Tech firms may violate Palo Alto zoning: Writing code not allowed downtown | Hacker News Reader

Tech firms may violate Palo Alto zoning: Writing code not allowed downtown

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It always surprises me that a country that supposedly is one of the most "free-market" economies in the world and has a political rhethoric based on ridiculing overzealous regulation has zoning regulation that covers minutiae (which I haven't discovered in that level of detail anywhere).

Sure, you don't want someone to open a chemical factory next to your backyard. You don't want heave transport moving through your side street. You don't want the nice house with a mountain view to suddenly have twenty story high rises obstructing that view, it makes sense that most places have restrictions on this. However, when did people think it is a good idea to make one office job different from another office job? In Germany(the ultimate bureaucrat heaven), there is as far as I'm aware no zoning issue preventing office work in residential buildings ( residential areas might have limits as to how big buildings might be, so the apple spaceship probably wouldn't be allowed in a historic residential area, but opening a doctors office, law firm or software consulting company in a residential building is fine as far as zoning goes -- and tech/engineering companies routinely trade buildings with insurance companies and the like).

Also a key principle of America is that self-governance is pushed out to the smallest units. It's perfectly reasonable for a the residents of a town to want to and be able to influence its character.

Yes, but that exists in other places as well (usually zoning is done locally -- in Germany it's on the city or county level). However, the different categories and what zoning can do vs. what it can't do (preserve 'character' / quality of life/ etc. yes. Discriminate against specific industries/groups/etc not so much.) are decided on a more global level (which also makes the process somewhat more transparent). I believe there are still facilities for local exceptions etc ( e.g. All houses in this street are a certain brick colour, and that has to be preserved), but these are more an exception than a norm.

It's not really a "free-market" issue. It's more about good regulation versus bad regulation.

Sure, we could just complain about how NIMBYism hurts us all, but as long as there isn't a more powerful government unit intervening to control local regulations then we are always going to have overly restrictive zoning.

This is an example where the libertarian arguments come up short. Paradoxically, what's needed is more regulation, specifically, regulations restricting excessive zoning regulations. Yep, that seems bureaucratic and confusing, but is there another serious alternative? Local governments love to meddle and will do so unless a more powerful authority prevents them.

It's weird, but really the only way out of this mess is more regulations at the state or federal level.

"but is there another serious alternative?"

Certainly. Enforcing constitutional limits on government action.

The problem is that when it comes to local government, there basically are no constitutional limits. American government is constructed under the assumption that local government ought to be able to vary enough to support everything from communes to monasteries, rather than state or county governments enforcing a uniform notion of "normal life" with "normal" civil rights overriding local notions of morality.

If you live in a dry town and you're a drinker, you're supposed to GTFO, not complain about human rights.

"local government, there basically are no constitutional limits"

They certainly get a lot of leeway, but "incorporation" applies many federal protections against municipal governments too.

guidelines on what rules can do (e.g. That restrict rules on other actions) act to increase agency, not decrease it so I'd say they reduce the amount of bureaucratic hassle (they also decrease the total complexity of rules)

> country

The zoning laws are local to Palo Alto.

It is free market. You're free to find another town to set up shop in.

This argument doesn't make sense. The original argument was "this town isn't as free a market". Your argument can be used similarly by a non-free market spokesperson too: "Is not free market. (But) You're free to find other place to set up shop in".

  It always surprises me that a country...

Palo Alto is representative of regulation in the USA at large?

Probably not, but housing and construction are regulated pretty severely in general, and seem to attract a pedantic, bureaucratic mindset that has little to do with being the land of freedom par excellance. Buying a house is a mess of paperwork dedicated to distorting market realities; owning one can be similar. The very idea of homeowners' associations, with various bad-tempered members who have nothing better to do than look for violations, is a frightening one...

Homeowner's association exist to protect the common shared ownership of condominiums. If you don't want to deal with an HOA, buy a single family home instead or a large plot of land and then you're free to do whatever you'd like. There are definitely more nitpicky HOAs but generally you should do your research and find a community that shares your values when you invest in a multi-tenant property with shared common area ownership.

