Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?
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The John Deere HQ (featured in the article) is almost worth the trip to Moline, IL https://www.google.com/search?q=Eero+Saarinen%E2%80%99s+proj...
The IBM research center in Yorktown Heights is a section of a circle https://www.google.com/search?q=yorktown+heights+ibm&espv=2&...
The IBM research center in Almaden is in an amazing CA county park https://www.google.com/search?q=almaden+research+center&espv...
That being said, Frank Lloyd Wright hated the location because it isn't suburban. The reason none of the buildings have normal windows is because Wright thought the surrounding urban/semi-urban landscape was too ugly to look at.
https://www.google.com/search?q=weyerhaeuser+headquarters&so...
the gardens are also worth checking out if you are in the area, the entrance is right near the bonsaid museum entrance.
I consider cities like NY and SF to be great places to live if single but basically untenable with a family except in certain circumstances.
There are some great cities like Seattle and Tokyo where I might be willing to raise my family but in general I am glad that tech companies aren't in city centers.
I think the main issue would be the "hidden" discrimination against foreigners (gaijin) though and very demanding and destructive company culture.
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Tokyo,+Japan/@35.6826505...
IMO parks availability is OK. You can't escape the urbanity (skyscrapers visible from any point in any park I visited), but greenery is there. Lots of small cozy green pockets by channels/rivers. Huge wast flood-plains (?) in the city itself. Gorgeous famous parks that may require a quick train ride. Loved the mountains on the north-west side too. Less than an hour ride, from most parts I think?
Take it from somebody who is really used to green stuff. Like seeing wild animals <10 minutes from home and having several swimmable lakes nearby. And we have pretty good mountain bike trails in the city limits, including right next to downtown.
Overall I think Tokyo is a great place to live. Corporate culture is atrocious though. I'm not a big fan of well... modern Japanese social culture either. I believe kindergartens are sparse. But that's because Japanese don't use them much. Once giving birth, women are expected to raise kids (they're ok to do career if they go childless though). Apartments are small to americans. But ok-ish for europeans. I can totally see why somebody wouldn't like Tokyo (or Japan in general) but objectively I think it's one of the better places the world.
Could you elaborate on that? I've got an 18-month-old, and we happily commute by train together in San Francisco every day.
At what age does it get bad?
New York's a great town if you're not racist and only slightly classist.
Let's not forget why suburbs became popular in the first place. cough cough https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
"A greater percentage of whites and lesser percentage of citizens of other ethnic groups than in urban areas. However, Black suburbanization grew between 1970 and 1980 by 2.6% as a result of central city neighborhoods expanding into older neighborhoods vacated by whites.[27][28][29]"
"The English word is derived from the Old French subburbe, which is in turn derived from the Latin suburbium, formed from sub (meaning "under" or "below") and urbs ("city"). The first recorded usage of the term in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was made by John Wycliffe in 1380, where the form subarbis was used."
Generally in the west, being below something is a sign of weekness or inferiority. Traditionally only poor/ surfs/ peasants/ redneck country folk / barbarians (which has a great etymology btw), lived outside the city walls... Hence sub urban areas. They developed originally primarily for economic reasons you're right not racist. Or maybe we're taking about two different things with the same name? Because I'm talking about the vast droves of concrete waste in America inhabited by isolated individuals who exist in echo chambers of their own creation and defend them vehemently. #yesallsuburbs
Yet, I find it quite interesting that many people ascribe quite a few things they are against (for whatever reason) to racism --but when you look further many of these phenomena also exist in generally homogenous paces, so it's not intrinsically racist, although it's possible racism contributed to some of these phenomena or that racism finds some of the phenomena a useful expression or vehicle. It still does not make the phenomenon intrinsically racist.
Occasionally, then some will say, well America exported it with their imperialism, so of course you find it elsewhere --yeah like Russia where they were all out anti-US!
> "In many parts of the developed world, suburbs can be economically distressed areas, inhabited by higher proportions of recent immigrants, with higher delinquency rates and social problems. Sometimes the notion of suburb may even refer to people in real misery, who are kept at the limit of the city borders for economic, social, and sometimes ethnic reasons. An example in the developed world would be the banlieues of France, or the concrete suburbs of Sweden [...]. Thus some of the suburbs of most of the developed world are comparable to several inner cities of the U.S. and Canada."
