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High Tech Companies Becoming Fools For the City
theodp writes "Drawn by amenities and talent, the WSJ reports that tech firms are saying goodbye to office parks and opting for cities. Pinterest, Zynga, Yelp, Square, Twitter, and Salesforce.com are some of the more notable tech companies who are taking up residence in San Francisco. New York City's Silicon Alley is now home to more than 500 new start-up companies like Kickstarter and Tumblr, not to mention the gigantic Google satellite in the old Port Authority Building. London, Seattle, and even downtown Las Vegas are also seeing infusions of techies. So, why are tech companies eschewing Silicon Valley and going all Fool for the City? 'Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl,' Paul Graham presciently explained in 2006. 'It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities. But a competitor that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage.'"
'Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl,' ...
And a city is "soul-crushing urban sprawl".
Big difference!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I hate the suburbs.
I grew up in midwest suburbs, and I don't think my childhood was "soul crushing". If you don't like the suburbs, well that's fine. You are welcome to not live there. But I just don't get the hateful crusade against them. I personally enjoyed having a decent sized yard as a kid.
Drawn by amenities
Locally the only amenity offered by "the big city" over the suburbs is incredibly low rent because no one wants to work there. Crippling decaying infrastructure, one of the worst ranked school systems in the nation (no one between 25-50 wants to live here unless they're rich enough for private schools), extremely high crime, police don't respond to anyone not actively bleeding or shooting (that was weird to discover), one of the most racially segregated cities in the North (burbs are much more multicultural, weird but true), no parking so only locals are allowed, filthy, crippling tax/license/fee burdens, larger scale corruption in govt (note the burbs are almost as corrupt, just not quite as big). So why would anyone voluntarily work there? Oh, I see, rents are about a tenth the cost of equivalent rent in the burbs, assuming you can find burb space at similar level of squalor.
Don't ague that world class cities are better than my "top 20 city". World class cities are surrounded by world class suburbs, so Again the only reason to locate in the city is low rents.
There are exceptions where there are pretty good high rent locations squashed up against water features. They don't matter, less than 1% of the population lives and works there. For the 99% of the remaining population, the big cities suck.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've always wondered about that lol. Why are the tech companies almost always attracted to areas with exceptionally high cost of living? Must be something I'm missing.
Really the only important thing is who your neighbors are. Ideally they'll be as libertarian as yourself. Doesn't really matter whether they are social or conservative as both understand that people need to be able to live their private lives without undue government interance. You know the type I mean, the ones who don't give a shit if you smoke pot or have five spouses. The people who want to control what you do on your own time are authoritarians. A libertarian's only concern is that you both look after each other's homestead when you can't be looking after it for yourself.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Pinterest, Zynga, Yelp, Square, Twitter, and Salesforce.com are some of the more notable tech companies
Pinterest, Zynga - please, Sir, can I have a share of the social media pie?.
Yelp - a phone book - bravo, new world.
Square - because it's not already too easy to get people spending money.
Twitter - RSS for the ADHD-sufferer.
Salesforce - because your clients' data's not worth shit.
more than 500 new start-up companies like Kickstarter and Tumblr
Kickstarter - taking out the middleman (hello, I'm your new middleman)
Tumblr - absolutely no point whatsoever.
gigantic Google satellite in the old Port Authority Building
What represented a country which actually made things now houses the world's largest ad broker.
Anyone who still takes capitalism seriously is an idiot.
But I just don't get the hateful crusade against them. I personally enjoyed having a decent sized yard as a kid
"Decent sized yard" is the key. Many, all too many, suburbs don't have greenspace (parks and other places to play) or if they do they are driving distance for most kids. In my suburban neighborhood, the yards are on half acre or less plots, the nearest park is 5 miles away, and the kids have really no where to play outside; so they stay indoors playing video games and getting obese.
When developers build a subdivision in suburbia, they put as many homes in the development as they can to maximize their profits - to state the obvious. Any amenities are an after thought and poorly designed - usually it's just a "clubhouse" and a shitty pool that's too small to do laps in; such as some kidney shaped thing to lounge around to work on one's melanoma. We have tennis courts but they were built in an area that the developer couldn't put a house so he put tennis courts there - which are constantly being vandalized by the little shits who have nothing better to do.