Neighborhoods of single family homes can also establish HOAs, and they can become hotbeds of covert aggression. I believe that the parent comment was referring to this scenario since it is easy to spy on neighborly behavior.

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about -- how, in many housing-related areas, the US is profoundly un-cowboy-ish.

In the other places in the US that I've visited or lived in, similar situations happened (e.g. University owned housing vs private student housing in the exact same building treated very differently).

Perhaps one of the causes is that every place gets to make its own regulations, classifications etc. -- not just how to zone, but what zoning means, what categories there are, etc.

because they have no true Scotsman there?

Overwhelmingly, modern Americans favor regulation and this is deeply reflected in our politics and culture. Only a tiny minority opposes the regulatory state and they are broadly denounced as haters of the poor/women/minorities/powerless/children/babies/education/environment/health/happiness/etc.

According to one conservative think tank, the US doesn't even make it into the top 10 of most economically free nations: http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

No, not really. You're trying to make this about political correctness and libertarianism. It's just not.

It's about NIMBYism and NIMBYism has been used to hurt the poor/women/minorities. It's also been used to hurt wealthy developers. NIMBYism is a problem all around, but has little to do with libertarianism or political correctness.

These lines of argument by ideologically driven libertarians are getting boring. I don't think the anti-PC rhetoric even pisses anybody off any more, we all just roll our eyes like we do when the unpopular creepy kid shows up at the party.

NIMBYism isn't regulation?

It's not the kind of regulation that libertarianism actually opposes in principle, even if many libertarians do oppose it in practice.

In libertarian system you can sell your "mountain view" to a developer.

Your counter-argument started very nice with the NIMBYism part and then you fizzled everything by saying irrelevant stuff like it's getting boring and nobody gets pissed off anymore.

Do you really think that your last sentence adds anything useful to further the discussion?

If someone brings up blaming zoning laws on PC culture is it not appropriate to address the cutting of an excessively wide cloth to pin onto "PC" behavior?

The whole hating women/minorities is spiel to shut people out. So that no one will question the "Generational Theft".

My initial thought is that the kind of regulation being proposed here is going to be unconstitutional.

In the United States, source code is protected as free speech. Limitations on free speech are subject to "strict scrutiny" which means a restriction "narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest." A compelling state interest is, per wikipedia, "something necessary or crucial, as opposed to something merely preferred. Examples include national security, preserving the lives of a large number of individuals, and not violating explicit constitutional protections." And the regulation must also be the least restrictive way of achieving the interest.

It is improper for the government to declare that certain types of speech, say, journalism, may occur in a geographic area but not other kinds, say, source code creation.

IANAL

Edit: wow, thats a whole lotta downvotes. I wonder why.

> In the United States, source code is protected as free speech.

That's unclear in the general sense. There have been some Circuit Court decisions that held something like that in at least some circumstances, and some criticism that the broader of those are in some tension with applicable Supreme Court precedent. AFAIK, the Supreme Court has never held that source code is speech in the broad sense.

> Limitations on free speech are subject to "strict scrutiny"

Incorrect. Content-based limitations on speech are subject to strict scrutiny, content-neutral limitations on speech are subject to intermediate scrutiny. Restriction of a particular medium of speech without regard to content would seem to be a content-neutral restriction.

This is a complicated topic. Content-neutral restrictions can be subject to strict scrutiny.

http://plannersweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2000/01/379.pdf

> A compelling state interest is, per wikipedia,

An interesting example that doesn't seem to match the issue of yelling free-speech through a megaphone at 3AM in a crowded apartment block. (It's not national-security, and the only life being preserved is probably your own.)

Palo Alto is one of the most desirable areas to live in ... why? It's because of smart zoning rules.

