On another note- Office location can be the most personal aspect of business to an exec processing the decision. A territorial undercurrent is in play.
I was trying to stick it out and wait for the culture and mood (which had been fantastic beforehand) to get back in the groove, but our best people started to leave one by one, then one of the founders of my current company reached out to me personally, and it was too hard to pass up.
Up in SF, moving the office one mile can add 30 minutes to some people's daily commutes each way.
Meanwhile, moving from one office to another within Sunnyvale won't change much considering there are many ways to get in and out of there.
Moving from one city to another can be highly disruptive.
Everyone in the office was immediately for it. However, the CEO and a few other key employees were thinking further out in the southeastern suburbs, and everyone else assumed that meant into the city, centrally located, with cheaper rents.
We ended up staying in the office park that no one really liked.
A company I worked at in the 90s moved their office from downtown Chicago to the suburbs, seemingly so the executives would have a shorter commute. As a consulting firm, most of the employees were younger, didn't have families, and lived in the city and so ended up leaving the company when their commute changed. They also had trouble recruiting because of the new location. Having the only office in the suburbs didn't last long and they had to re-open a downtown office.
All this drama about relocating office a couple subway stops seems ridiculous.
I understand the argument about exacerbating commutes (even though it sounds crazy for a short-distance move) but I think this one is quite weak.
Let's do the math.
There are 24 hours in a day. You should be sleeping for ~8 of those leaving 16. Assuming you are supposed to be at the office for 8 hours (pipe dream, but let's just go for it) that leaves 8 hours of time for other stuff. If you previously had a great 15-30 minute commute then you would have 7 hours of free time to work on side projects and do things you want to do. That would be a pretty sweet normal life. Adding an extra hour to the commute cuts your free time down by ~30%. That is a big deal.
I also find it very helpful to include any time spent commuting as "working time" when considering where to work. You should also consider the increased cost to commute from a more like this. An extra hour of driving 5 days/week represents a non-trivial amount of money. So the salary needs to compensate, or the time at the office needs to go down.
No matter how you look at this, a move like this is asking all of the employees on the short end of the stick to effectively take home less money (not exactly a pay cut, but the end result is the same).
Edit: oh and I'm not from SF, I live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This has nothing to do with SF.
The bay area has something like 15 million people.
Do the math.
One either has a shitty rent/house payment or a shitty commute.
2013 US Census estimate is 837,442, which is considerably more than 500,000. [1]
> The bay area has something like 15 million people.
The 9-county Bay Area has approximately 7.1 million people as of 2010. [2]
NYC by comparison has ~2.5x in the metro for every 1x in the City.[1]
__________
[1] 19.9 million vs 8.4 million.