More seriously. Suburbs may be the trendy area in the English speaking world but that's not the case everywhere else. Watch out when you go to holidays/business trips abroad, there are 'suburbs' you don't wanna end up for your own safety ;)
Genuinely asking, as I'm unclear how this term's defined these days.
As far as I'm aware, racism used to be defined as "believing one race is superior to another."
However it seems most of its users use it now to mean "protecting oneself from populations with, on average, markedly higher violent crime rates than other populations." You're not supposed to do that - you're supposed to grin and bear it.
For diversity.
Right?
1. a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2.a. a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles
2.b. a political or social system founded on racism
3. racial prejudice or discrimination
As far as your comment you are simply "protecting oneself from populations with, on average, markedly higher violent crime rates than other populations," if that population is defined by race, you are being racist unless there is some newly published study I have yet to hear about that "blacks love crime."
The list of corporate crimes, especially in finance, is not short. Just because (e.g.) LIBOR fixing doesn't threaten you with a gun doesn't mean you're not still a victim of theft, and that you haven't lost real money as a result of it.
So if you're arguing that crime is bad, then yes - it's racist to limit your definition of dangerous and anti-social crime to direct physical assaults by poor black people.
Also, where in the world have you lived? I just moved out of Harlem a few months ago and experienced everything the OP mentioned and more. The fact is, Harlem (at least East Harlem) is a dangerous and predominately black community. Crime there is driven more by circumstance (upbringing, low income, environment, etc.) than skin color, obviously, but I don't blame anyone who wants to move out of a dangerous area.
Also, "don't live around poor people" is basically saying "why don't you just make more money?", and is incredibly thoughtless. I didn't choose to live in a crumbling walkup in the bad part of town, I had to because that was my only option, and I got out as soon as I could.
I personally have had the experience of being physically assaulted for being a white nerd who dared 'diss a clique of blacks in my high school. It was 1993.
First of all, things have changed, and changed radically. If you want your car broken into and rifled through, you;re more likely to get that joy in a small rural town, thanks to the opiates epidemic.
Secondly, the cities have become remarkably safer, though no less diverse.
I think the cost of living is that main reason, and can't be overstated enough.
Cities are great environments for most people (including kids) -- but cities are already the most expensive places on the planet for living / working / schooling. Trying to house a family there (with the extra stress of daycare costs, educational costs, larger housing needs, etc) just makes it all that much more impossible to afford.
If you imagine cost of living as a 100-foot wall around major cities, a single person can just get themselves over and be ok. But for a family, they likely have to scale that same wall 2x, 3x, or 4x times.
Edit: Also happy to share my experiences in more detail if you are considering this path. My email is in my profile.
[1]http://blog.sfishome.com/san-francisco/san-francisco-public-...
Fortunately, we're able to afford a catholic school.
You probably should have stopped your comment there, then.
> I can't help but chuckle at the irony that you pay a premium...
vs
> I chuckle at the irony that Catholic schools charge a premium...
Unfortunately, there's a lot of inequity. Most suburban districts get 30% more state funding to do things like build olympic swimming pools and buy iPads. The local taxpayers in urban districts like the one I live in get glorified daycare with classes of 30-35 kindergarteners, and we get to fund a parallel charter school system that enriches the bondholders who built the schools.
I'm not the governor, don't serve in the legislature and have limited ability to influence our school board, whose hands are largely tied. My options are: go private, move, or have my child get an inferior education. I have the good fortune to make the choice that I made. If that makes me a poor christian, so be it.
Not at all what I meant. I might do the same in your situation. My comment was merely to point out how backward the situation is. That the intent of religion to unify people regardless of economic status is defied when their educational service requires wealth. And one of the reasons it's a premium service may (arguably) be due to economic exclusion.
I don't blame you one bit for providing your child the best education you can.
My parents were considering it because the school I was supposed to go to was a good 40 minute walk and they didn't provide a bus because we were still within the limit.
Wound up with a city bus pass instead.
They are often one of the only affordable ways to give your child a good education in neighborhoods where the state fails to provide a minimum acceptable public option.
The first suburbs were enabled by trains, not cars, and were developed and promoted by the railway company.
