They give tours, and they are well worth the time. It's a family owned company, so you get a lot of cult-like adoration for their dear leaders, but it does seem like a great place to work.
That being said, Frank Lloyd Wright hated the location because it isn't suburban. The reason none of the buildings have normal windows is because Wright thought the surrounding urban/semi-urban landscape was too ugly to look at.
One of my favorite buildings, the Weyerhaeuser (paper company) HQ in Federal Way, just south of Seattle, sits well and integrates with the terrain around it:
It used to be one could drive over to it, and on a weekend people (not of the executive class) would be out picnicking or flying kites by the surrounding pools. There was a corporate-sponsored bonsai garden (appropriate for a company in the tree business) which was open to the public. That was in the mid-90s.
IIRC correctly (not sure on this one), there also used to be an IBM campus a few miles to the west and there still is another campus on Bailey a few miles east. Pretty incredible that there used to be 4 (maybe 3) large-scale IBM campuses all within a ~10 mile radius.
I've happily relocated to suburbia since starting a family with small children. As others have mentioned, I enjoy the open spaces, lack of crowds, and lines when I want to go out and do something.
I consider cities like NY and SF to be great places to live if single but basically untenable with a family except in certain circumstances.
There are some great cities like Seattle and Tokyo where I might be willing to raise my family but in general I am glad that tech companies aren't in city centers.
I moved to NYC with my 4 young kids. NYC is a great place for kids as long as you can afford the rent. We sold our cars, get most of what we need delivered, and walk or bike pretty much everywhere. All the kids activities are at walking distance and my oldest who is 12 is completely independent. I have no idea why people think that cities are bad for kids (apart from the cost of lodging).
> I have no idea why people think that cities are bad for kids (apart from the cost of lodging).
I think the cost of living is that main reason, and can't be overstated enough.
Cities are great environments for most people (including kids) -- but cities are already the most expensive places on the planet for living / working / schooling. Trying to house a family there (with the extra stress of daycare costs, educational costs, larger housing needs, etc) just makes it all that much more impossible to afford.
If you imagine cost of living as a 100-foot wall around major cities, a single person can just get themselves over and be ok. But for a family, they likely have to scale that same wall 2x, 3x, or 4x times.
I don't live anywhere as dense and NYC, but I'd echo the sentiment. I live on the city fringe, and the ability to easily get to music, dance, language lessons, galleries, playgrounds, and so on are all invaluable to me and the kids. Pretty much anything they want to do (other than "have a pony") is much easier in the city that it would be in an outlying suburb. And when they get into their teens, I'll be a lot happier with them having good options for buses, trains and so on.
In most cities you also need to be able to afford private school and the public transportation options are not as dense as NYC. A city like NYC is in a completely different echelon from nearly every other medium/large city in the US.
If you've had the experience of being physically assaulted by random blacks high on drugs, had other random blacks break into your car, and still others accost you at night and ask probing questions designed to test how soft or hard you are as a robbery target (not to mention been pickpocketed by other blacks you tried being nice to), as I have, and you relocate yourself somewhere there are not so many of these people, as my family has, does that make you racist?
Genuinely asking, as I'm unclear how this term's defined these days.
As far as I'm aware, racism used to be defined as "believing one race is superior to another."
However it seems most of its users use it now to mean "protecting oneself from populations with, on average, markedly higher violent crime rates than other populations." You're not supposed to do that - you're supposed to grin and bear it.
According to Merriam-Webster[1], racism is defined as one of the following:
1. a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2.a. a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles
2.b. a political or social system founded on racism
3. racial prejudice or discrimination
As far as your comment you are simply "protecting oneself from populations with, on average, markedly higher violent crime rates than other populations," if that population is defined by race, you are being racist unless there is some newly published study I have yet to hear about that "blacks love crime."
Yeah, except that in reality, socioeconimc conditions are often tied closely to race. That doesn't mean that e.g. blacks are inherently more likely to commit crime than Asians, but certainly blacks are a more impoverished race in general. That leads to higher crime rates, so it's certainly not racist to be more fearful of that group of people in general, it's just a learned behavior and a reflection of reality.
Dude, the 80's called. They want their cliches back.
I personally have had the experience of being physically assaulted for being a white nerd who dared 'diss a clique of blacks in my high school. It was 1993.
First of all, things have changed, and changed radically. If you want your car broken into and rifled through, you;re more likely to get that joy in a small rural town, thanks to the opiates epidemic.
Secondly, the cities have become remarkably safer, though no less diverse.
The problem with that argument is that white collar corporate fraud is far more of a social problem than small-scale mugging. It's hugely more destructive of security and prosperity.
The list of corporate crimes, especially in finance, is not short. Just because (e.g.) LIBOR fixing doesn't threaten you with a gun doesn't mean you're not still a victim of theft, and that you haven't lost real money as a result of it.
So if you're arguing that crime is bad, then yes - it's racist to limit your definition of dangerous and anti-social crime to direct physical assaults by poor black people.
You're just ignorant for labelling the race instead of the pertinent attribute: criminal. Are you OK being victimized by whites in Appalachia robbing you for pain pills or white rednecks in Tennessee high on Meth? As long as "blacks" don't do it?
I don't think this is a very good argument. The term blacks was likely arbitrarily chosen and wasn't meant in a derogatory or disrespectful manner.
Also, where in the world have you lived? I just moved out of Harlem a few months ago and experienced everything the OP mentioned and more. The fact is, Harlem (at least East Harlem) is a dangerous and predominately black community. Crime there is driven more by circumstance (upbringing, low income, environment, etc.) than skin color, obviously, but I don't blame anyone who wants to move out of a dangerous area.
Also, "don't live around poor people" is basically saying "why don't you just make more money?", and is incredibly thoughtless. I didn't choose to live in a crumbling walkup in the bad part of town, I had to because that was my only option, and I got out as soon as I could.
> "In many parts of the developed world, suburbs can be economically distressed areas, inhabited by higher proportions of recent immigrants, with higher delinquency rates and social problems. Sometimes the notion of suburb may even refer to people in real misery, who are kept at the limit of the city borders for economic, social, and sometimes ethnic reasons. An example in the developed world would be the banlieues of France, or the concrete suburbs of Sweden [...]. Thus some of the suburbs of most of the developed world are comparable to several inner cities of the U.S. and Canada."
More seriously. Suburbs may be the trendy area in the English speaking world but that's not the case everywhere else. Watch out when you go to holidays/business trips abroad, there are 'suburbs' you don't wanna end up for your own safety ;)
You can pretty much draw a line from English veneration of countryside manors to modern suburbs in the anglophone world and clearly they are quite popular in the US. Calling French banlieues "suburbs" probably obscures more than it clarifies.
First off, yes, racism and classism have influenced and continue to influence many things around the world [we can go to South Sudan, for a contemporary example].
Yet, I find it quite interesting that many people ascribe quite a few things they are against (for whatever reason) to racism --but when you look further many of these phenomena also exist in generally homogenous paces, so it's not intrinsically racist, although it's possible racism contributed to some of these phenomena or that racism finds some of the phenomena a useful expression or vehicle. It still does not make the phenomenon intrinsically racist.
