[extropy-chat] Silicon Valley pod villages?

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hey, for you all in the Valley, I've been wondering
> recently, given the
> still sky-high cost of living out there, if anybody
> has started
> developing body-locker type pod villages for low
> level tech workers to
> reside in locally (y'know, rather than having to
> commute an hour each
> way in the morning).... what is the word on this?

Like Samantha said, telecommuting is finally on the
rise.  (As an anecdote, until last Tuesday I'd never
met any of the people I'd been contracting for since
August - and we only met each other last week because
a potential business partner wanted to meet the team.)

I'm not sure, but I suspect that regulations would
require rather more than a body locker per person.
Higher-than-intended density housing is permitted by
the local city and county governments where you have
extended families with nowhere else to go, but an
effort that intended up front to cater to and
legitimize the same among (relatively)
medium-to-high-paid professionals (including low-level
tech workers - base pay there is higher than base pay
for, say, most government employees) would run into
licensing problems.  And then there's the related
problem of where to build the thing: neighbors (and
there are pre-existing neighbors almost everywhere,
since almost all the land's developed) would object
that it might decrease the value of their land (and
thus protest to their elected representatives, who
would summarily bar the project in order to keep their
jobs).

Maybe if ways can be found around that...but the only
way off the top of my head involves locating it far
enough away from the developed areas that you lose the
commute benefits.  An arcology would be easier to
locate close enough to matter.  (All that unused area
in the San Francisco Bay, not to mention the Pacific
coast.  Or the sparsely-populated hills, though you'd
probably have to pay for construction of better roads
to handle the traffic you'd at least locally generate
in order to get approval.)