Actually, the exact opposite. Central Palo Alto was built before World War II, when zoning codes were nonexistent, or much less strict. Most of Silicon Valley was built afterwards, when zoning mandated cookie-cutter suburbs, sterile office parks and acres of parking lots, and is much uglier.

It's more because of stanford, the jobs and the schools, which is about people and not zoning laws. There are plenty of places that are nicer to live and nicer looking than palo alto. And I've lived there for years.

There's nowhere that is nicer than downtown palo alto.

I guess I don't understand why this is an issue. How is 1,000 software "coders" as the article quotes different from 1,000 administrative personnel.

I could understand if the goal of zoning wanted to preserve Downtown as a destination/place for generating foot traffic/visitors...but I don't see a difference between an office of 1,000 HR people for Amazon and 1,000 software engineers.

There's a lot of subtext behind zoning in Palo Alto, some of it between people who still want to live in the 1970s version of the city.

In this case, the issue is what happens to non-tech businesses in downtown. When there are a large supply of small and medium professional services business, the bars, restaurants, barbers and small shops do well. The Palantir employees tend to eat in their own cafeteria, and are perceived to purchase less from the local businesses. This is why there's an element of the population that prefers smaller businesses whose employees go downtown during the lunch hour.

The city does have space though, they just choose not to build on it. Another research park could be built and zoned for. (As could more housing)

The article also doesn't quote the many Palo Alto residents who like being a short commute to work, rather than taking Caltrain to SF for tech jobs.

> The Palantir employees tend to eat in their own cafeteria

If that is a problem, then the zoning laws should restrict cafeterias, not job functions. The more specific and direct that regulations get, the better things tend to be.

Except that's a very transparent solution to a problem which doesn't belong to Palantir or their employees, aka the food being served down town either isn't good enough or isn't served fast enough for Palantir employees to voluntarily choose it.

Everyone except the businesses would justifiably riot.

There's also an issue of tax distortion. In the tax code as written, it's a deductible expense to provide an onsite cafeteria, and employees don't have to count it as income.

But if an employee goes offsite to get lunch, they have to buy it with after-tax money.

So when the business buys them food, it's effectively at a 1/3 discount to what they'd have to pay after-tax out-of-pocket -- more when you consider sales taxes and bulk discounts!

So it's not exactly a level playing field there either.

The employer also generally gets more time from the employees. (Saving $5 on lunch isn't nearly as valuable as saving an engineer 15 minutes of time)

I go the other way. I don't want to restrict too much land usage. Just open more commercial space.

I think this is largely about Palantir, there's been a lot of backlash as they've been slowly taking over the city. Their presence is at least an order of magnitude bigger than any other company downtown.

> The city does have space though, they just choose not to build on it.

Oh, where? I don't drive around much down there but I haven't seen empty lots just lying around like I have in e.g. Sunnyvale (the corn palace plot).

Look up.

Also, like any city in the US, there is a ton of land dedicated to the storage of automobiles that is unused a great deal of the time.

Ah...memories. I lived down the street from there for a few years, 20 years ago. We would take a walk in the evening around the neighborhood, always wondering if we'd see excavators moving into the corn field.

They all get hungry - they generate a demand for goods and services such as restaurants - which is really good for their downtown economy.

Not if their company provides free food/beer.

Exactly. All the Google cafes more-or-less destroyed demand for the restaurants that used to exist around the old SGI headquarters.

One could argue that the cafes do replace those businesses, just in a different form. And one would be right, but the tax situation works out differently, especially the sales tax situation.

It's not just a tax problem. It also works out differently for the people who don't work at those tech companies. A downtown that houses mostly businesses that feed their employees will become less "porous" over time, and less amendable to people who live downtown vs. those who work downtown. A downtown without restaurants and bars and corner shops is not a downtown worth speaking of.

I spent several years living in Houston, which, at the time, had among the least pleasant downtowns I'd ever seen, or have seen since. It was completely bereft of good food, small shops, etc. There was no reason to go downtown unless you worked there, and no way to live there, and it showed. At night, it was a total dead zone; the fourth largest city in the nation, and its downtown population at night approached zero.