That is wrong I think. Inner London for instance still hasn't recovered the population level that it had in the 1930's. There are also videos that show a lot of traffic, and huge numbers of pedestrians. Go back another 30-50 years and most of the traffic would have been horse-drawn carts, which means enormous amounts of excrement, and extreme levels of noise, because before the invention of pneumatic tires wheels were metal on stone.
But seriously, it's cheaper and you get to build your own building if you like, maybe bespoke, rather than lease someone else's building. It's not like most US cities will not have a tortuous approval process and a long approval process and unions, etc. to contend with and extra taxes...
What's the next question, why aren't companies building right next to the Capitol? Maybe we should be like Paris and London and Tokyo and have everything important, the important institutions, important buildings and important people all living in one important city. Let's all move to DC and concentrate everything!
On the other hand, we have the Packard building and numerous others in Detroit or Phily.
Building your own office is so much cheaper if you do it where real estate is cheap and you have a very good bargaining spot where you can actually barter for lower taxes.
Google employees are worth much more per-capita than most bank employees - and banks stay in the city - due to the networking (and prestige?) nature of the industry.
I think it also has to do with isolation and creating culture.
Urban areas have a lot of distractions, and individuality is encouraged.
There is 'not that much to do' in Palo Alto, at least, compared to the city ... people live in pretty normal homes, doing pretty normal things in the little time they have outside of work.
Also consider: how many truly innovative companies were ever created in the city and grew to be quite large?
I mean - 'cost' would be a factor, but why is it almost never the case?
If you need 10K employees, you need a lot of 'regular folks' - grinders, who show up every day - and who aren't the fleeting, company-hopping, types.
Obviously it's just a thought.
A lot of great Universities seem to be out in nowhere-land as well. I think there's something to be said for being out of the social centrifuge.
Amazon is one example.
Less than 50 people work in a typical datacenters. All the R&D to make the datacenter is done outside of it, in R&D centers.
Think about all the big companies you know.
None of them - except banks/insurance are really in the city.
Look at Twitter, they almost got there, now dwindling.
I've worked at a few startups, and visited a zillion.
Though Goog/FB do have a cool/trendy vibe ... I can't help but feel that most of them wouldn't fit city life very well.
I knew some Engs. in the Valley - super smart dudes who never heard of ISIS. I mean, man. They don't even watch the news. Work -> kids -> geeky projects -> riding. That's it. I don't blame them at all ... But I really do think that the culture out in the burbs is more amenable to 'Empire Building' and getting loyal, normal, predictable folks.
BTW - banks have a lot of job hoppers - because their career paths are so formalized, it's not a big deal for people to hope from one building to the next. Some of the systems are identical, if not entirely the cultures. And many forms of banking are intensely social, which is not like tech.
I also think most banking types tend to be 'upper urban' type people - or at least aspire to that. Tech people are more low key about things.
Anyhow, just my observation.
Banks can be in the 'burbs, but when most were incorporated, it was beneficial to be next to the exchanges and to government (both the fed office and the feds, etc.) but some have moved to Raleigh or RTP... And, for some a big skyscraper = prestige.
>There is 'not that much to do' in Palo Alto
For people without kids this makes a difference --it makes a difference to the newly independent, the ones in fraternities and sororities, they want to continue their partying. For people with kids, even if they live in the city, most nights are spent at home -unless they are one of those "power" people who must "rub elbows".
>how many truly innovative companies were ever created in the city
I think that's just a coincidence. As you point out, lots of universities are in the burbs (Cheap land for a nice campus and dorms) and a nice place to start on your idea with your mates/pals/etc.
In addition, till recently, companies had to "build things" physical things and it's easier to build those things where there was land. There is a reason Toyota isn't in the center of Tokyo. But nowadays where the product is non-physical, we do see some innovative companies begin in expensive cities.
>A lot of great Universities seem to be out in nowhere-land as well
True, but there is the exception of Boston.
Or NYU, Columbia, University of Chicago, UCLA, King's College, London School of Economics, the Sorbonne
Pick one. "culture" develops when different ideas meet. Unless you mean corporate cargo-culting and echo chambers.
The one tower shows that it isn't a hard limit but a preference.
Now nimby is a word with negative connotations. I am not saying this is bad, just that the people of mountain view have chosen to limit high density development in ways I personally disagree with.
If I can say it in a neutral way, California in general seems to value and privilege long term residents over newer residents, in ways that other states don't seem to.
