Facebook opening an engineering office in Seattle
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Shortly after Google went public, a lot of old-time Googlers moved to Washington so that they could avoid paying CA taxes
I doubt this. A lot of my peers who work at MS loved living in the city, but had to move out to the suburbs (that they don't really like) to save on commute. Which is the point - if MS was downtown it would be reasonably commutable by just about everyone (including suburbanites in Bellevue). The reverse (putting the office in the 'burbs) makes commuting slightly simpler for suburbanites at the cost of making it nigh impossible for urban dwellers.
Personally, having grown up in a sleepy suburb not at all unlike Kirkland, I'd loathe to go back - and I know a lot of my younger peers feel the same. This is on top of all of the requisite issues with suburban lifestyles (e.g., over-reliance on cars, health concerns due to driving everywhere, sprawl, walkability in general, social homogeneity, etc).
I currently live 20 minutes away from work by bus (plus side: I get to walk home on a good day, try doing that in the suburbs), and luckily my employer is reasonably close to downtown. That's less commute than most suburban office parks demand, and all of it is "free time" (i.e., I can be doing other things than watching the road).
Putting the company downtown will effectively force everyone to go through the I-90 or 520 bridge which suffer from massive traffic or live in the city. City life is not for everyone.
And about the exercising, there's much less to be done downtown unless you like doing everything indoors. Walking around the street isn't very entertaining unless you are shopping or eating at restaurants. You could take the time you save from not having to commute to seattle and use it to exercise. And didn't they tell you they have trails and soccer fields at the Redmond campus?
Which has plenty of capacity for transit, especially the mass, rapid sort that cities on the east side are so busy trying to prevent from being built. Yeah, screw efficiency and the environment, as long as the smelly poor people can't get to our neighborhood!
It's clearly a much better solution to have everyone trying to cram down a freeway, a single occupant to each 1-ton vehicle.
Side note: it's a bit disheartening that 2 passengers qualify for the car pool lane around here.
You see a nice house, I see rows of identical houses with equally identical people in it. I see stagnation and loss of perspective, as everything the least bit unseemly and incongruous with your hard-earned socioeconomic status is blissfully hidden.
You see a cramped apartment, I see living in a neighborhood with history and soul, with something more than more rows of cookie cutter houses. Where people living in highly developed places don't pretend to be living on a "ranch", "glade", or "estate". Where there is so much life teeming around you that walking home is a treat, not a chore.
Putting it that way, no wonder the same money buys a big house in the burbs... I mean, there's gotta be something to justify all that you lose by leaving the city.
It's all perspective I am merely telling you that not as many tech workers enjoy the suburban thing as you seem to think. This goes far beyond hard-partying young types. I've met many a middle-aged or even elderly folk who like livin in the city for the same reasons.
Hell, I know some people with children that greatly prefer living in the city.
You see a nice house, I see rows of identical houses with equally identical people in it.
I see faceless skyscrapers, I see people packed like sardines where a 2 bedroom condo costs $1 million. The uniformity of city condos far surpasses that of the suburbs. Instead of nice green shrubbery and pine trees I see cracked concrete stained with oil and skoal spit out yesterday. Broken glass bottles on the sidewalk, some foul liquid oozes down into the sewer grate with a noxious odor. Crumpled cigarette butts line are nearly as numerous as the number of people walking over them.
The streets are lined with pan-handlers and people that are too busy to give you the time of day. A walk through the city will show you soulless corporate buildings taking up so much space. Or the occasional century old abandoned building with broken windows and carelessly pulled drapes that barely attempt to hide the empty interior. And countless rows of residential skyscrapers that peer out with 1000's of identical windows.
When going to sleep, you are annoyed by the number of sirens going off at 3 AM in the morning or the idiots who are shouting outside about how drunk they are. And then you wonder why most of the people who have a choice, don't choose the city.
Hmm HN didn't update the full sentence. It was supposed to be: For the past thousand years, people have chosen to live in the city because they needed to get a job.
As it turns out, the east-siders aren't in general opposing transit. The major impediments are the fact that the highway commission and the transportation commission are at odds with each other, and the transportation commission here has an illustrious history of failures.
"You see a nice house, I see rows of identical houses with equally identical people in it. I see stagnation and loss of perspective, as everything the least bit unseemly and incongruous with your hard-earned socioeconomic status is blissfully hidden."
I agree with that. Those large subdivisions full of identical "luxury" homes are eyesores.
I know a lot of people who live on the east side who constantly complain about how dull it is. In Seattle, you can get GOOD coffee from local mom & pop roasters (just wait until you try Trabant if you haven't already), on the east side you're stuck with one of the bizillion Charbucks scattered around, and the occasional Tully's, which is only slightly better than Charbucks.
* Less competition for talent than bay area
* amazon/microsoft/google/adobe/myspace engineers
* fairly vibrant startup community