Occasionally, then some will say, well America exported it with their imperialism, so of course you find it elsewhere --yeah like Russia where they were all out anti-US!
You're absolutely right I mentioned this earlier, but racism and classism have become confounded in America. But it doesn't really matter what we call it, they're all just other names for hate. We humans love to get granular in our definitions and categories. Especially in how specifically we hate other people and for what reasons, as if to justify it... I guess it makes it easier to kill them
"A greater percentage of whites and lesser percentage of citizens of other ethnic groups than in urban areas. However, Black suburbanization grew between 1970 and 1980 by 2.6% as a result of central city neighborhoods expanding into older neighborhoods vacated by whites.[27][28][29]"
"The English word is derived from the Old French subburbe, which is in turn derived from the Latin suburbium, formed from sub (meaning "under" or "below") and urbs ("city"). The first recorded usage of the term in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was made by John Wycliffe in 1380, where the form subarbis was used."
Generally in the west, being below something is a sign of weekness or inferiority. Traditionally only poor/ surfs/ peasants/ redneck country folk / barbarians (which has a great etymology btw), lived outside the city walls... Hence sub urban areas. They developed originally primarily for economic reasons you're right not racist. Or maybe we're taking about two different things with the same name? Because I'm talking about the vast droves of concrete waste in America inhabited by isolated individuals who exist in echo chambers of their own creation and defend them vehemently. #yesallsuburbs
If they're "inferior" then it's hard to see them as a fortress for the wealthy to hole themselves up in so I think your argument is self-contradictory.
A common fear I hear from young expecting couples is that kids cannot be raised in the city. We moved to SF 4 years ago from the suburbs and really enjoy the benefits of being here with kids (in 1st & 3rd grade). It is definitely an adjustment from suburbia, but so far it has been worth it.
Edit: Also happy to share my experiences in more detail if you are considering this path. My email is in my profile.
I imagine the dealbreaker for most young couples expecting kids is the cost of renting a 3+ bedroom in SF more than any fear of raising kids in the city.
Well, there is the dreaded PS lottery[1]. So unless you both are working and can put the kids in private school, the kids may well end up in one of the district's poorly run schools.
Not judging you at all, but I can't help but chuckle at the irony that you pay a premium to educate your child at the Christian organization that worships a god who championed the value of the poor.
I don't pay them a premium, I pay them a very fair rate to provide an amazing service in addition to paying my taxes.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of inequity. Most suburban districts get 30% more state funding to do things like build olympic swimming pools and buy iPads. The local taxpayers in urban districts like the one I live in get glorified daycare with classes of 30-35 kindergarteners, and we get to fund a parallel charter school system that enriches the bondholders who built the schools.
I'm not the governor, don't serve in the legislature and have limited ability to influence our school board, whose hands are largely tied. My options are: go private, move, or have my child get an inferior education. I have the good fortune to make the choice that I made. If that makes me a poor christian, so be it.
Not at all what I meant. I might do the same in your situation. My comment was merely to point out how backward the situation is. That the intent of religion to unify people regardless of economic status is defied when their educational service requires wealth. And one of the reasons it's a premium service may (arguably) be due to economic exclusion.
I don't blame you one bit for providing your child the best education you can.
Catholic schools are often cheaper options than other private schools. No need to act condescending.
My parents were considering it because the school I was supposed to go to was a good 40 minute walk and they didn't provide a bus because we were still within the limit.
It's not condescending to point out hypocrisy. Why don't you encourage them to do the Christian thing and open their doors to all economic classes, just like Jesus did. No need to act enabling.
Catholic elementary schools cost on average ~30% of the price of secular elementary schools.
They are often one of the only affordable ways to give your child a good education in neighborhoods where the state fails to provide a minimum acceptable public option.
Not blaming you because that's a rational choice, but if parents who teach their kids to read before elementary school (or at least before 5th grade) never put their kids in that school, how can society expect the average to ever better?
It doesn't, it just gets very _expensive_ to live very well in a city center with a family. I guess this is what the OP meant by "certain circumstance".
You don't need to live in a center or Manhattan for instance. But it doesn't really help much prices wise. Real estate in NYC is just expensive in general.
I live in the SF peninsula and don't think the traffic is terrible. Mostly 20 min to get anywhere. There are a few places 101, 85 and 280 that are busy during peak times in some directions, but other than that, its pretty similar to most other cities I been.
We can say that to any congested areas: Only few directions at only specific time, it is bad luck because this is where the majority of people is commuting to or from.
The Bay Area has been getting worse for the last few years, it is now pretty common to spend 1h30 between San Francisco and Mountain View.
But the good news about the peninsula is that there's almost zero residential traffic, and it's almost always <10 minutes to get to most common retail/service businesses (groceries, laundries, takeout food, neighborhood schools, gyms, etc). I attribute this to the fact that there are so few through streets connecting major arteries, and enough major arteries (El Camino, Central Expy, 101, 237(ish), 280, and 85) that attract the vast majority of worker traffic. Getting to & from work sucks, but getting around the neighborhood is a piece of cake.
You don't want to raise kids in Tokyo. Almost no parks, too much concrete, kindergarten places are sparse and expensive, train stations don't have elevators for the pram, trains are overly crowded, apartments are small.
Tokyo is one of the most walking/biking friendly cities I've ever seen. Once you get out of central areas like Shinjuku/Shibuya, there are tons of lovely lanes where cars are technically allowed but so rarely go that the street is just filled with people walking. So you don't need to cart your kids everywhere. It's so safe that Japanese parents let their kids walk to the grocery store to run errands for them. Having grown up in suburban America, I hate the feeling of being stranded after school waiting for my parents to pick me up, or not being able to explore or go to the comic store in the shopping center myself. Once a kid is older than 5, Tokyo would be amazing.
There are plenty of parks in most of Tokyo and apartment costs are reasonable if you get 10-20 minutes of metro away from the center. There are excellent educational centers in Tokyo too if you know where to look and every single train station has an elevator (albeit - only in one out of several exits which can make your trip longer).
I think the main issue would be the "hidden" discrimination against foreigners (gaijin) though and very demanding and destructive company culture.
Yes, Tokyo is huge. And yes, different parts of it are different.
IMO parks availability is OK. You can't escape the urbanity (skyscrapers visible from any point in any park I visited), but greenery is there. Lots of small cozy green pockets by channels/rivers. Huge wast flood-plains (?) in the city itself. Gorgeous famous parks that may require a quick train ride. Loved the mountains on the north-west side too. Less than an hour ride, from most parts I think?
Take it from somebody who is really used to green stuff. Like seeing wild animals <10 minutes from home and having several swimmable lakes nearby. And we have pretty good mountain bike trails in the city limits, including right next to downtown.