Why do folks live there? Schools. To have their kids go to a better school.
Decent sized yards are usually found in areas where the zoning boards force developers to a minimum sized plot that allows for the decent sized yard - like my parent's house where I grew up. The minimum building lot was an acre and as a result I also grew up with a decent sized yard.
I used to work in a downtown area, but no more. I don't miss having my car broken into.
Panhandlers and bums are a mixed bag. I sort of miss it for nostalgic reasons, but didn't like it when I was down there with them.
Our city is short on musicians, street mimes and preachers, so it wasn't the full urban experience. YMMV.
Krugman wrote a similar prediction back in the y2k special issue of the NYT:
Here again, there were straws in the wind. At the beginning of the 1990s, there was much speculation about which region would become the center of the burgeoning multimedia industry. Would it be Silicon Valley? Los Angeles? By 1996 the answer was clear; the winner was ... Manhattan, whose urban density favored the kind of close, face-to-face interaction that turned out to be essential.
http://mit.edu/krugman/www/BACKWRD2.html
Just skimming the comments here I can see that there are all kinds of opinion on this. Some folks are city people, some are not. Personally, I have never lived or worked in a city. I live and work in the Boston suburbs. The suburbs here are not exactly as 'sprawling' as those around larger cities in warmer climates. Office parks with high tech jobs follow all the ring roads around Boston. You can easily find a place to live near them, so that any supposed sprawl doesn't have to affect your daily life at all.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Define "Sprawl."
Is it perhaps the commute or the schools or the restaurants or the parks or the entertainment or the museums or the cost of housing or the type of housing or the transportation or the opportunities or the je ne sais qua that determines where one wants to work?
Jobs on Wall Street are moving out of New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/business/finance-jobs-leave-wall-street-as-firms-cut-costs.html?pagewanted=all
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
My soul is crushed after being subjected to this article.
I hate people that want to impose their preferred development style on everyone else. If you don't like the suburbs, live in the city. If you don't like the city, live in the burbs or country. Why does it have to be only one development model? Variety and choice is good.
I'll bet that this trend, created by small startups, will quickly reverse. The driving factor for Silicon Valley's sprawl was the need for inexpensive space. Space for lots of people and lots of warehouses and lots of parking. Once the city startups need the space and see the cost, they'll move into the soul crushing zone again.
The companies listed are located where their founders live. They personally don't want to commute or live too far away from their friends. I don't think the founders care so much about the workers who generally aren't paid enough to purchase homes where the company is located. Lots of companies are founded by people that live in Palo Alto and they don't end up commuting to SF.
Cool.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
One of the biggest issues with Silicon Valley is that it is all tech nerds. If you work in a big city you can run into the opposite sex from time to time.
Places like Pinterest, Yelp, Twitter, might as well be call "Hipster" because moving to the cities is as noted above, a way to get cheap and short-term young workers. It is not a sustainable strategy.
Cities have higher rents than suburbs (duh, land is more expensive there, and decent districts are in short supply). By contrast there is far greater square footage of safe places to work in suburbs.
Cities draw young unmarried workers seeking the opposite sex. Suburbs draw married/cohabitating couples seeking decent places for their children. As the workforce ages it demands suburbs. Particularly for women who find cities threatening after they've found a mate.
Cities are filled with Black, and Hispanic populations who are MUCH MUCH MUCH higher in criminality than White middle class suburb populations. And not all cities are the same. Portland, Seattle, and other Whitopia Cities are far safer (this includes San Francisco) than 90% Black Detroit, or Cleveland, or Birmingham Alabama, or much of metro Atlanta. Inner-ring suburbs that are mostly Black, filled with over 90% illegitimate kids, no adult male presence in their lives, gangs ruling everything, massive dysfunction, can be far more violent (look at murder rates) than places like San Francisco, which has a low murder rate (the result of Blacks in particular being ethnically cleansed out of the place by rising property prices). Oakland across the bay is the mirror image of San Francisco -- poor, Black, Hyper-violent.