The root, I think, is that California is a very desirable place to live, and the Malthusian view of growth, which most Californians hold means they don't want to just build until everyone who wants to live here can.
If you hold growth to be undesirable, you are left with fewer choices to distribute the privilege of living here. Rather than completely distributing this limited resource through money, California has a bunch of mechanisms that push the costs on to people immigrating here. (I believe that those who move are merely collateral damage, from that viewpoint.)
Now personally, I disagree because I like density and growth, but my point is that you can construct arguments from the other side that are also made in good faith.
My other point is the controversy is largely over the desirability of growth and density.
(Another interesting point is that I am told by locals that the one tower near Castro was vacant for quite some time)
My theory: the Big Guy moved out of downtown because land and taxes are cheaper, many (most?) people enjoy seeing green as opposed to concrete, and the commute is often (not always) better, since most people live in the suburbs anyway. Couple that with an up-and-coming municipality willing to subsidize the building and infrastructure and you've got quite a lot of cash left in the budget. What do you do with it? Build an impressive structure, with the perks and eye-candy to lure the talent you're hoping to hire and retain.
The author's point is that the so-called great innovators of today--Apple and Google are cited--are really doing nothing to innovate the workspace, despite having plenty of opportunity to do so.
Somehow I suspect that this "innovation" they are required to do just happens to line up perfectly with the author's own personal and political preferences.
Joel Garreau, Edge City
I like cities, but I also really enjoyed the couple of times I've worked at parks like this. There's a lot to be said for a predictable commute and a window full of green things. I've found that harder to come by when I work in cities.
The best people out there can make money literally from anywhere, why the heck would they go to some compound of industrialized personalization like that?
The notion that the current employees would want to move to the cities using that argument could be replaced with anything. "Night shifts" or "working in the nude"; they accepted the job under these conditions.
The preference is baked into the premise
Of course, I'd much rather life and work in the real thing, which is the literal opposite of what the article proposes, so there's that.
If you think people who only need to work 4 hours a week would waste their time in the overhead inherent in the structure of a corporate office park then you don't know people who value their time
Since an office can only be in one place and therefore satisfy one subset of 'the best people's preferences - remote working is the logical conclusion for getting the best people who are also fussy about location.
The point of the article is that all those campuses are isolated from the local community, and it is not good because it does not help to develop better infrastructure and it isolates people.
At the end of the article the author mentions 2 SV projects which actually do things differently: Box HQ and Facebook HQ. In SV. Not in SF.
To give you a personal example, what surprised me moving from Europe to SV is the bus service: public bus service is terrible in SV, and what is the answer from big corp to help their employees to commute? Having their own shuttles service... What usually happens in Europe is that the people, the corp, the city, the county etc. interact to build a public bus system. It then allows sharing between companies and benefits everyone. But in the case of those gated communities they do not do that.
What is there about the local community that is good, if most agree with the echo chamber view that all good exclusively comes from a small number of hyper selective ivies with very peculiar demographics? If the local community were good, why won't they get hired, why are they only vitally important to be nearby, yet not actually in contact? What is the metric or method where the quality of software, for instance, depends directly on distance to X, Y, Z? Why could someone possibly think X, Y, and Z only exist in urban areas? Ignorance not being much of a defense.
If good can only come from young elite freshly grad white males as employees, is working near/in the ghetto a peculiar form of penance? "We wouldn't let them get an education for skin color reasons but we are good people because we will permit them empty the trash bins after hours out of the goodness of our hearts".
"We don't hire coloreds or foreigners or girls here for culture fit reasons, only guys from the same frat at the same elite school, but we are a block away from several ethnic restaurants" appears to be the new "some of my best friends are blacks" for racists who don't get that they sound racist. Burb people and non-startup people are much more open minded than city people on average, more flexible, willing to try something new, a new lifestyle in a new area in new construction, etc.
The article assumes parks and nature are an inherent evil, which seems outright weird. Also a severe case of neophillia where any historic architecture is inherently evil, but I like old buildings, they look cool... Something new is guaranteed to be new, not guaranteed to be better. Also history is long and something new is almost certainly a historical rehash that failed because of X, Y, and Z. History is circular not linear. "I wanna make a village (where I'm chief)" isn't innovative in 2016, it was innovative in 6000 BC. Its just part of the fad rotation today, and like all fads it can be ignored with little loss.