Overall I think Tokyo is a great place to live. Corporate culture is atrocious though. I'm not a big fan of well... modern Japanese social culture either. I believe kindergartens are sparse. But that's because Japanese don't use them much. Once giving birth, women are expected to raise kids (they're ok to do career if they go childless though). Apartments are small to americans. But ok-ish for europeans. I can totally see why somebody wouldn't like Tokyo (or Japan in general) but objectively I think it's one of the better places the world.
Be warned, those parks, while big, can't be used for much. Most of them have "no ball sports" signs, and yes, it's enforced. Can you imagine going to a huge park and not being able to throw a frisbee?
That's partly why we left. Not to mention, we were in a small apartment on the 29th floor of a building in Shinjuku. Kids couldn't really do much but stay inside all day. We moved back to the Seattle area and the kids are a lot happier (they are only 5 & 7) now that they can run through the neighborhood as they want -- open fields, forests, tails, parks. Quality of life is a lot better for a family in Seattle compared to Tokyo.
I suppose one could argue that cities in the early - mid 20th century weren't as heavily populated. I could be wrong, but I would also assume that noise levels were much lower and the streets much less congested. Looking at old pictures of city life, you often see kids playing in the streets. I don't think that would be possible today.
> I suppose one could argue that cities in the early - mid 20th century weren't as heavily populated. I could be wrong, but I would also assume that noise levels were much lower and the streets much less congested.
That is wrong I think. Inner London for instance still hasn't recovered the population level that it had in the 1930's. There are also videos that show a lot of traffic, and huge numbers of pedestrians. Go back another 30-50 years and most of the traffic would have been horse-drawn carts, which means enormous amounts of excrement, and extreme levels of noise, because before the invention of pneumatic tires wheels were metal on stone.
True, European cities would still have been densely populated, but I was envisioning US cities from that time period since we are talking about the American 'burbs. (I could be wrong just as well.) I currently reside in DC and the old, original suburbs as well as what used to be considered the outskirts, have long been consumed by the metro area. Where it was once sparsely populated, it is now heavily populated, heavily paved and herds of cars as far as the eye can see.
Companies being located in cities doesn't prevent you from living in the suburbs and commuting in by your mode of choice. Companies located in suburbs make it extremely inconvenient to live in a city and commute out in any mode other than a vehicle, which you would not have use for otherwise.
But seriously, it's cheaper and you get to build your own building if you like, maybe bespoke, rather than lease someone else's building. It's not like most US cities will not have a tortuous approval process and a long approval process and unions, etc. to contend with and extra taxes...
What's the next question, why aren't companies building right next to the Capitol? Maybe we should be like Paris and London and Tokyo and have everything important, the important institutions, important buildings and important people all living in one important city. Let's all move to DC and concentrate everything!
On the other hand, we have the Packard building and numerous others in Detroit or Phily.
This - so much. If my company grows I don't really see how we can _afford_ taking a much bigger office as large office spaces are really expensive in city centers to being with - not to mention supply isn't exactly great.
Building your own office is so much cheaper if you do it where real estate is cheap and you have a very good bargaining spot where you can actually barter for lower taxes.
I'm in IT, give me a year and 35k and everyone in the office at my clients wouldn't have to come to work. A big part is control. During hurricane sandy they made the office workers sit in a unlit office for a week just beacuse.
That doesn't explain silicon valley; suburban living with big city (and rather worse than 'big city outside of California') zoning; I bet it's way harder to build something in mountain view than it is to do the same in Seattle, even without the cost differentials. And god help you if you want something over three stories in Mountain View. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but my understanding is that it's extremely difficult
There are rather severe height restrictions in Mountain View because of Moffett Airfield. Despite this, there are Google buildings in the area that are at least 4-5 stories. It doesn't have much to do with NIMBYs (although I'm sure if the airfield was removed, the height restrictions would stay because of them).
Sure, but downtown mountain view has only one tower, while startups are now crowding out cafes and bookstores on Castro st.
The one tower shows that it isn't a hard limit but a preference.
Now nimby is a word with negative connotations. I am not saying this is bad, just that the people of mountain view have chosen to limit high density development in ways I personally disagree with.
If I can say it in a neutral way, California in general seems to value and privilege long term residents over newer residents, in ways that other states don't seem to.
The root, I think, is that California is a very desirable place to live, and the Malthusian view of growth, which most Californians hold means they don't want to just build until everyone who wants to live here can.
If you hold growth to be undesirable, you are left with fewer choices to distribute the privilege of living here. Rather than completely distributing this limited resource through money, California has a bunch of mechanisms that push the costs on to people immigrating here. (I believe that those who move are merely collateral damage, from that viewpoint.)
Now personally, I disagree because I like density and growth, but my point is that you can construct arguments from the other side that are also made in good faith.
My other point is the controversy is largely over the desirability of growth and density.
(Another interesting point is that I am told by locals that the one tower near Castro was vacant for quite some time)
Google employees are worth much more per-capita than most bank employees - and banks stay in the city - due to the networking (and prestige?) nature of the industry.
I think it also has to do with isolation and creating culture.
Urban areas have a lot of distractions, and individuality is encouraged.
There is 'not that much to do' in Palo Alto, at least, compared to the city ... people live in pretty normal homes, doing pretty normal things in the little time they have outside of work.
Also consider: how many truly innovative companies were ever created in the city and grew to be quite large?
I mean - 'cost' would be a factor, but why is it almost never the case?
If you need 10K employees, you need a lot of 'regular folks' - grinders, who show up every day - and who aren't the fleeting, company-hopping, types.
Obviously it's just a thought.
A lot of great Universities seem to be out in nowhere-land as well. I think there's something to be said for being out of the social centrifuge.
Banks can be in the 'burbs, but when most were incorporated, it was beneficial to be next to the exchanges and to government (both the fed office and the feds, etc.) but some have moved to Raleigh or RTP... And, for some a big skyscraper = prestige.
>There is 'not that much to do' in Palo Alto
For people without kids this makes a difference --it makes a difference to the newly independent, the ones in fraternities and sororities, they want to continue their partying. For people with kids, even if they live in the city, most nights are spent at home -unless they are one of those "power" people who must "rub elbows".
>how many truly innovative companies were ever created in the city
I think that's just a coincidence. As you point out, lots of universities are in the burbs (Cheap land for a nice campus and dorms) and a nice place to start on your idea with your mates/pals/etc.
In addition, till recently, companies had to "build things" physical things and it's easier to build those things where there was land. There is a reason Toyota isn't in the center of Tokyo. But nowadays where the product is non-physical, we do see some innovative companies begin in expensive cities.
>A lot of great Universities seem to be out in nowhere-land as well
None of them - except banks/insurance are really in the city.
Look at Twitter, they almost got there, now dwindling.
I've worked at a few startups, and visited a zillion.
Though Goog/FB do have a cool/trendy vibe ... I can't help but feel that most of them wouldn't fit city life very well.
I knew some Engs. in the Valley - super smart dudes who never heard of ISIS. I mean, man. They don't even watch the news. Work -> kids -> geeky projects -> riding. That's it. I don't blame them at all ... But I really do think that the culture out in the burbs is more amenable to 'Empire Building' and getting loyal, normal, predictable folks.
