LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google, Netflix | Hacker News Reader

LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google, Netflix

latimes.com

97 pointsguyhance81 comments

This article is written awkwardly enough that it's hard to tell what the facts are.

Companies including Google, Amazon and Netflix have agreed to rent entire buildings before construction has even begun.... Content creators, as such businesses are known, have rented more than 4 million square feet of Los Angeles County office space in the last three years, real estate brokerage CBRE said.

Google is not typically known as a "content creator" business. What sort of companies count towards this 4 million square feet figure?

Later the article refers to "FAANG-type tenants". FAANG is an acronym referring to 5 specific companies. What is a "FAANG-type tenant"? One of those five companies? Any tech company?

It also isn't clear from this article whether this 4 million square feet is a lot. I poked around and from https://www.reonomy.com/properties/commercial-real-estate/us... it looks like about 250 million square feet of commercial real estate changes hands in LA every year. So this tech effect is almost 2% of the real estate market.

> Later the article refers to "FAANG-type tenants". FAANG is an acronym referring to 5 specific companies. What is a "FAANG-type tenant"? One of those five companies? Any tech company?

obviously any of those large high growth innovative tech companies of the content-creating variety

partially sarcasm. it should be further defined

Bit off tangent but how is Netflix similar to the rest of the acronym?

I think it's because they're all publicly traded tech companies worth over a certain market value

Well, netflix hosts content partially created by itself and partially by others. Facebook hosts content made entirely by others (I think).

So it's... kind of similar to at least that one?

But I do wonder why netflix and not microsoft. MSFT seems to be closer to the FAAG part.

EDIT: A quick search on DDG revealed it's because of the value of their stock.

A quick search on DDG revealed it's because of the value of their stock.

That doesn't make sense because the value of Microsoft's stock is a lot closer to the other four than Netflix's stock is. It is just because FAANG is a cooler-sounding acronym than FAAMG.

High growth, tech heavy focus

Netflix does very innovative things to get to where it is. Its not that innovate anymore since a lot of the infrastructure is 'easily' replicable, but it is still the only well capitalized and large solo content streamer. All the other ones are #metoo's from incumbent organizations

It really is just to spell "FAANG" which sounds a bit nefarious. Netflix is by far the smallest of the five; Microsoft is a lot larger than Netflix by market cap.

YouTube has a space in LA already, it's pretty huge. Maybe they're expanding it

West side pavilion is going to supersede the Venice/Sahara Monica R&D office I’ve heard, not sure if YouTube would, though it isn’t that far from their Venice beach office already.

yup, more info on that: https://urbanize.la/post/google-lease-entirety-westside-pavi...

and amazon is moving into culver city: https://urbanize.la/post/fresh-renderings-amazons-future-cul...

I'm super glad to hear that, its crazy to have a deadmall like that in LA.

It wasn’t dead when I was living there in 2016. It failed really quickly, actually.

My understanding is that YouTube is staying in the newer offices in Playa Vista and it's the Venice offices that are moving over to Westside Pavilion. This is still a couple years away.

They probably mean YouTube, which is part of Google.

We've been spoiled by Bay Area news sites that actually know what they're talking about when it comes to software companies.

It might be because these companies are investing in movies, tv shows and games because movies, tv shows and games can bring home those sweet, disproportionate billion dollar paydays.

I think FAANG-type is defined a bit further down, he's talking about companies that have enough power and/or hype that they drive real estate demand in their surrounding areas.

>“The Netflix, Google and Amazons of the world are not going to their service providers,” he said. “Their service providers are going to them.”

It all seems pretty meaningless though. This is just a PR piece for CBRE, not any sort of journalism.

You can add Boeing and Seattle to that list.

Eh, Boeing has huge scale, but they havw a worse version of Amazon's recruiting problem. Terrible work environment for most employees (unless you like knuckledragger drivel), poor quality work by other teams being swept under the rug by managers, and large relocation/sign on bonuses being dangled in front of potential employees for year long commitments post-move.

I take "FAANG-type tenants" to mean "Companies that aspire to FAANG levels of prestige" in an implicitly negative way, as in companies that are chasing the visible adornments of very successful companies such as open offices, micro kitchens, interns trying and failing to stay upright on Hoverboards, etc, instead of the things that actually made those companies successful. FAANG offices all have a particular "look" and that look is currently very trendy.

Google is not typically known as a "content creator" business.