And a good deal of the Silicon Valley is being over-run by the Mexodus, transforming a great deal of it into Tijuana Norte. With all the gang and drug violence. That makes retaining skilled workers difficult. No one wants to risk getting mugged or shot just walking to their car. Mexicans leaving places like Michoacan or Chiapas retain the characteristics: gang violence, corruption, drug trafficking, of their homeland (where recently two bloggers were butchered and hung upside down as corpses from a bridge).
A lot of what is driving this move to cities, and lets be honest, no one is moving to Oakland, is a desire to avoid the Mexicanization of much of the inner-ring suburbs which has transformed them into a variation of Tijuana. No one wants to work in Tijuana. An expensive, mostly White, and thus safer city like Portland beats a place like East Palo Alto. But for a company to thrive long term it must have long-term employees who can stay and keep their expertise, and that means a safe suburb with a reasonable commute. No one can afford to live in San Francisco who has not inherited a trust fund, places like Portland or Seattle are little better. And Chicago is sliding into Detroit-like decay before our eyes. Two people were shot just blocks from Obama's mansion in less than two weeks.
In general, younger people live in cities. Older, married with kids people live in the suburbs. The younger folks are simply less expensive. Companies move to the city to get younger workers and get rid of older workers without having a layoff.
I work at the Port of New York Authority building, and I'd much rather my job were in some soul-less office park in the suburbs. The choices for housing in the NYC area are to rent in a shoebox in Manhattan for insanely high prices, rent a slightly larger place in Hoboken, Jersey City, Queens or Brooklyn for also insanely high prices (and have a relatively long subway commute), or to buy in the suburbs (also insanely costly) and have a ridiculously long commute (1hr+, whether Long Island or New Jersey). I'm not a city person, I need some space. My wife is an artist, she needs some space to work. I'm not so interested in "nightlife" (#1, I'm married, so the payoff isn't there. #2, I'm a geek, so it never was)
I think there's two main reasons the tech companies are mostly going to cities. One is an ideological attraction to cities and antipathy to suburbs on the part of management. The other is an attraction to cities (particularly including New York and San Francisco) on the part of new grads; when you're competing for Ivy League CS grads, an office in Putnam County, NY or Eureka, IN just isn't going to cut it.
... try Vancouver, B.C.
Liberal? Check.
Some big universities? Check. (Are they good enough? You can debate that, but they're hardly unknown)
No urban sprawl and thriving city center? Check. The best in North America
An added bonus, it's much easier to get workers to set up shop here from other parts of the world than USA. It's in the same time zone as Silicon Valley and intermediate between Europe & Asia. (That is critical when you need to hold meetings)
VC Money? Hmm....that might be the only catch
Yes, I worked in Silicon Valley before and yes, it is sunny and it is a bit of a soul crushing urban sprawl.
It's because it's where the young talent largely is. The change is that companies are now actually locating in SF, partly because the city is trying to actively attract and keep businesses, partly because the valley is becoming a lot more expensive. A decade ago as soon as a startup hit a certain size and needed larger space it left the city - now it can actually afford to stay. You still see shuttle busses for the larger valley companies picking up folks in the city to ferry south. The Google Bus is always packed with folks to make to the 40 mile trip down to Mountain View...
And It isn't so much that the valley is soul-sucking suburban sprawl, though there are many places like that - strip malls and Chili's and Walmarts - it's that it's just not a great place to be a young renter. The downtowns of the some of the communities in the heart of the valley - Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, etc. - are quite nice, with art house theaters, swanky shops and restaurants. But they're geared more towards rich folks and single family homes than young folks, and not only is trying to find a place to rent around there hard it's going to as or more expensive than living in SF...