BTW - banks have a lot of job hoppers - because their career paths are so formalized, it's not a big deal for people to hope from one building to the next. Some of the systems are identical, if not entirely the cultures. And many forms of banking are intensely social, which is not like tech.
I also think most banking types tend to be 'upper urban' type people - or at least aspire to that. Tech people are more low key about things.
Yet, when they need distribution centers --where do they go for real-estate? Where do AMZN, GOOG, MSFT, etc., go for their DCs? That's right, not in downtown.
To be fair, the discussion is about corporate offices and not DCs. Amazon may build DCs out of town for servers but they build skyscrapers downtown for people.
It's possible. But if you need big space, you're better off in the burbs. Also, lots of your workforce in SV live in the burbs, close to a million along Hwy 101 from Daily City to Santa Clara. And you have another good amount from Milpitas up to San Leandro along I880. So, it's not like people are slogging from SF or SJ to far-out suburbs.
Author's theory: the Big Guy moved the company HQ to the suburbs because he's out to get you, especially if you aren't white.
My theory: the Big Guy moved out of downtown because land and taxes are cheaper, many (most?) people enjoy seeing green as opposed to concrete, and the commute is often (not always) better, since most people live in the suburbs anyway. Couple that with an up-and-coming municipality willing to subsidize the building and infrastructure and you've got quite a lot of cash left in the budget. What do you do with it? Build an impressive structure, with the perks and eye-candy to lure the talent you're hoping to hire and retain.
I'm not sure these cases are parallel, though. The article is discussing "America's most innovative companies", meaning the behemoths: Apple, Bell, IBM, etc. I haven't read the book, but from poking around on Amazon, it seems to be discussing mostly small and midsize privately-owned businesses. In those situations, I can absolutely see the whims of one person playing a much more central role than in large companies with shareholders to answer to. After all, most small businesses are started by people who (naturally) work near their homes.
Yep, saw that happen with at least one company. When the lease was about to expire at the office the CEO wanted to relocate the office to the far south suburbs, where he lives, even though it meant 2x-3x longer commute for all but a couple of the employees there, and people were already driving 30-45 minutes to get there.
Whatever the causes may be, the effects are the same: these large institutional office parks are designed to isolate employees and reinforce the automobile-centric suburban lifestyle.
The author's point is that the so-called great innovators of today--Apple and Google are cited--are really doing nothing to innovate the workspace, despite having plenty of opportunity to do so.
>The author's point is that the so-called great innovators of today--Apple and Google are cited--are really doing nothing to innovate the workspace, despite having plenty of opportunity to do so.
Somehow I suspect that this "innovation" they are required to do just happens to line up perfectly with the author's own personal and political preferences.
But what would the opportunity costs of that be? Their core competencies are not in "innovating the workspace". There's a chance they could come up with something cool, but an equal chance they'd come up with something bad. For the most part, it seems like doing this is not hurting recruitment.
This is a weird article. It assumes that this style is bad up front, then mocks all the different ways in which it was defined as good. "People like green spaces, how crazy is that?"
I like cities, but I also really enjoyed the couple of times I've worked at parks like this. There's a lot to be said for a predictable commute and a window full of green things. I've found that harder to come by when I work in cities.
Yeah, it's seems like the author has a solution looking for a problem. These companies have plenty of money. If their employees didn't like these suburban campuses they would move to cities.
Or perhaps the best catches would never walk in for the interview because they find it a synthetic asphyxiating saccharine fabrication, centered around an automobile and isolation.
The best people out there can make money literally from anywhere, why the heck would they go to some compound of industrialized personalization like that?
The OP had a fairly significant self selection bias.
The notion that the current employees would want to move to the cities using that argument could be replaced with anything. "Night shifts" or "working in the nude"; they accepted the job under these conditions.
I don't know if I'm one of those "best catches" (I strongly doubt it), but I do know that I'd rather work in a place that pretends to be open and relaxing and full of life and fresh air than one that doesn't even try to pretend to be any of those things.
Of course, I'd much rather life and work in the real thing, which is the literal opposite of what the article proposes, so there's that.
The implication was in the negotiation. The best people I know can swing a full salary coming in one half of one day a week.
If you think people who only need to work 4 hours a week would waste their time in the overhead inherent in the structure of a corporate office park then you don't know people who value their time
It's a pretty common career arc for people to start working in the city, move out to the suburbs, and then eventually want to find a job in the suburbs to have an easier commute.
> The best people out there can make money literally from anywhere
Since an office can only be in one place and therefore satisfy one subset of 'the best people's preferences - remote working is the logical conclusion for getting the best people who are also fussy about location.
This is not about "city = good, suburbs = bad". It is about "walled garden = bad".
The point of the article is that all those campuses are isolated from the local community, and it is not good because it does not help to develop better infrastructure and it isolates people.
At the end of the article the author mentions 2 SV projects which actually do things differently: Box HQ and Facebook HQ. In SV. Not in SF.
To give you a personal example, what surprised me moving from Europe to SV is the bus service: public bus service is terrible in SV, and what is the answer from big corp to help their employees to commute? Having their own shuttles service... What usually happens in Europe is that the people, the corp, the city, the county etc. interact to build a public bus system. It then allows sharing between companies and benefits everyone. But in the case of those gated communities they do not do that.
The most basic message is not even that the isolation is bad, it is just that any perceptions of these new campuses being innovative are greatly exaggerated. It's startups turning into the IBMs of the next generation in action, go have fun celebrating that.
What is there about the local community that is good, if most agree with the echo chamber view that all good exclusively comes from a small number of hyper selective ivies with very peculiar demographics? If the local community were good, why won't they get hired, why are they only vitally important to be nearby, yet not actually in contact? What is the metric or method where the quality of software, for instance, depends directly on distance to X, Y, Z? Why could someone possibly think X, Y, and Z only exist in urban areas? Ignorance not being much of a defense.
If good can only come from young elite freshly grad white males as employees, is working near/in the ghetto a peculiar form of penance? "We wouldn't let them get an education for skin color reasons but we are good people because we will permit them empty the trash bins after hours out of the goodness of our hearts".
"We don't hire coloreds or foreigners or girls here for culture fit reasons, only guys from the same frat at the same elite school, but we are a block away from several ethnic restaurants" appears to be the new "some of my best friends are blacks" for racists who don't get that they sound racist. Burb people and non-startup people are much more open minded than city people on average, more flexible, willing to try something new, a new lifestyle in a new area in new construction, etc.
The article assumes parks and nature are an inherent evil, which seems outright weird. Also a severe case of neophillia where any historic architecture is inherently evil, but I like old buildings, they look cool... Something new is guaranteed to be new, not guaranteed to be better. Also history is long and something new is almost certainly a historical rehash that failed because of X, Y, and Z. History is circular not linear. "I wanna make a village (where I'm chief)" isn't innovative in 2016, it was innovative in 6000 BC. Its just part of the fad rotation today, and like all fads it can be ignored with little loss.