Having worked in suburban office parks and extremely urban areas I'm mystified at the isolation thing. It seems to exist entirely in some peoples minds but not in reality. "support companies" seem to grow fabulously, sprawl like, profitably in the burbs almost despite local government opposition, endless buildings of retail and restaurants and bars. The city mostly seems to be where those employers go to die even after obtaining sometimes massive government subsidies. Observation would imply that something is killing those businesses in the city and expanding them in the burbs and its probably not the theoretical "isolation" that observably seems to exist primarily in reverse. If burb offices are isolating, why is the economic growth in the immediate area so explosive compared to the dying subsidized urban areas?
The stuff in the article would be known by realtors as "trophy buildings". Some lucky folks get to work in one of those but most people even in the innovative companies work in flex space in the exburbs. This architecture is so boring that no one wants to even talk about it. Its just a place to show up for work. In your car, of course.
Actual 1950's suburbia, these days, consists of charming inner-ring "streetcar" suburbs. They would be classified by most folks today as "walkable" upscale neighborhoods. Some outer suburban areas are now getting the "new urbanist" treatment to make them more like streetcar suburbs, but sadly these developments are NOT YET getting to the exburban office parks off the highway exits.
Hmm, maybe because some of us actually appreciate not being in some smog-chocked urban hellhole? I mean, if I'm going to commute somewhere, I'd rather commute to some place where there's actually, you know, grass and trees and stuff.
I lived in one of those suburbias for quite a bit of my life. They're perfectly fine places with plenty of room to stretch out and enjoy some air that's actually fresh. Hell, some of them even have actual wildlife; fancy that? But apparently the city-slickers are too good for that, what with their fancy concrete and smoke and noise and light pollution.
I just love the implication that everything that isn't a city center is devoid of luxuries like clean water or smooth-flowing traffic. Yes, us suburban and rural peasants are apparently stupid for believing that there's an actual alternative to being stuck in yet another skyscraper between bouts of fighting for elbow room on buses and trains (both of which exist even in rural areas, let alone suburban, by the way; the article seems reluctant to admit such amenities exist anywhere outside of the Big City™).
Yes, keep pretending that the city life is the only life worthwhile. More room for me out here in the woods.
Also having to drive long distances or having nothing within walking distance sucks.
All of this is possible if you work at the Apple, Google, FB, Intuit, Microsoft, LinkedIn, etc. campuses.
Assuming you had $2 Million in assets to start that would still leave you with $1.8 Million which assuming modest returns of 2.5-5% would still leave you with a yearly income of $45k-$90k which is an obscene amount of money if you mortgage is paid off.
And once SV employers are destroyed, one guess what happens to the property prices...
They would have to live modestly for the first couple of years while their stock options vested and savings grew.
The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake. That entire website should be deleted and "Hunter Oatman-Stanford" (what a name!) should give up writing in shame, retreat to a monastery and think long and hard about where it all went wrong.
The thing is, the phenomenon is pretty much world-wide, thus easy to prove/disprove. You see it in Mexico, in France, in Germany in Japan. Some of these places don't have the dreaded "Other" to dread, so they cannot have that motivation, unless the author thinks many, more or less homogenous places, are acting preemptively against a possible future Other.
The author ascribes it to racism not "people hate each other". However, I think racism is a facile explanation to trot out [perhaps even socially expected].
Also, I don't have to hate to not want to live next to you, nor do I have to hate my family if I don't want to live next to them.
1) cars, cars enabled people to commute. They were not bound by walking and transit. 2) Population growth. After wwii we saw lots of growth and cities were not seen as a place to raise children --given the pollution and grime which plagued previous industry. People wanted nice affordable places to raise their kids, not tenement housing. 3) Decay. Cities were not always peaceful, clean places. They had labor unrest, grime, crime, noise, etc. and some people wanted to "graduate" to nicer places. I think redlining illustrates that not only did whites want to move to the burbs, but also minorities wanted to move out of cities(else redlining would not have existed as a tool to discriminate against their moving in)
Modern cities are not the same as mid 1900s cities. They are cleaner, better run, better planned, more responsive, etc.
Agreed, I thought Cupertino was a silly example. It's actually funny that you say "suburbs of Silicon Valley," because the entire valley is suburban.