I have spent more money at The Patio than I would care to admit. The second I left my job downtown I never went back.

I get the feeling the sentiment is more about "get off my lawn you pesky techies" than about actual economics.

Let me get this right. The place that got insanely rich because of software is trying to forbid the creation of software?

If I understand the article[1], they got insanely rich during a time software was developed outside the downtown and small[2] "traditional" businesses inhabited the downtown. Apparently they did not pay attention to zoning when allowing the big software companies to inhabit the downtown[3]. This politician wants the big companies to find somewhere else so small businesses are not forced out of the downtown.

1) understanding the argument does not support the argument

2) small seems to be the crux of the reason

3) an odd opposite to SF

Assuming this article isn't satire (I'm still not sure!), their position seems to be that they wanted the tech companies to stay in a designated "research park" area, removed from downtown.

So they're not trying to forbid it, just keep (their vision of) "small service businesses" from being displaced downtown, where they want those services to locate. (There's probably an inflammatory analogy in there about slaves, plantations, and mansions that a rabblerouser wants to make...)

I'd be very surprised if this were satire. Here's the original newspaper headline:

http://i.imgur.com/PcvRsrA.jpg

Wow. That's a too-good-to-be-true submission for reddit's /r/nottheonion forum, except there's no free online version.

Palo Alto resident here - I'm fairly new, lived here less than a year.

I think the biggest problem is traffic, and it doesn't matter if it's an Administrative office or a software development company - more businesses means more traffic.

The downtown area feels quaint, and I like it. A lot of small businesses with a few big ones scattered about. It's a good combination IMO - because without the big businesses, the small ones wouldn't have enough business to stay open.

The only other issue is competition for rent. As rent prices increase the only way for a small business or a startup to get going in the area is with external funding. Rezoning things or pushing out businesses might fix that, but at the cost of moving all the customers away.

City councils universally are short sighted and make dumb decisions. This shouldn't even be something they are thinking about IMO. They should be working on actually letting residents use the fiber the city installed. My only options are xfinity and DSL. Huge tech companies all over the place and no good broadband options. It makes no sense whatsoever.

This area is pretty awesome though. Great parks, great schools, and a town full of incredibly interesting people. So they did something right.

I'm not sure how you found interesting people. Maybe luck? But people that work all day and then come home and hide in their apartments/homes, avoiding community contact, can't be interesting. Is it interesting how they express their individual character, and high brow culture, by buying the blue BMW M3 rather than the black?

Ha! There are a lot of people working all day and all night to afford to live here, that's for sure. But there isn't a BMW on my block. I'm sure that part of PA exists, but I'm not a part of it. (Maybe they have all the good internet access)

There are so many awesome people here. Yeah, there are the VCs and the software guys who are interesting in their own ways, but there's so much more going on if you open your eyes and talk to a few strangers.

Is content that focuses on the same relatively small area of the United States over and over relevant to Hacker News at large? To anyone who isn't a Californian living in one of the SV cities (Palo Alto, San Francisco, Mountain View, etc) these kinds of stories are pretty irrelevant. Granted, a large portion of HN readers are probably in these cities, but does that give local politics a green light?

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

I'm inclined to say that it's on-topic. I've never been to SF or Silicon Valley, certainly never worked there, but it's the region that Hacker News and the startup world in general (the computing world in general?) is centered on; call it future-historical-interest as much as anything else.

This seems just about as absurd as zoning the computers in those buildings for Excel and Powerpoint use only.

Hey, don't give Redmond, WA any ideas!

Programming doesn't fall under "general business" uses? It seems like that would cover just about anything.

Having lived in Palo Alto most of the last 30+ years, and living within walking distance of downtown, I have an opinion :-).

The problem is the mix. I almost never go downtown because it no longer has that many businesses that are much use to me. Non-retail / non-service businesses have taken up a bunch of the space, and many of the restaurants that did move in are more to service tourists (!). There is still one bookstore at least. Instead I bike/drive to california ave which caters more to locals.