Having worked in suburban office parks and extremely urban areas I'm mystified at the isolation thing. It seems to exist entirely in some peoples minds but not in reality. "support companies" seem to grow fabulously, sprawl like, profitably in the burbs almost despite local government opposition, endless buildings of retail and restaurants and bars. The city mostly seems to be where those employers go to die even after obtaining sometimes massive government subsidies. Observation would imply that something is killing those businesses in the city and expanding them in the burbs and its probably not the theoretical "isolation" that observably seems to exist primarily in reverse. If burb offices are isolating, why is the economic growth in the immediate area so explosive compared to the dying subsidized urban areas?
Well, that's a nice article. I have to say, however, that the vast majority of tech companies aren't in 1950's suburbia, they're located in late 20th century office parks: single story "flex space" buildings built on concrete slabs with plentiful parking, a truck dock or two, drop ceilings with good HVAC and fluorescent lighting over a sea of cubicles.
The stuff in the article would be known by realtors as "trophy buildings". Some lucky folks get to work in one of those but most people even in the innovative companies work in flex space in the exburbs. This architecture is so boring that no one wants to even talk about it. Its just a place to show up for work. In your car, of course.
Actual 1950's suburbia, these days, consists of charming inner-ring "streetcar" suburbs. They would be classified by most folks today as "walkable" upscale neighborhoods. Some outer suburban areas are now getting the "new urbanist" treatment to make them more like streetcar suburbs, but sadly these developments are NOT YET getting to the exburban office parks off the highway exits.
"Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?"
Hmm, maybe because some of us actually appreciate not being in some smog-chocked urban hellhole? I mean, if I'm going to commute somewhere, I'd rather commute to some place where there's actually, you know, grass and trees and stuff.
I lived in one of those suburbias for quite a bit of my life. They're perfectly fine places with plenty of room to stretch out and enjoy some air that's actually fresh. Hell, some of them even have actual wildlife; fancy that? But apparently the city-slickers are too good for that, what with their fancy concrete and smoke and noise and light pollution.
I just love the implication that everything that isn't a city center is devoid of luxuries like clean water or smooth-flowing traffic. Yes, us suburban and rural peasants are apparently stupid for believing that there's an actual alternative to being stuck in yet another skyscraper between bouts of fighting for elbow room on buses and trains (both of which exist even in rural areas, let alone suburban, by the way; the article seems reluctant to admit such amenities exist anywhere outside of the Big City™).
Yes, keep pretending that the city life is the only life worthwhile. More room for me out here in the woods.
In a stark contrast, I think is Google's 111 8th Ave Port authority NYC building, its one of the best workplaces. All advantages of having a huge building (Bigger area than new Apple spaceship campus), while still being in an extremely vibrant and well connected neighborhood.
I work in said building and love it. Absolutely a top notch office in a top notch location. Unfortunately the historical circumstances of the building (see video below) make it pretty much one of a kind; there simply aren't any more buildings like this for other tech companies to use. And good luck trying to build a new building of this scale.
111 uses an open floor plan with conference rooms in the middle on most floors. Most desks are located near large windows and natural light, but they aren't really in offices if that's a big selling point for you.
It's pretty damn nice run on open space trails before biking to work, have your kids walk themselves to school, have time to coach a soccer practice on a natural lawn pitch, BBQ dinner in the back yard where you grow many of the ingredients, and then go to bed with the windows open.
All of this is possible if you work at the Apple, Google, FB, Intuit, Microsoft, LinkedIn, etc. campuses.
I can't see how you can do this in the South Bay unless you already had $2 million to buy the house with the yard. If you do, why did you move here instead of early retiring?
You can have all this for <$1m house if you don't care much about the condition of the house. $1.25m will get you something you're happy to call home. Not many parts of the country let you go to bed with the windows open pretty much year 'round.
Of course, the flip side of that argument is that in many nice parts of the country, $200k will get you something you're very happy to call home and you can spend a lot less than the leftover $1M blowing heated or cooled air into your open windows for the parts of the year it's not nice out!
It would be hard to retire anywhere with the 20% down needed to buy the house, and it will be easier to retire ten years later if you do buy the house.
You realize that in most areas of the US you can buy a perfectly nice house for $200k right?
Assuming you had $2 Million in assets to start that would still leave you with $1.8 Million which assuming modest returns of 2.5-5% would still leave you with a yearly income of $45k-$90k which is an obscene amount of money if you mortgage is paid off.
I think his point is that if you happen to have $400K in the bank, you can buy a $2M house in Silicon Valley with 20% down, make $400-500K/year combined, and in 10 years retire with $2M in the bank and the house paid off. While if you live elsewhere in the country, you could buy the $200K house free-and-clear, make maybe $150K/year combined, and...well, in 10 years you'd also retire with about $1.5M in the bank and the house paid off.
This is only true if you're rich enough to afford to live near any of these campuses. For most of us mere mortals, South Bay "campuses" mean taking your pick between crippling commutes and tiny apartments.
Eyerolling politicized nonsense. So what if they are out in the suburbs? This weird, near-religious attitude about where people live gives off a really bad odor. Not to mention "isolated from the communities they impact"? What? People in the suburbs of Silicon Valley don't use iPhones? John Deere needs to be located downtown so it can relate to, uh... farmers? It's nuts.
The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake. That entire website should be deleted and "Hunter Oatman-Stanford" (what a name!) should give up writing in shame, retreat to a monastery and think long and hard about where it all went wrong.
>The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake
The thing is, the phenomenon is pretty much world-wide, thus easy to prove/disprove. You see it in Mexico, in France, in Germany in Japan. Some of these places don't have the dreaded "Other" to dread, so they cannot have that motivation, unless the author thinks many, more or less homogenous places, are acting preemptively against a possible future Other.
Racism is what classism becomes. In America the two are confounded. People hate other people for a lot of reasons. All you're proving is that there is a lot of hate in this world.
The author ascribes it to racism not "people hate each other". However, I think racism is a facile explanation to trot out [perhaps even socially expected].
Also, I don't have to hate to not want to live next to you, nor do I have to hate my family if I don't want to live next to them.
I think redlining restricted minorities from the Suburbs, but didn't contribute to the growth of suburbs itself. What contributed to suburban growth, in my view was:
1) cars, cars enabled people to commute. They were not bound by walking and transit. 2) Population growth. After wwii we saw lots of growth and cities were not seen as a place to raise children --given the pollution and grime which plagued previous industry. People wanted nice affordable places to raise their kids, not tenement housing. 3) Decay. Cities were not always peaceful, clean places. They had labor unrest, grime, crime, noise, etc. and some people wanted to "graduate" to nicer places. I think redlining illustrates that not only did whites want to move to the burbs, but also minorities wanted to move out of cities(else redlining would not have existed as a tool to discriminate against their moving in)
Modern cities are not the same as mid 1900s cities. They are cleaner, better run, better planned, more responsive, etc.
> People in the suburbs of Silicon Valley don't use iPhones?