Where's the urban area that Apple is supposed to move to? Downtown San Jose? If anything "the communities their products were supposed to impact" (Which are what by the way? Rich people?) are concentrated more heavily in Cupertino than anywhere else in the valley.*
Aside from that, I'm sure Apple is enjoying the position that comes with literally owning half a city. Imagine getting any other city that obsessed with property values and traffic to approve the new campus.
*Downtown San Jose's office spaces are criminally underoccupied, but I imagine there's not nearly enough vacancies to fill the needs of a giant like Apple.
> The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake.
The article is massively oversimplifying, but it's not wrong. The mid 1900s saw southern, rural blacks move into cities and urban whites move into suburbs. You could write a book about the relationship between those two trends (and I'm sure many have) and I don't doubt that it played a part in corporations resettling as well, whether they had race in mind or not.
The amusing thing is that in my tech suburb, we have a significantly higher population of non-whites because of the tech industry (employing many Asians). Moving a tech company to the suburbs actually increases their diversity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
...as for the U.S. Dollar argument. Previously on Hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681
J.D. Rockfeller II was a notorious Social Darwinist ( the founder of some Social Hygiene organization so probably also a eugenicist ). Eugenics was a Progressive idea.
Many company owners - Henry Ford being one of them - ran company towns for Progressive/Utopian reasons.
Some mining towns would not have existed had the miners had to have arranged their own housing and depend on random strangers to provide supply.
Of course some had to "sold their soul to the company store" but it's like most things - a spectrum and not a given. And it was not all just about greed. It was more likely to be about stubbornness, anyway.
It wasn't just getting food, though that was certainly a hassle whenever I was visiting that office. It was also the infeasibility of finding a place to live that would leave me with less than an hour total time spent in the car per day. Let alone a location that would let me walk or take a bus to work, which is my strong preference. I'm in a dense city now, and my total commute is admittedly longer than an hour, but half of it is walking and the other half is reading a book or knitting, so it hardly ever feels like a waste of time.
[Edit: clarified round trip.]
Even all the way from Durham you can be in Wilmington in 2 hours and a few minutes.
4 hours will get you almost all the way to Charleston, SC which is way way way far away.
Man, really want to travel to Shanghai one day, but just really don't have 24 hours
One of the things that Raleigh & Wake County has really done well is create the network of greenway trails. If it works for you, it's entirely possible to use them to commute on a bike.
If urban centres continue to gain in popularity I could imagine suburban companies needing to open urban satellite offices to be able to retain talent that is reluctant to change their urban lifestyle or waste a significant portion of their day in a commute.
Many of my friends have gone to work at such places, but did so grudgingly. If they had had an urban alternative they'd have taken it. Others have chosen not to pursue job opportunities that would have necessitated long commutes.
This change is well under way. I'm in Manhattan and a good number of tech companies have large offices here, most prominently Google.
The problem is that if you want to be at the interesting end of IT you probably need to be somewhere with a decent population (1m+ , maybe closer to 3m+) to have multiple employer options. You might also want to be in a largish place for cultural options (rock concerts, professional sports teams, varied cuisine, minority hobbies, whatever).
Trouble is that big places have various combinations of traffic, high house prices, long commutes etc. So suddenly the nice house in the suburbs you can afford is a 60 minute drive to work and on the weekend you spend all day in your car driving the kids (until aged 16) from place to place.
I like being able to drive 10 minutes to work, or 5 minutes to the grocery store, and not have to worry fighting traffic or finding parking. I like that there are walking trails behind my employer's office. I like that in the evenings or in the weekends I can drive into the mountains or to the coast. These things would not be possible if I lived in a city.
There are definitely places that want to give employees less leverage by being the only employer in the area, at least for their given field.
e.g. If you don't like your job at Epic in Wisconsin, you're more likely to be looking at relocation.
Meanwhile, I have contacts 10 minutes down the street by foot.
I'd like to see the evidence for this determining a business location.
I live surrounded one such moat--the closest thing to a rust-belt city in the midsouth. I'd have to move 1.5 hours to find another job in my field, and I'd still be commuting another 30 minutes or so.
Sorry for being a bit demanding here, but I hear an awful lot of things about business that are accepted wisdom, but upon digging deeper find there is no basis in fact for them.
There's plenty of historical material about IBM out there. GE is another great example who even built housing for the management at remote plant and as they moved across the country, military style.