The bigger problem is one of literal monoculture. I was worried when Facebook took so much space downtown; when they moved out there was a glut of vacancies. That's been soaked up by Palantir, and more -- when they move away it'll be worse. By and large let the office parks be for offices and the retail space be for retail services. It's totally reasonable for a town to want to manage this.

Building more large buildings is a decent way to address this as well, BTW.

> By and large let the office parks be for offices and the retail space be for retail services.

This is at the heart of the issue. But beyond "retail services" the ordinance seems to include services like dentists, doctors, lawyers, etc. that individuals want to visit in a compact setting rather than driving out to an industrial park, along the El Camino, etc.

Palantir/FB/etc. taking up large swaths really is creating a mono-culture as you mention. The same thing, to a point, is seen in downtown Mountain View (though smaller..)

beat me to it. i have lived in downtown palo alto for the past six years during this span, University Ave seems to be slowly but surely transforming to a start-up office park. An example: on the NE side of University between Waverly and Cowper, where there used to be four or five shops (including an awesome place that made their own bagels, and another that sold toys made from wood) there is now a massive hole in the ground with a lot of noise coming from it, and which in ~ 18 months will be an office full of start-ups.

sometimes i walk an entire block through downtown palo alto without seeing a single yoga studio.

Everywhere in the world you have cities wanting to attract startups and tech companies and be the next Palo Alto.

And in Palo Alto they want to change the zoning code to make it harder for those companies to stay.

Ironic...

If Palo Alto is actively trying to shed tech companies, and the rest of the world is actively trying to attract them, why not move en masse? I'm sure there are other places with weather that appeals to people who like San Francisco's.

This sounds more provocative than I meant it to sound. It really does seem like a mature tech company is better off leaving SF/Silicon Valley and finding somewhere where they'll be welcome -- maybe even somewhere that wants them enough to pay their relocation.

I guess this has been ignored for awhile: Google started downtown. When they are referring to Amazon, I'm pretty sure that's A9 which was started as Altavista as a DEC project in the same building.

A9 is not related to altavista. Altavista was bought by overture, who was later bought by yahoo. A9 is completely unrelated... developed some of amazon's features -- inside the book; product search; q&a.

Also to add on this, A9 is their subsidiary that implements search engine functionality and data analytics at Amazon. "Amazon.com" is a 9 lettered word, not including the dot; "algorithms" is also a 9 lettered word.

Udi Manber, the guy who invented agrep, has worked at Yahoo, Amazon, and now Google/YouTube (as a search engine engineer at all these places), and also wrote "Introduction to Algorithms", and co-invented suffix arrays with Gene Myers, was A9's first CEO.

A former AltaVista executive and founder of A9, William Stasior, was the second CEO of A9, where he then wandered off to Apple as Vice President of Siri.

Brian Pinkerton is now the General Manager of A9, and he is famous for starting one of the first search engines, WebCrawler, before AOL bought it, sold it to Excite, which then Blucora bought all those assets along with Dogpile. Blucora also owns TaxACT, Monoprice, and HowStuffWorks.

A9 is currently located in the building that SurveyMonkey used to occupy, across from the Palo Alto Transit Center.

So, yeah, the silicon valley culture is very weirdly interconnected.

Udi doesn't work at Google now- he's at NIH. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/10/search-whiz-udi-manbe...

Odd coincidence that A9 is in Altavista's old building...

One thing the article misses--which I expect is because it wasn't mentioned in the City council meeting--is the difference in transit accessibility between downtown Palo Alto, the Stanford Research Park, and East Bayshore.

Let's take downtown Palo Alto as the baseline. It's within walking distance of the Palo Alto Caltrain station, which gives you great connectivity to almost all Caltrain trains. For bus service, you've got great connectivity North (via Samtrans ECR) and South (via VTA routes 22, 35, and 522), and good connectivity East (via Samtrans routes 280 and 281).