Google is trying to get into gaming.[1][2][3] More from the infrastructure/back end side than the user-facing side, but they at least produce some demo games to show off the infrastructure.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/gaming/

[2] https://improbable.io/blog/google-partnership-pr

[3] https://developers.google.com/games/

A couple demo games for their gaming infrastructure ambitions are basically irrelevant. You can make a demo game with 100 man-hours.

The point is that Google has buildings in LA full of people working on their gaming infrastructure. So they look like a content creator from a real estate perspective.

Why does working on gaming infrastructure make them look like a content creator, moreso than working on their compute cloud or their search engine?

YouTube's studios are in LA. I imagine Netflix and Amazon have studios there as well.

Random guess, but I would assume the majority is Amazon. They are purchasing land in urban centers and repurposing them as shipping hubs. Both to expand their Network, and to improve their last mile delivery. The others afaik are simply buying office space in urban areas.

Since when are these companies "content creators"? They operate platforms such as Twitch and YouTube that the content creators use, but you wouldn't call Wal-Mart an "electronics manufacturer".

  “The idea of getting on 
  escalators like you did in the 
  1950s and ’60s is not
  happening,” said executive Bert 
  Dezzutti of Brookfield Office 
  Properties. “People desire to 
  move around and be untethered.
  You’re not using lazy old 
  escalators anymore.”

This can’t seriously be a thing right, this is the story of 1 crazy man and his vendetta against escalators and not an entire community gone mad...

Who wants an escalator in an office building with more than two floors? They are literally designed to make it take longer to reach your destination than an elevator.

I worked at Google NYC for 6 years. It's a 16 story building that was designed to be a freight transfer terminal.

The elevators were very very slow. It was often significantly faster to walk up 10 flights of stairs than to wait. I would have killed for an escalator.

(In all fairness to the facilities team, they built new banks of elevators on a very regular basis. Still slow, depending on which floor you wanted to go to. But I'm sure it's much better now.)

You're talking about 111 8th?

SimTower with the critical insight... people will prefer escalators to elevators when they are going 5 or less floors.

It's a tradeoff between latency and throughput... Also, there are some small advantages for people who are claustrophobic, and in cases when the power goes down.

Tons of hotels have escalators serving the bottom floors (meeting rooms, restaurants) combined with elevators (guest rooms).

In tall office buildings with many tenants, it's not that unusual for companies with multiple adjacent floors to have stairs or escalators, in order to avoid waiting for an elevator.

I worked in the Sears Tower for a few years. Coming in from the west side of the building, had to walk down a flight of stairs, take an elevator up around a few dozen floors, transfer up a floor via an escalator to get the next elevator to get to get to my final floor at about 40 floors. It was about 10 minutes from entering the building until I got to my desk sometimes. Stairs were not an option because you could only exit at ground floor.

Previous job, we had elevators straight to most our floors, we occupied the upper floors of a 37 floor building. We also had a few around floor 10, to get to those, one had to go all the way to gound floor and then back up. Within a block, stairs were an option and id generally use the stairs for up to 3 floors.

You must've never seen slow elevators!

> They are literally designed to make it take longer to reach your destination than an elevator.

What makes you say that? An escalator is about delivering a constant flow of people between two fixed floors. An elevator delivers bursts of people between a choice of floors.

Which one is faster depends on availability and the journey you want to make.

Or one real estate observing the alien culture of a generation he has no connection to, and making wild assumptions to fill in the gaps.

I mean, I think it’s more just that office buildings don’t normally have escalators.

Obviously they disagree with luxury developments in places all over the world which make liberal use of escalators in their buildings.

This article is pretty hilarious. Its mostly just quotes from someone hawking their wares so any decision they made will be trumpeted (by them) as the next big thing.

That said, LA construction is only a few stories (2-3) high and turning escalators into stairs is an easy way to save cost and make a place feel a bit bigger. You can join the up and down into one large stair and you can often put them outside too.

> One perhaps surprising trend is the excommunication of escalators, which were long considered luxurious amenities. “The idea of getting on escalators like you did in the 1950s and ’60s is not happening,” said executive Bert Dezzutti of Brookfield Office Properties. “People desire to move around and be untethered. You’re not using lazy old escalators anymore.”

I never though about it before but that actually is a fascinating cultural shift.

White-collar workers today spend so much time sitting, and are so conscious of health and wanting to be active, that escalators aren't a luxury -- they're the antithesis of a healthy lifestyle.