I'm also interested in seeing more specific evidence but initial data suggest IBM avoided obvious, cost-effective choice for isolating teams by market segment in expensive ways. That already looks bad somehow.
It's a big leap to go from suspecting nefarious motives to "definitely". It could be anything from lower cost of land and living expenses to executives thought it would be a good place to raise kids. Or it could be that IBM thought it would try a "Skunk Works" type operation that was deliberately cut off from the rest of the company - a setup made famous by Kelly Johnson at Lockheed.
Besides, one can't prove a negative. If you research cars that run on water, and don't find any, that doesn't prove that they don't exist. I could just say you didn't look in the right place, and you should try harder.
As it is, they're located is a mostly low density suburban area 5 miles from the nearest commuter rail station.
If they were willing to absorb a 50-100% increase in housing costs or downgrade their living spaces (giving up things like "going for walks at night without getting stabbed"), maybe. Living close to an urban office is an extreme luxury good that'll give any mainstream luxury car a run for its money.
>good transit options
The Bay Area has some of the best transit options in the country, and they are to stand with one arm over your head and one arm on your backpack, pressed up against hundreds of strangers, and just try to keep your balance and avoid eye contact while the bus or train lurches around for 30+ minutes. After walking or riding your bike for ~20.
I like driving, so maybe I'm just having trouble empathizing with people who feel forced to do it, but is a ~10 minute drive to a suburban office park really as miserable to you as the ~50 minute BART commute from Berkeley to SF?
If I had a suburban employer with a giant free parking lot (i.e. letting me live anywhere) moving to a downtown office in a hot real estate market without at least a 2x salary increase, I'd quit in a heartbeat.
[citation needed].
It really doesn't. In fact, it notoriously has pretty much the most underdeveloped public transit options of any major city in the US.
(and while folks disagree on #1, i don't think anyone would disagree it's in the top 5 worst)
In DC, i could easily get to work pretty much anywhere in the city in roughly the same time or less i could by driving.
In NY, ditto.
In the bay area, it would probably be 2x the drive time, and a serious pain in the ass (and that's saying a lot, given how bad the drive times are) ]
I agree the Bay Area has some of the loudest advocates for better transit, but it doesn't appear that it actually gets better than this except in Manhattan (and Europe).
[0] https://smartasset.com/mortgage/best-cities-for-public-trans...
[1] https://www.redfin.com/blog/2015/12/transit-score-2016.html
America would be better for everyone if a few more people with influence lived in these places. They'd demand the situation improve.
(The same for the public transport -- in cities where rich people use it, the service is better.)
The same for the public transport -- in cities where rich
people use it, the service is better
If I had a suburban employer with a giant free parking lot (i.e. letting
me live anywhere) moving to a downtown office in a hot real estate market
without at least a 2x salary increase, I'd quit in a heartbeat.
But unless the company is small enough that a significant portion of its employees live in that suburb, moving to the city has the potential to ease the commutes of many more employees since the city in general has more housing density, and better transit connections.
I worked at a company that moved from one suburb 40 miles away across the bay to another. Within a year they lost about 30% of their employees that didn't want to make the commute or move. Since I lived in the city, the only different in my commute was taking a different train system... and the new location was a bit more bike friendly from the train to the office, so made my commute better.
So while you may not want to give up your 10 minute suburban commute, the employee living 2 suburbs over that fights traffic ever day for his 30 minute commute to the company may be happy to take the train his suburb to the city to the new location.
Public planning and transit is not about making your commute better for your job at one particular employer, but about making the commute better on aggregate for everyone.
The Bay Area is not a good example of good transit oriented planning, or Google would have been allowed to build housing near its campus, Apple wouldn't have been allowed to build a 13,000 employee office even farther from BART+Caltrain than its current office, and the 49ers wouldn't have been a 70,000 person stadium without regard to existing transit connections.
Since communities largely do their own city planning, they optimize for their own growth and tax base, ignoring issues of traffic.
This whole "automobile lifestyle is evil and most people wouldn't drive if they had the choice" narrative is getting kind of stale.
But building more homes and offices in suburban neighborhoods is not going to make that any better. There's not much space left in the Bay Area for bigger roads, yet the population continues to grow.
