given that more and more Californians are being born every day and that we should change our land-use and infrastructure to be even more inclusive, not less.
Wouldn't RSUs open employees to a different and more punitive tax regime (income tax) than options (which would fall under capital gains if you exercised early enough)?
RSUs are simpler and can be planned for. For example, a company could grant RSUs with a mandatory buy back vesting schedule (basically 83b election) upon hire and include the taxes as part of the comp package.
Examples:
Junior Engineer Sally joins Company A and is offered 0.25% of the company in RSUs. Company A recent raised at a 20M post money with a preferred share price of $1 and a FMV of $0.20. She owes tax on $10k of RSU gains. Company A either: 1) Buys back $4000 of stock in order to cover taxes 2) Provides a $4000 signing bonus to cover taxes.
Senior Engineer Bill joins Company B and is offered 0.05% in RSUS. Company B recently raised at a $500M valuation with a preferred share price of $10 and FMV of $3. He owes tax on $75k of RSU gains. Company B either 1) Buys back $30k of stock or 2) provides a $30k signing bonus.
But, you have to pay income tax on the value of the shares at the time when they vest, i.e. become non-restricted. You have zero control over that vesting schedule, and thus the tax bill, and you likely wouldn't have a liquid market for the shares before an IPO.
Any gain post-vest can indeed be long-term cap gains, if you hold the shares > 1 year.
Tokyo has a couple things that the Bay Area does not.
1) Zoning happens at the national level in Japan, not the local level so there are no, or at least very weak political mechanisms for neighbors to block projects.
2) There is no Proposition 13, which caps property tax levels for incumbent homeowners. What this means is that transit providers can pay for infrastructure needs through increases in land value created by better connections to transportation. California can't do this because if it improves infrastructure or experiences an economic boom, the incumbent property owners basically get to appropriate all the increases in land value.
San Francisco, and several other American cities, were places for freaks and weirdos in the mid-20th century because of a historical anomaly in which the US federal government deliberately subsidized white, middle-class families into leaving for nearly-created suburbs. This trend began reversing in the 1980s and now land-values in the urban core reflect what is seen in cities all over the rest of the world -- that central areas have higher land and housing costs than the periphery.
It was a great, interesting, trippy twenty to thirty-year period, but it doesn't exist anymore and its loss in the Bay Area was probably accelerated in part because California has such an unusually politicized and unpredictable land-use and development process that has led it to consistently underproduce housing for the last 40 years.
The "young Gods" you speak of tend to have higher incomes not just because of the tech industry. They have higher costs because the elder babyboomer Californians rigged and created a system that is so constricted that only the wealthiest millennials can afford to participate in it.
We're in the middle of rewriting our stack to look like this:
- TypeScript web code
- Using React
- Connecting to a custom, to-be-opensourced reactive datastore written in Scala called LunaDb: https://blog.asana.com/2015/05/the-evolution-of-asanas-luna-...
- Using to Amazon RDS (hosted MySQL) and Redis as our primary backing stores
- Running on top of kubernetes, docker, AWS
For the nth time, it's not really about that. It's politics. It was an effective symbol for tenants rights activists to latch onto to get attention for eviction protections, which weren't going to momentum otherwise without a nice, sexy controversial symbol that would attract national media.
Yes, that is a very cool future vision. :) Difficult to execute at this particular moment in time, so seeing if people will bite at location-independent leases is a first step.
Again, the price is intended to be across a network. There will be another U.S. location in the next few months, and then more to come after that.
For Ubud, it's a two-dozen unit, newly-opened boutique hotel with contemporary design and architecture, rooftop open space for dance, capoeira and Bahasa Indonesia or Bahasa Balinese language classes, along with an adjacent vegan, raw food restaurant.
If you want to be on your own, find your own Airbnb or have a private home, that's great. There are lots of options in Ubud, and the rest of Bali. People should find the housing that is right for them. The point of this is to have a larger community with events, communal dinners, activities, and involvement with local institutions and leaders. The space is already evolving as is. Have had two dance classes this week, two acro jams, and a capoeira class coming on Sunday. People are working on their own projects and startups, and organizing nights for talks.
The plan is to have the price be fixed initially, but if we discover seasonality in movement across the network, then we might have to adjust prices based on that later. We'd like to keep it flat for as long as possible.
More feedback is obviously welcome though! This is an experiment to see if we can get people to move in groups to less obvious locations, and then to contribute or integrate with local communities. I personally dislike the "nomad" term, even though I've been technically living this way for 10 years.
Like others have mentioned, you keep saying "boutique hotel with contemporary design" but if you're going after the common nomad, they don't care too much. I've been location independent, mostly in se asia, for over a year now and had almost exactly what you mention here, co-living with multiple nomads in a beautiful villa in Ubud, for around $400/mo (one quarter of what you have here). I understand it is part of a bigger plan but as a potential customer, I see no reason to use your service for the few months a year I want to spend in a cheap location like Asia, and would rather unsubscribe during that time. That is probably why you will require a yearly membership, or something of that sort :)