If buildings necessarily express the values of the people in them, well values have changed. It's the age of Fitbit and walking around dense city centers and walking up stairs -- not being sedentary and driving and just standing on an escalator.

(While elevators are still mandated for disabilities, which escalators were never good for anyways.)

I will belive that when I see workers walking up stairs, not just the type A's looking at their Apple Watch step counter, instead of escalators ;)

I think its mostly landlords wanting to look like office buildings not retail space.

YouTube is quite proud of the employee-only slide they have between two floors (might be gone, haven't visited in a couple of years)

I think, like many fitness things, it's actually as much of a discipline thing as anything else.

When we're confronted with an escalator next to stairs, we take the escalator out of laziness, even though we wish we didn't.

But we'd actually prefer there not to be an escalator at all, so we'd have to walk.

Same thing as when you choose not to keep snacks at your desk because you know you'll eat them.

We prefer an environment that nudges us in the right direction, precisely because we don't always have the discipline we wish we had.

i actually prefer a wide escalator so i can walk up/down (and around the standers) and get both speed and a workout. =)

I live in London, where escalator lane discipline is very good - mostly because if you fail to stand on the right you will get jostled by 80kg of fast moving commuter.

It's a culture shock going to places where people stand on both sides blocking the way through.

Guess I must be a weirdo. Given a set of stairs next to an escalator, I always the stairs.

I always do this, it typically happens at airports, and I take pleasure in arriving at the other end faster as well. I'm going to sit on a plane for hours why would I want to pass up the opportunity to get some meager exercise beforehand?

If I'm going to sit in a cramped, poorly ventilated space, I'm doing everything in my power to avoid sweating beforehand, including taking the escalator.

I also lean towards the stairs (or at least not just standing on the escalator), but in my experience it's like 80/20 or "worse" between people who go for the escalator vs the stairs. Of the escalator crowd though, there are a good chunk who prefer to walk rather than stand.

Stairs are faster and better exercise than (standing on) escalators. I guess you can make the argument that walking up escalators is faster, but stairs are almost always wider and less congested, whereas getting stuck standing on an escalator happens all the time anywhere busy.

I've had the opposite problem before - I preferred to take the stairs, but they shoved them off in the corner and put the elevator in the center of the building.

Yeah. To paint in broad strokes, the big cultural shifts from Boomers to Millennials seem to center around Boomers defining success and luxury very traditionally: maximizing ownership and indulgence, minimizing effort. Millennials have seen how unhealthy and wasteful those lifestyle choices are, and have largely freed themselves from the social pressures that drove them.

Of course, all is relative. Millennials have invented their own type of shallow success-signaling (social media), excessive wealth signaling (focused on experiences - trips, food, etc. - instead of possessions), and avoidance of effort (delivery services and other gig-economy apps). Society changes, but people don't really change.

Delivery services and trips are indulgence and minimizing effort. The only noticeable difference between the two is the reduced focus on ownership, but that’s more likely related to the fact that millennials got screwed by the Great Recession more than them being oh so woke.

This anti-escalator movement sounds like complete nonsense to me. First of all, office buildings almost never have escalators. They never did, and they never will. When a company buys an old mall or movie theatre or something else that had an escalator, it doesn't surprise me that they might gut them and not replace them, but it's not because this generation doesn't want escalators. They didn't build escalators in offices in the 50s and 60s either. This is just retail space undergoing renovation.

They're an expensive maintenance chore. A broken down escalator drags down the whole property

“An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.”

- Mitch Hedberg

One issue that isn't capture by that quote is that an escalator cannot be used while being repaired. If the maintenance person is away while the escalator is part-way through being repaired it's very reasonable to see a "Temporarily Out of Order" sign.

Also escalators tend to be pretty bad at being stairs if you're not fit and healthy (and even then…), they usually have much higher steps and sharper edges than normal stairs, and are thus significantly less accessible when they're not operating.

BART takes this philosophy truly to heart.

Are you suggesting they just chrome plate the stairways and there are actually no motors underneath at all?

I think he meant they don't actually do this.

>An escalator can never break

This reminds me of the first time I went to /r/gore. I'll just say the scene involved an escalator.

