Apple plans to build a new 324,000 sq ft office space in North Carolina | Hacker News Reader

Apple plans to build a new 324,000 sq ft office space in North Carolina

imore.com

34 pointsmynegation18 comments

One of the reasons I wouldn't want to work for Apple is that they have an old school view of what an office should be: a sprawling car-dependent campus completely removed from the urban fabric, where employees are doomed to sit on the highway for hours per day dodging potential injury and death.

Steve Jobs had an affinity for college campuses with ample green space and on-site amenities, but didn't seem to consider the fact that college students live on-site and walk everywhere, in contrast to employees who sit in daily traffic to get to their work campus.

While Apple Park is wonderfully futuristic in many ways, in other ways it's firmly stuck in the past. These inconvenient flaws with its design are literally hidden away, with Apple's massive parking structures being located underground.

In an era where finding remote work is so simple, I have a hard time understanding a company that wants to build a campus in this style. 281 acres: for what exactly? You can fit this much office square footage in a single mid-rise building.

Example: https://www.officespace.com/il/chicago/2120829-925-1025-w-fu...

Now for comparison, do a street view of the research triangle area where Apple wants to build. Plop the little Google pin down between Pfizer and Cisco Systems.

Which environment would you rather work in? Walking distance to residences, shops, restaurants, and transit connections, or on the site of an environment built without a single thought to the human who is not encased in the automobile?

North Carloina is one of the worst areas for sprawl in the country, but it also has so many new urbanist neighborhoods that are bucking that trend. It's just a little bit of a shame to me that Apple isn't a part of the trend of companies building their offices in places that are integrated with the lived environment.

> employees are doomed to sit on the highway for hours per day

Average round trip commute is less than an hour in the US so this is an extreme exaggeration to make your point more valid.

In urban centers or nearby, the type of location Apple and other big tech are likely to have a campus/office, it is likely much more than one hour roundtrip. What you've done is taken the average across the entire US which includes many places where people work very local jobs that require a 5-10 minute commute and used this to refute OPs claim. While you were at it, you blamed them for making an exaggeration and threw in a little "appeal to motive" to explain why OP would make such an "extreme exaggeration". Be better.

Meanwhile you just insult me while making claims backed by 0 data. Here’s the reality: average commute in SF is 34 minutes each way. Barely over an hour, so again OP’s claim was vastly exaggerated to make their point. Even the “worst” commute (PA) is 80 minutes, a far cry from “hours a day”. Here’s my source: https://stacker.com/california/san-francisco/san-francisco-h...

Where’s your source? Be better.

That’s still too long.

Never said it wasn’t.

We’ve been hearing rumors about this Apple complex for at least 3 years now. It’s making real estate prices go bonkers. I drive by the site all the time and nothing has been done at all. No signs, no foliage cleared, no road work, no cranes. I think they’re blowing smoke up the governor’s rear.

I'd venture there's a certain political spotlight which the NC legislature consistently inserts it's self into, that could create a sticking point for some high level C-suite executive at Apple.

Yah, I'm convinced North Carolina wants to be the new Florida politically.

The news headlines out of that state can be bewildering. The Republican attempt to strip Roy Cooper of his powers as a democratically elected governor was quite an eyebrow raising moment.

It will get worse now that the NC Supreme Court has overturned its previous decision that partisan gerrymanders were illegal.

As a NC resident, I strongly expect that the current legislature will quickly draw districts to ensure their ability to maintain a super-majority in both houses of the state gov.

Politics aside, why would they build anything at this point? They already got the tax break.

It’s not a refundable tax break. They need to develop to actually realize the benefit.

Usually all of these tax breaks are dependent on actually building facilities, hiring and maintaining staff levels over a period of time. They likely haven’t gotten anything yet. Same goes for things like that Foxconn factory in the midwest (WI?) that never materialized.

The funds are based on a percentage of employee withholdings (income tax) - if there are no employees, there are no funds to Apple:

"It is a performance-based economic development incentive program that provides annual grant disbursements for a period of up to 12 years, to new and expanding businesses based on a percentage of withholding taxes paid by new employees during each calendar year of a grant. This percentage ranges from 10% to 75% (80% for awards after October 1, 2015 in Tier 1 counties). "

You can find the specifics for the Job Development Investment Grant program annual report for 2021 - this is the one that has the Apple program details: https://www.johnlocke.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/2021-JD...

As far as I can tell, they are just proposing that most (75%) of the income taxes the new Apple employees would have paid to the state will instead go to Apple. If they never have any employees, Apple gets 75% of zero.

<edit for additional info>It appears that the Apple incentive is "transformative" a classification that means the amount can raise from 75% to 100% if Apple meets the hiring targets . . .

I wouldn't judge too harshly. We're not Apple-big, but even significantly scaling back design plans, we're almost 50% over budget on a $MM facilities expansion.

That's just the reality of completing projects in a 2023 market that were drafted in 2018.

Bonkers real estate prices in NC are probably more about people cashing out of higher-price areas and coming here now rather than any future Apple development. I think the Apple (and Google) moves to NC have some impact it's just that NC is attracting a lot of movers from CA, NY, and FL already. Check out:

https://www.ncdemography.org/2023/02/08/where-are-north-caro....)

This says 366K people moved to NC in 2022. That's a lot of folks who come here and probably a bunch are trying to buy houses in the RTP area.

NC is Epic and Red Hat HQ. A lot of talent at both.

Is this Apple's first major expansion towards the East Coast?

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