I don't know exactly which area is meant by "East Bayshore", but if it's the area served by Mvgo's East Bayshore shuttle (which goes to the Mountain View Caltrain station), then you've got inconsistent transit access, centered around commute times. The trips do go pretty late (until ~8 PM), but there's no access during lunch or on weekends. There's also coverage by VTA's route 40.

As for the Stanford Research Park, that's got alot more routes covering it, but again they're almost all commute-focused. For local traffic, VTA's route 89 goes through the area and connects you to El Camino Real and the California Ave. Caltrain station, but it doesn't run too often. VTA express routes 101-104 run a few commute-time trips to the south and east of the county. There's also the Dumbarton Express DB1 route (connecting people to the East Bay), which only runs during commute times (unlike the DB route, which runs at least hourly during the day). Finally, Marguerite has a connection to the Palo Alto train station (the RP route, running only during commute times); and another route (the 1050A route) that was recently adjusted to connect the Research Park, El Camino Real, and campus. That route I like the best, because it runs throughout the day.

The summary is: The areas earmarked for tech companies are served almost exclusively by transit that _only_ runs during commute hours, and rarely runs outside of those times (or on weekends). That just doesn't work as well any more, which is why places like downtown are such a big selling point for companies.

Full disclosure: I work at Stanford, and used to work on-campus, but recently got moved out to the Research Park area.

Though it is worth noting that most tech companies solve this problem by providing private shuttle services on a more convenient schedules.

Small world. Hey Karl.

I'm not seeing how an office environment for coders would not be included in "general business offices".

Also, IANAL, but does a single city council member actually have the authority to make such determinations? The council as a whole can certainly approve/reject specific development projects, but one members opinion does not set policy. A vote to clarify things would be required, would it not?

EDIT: I re-read it... it is the mayor, not a council member, but the question remains -- does he have the authority to make such declarations?

In Palo Alto the mayor is one of the council members. There is also a professional city manager.

And BTW Richard Alexander is a professional agitator who can always be counted on to call the town government jerks.

Good on you, Mayor Burt. We can no longer allow vibrant young professionals with expendable income to ruin our dining/nightlife center.

This article is missing some key facts. It's important to realize that A9 (Amazon's subsidiary in downtown Palo Alto) has at most 500 people located there. They have the equivalent of 2-3 buildings, and they're not large buildings. Amazon's footprint there is really the same as a mid-size startup (ie, the A9 all-hands fits in one large restaurant). I can understand why a city would not want a large employer in a downtown area that provides free food to its employees--this clearly destroys the business for nearby restaurants. Amazon, famous for its frugality, doesn't provide free meals. OTOH, you can regularly see Palantir employees walking to their cafeteria.

Excluding the free food issue, I don't understand why you wouldn't want to encourage big companies to setup small offices in your downtown.

Are there any jobs that don't involve coding ?

Are there small business owners and administrative tasks that don't write excel rules or procedures ?

Are there auto shops that don't run complex diagnostic tools that (probably ?) have macro languages (or something like that) ?

I really don't see how any business or administrative personnel of any kind, working at any business, would not perform "coding" in some way.

This is not to mention the actual literal task of "coding" that all medical staff and doctors' front office staff perform for each and every patient that they see ...

>Are there any jobs that don't involve coding

Yeah, basically all of them.

I hate the word "coding" you shouldn't use it. Excel rules and procedures are not "codes" or anything remotely like them. They are high-level constructs. Codes are enigmas like SHA-256.

Best of luck in your sisyphean quest.

How about all the tech companies just take their income and property taxes elsewhere entirely?

Somewhere with parking, maybe.

Sensational headline. Alternate: "Palo Alto zoning: large tech firms cause of concern"

They actually state they would like to keep startups around(rebutting current sensational headline.)

They should not allow people to say the word "code" in public places. There is nothing remotely code-like about writing software that most of you people do.

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