Agreed, I thought Cupertino was a silly example. It's actually funny that you say "suburbs of Silicon Valley," because the entire valley is suburban.
Where's the urban area that Apple is supposed to move to? Downtown San Jose? If anything "the communities their products were supposed to impact" (Which are what by the way? Rich people?) are concentrated more heavily in Cupertino than anywhere else in the valley.*
Aside from that, I'm sure Apple is enjoying the position that comes with literally owning half a city. Imagine getting any other city that obsessed with property values and traffic to approve the new campus.
*Downtown San Jose's office spaces are criminally underoccupied, but I imagine there's not nearly enough vacancies to fill the needs of a giant like Apple.
> The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake.
The article is massively oversimplifying, but it's not wrong. The mid 1900s saw southern, rural blacks move into cities and urban whites move into suburbs. You could write a book about the relationship between those two trends (and I'm sure many have) and I don't doubt that it played a part in corporations resettling as well, whether they had race in mind or not.
>The article is massively oversimplifying, but it's not wrong. The mid 1900s saw southern, rural blacks move into cities and urban whites move into suburbs. You could write a book about the relationship between those two trends (and I'm sure many have) and I don't doubt that it played a part in corporations resettling as well, whether they had race in mind or not.
The amusing thing is that in my tech suburb, we have a significantly higher population of non-whites because of the tech industry (employing many Asians). Moving a tech company to the suburbs actually increases their diversity.
Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham was designed along these lines. It's very tranquil, but difficult to go anywhere for lunch as the drive just takes too long. Which might have been part of the master plan all along...
Part of the reason I refused to relocate to Raleigh is that the office was so isolated.
It wasn't just getting food, though that was certainly a hassle whenever I was visiting that office. It was also the infeasibility of finding a place to live that would leave me with less than an hour total time spent in the car per day. Let alone a location that would let me walk or take a bus to work, which is my strong preference. I'm in a dense city now, and my total commute is admittedly longer than an hour, but half of it is walking and the other half is reading a book or knitting, so it hardly ever feels like a waste of time.
I don't know your specifics, but I just moved to the bay area from the RTP area, having lived there for the last 13 years. The worst commute my wife or I ever had was when we lived in south-ish Cary and she had to drive to the Six Forks exit off 540... which still didn't take 30min. You definitely can't live within walking distance of any RTP offices (this was intentional), but you could bike -- lots of folks do. There are lots of great residential neighborhoods within 10-15min drive of any arbitrary part of RTP.
Ha! I used to do the opposite commute. Falls of Neuse & I-540 to Tryon Rd. & US-1. It was a minimum of 35 minutes, but more often 40-50 minutes. I used to listen to some of the MIT Open Courseware lectures during the drive until I realized I was paying more attention to it instead of my driving, and had to stop.
One of the things that Raleigh & Wake County has really done well is create the network of greenway trails. If it works for you, it's entirely possible to use them to commute on a bike.
You're 100% right --> the commute westward on 540 (from N. Raleigh toward RTP) and the commute eastward on 40/440 (toward Raleigh) are much worse. It's even getting bad around the south side with all the growth around Garner the past few years. We lived in Cary & worked in RTP so didn't really ever have any commute problems.
Do they have restaurants, cafes, or convenience stores in the Park (even if overpriced)? I searched their site and Wikipedia but they don't seem to (or they make it impossible to find on their site):
I don't know if there's any restaurants in the park proper, but the new Park redevelopment plans calls for building retail, dining and apparently residential space in the Park
Sure, it might have made more sense to write "4hrs there and back" or "4hrs return", but it seemed obvious to me and I'm just a dumb high school drop-out welder.
Though downtown Raleigh today is quite a difference from RTP. I used to visit RTP and Apex quite a bit with a previous employer. And, in my current job, I had to go to the NC Centennial Campus initially. All required rental cars. Now it's an Uber to downtown Raleigh. No car required.
Pretty sure company towns were run by greedy corporations that could get away with their creation in a time without legislation. A lot of good people and small children lost their lives fighting company towns.
Re: Ludlow : "...the culmination of a bloody widespread strike..." My grandfather was involved in the Mid-Continent strike, which wasn't as bloody but he was blackballed from working in oil again.
J.D. Rockfeller II was a notorious Social Darwinist ( the founder of some Social Hygiene organization so probably also a eugenicist ). Eugenics was a Progressive idea.
Many company owners - Henry Ford being one of them - ran company towns for Progressive/Utopian reasons.
Some mining towns would not have existed had the miners had to have arranged their own housing and depend on random strangers to provide supply.
Of course some had to "sold their soul to the company store" but it's like most things - a spectrum and not a given. And it was not all just about greed. It was more likely to be about stubbornness, anyway.
As the revitalization of American cities continues at what point do these campuses become white elephants for these tech companies in the Valley?
If urban centres continue to gain in popularity I could imagine suburban companies needing to open urban satellite offices to be able to retain talent that is reluctant to change their urban lifestyle or waste a significant portion of their day in a commute.
Many of my friends have gone to work at such places, but did so grudgingly. If they had had an urban alternative they'd have taken it. Others have chosen not to pursue job opportunities that would have necessitated long commutes.
Most people prefer a mansion, a giant salary, etc. But doesn't mean they get it.
The problem is that if you want to be at the interesting end of IT you probably need to be somewhere with a decent population (1m+ , maybe closer to 3m+) to have multiple employer options. You might also want to be in a largish place for cultural options (rock concerts, professional sports teams, varied cuisine, minority hobbies, whatever).
Trouble is that big places have various combinations of traffic, high house prices, long commutes etc. So suddenly the nice house in the suburbs you can afford is a 60 minute drive to work and on the weekend you spend all day in your car driving the kids (until aged 16) from place to place.
In articles and discussions like this I often feel like I'm in the minority by preferring to live and work in lower density areas. Living, or simply visiting, cities is stressful to me, and the benefits of doing so are not worth the downsides.
I like being able to drive 10 minutes to work, or 5 minutes to the grocery store, and not have to worry fighting traffic or finding parking. I like that there are walking trails behind my employer's office. I like that in the evenings or in the weekends I can drive into the mountains or to the coast. These things would not be possible if I lived in a city.
It was a key part of IBM's business model. Mainframes in Poughkeepsie and Binghamton, NY, semiconductors in Fishkill & Burlington, AS/400 in Minnesota, x86 in RTP.
Can I ask for some more direct evidence - like an interview with a decision maker, some memos, sworn testimony, a copy of an official IBM strategy paper, a history of IBM by a respected historian?
Sorry for being a bit demanding here, but I hear an awful lot of things about business that are accepted wisdom, but upon digging deeper find there is no basis in fact for them.
The evidence up to the point was that, for cost cutting and knowledge sharing, it's better for people to be closer together with consolidation of common stuff. Spooky just pointed out they had teams for each of their markets in different locations. That's unusually isolated and just by what area they compete in. Why would they go out of their way to do that?
