For a company that has a reputation of announcing and releasing ambitious projects only to cancel or send them into a “graveyard”, this does not surprise me. I do not discount the current housing market as a factor leading into this decision, but regardless, I wasn’t expecting much to happen.
Also, I do find the following a bit suspect:
What’s more, the pandemic reshaped ideas about work and opened the door to work-from-home opportunities. Companies are slowly getting people back into the office, but working from a central location isn’t the necessity it once was for many. This means folks taking jobs in Silicon Valley don’t necessarily have to move as deep into the city as they once did, allowing them to live a bit further out from town and avoid the premium real estate market.
Wasn’t Google one of the numerous tech companies that demanded their employees to return back to office?