I've always loved this joke and basically quote it verbatim in my head when I encounter a broken-down escalator, but there's actually a whole chain of silliness that prevents most escalators from being used as stairs when they're not running. You see, the management will usually block them off for "safety reasons", which always seemed kind of silly to me, but eventually I ran across a facilities person who was able to explain it to me: stairs have a standard riser height per step, and everyone is used to walking up and down stairs of that height. Escalators, for whatever reason, are different. The stairs are taller. And people tend to trip when using them as stairs. So they minimize risk by just saying "go use the elevator or regular stairs." It's still kind of silly, but I kind of get it. What I don't get is why the escalator manufacturers don't make the risers the same height as normal stairs. I also don't really get why we apparently don't trip when walking up or down a running escalator, but it's possible the answer is that it doesn't really matter, because if you can't handle the step height on the escalator, you just stand still. :shrug:

> What I don't get is why the escalator manufacturers don't make the risers the same height as normal stairs.

The taller the step, the shorter the escalator. Doing that saves space and money.

Eh, if you mean "shorter" in number of links in the chain, sure, but obviously the overall amount of materials that go into the escalator isn't appreciably affected, and an escalator with larger, chunkier steps must necessarily take up more space due to the thickness. You could argue that reducing the number of moving parts is desirable, and I'm sure that's true to a point, but I'd be surprised if the operational burden and cost of an escalator with 51 7 inch steps is significantly different than one with 45 8 inch steps.

Then again, there's some reason they do it, and I'd guess cost is part of the equation. I just don't think it's quite as simple as you're stating it.

Edit: I'd actually bet that a large part of the calculation is cost of retooling and changing the standard, which would involve having a whole line of incompatible parts to manage.

Escalators do fail in ways other than becoming stairs.

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/10/catastrophic-escalator-fa...

I don’t think I’ve ever been in an office building with escalators. I think this is more just a result of them taking a shopping center, which usually has escalators, and turning it into an office, which doesn’t. They’re not really a practical way to get around; unless you have a rigid “stand to one side” rule (as on the London Underground) they’re slower than stairs.

> White-collar workers today spend so much time sitting

It would take a lot to convince me that white-collar workers of the past spent less time sitting.

>It's the age of Fitbit and walking around dense city centers

What? Most people still don’t live in dense urban city centers. Look at LA and the Bay Area. Both are still dominated by driving.

~From playing Dwarf Fortress, I learned that ramps are better at reducing pathing collisions than stairs. If these buildings take out their escalators and put in stairs or elevators instead, they might not see visible congestion, but their framerate will drop into the basement.~

But seriously, this is mainly about shopping mall conversions. I have only ever worked in a partially-converted shopping mall for a few months, but I thought it was great office space compared to floors in purpose-built office buildings, mainly because it still partially functioned as a mall. There was a sandwich restaurant, a movie theater, and a motor vehicles branch, and it had a public transit bus stop. The biggest problem was a lack of windows and natural light. I would argue that keeping the gross features of the interior space intact--such as the escalators--would make a better office space, as the mall was already designed to be attractive to visitors and move them around efficiently.

Besides that, the conference rooms have to be named after some of the former mall tenants. That's an unbreakable rule.

Interesting that escalators are considered passé now. Bloomberg was incredibly proud of their curved escalators and pointed them out repeatedly.

I don't know, if the alternative is elevators, that can quickly become a bottleneck shit show.

LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google, Netflix

That's nothing. In Chicago, a real estate developer transformed a 10-story-tall refrigerator into offices for Google.

https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2013/06/17/meatpacking-d...

http://archive.is/dieqU

Thanks for this. Drives me crazy that LA Times hard blocks all website access if you’re in incognito mode

The title of this post (at time of commenting) is exceptionally misleading. A more accurate one is "Landlords rip out escalators and walls to attract tenants like Google and Netflix", which is the one from the original article.

Thanks, we've updated it from the submitted “Google and Netflix Turning Real Estate Market in LA into the Bay Area” to the original (edited for length).

It does sound like the "LA" part of the original title is kind of important, though. It's implicit in the source (latimes.com), but the architectural details are only part of the story. The real point of the story, as I see it, is that these architectural changes are happening in Los Angeles. That's a new development in the type of business that LA caters to: it motivates architectural changes, and will motivate all kinds of other changes as the people actually occupy those buildings.

I think you're probably right that the domain is too subtle for this point—we've added an “LA”.

It's still a confusing title. The article is about retail conversions, which of course require cutting the interior to remove useless parts. The interior space of the old buildings isn't the important part, except for one quote by the escalator hater.

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