I'm also interested in seeing more specific evidence but initial data suggest IBM avoided obvious, cost-effective choice for isolating teams by market segment in expensive ways. That already looks bad somehow.
It's a big leap to go from suspecting nefarious motives to "definitely". It could be anything from lower cost of land and living expenses to executives thought it would be a good place to raise kids. Or it could be that IBM thought it would try a "Skunk Works" type operation that was deliberately cut off from the rest of the company - a setup made famous by Kelly Johnson at Lockheed.
Generally, when someone makes a claim of something to be true, it's up to them to be able to defend it with evidence. It's not incumbent on others to research it for them. For example, if I posted here "someone made a car that runs on water!", people would legitimately expect me to provide a cite.
Besides, one can't prove a negative. If you research cars that run on water, and don't find any, that doesn't prove that they don't exist. I could just say you didn't look in the right place, and you should try harder.
I'd suggest doing some research if you're curious.
There's plenty of historical material about IBM out there. GE is another great example who even built housing for the management at remote plant and as they moved across the country, military style.
It often ends up being more of a moat for an existing location.
I live surrounded one such moat--the closest thing to a rust-belt city in the midsouth. I'd have to move 1.5 hours to find another job in my field, and I'd still be commuting another 30 minutes or so.
I can see it winding up being that way, but I'm not convinced that any business picked a location for such a reason. For one thing, it would be hard to convince workers to move there. Businesses do pick locations based on availability of workers, not lack of them.
How many options would Apple have to get 3 million sq ft in a city in the Bay Area? The majority of employees are going to commute anyway so why not just have them go to a suburb?
This. Considering the only options for a "city" are San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, Apple has quite literally no chance of snapping up that much raw square footage without moving out into the more suburban areas of the valley. Even if they were able to purchase and lease literally every high-rise building in, say, downtown San Jose, they would not come close to this pure amount of real estate.
By locating in a suburban area, they are forcing almost all employees to drive (or take commuter shuttles). But if they moved to an urban area, many employees could find housing nearby, and many more could find good transit options.
As it is, they're located is a mostly low density suburban area 5 miles from the nearest commuter rail station.
If they were willing to absorb a 50-100% increase in housing costs or downgrade their living spaces (giving up things like "going for walks at night without getting stabbed"), maybe. Living close to an urban office is an extreme luxury good that'll give any mainstream luxury car a run for its money.
>good transit options
The Bay Area has some of the best transit options in the country, and they are to stand with one arm over your head and one arm on your backpack, pressed up against hundreds of strangers, and just try to keep your balance and avoid eye contact while the bus or train lurches around for 30+ minutes. After walking or riding your bike for ~20.
I like driving, so maybe I'm just having trouble empathizing with people who feel forced to do it, but is a ~10 minute drive to a suburban office park really as miserable to you as the ~50 minute BART commute from Berkeley to SF?
If I had a suburban employer with a giant free parking lot (i.e. letting me live anywhere) moving to a downtown office in a hot real estate market without at least a 2x salary increase, I'd quit in a heartbeat.
I agree the Bay Area has some of the loudest advocates for better transit, but it doesn't appear that it actually gets better than this except in Manhattan (and Europe).
If I had a suburban employer with a giant free parking lot (i.e. letting
me live anywhere) moving to a downtown office in a hot real estate market
without at least a 2x salary increase, I'd quit in a heartbeat.
Same here. People talk about how difficult it is to live in the city and work in the suburbs, claiming that if the company just moved to the city then everyone would be happy. But it's perhaps even more difficult to live in the suburbs and work in the city, and many people, including myself, would rather find a different job in the suburbs than have to put up with a commute like that.
Few people think that moving an office from a suburb to a city will make everyone happy, clearly those that live in the suburb next to the office will not be happy that they have a longer commute.
But unless the company is small enough that a significant portion of its employees live in that suburb, moving to the city has the potential to ease the commutes of many more employees since the city in general has more housing density, and better transit connections.
I worked at a company that moved from one suburb 40 miles away across the bay to another. Within a year they lost about 30% of their employees that didn't want to make the commute or move. Since I lived in the city, the only different in my commute was taking a different train system... and the new location was a bit more bike friendly from the train to the office, so made my commute better.
So while you may not want to give up your 10 minute suburban commute, the employee living 2 suburbs over that fights traffic ever day for his 30 minute commute to the company may be happy to take the train his suburb to the city to the new location.
Public planning and transit is not about making your commute better for your job at one particular employer, but about making the commute better on aggregate for everyone.
The Bay Area is not a good example of good transit oriented planning, or Google would have been allowed to build housing near its campus, Apple wouldn't have been allowed to build a 13,000 employee office even farther from BART+Caltrain than its current office, and the 49ers wouldn't have been a 70,000 person stadium without regard to existing transit connections.
Since communities largely do their own city planning, they optimize for their own growth and tax base, ignoring issues of traffic.
The same for the public transport -- in cities where rich
people use it, the service is better
I wonder which is the cause and which is the effect here. Maybe some cities were proactive in improving their safety and public infrastructure, and as a consequence have attracted rich people to live there. That's really the only way it will work, anyway - getting anything done in the civic sphere takes a lot of time and effort, and it's not worth it for most people and companies. If cities wish to attract them, they need to proactively improve themselves.
The post-baby-boomer generations really are getting sick of driving and don't care for the same things as their grandparents did. The problem is we didn't get to a car-centric culture overnight, and it won't change overnight either.
Entire swaths of the country are still set-up for travel in which every trip begins and ends in a parking space. All the most forwarding thinking places are now rapidly embracing "complete streets" and walkability in their urban planning. It will take time but the lessons have been learned and things are changing. Give it a few decades.
Most people in America don't have effective transit - not even in the SF Bay Area.
But building more homes and offices in suburban neighborhoods is not going to make that any better. There's not much space left in the Bay Area for bigger roads, yet the population continues to grow.
In a city, there's so much out of your control. You have to fight the government and the city residents and who knows what kind of obstacles you may face.
If the rent is cheap, then great, you have a lot of employees close by. If not, you have just made life for them more difficult and given them a longer commute by fighting their way into the city. All because nobody in the city wants to build more residential.
If it works out and the city actually wants you there, then great. But I am not surprised Apple didn't want to try their luck in SF.
> Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?
> Stuck
This already implies a negative connotation of "1950s suburbia". Like we ought to move on, just cause.
What about the flip-side of this question: what is it about a 1950s suburbia that helps America's Most Innovative Companies? I'll offer some ideas. Maybe it's a lot more stable socially, so there's most local community trust and engagement, and more mental energy to devote to one's work. Families are stable and know and support each other, e.g. community caregiving responsibilities for children. As well, there's less distracting "events" going on than in a typical city. And so more mental thought and energy can go into work.
As well, it's cheaper to not be in a crammed urban center. This also helps play into a certain level of "mental safety" if you will that enables one to focus more on their work - what else are you gonna focus on?
