The suburban office park that launched Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

The suburban office park that launched Silicon Valley

thehustle.co

123 pointsrmason36 comments

> “Varian Associates signed a lease to build a $1m company headquarters […] Eastman Kodak signed a lease in 1952 to build a photo processing plant.”

Photo processing chemicals.

I’m interested to juxtapose the nostalgic glow of this development and the 2025 proposed change to the Endangered Species Act which appears to remove habitat destruction as a vector:

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/17/nx-s1-5366814/endangered-spec...

As a personal aside, I moved from the East Bay to Long Island. My adopted home had a history of light industry, now completely gone some 20 years. About 10 years ago they broke ground on a Superfund site and former factory which produced tungsten for the war effort in 1940’s. Now there’s luxury condos (789k 1Br) and a brew pub.

The problem with the ESA is that it achieves a public good at private cost. The cost is borne by the property owner, effectively without remuneration.

In other areas, for example in building public infrastructure, such confiscation without compensation is not allowed.

If preserving endangered species is so publicly valuable, why can't the property owner be compensated?

The ESA as currently implemented also leads to perverse incentives. If a landowner suspects endangered species may be present they have incentive to bulldoze before this is confirmed.

> The problem with the ESA is that it achieves a public good at private cost. The cost is borne by the property owner, effectively without remuneration.

You could say that about any legislation designed to correct a negative externality. The private individual or company goes from avoiding the cost of his activities to paying it. If we just compensated the property owner, society would still be paying the cost, which is what the ESA is trying to correct.

The problem here is that the issue is thrust upon the property owner without any deliberate action. This is unlike (say) industrial pollution, which requires a deliberate action on the polluter's part (although you might argue historical shifts in what is acceptable might also be described as not deliberate).

Perverse incentives abound. If you make your property more welcoming to nature, you risk having it taken from you if you are unlucky enough to make it too welcoming. Degradation is encouraged. You are incentivized to restrict access to your property to prevent unwelcome discovery of endangered species.

A contrary scheme would involve payments for making land more natural, with sliding scales based on the importance. Providing habitat for critically endangered species? You get a large payout. It would encourage expansion of habitat for such species, not destruction.

Of course governments would rather get benefits without having to themselves pay for them. That's actually something to worry about -- if costs are hidden, then the normal cost/benefit calculus that goes into formulating government policies is upset.

Even in the case of industrial pollution, it could be sensible to pay polluters to stop polluting, or at least give them positive financial incentive to do so. Issuing tradeable emission permits to polluters can be viewed as an example of this. Such a scheme was highly effective in reducing SOx emissions in the US, achieving SOx emission reductions 6x more cost effectively than had been projected. Similar incentive programs exist or have existed for farms and automobiles ("Cash for Clunkers").

I’m thinking a good amount about this. Right now I’m of the mind the benefit of weakening ESA is to lower costs and increase speed for _new_ property development. In other words, encroachment on wild lands.

When you say “The cost is borne by the property owner, effectively without remuneration.” I think about the property developer who buys next to the garbage dump and then complains about the smell from the dump. It’s adding undue cost to his housing development.

Where I’m living now there are several older and abandoned manufacturing properties. I believe buying virgin land and building it to your taste is very attractive compared to trying to shoehorn into someone else’s old building—which you might have to demolish at greater cost.

So, no. Right now I don’t think we should fast track the kind of development that needs shortcuts around ESA. Develop somewhere else. Capital investment doesn’t need public help going faster/harder into wild areas.

And if the idea of the cost of demolition and toxic building demolition seems insurmountable, consider the communities whose leaders said they will take the toxic garbage from the LA fires, despite the complaints of the people in those communities. Turns out the naysayers lost to the public good.

I think wild spaces with wild animals are a public good and should be protected. I enjoy those spaces as they are. Anyway, that’s how I feel about it right now.

The nostalgic view is probably because in recent decades all manners of light industry had been moved to Asia, and people started to think that maybe having some local manufacturing is a good thing.

The emphasis on using the outside green environment to inspire productivity should be rediscovered.

The transcript of the Alf Brandin interview is here - https://exhibits.stanford.edu/shs/catalog/pk029xq7977 . The in-browser viewer was a bit difficult from my point of view but you can download a PDF. For some reason the first eight pages are missing.

I think the pages are mixed up (there is a relevant "todo" on the cover page). For example p.1 of the transcript is PDF page 12 and p.2 ends up on PDF page 23. It's still a great read. The bad pagination almost works well, breaking up the pages of land development details with a random page from when he's in college putting a horse in a dorm room to prank his buddy.

Who remembers when route 237 was country road with a flashing signal at Maude Avenue? The Bier Garten (not sure of the spelling) on the corner was a favorite lunch hangout with awesome cheeseburgers.