Entire swaths of the country are still set-up for travel in which every trip begins and ends in a parking space. All the most forwarding thinking places are now rapidly embracing "complete streets" and walkability in their urban planning. It will take time but the lessons have been learned and things are changing. Give it a few decades.
If the rent is cheap, then great, you have a lot of employees close by. If not, you have just made life for them more difficult and given them a longer commute by fighting their way into the city. All because nobody in the city wants to build more residential.
If it works out and the city actually wants you there, then great. But I am not surprised Apple didn't want to try their luck in SF.
> Stuck
This already implies a negative connotation of "1950s suburbia". Like we ought to move on, just cause.
What about the flip-side of this question: what is it about a 1950s suburbia that helps America's Most Innovative Companies? I'll offer some ideas. Maybe it's a lot more stable socially, so there's most local community trust and engagement, and more mental energy to devote to one's work. Families are stable and know and support each other, e.g. community caregiving responsibilities for children. As well, there's less distracting "events" going on than in a typical city. And so more mental thought and energy can go into work.
As well, it's cheaper to not be in a crammed urban center. This also helps play into a certain level of "mental safety" if you will that enables one to focus more on their work - what else are you gonna focus on?
1. Suburbs are bad.
2. Everyone should live and work downtown in/near an urban core.
3. Cars are evil; no one should drive to work.
4. Offices need to be in converted warehouses, with exposed ducting and beams and what-not, and have "character".
I personally think all of those things can be true, some of the time, but I don't think any of them are true all of the time. And I think they're all getting undue weight vis-a-vis the prevailing zeitgeist.
They isolate you from the hustle and bustle of city life, the parks nearby are a nice retreat during the day. Less traffic on the commute uptown.
Also cubicles, love them, can concentrate on the hard stuff.
Its not glorious stuff but highly effective, guess I'm in the wrong century.
Maybe it's not on such a grand scale as the examples from the article, but things like this are closer than you think.
You can also walk about 0.4 miles to a Marguerite line that isn't commute-only.
Check out http://stanfordresearchpark.com/explore
There are a bunch of companies located here including parc, VMware, nest, SAP, Tesla, HPE, etc.
In that case (I commute into campus by bus), I'd use one of the Zipcars on campus to do lunchtime errands.
Even though I hate admitting that.
It'd be far more logical for VCs to pick a far more livable, affordable area so that their investments could go further, last longer and have a higher chance of success.
VC firms are really just high risk money lenders that have a seat on the boards of the companies they lend to. One could take a dystopian view that VC firms like the super high burn rate that having a startup in the Bay Area entails because the high costs makes companies more dependant on round after round of capital thus giving higher and higher percentages to the VC firms of the companies that do eventually make it. That's a little dark, even for me.
More likely, we've made this hellscape of $4k 1bdrm apartments because VC firms are comfortable in their big, well appreciating homes in choice parts of the Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area and they don't want to drive very far to meet with the companies in their portfolio. This and other factors (NIMBYism) creates the situation to this day.
If VCs were brave and smart, they would try and find a longer term solution to the problem. Find a city nearby that has significantly lower cost of living. I'm actually looking forward to the VC bubble bursting again so that companies would be forced to get scrappy again and start solving this problem themselves.
If I were founding or running a startup today, I would in a location that 1hr or two away from the major startup centers in a place where my workers wouldn't have to spend 50%+ of their salaries making NIMBY owners richer.
"Man's best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in small communities, or else by those who, having had such environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities; for what is wanted is contact with the elemental processes of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed." - Alfred North Whitehead, source 'Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead'
Not to mention blacks, jews, and Irish.....
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-company-moves-subu...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/economy/why-corpo...
http://www.downtowndenver.com/homepage/moving-day-why-more-c...
http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-urban-downtown-eco...
At the same time, I know many people that do prefer to work in a middle of a city.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
Perhaps the author should make fewer assumptions about what other people do and don't like?
Good read, and I'd love an update some day. I think that the only thing that has changed is that we sometimes use pink/red bricks now in these large glass/steel boxes.
I recall the original one-of-a-kind American flags in the executive offices of the AT&T basking ridge NJ.
It's also setup with more of a story to the situation that shows a biased view of 'how we got here'.
I wonder if that 'storytelling' is something readers expect / prefer in general or if it's a crutch that is commonly used by in depth reporters who should instead be primarily presenting information with a great depth.