Nike is located 8 miles from downtown Portland in the suburbs of Beaverton. The light rail line runs from downtown to a forest near the campus so those who want to live in a urban environment can do so. One of the benefits to Nike is they can expand their campus more readily in a suburban environment. They recently bought up all the land around their campus and are building a bunch of new buildings. It would have been difficult to do that in an urban environment. But, unlike the suburbs described in the article, the area around the Nike campus is not middle-class white, but tends to be lower-class hispanic. You have to go about 3 miles north or south of campus to get to the middle-class neighborhoods. The farther you go to the east or west of the campus the lower income you get until you hit the agricultural land to the west or get closer to portland to the east.
A major Intel's RnD facility is also in the area, further west (It's in the next city over) a bit north of that line. At least at the time I lived in the area the stops that would service them weren't well connected to it. There may have been some buses, but if I'd had to make that commute I'd have taken a bike on to the rail system with me.
GE just moved HQ into the city of Boston, article seems to be cherry picking through history and unfairly picking on Apple, HP was pretty innovative and started in the suburbs. The interstate system and WW2 as a source of innovation seem to be also overlooked in the time period examined.
As HP's ability to innovate in technology (as opposed to business operations and cost-cutting) waned, it primarily put engineers in lower cost of living areas like Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. This pattern is consistent with almost all has-been tech employers that steadily transition more into traditional sales-driven cultures. Conversely, just because you start moving your company back towards a major metro area with more talent doesn't necessarily mean that they'll start an upward trend either.
The interesting thing to me, about this article, are the subtle undercurrents which are never really stated, but rather seem to be assumed. And they're part of a narrative that seems to be gaining steam, but which doesn't seem to be objectively true in any general sense.
1. Suburbs are bad.
2. Everyone should live and work downtown in/near an urban core.
3. Cars are evil; no one should drive to work.
4. Offices need to be in converted warehouses, with exposed ducting and beams and what-not, and have "character".
I personally think all of those things can be true, some of the time, but I don't think any of them are true all of the time. And I think they're all getting undue weight vis-a-vis the prevailing zeitgeist.
Here's a close-to-home example: the Stanford Research Park. It meets (in my opinion) the isolation requirement, but here's why I find it interesting: On a map, the area has amazing transit accessibility. But, almost all of that transit is commute-time-only express routes. There is very little integration between the research park and the surrounding communities.
Maybe it's not on such a grand scale as the examples from the article, but things like this are closer than you think.
Where is the Stanford Research park? My girlfriend works on Stanford campus and she complains about feeling isolated- she says it's like working on Mars. She works on Galvez and parks at the Stock Farm lot. But no running out on her lunch break to do errands- once you're on campus you're effectively trapped there.
Galvez cuts through most of East campus (either as Galvez St or as Galvez Mall), and the Stock Farm lot is on the far west end of campus, so with that much distance between car and work, I can understand that feeling!
In that case (I commute into campus by bus), I'd use one of the Zipcars on campus to do lunchtime errands.
Ignoring the commute-hour-only Stanford Marguerite shuttle, there's walking/biking/Ubering around 1.2 miles to the California Avenue Caltrain, or 3 miles to downtown Palo Alto... jobs at SRP generally pay pretty well.
You can also walk about 0.4 miles to a Marguerite line that isn't commute-only.
It took decades to construct the images of "success". I know that whenever I am associated with one of these awesome brands in a super sterile corporate location I feel like I have made it.
I get it, it gets to me too. It's too bad that the current aesthetic of success is so dumb and infantile though. The aesthetic of success of 14th century Venice was totally badass. Or 16th century Antwerp. Or 19th century Budapest. How is it that a place so enormously wealthy like SV looks so disposable.
For centers of innovation and insight into the future, startups collectively shoot themselves in the foot by centering on some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
It'd be far more logical for VCs to pick a far more livable, affordable area so that their investments could go further, last longer and have a higher chance of success.
VC firms are really just high risk money lenders that have a seat on the boards of the companies they lend to. One could take a dystopian view that VC firms like the super high burn rate that having a startup in the Bay Area entails because the high costs makes companies more dependant on round after round of capital thus giving higher and higher percentages to the VC firms of the companies that do eventually make it. That's a little dark, even for me.
More likely, we've made this hellscape of $4k 1bdrm apartments because VC firms are comfortable in their big, well appreciating homes in choice parts of the Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area and they don't want to drive very far to meet with the companies in their portfolio. This and other factors (NIMBYism) creates the situation to this day.
If VCs were brave and smart, they would try and find a longer term solution to the problem. Find a city nearby that has significantly lower cost of living. I'm actually looking forward to the VC bubble bursting again so that companies would be forced to get scrappy again and start solving this problem themselves.
If I were founding or running a startup today, I would in a location that 1hr or two away from the major startup centers in a place where my workers wouldn't have to spend 50%+ of their salaries making NIMBY owners richer.
"Man's best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in small communities, or else by those who, having had such environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities; for what is wanted is contact with the elemental processes of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed."
- Alfred North Whitehead, source 'Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead'
It takes time for these shifts to play out, but I'd say the reverse is already happening. For a couple of examples that the article provided (Apple, Google), one can find a lot more examples of opposite -- stalwart companies moving back to the city core:
IBM Watson's HQ is Aster Place, in the East Village of NYC. Many other companies have opened offices more "downtown" than their existing offices. I can cherry-pick data as well as the next person...
Microsoft campus is in the middle of very stereotypical suburbia, and it's lovely, and a non-insubstantial factor my continued employment there. In contrast, I would turn down pretty much any place in Seattle proper, after having some experience working in downtown Vancouver.
At the same time, I know many people that do prefer to work in a middle of a city.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
Perhaps the author should make fewer assumptions about what other people do and don't like?
Good read, and I'd love an update some day. I think that the only thing that has changed is that we sometimes use pink/red bricks now in these large glass/steel boxes.
It reads like it might be mostly a summary of the Louise Mozingo book mentioned at the beginning of the article. I haven't read the book, so I can't be sure about that. Mozingo is cited a number of times. It also seems to take a very pro-density position. I suppose high density will benefit some industries more than others.
There are alternatives. Palantir taking multiple buildings in Palo Alto is one. They're getting a lot of heat from the locals for it. City building isn't a great option either. Is the answer mass-telecommuting?
I have a theory: the people who love open offices are the same people who love living and working in a city. It feels like the same sort of debate, just on a different scale.
It took me a good while to read it because it is rather information sparse (lots of puffery and filler content).
It's also setup with more of a story to the situation that shows a biased view of 'how we got here'.
I wonder if that 'storytelling' is something readers expect / prefer in general or if it's a crutch that is commonly used by in depth reporters who should instead be primarily presenting information with a great depth.
The John Deere HQ (featured in the article) is almost worth the trip to Moline, IL https://www.google.com/search?q=Eero+Saarinen%E2%80%99s+proj...
The IBM research center in Yorktown Heights is a section of a circle https://www.google.com/search?q=yorktown+heights+ibm&espv=2&...
The IBM research center in Almaden is in an amazing CA county park https://www.google.com/search?q=almaden+research+center&espv...