I think I remember 237 being 2-lane. Definitely remember the first Fry's location.

I remember that! 237 was a country road through a lot of grassland. The only thing of note in that part of the bay was a few streets of houses in Alviso. Great America was surrounded by empty space when it was built.

I remember the absence of the 237-880 interchange. Getting onto 880 from 237 during the evening commute hours used to be a pain.

Do you remember when they condemned all the houses along SR85 so high school kids could play loud music, drink, and party without bothering their parents?

No wonder Varian is still here after all these years. A prepaid 99 year lease for $41k!

I'm a bit sad I never got to see the orange groves.

There are a couple left, eg. the one by Sunnyvale Community Center [1] and I think I remember one in Campbell or Los Gatos.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3560492,-122.0268478,503m/da...

The one near Sunnyvale Community Center is an apricot grove and you can buy their apricots in the early summer.

There's an orange grove here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Tkycx4qdL8Wrq5zY6 near Intel HQ and the new set of SCUSD schools. The only thing from stopping you from picking an orange is a sign asking you not to.

There are some left in people's front yards in Sunnyvale.

The existence of citrus trees seems like a bit of a scourge to me at this point. Living in the Phoenix area -- indeed there was a wild real estate success with orange groves in our distant history -- there is a lot of ornamental citrus lining some streets. These fruits are, of course, inedible: very tough and bitter.

There are also citrus fruits in many, many yards of SFHs. And these are seemingly a scourge upon churches and other community centers. It seems that any Catholic who owns property is in the habit of harvesting their citrus and then toting huge bags to church, where they informally distribute it to all takers. Now you feel bad for not taking any, and there's always a ton left, and it's a common sight to see completely unlabeled bags of grapefruit or lemons with no hint of age or provenance. (Sometimes it's done right under the nose of St. Vincent de Paul, where they've got their own sources of good nutritious fresh fruit as well...)

The trouble is that unharvested citrus is likewise a scourge for the homeowner. The oranges can attract "roof rats" and other pests even while still on the branch. Falling to the ground, well you can imagine the mess and smell and pests that will come from that.

The homeowners often enjoy the shade and cachet enough to keep the trees around, though. I had another friend with fig trees, which was way more exciting when he offered them to us at church!

> Around the country, as companies have returned to cities or promoted hybrid work schedules, many suburban office parks have gone the way of the drive-in movie theater and the mall.

This is a bigger trend. Fifteen years ago the YC companies might be headquartered in Palo Alto or another suburb, but these days many of the YC companies are in San Francisco. I think we are seeing a revival of cities on a scale akin to the flight to suburbs in the 1950s.

I graduated college in the late 00s, and this was already considered a trend then. Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit were famously based in SF; while companies from the Google-Facebook era centered in the South Bay.

There was a sense that young people didn't want to be in the socially-disconnected, car-dependent suburbs, so companies would have an easier time retaining talent in The City (SF). For those in my generation who haven't been rewarded with a spouse + kids (as expected for 30-somethings in generations before ours), many have moved to New York as San Francisco has struggled to maintain a compelling social life away from the office.

Just recalled my first tech company was within the borders of Stanford Research Park. Fond memories.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the remaking of America by Margaret Pugh O'Mara is a pretty book worth checking out.

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/534709/the-code-by-...

* https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2019/07/18/book-rev...

Also goes into things like why Boston (New England) had some promise but ended up fizzling out (or at least not reaching the same scale as SV).

Been here for 27 years and had no clue. Thank you.

I have found that personally, when I live in a place I become less inclined to check out its history and all the touristy places. But if I'm merely visiting some place, I am enthusiastic about finding all the interesting sites with historical significance. It's a different mentality.

To potentially save folks a click: it’s Stanford Research Park.

If all you’re looking for is the answer, which can be found with a quick google. There is more to the article than just that.

Nevertheless, clickbait headlines annoy me.

"The history of Stanford Research Park"

Would mean much very little/nothing to most people, so I don't really see this as click bait.

"Stanford Research Park: The suburban office park that launched Silicon Valley"

Its the same article. Why does it matter if its answered in the title? Do you have no curiosity?

I recognize Terman from the names of places at Stanford but never knew he played such a big role in the early days of Silicon Valley.

Terman gets a bad rap because his father, Lewis Terman, was a proponent of eugenics. There used to be a Terman middle school in Palo Alto named after Frederick, but the bad association with the Terman name compelled them to rename it. Which is unfortunate because if anyone deserves to have a school named after them in Silicon Valley, Frederick Terman should be high on the list.

Speaking of which, can't mention early Silicon Valley and eugenics without William Shockley.

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/william-...

Shockley’s childhood home and the HP garage are separated by two houses.

I’ve wondered if there was any interaction between them but cannot find any evidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com