Traditionally, many of the tech startups came out of the nexus of Stanford and all the VC groups along Sand Hill Road right across from the campus and as such settled around the area. But now Palo Alto has some of the most expensive office space in the world because of that demand and startups are looking elsewhere, particularly ones founded by transplants who have no connection to the area. They'd much rather live in SF, and there's still chunks of SF yet to be gentrified where companies can find good deals (i.e. Twitter's new campus).
Until you get a life. Wives want kids. Get kids, need more space to accommodate them and a car. Kids get few years old, need decent school to send them to.
City hobbies: stepping over drunks, hosing piss out of doorways, replacing broken car windows and the stuff that was stolen, hunting for parking, carrying tear gas.
Tech businesses moving to cities is a TV sitcom induced fad that will Pass as quickly as it arrived.
talk a good game about "diversity" and "inclusion" during those times you're not hating on your suburban neighbors.
everyone I work with is a telecommuter.
everyone. for the past 7 years or so.
some of them are in Europe, some of them are in America, some of them are in Australia, and some of them are in India.
they are all in their homes, which may or may not be in a city, I don't really know because it doesn't matter in the slightest.
and no, I don't work for some spiky hair'd startup hipster magnet.
I work at one of the biggest companies in the world.
this is how the future will be.
Around 2009, right after the big recession crash, it really was like that. I was walking near Union Square at "rush hour", and seeing empty streets. The first time I saw that, I asked a cop if there was some emergency or street blockage, and he said no, it's been like this for a few weeks now.
San Jose was even deader. Very convenient, though; drive downtown, park in empty space in front of building, go in.
For sheer city deadness, it's hard to beat Cleveland at night.
I walk outside, down the block, stop at Whole Foods, pick out what I want and check out and pay twice as much. They set up a delivery for me later that day because I really don't want to get my shit stolen on the walk home. While I'm out I walk by my favorite bakery and pick up some scones so I can feel like a hip classy urban socialite, and then stop by my favorite coffee place (there are about 10 to choose from in a 4 block radius) to sit and have some coffee and read while trying to block out the sound of honking taxis and angry Italians. I decide that it's such a nice day out that I'd like to go to central park, so I hope I don't get mugged as I hop on the uptown subway that's around the corner, and 10 minutes later, I escape the compacted mass of bodies that is the NYC subway system and I'm there. I stroll through the park -- not having had to find somewhere to park my car which would cost me a small fortune if I even owned a car -- and then get yelled at by some crazy hobo pooping in the bushes, and then realize that it's getting to be about time for my delivery from Whole Foods. I pop back on the subway where I am randomly accosted on the train by some tough guy who doesn't like my shirt and am back home to my cramped $2000/month studio apartment in 10 minutes.
Else I don't know which part of London you live in.
and they want their stereotypes of cities back. Dirty, filled with crime, derelict neighborhoods, etc. etc. Thanks to the meth epidemic I'd say that suburbs and rural America have inherited that rap.
I live in Brooklyn. Yesterday I took a break from programming and went for a casual walk through the neighborhood, swung past the cafe on the corner where there was a full-fledged ceilidh going on, then went up the street through a block party where the kids were drawing with chalk on the street and playing in the fire hydrant they had opened a bit as a sprinkler. Through Prospect Park where people were playing cricket and eating tandoori BBQ. Then around through the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens where they were having a bonsai exhibition. Out the north entrance and sat and watched the mathematically patterned dancing fountain in front of the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a bit. Then swung back through the green market at the top of Grand Army Plaza where I picked up some of the finest organic veggies on the Eastern seaboard for dinner. There was a bluegrass/folk trio jamming just inside the GAP entrance to Prospect Park, so sat and listened to them for a while. Then walked back home past artists selling works that would be hanging in a museum in the rest of America.
That wasn't a special festival day, just an average summer day in New York. Didn't have to plan to see any of those things. Just did, because they're just there and they're just happening like that all the time, everywhere here. Had I walked in a different direction I'd have seen plenty of similar things that way.
None of any of that sounds anything like the weird, dystopian picture you painted of the big, bad city.
For me, being around that degree of refined creativity and passion is incredibly inspiring as a human being and as a technologist. So, yeah, because the suburbs are the opposite of that sort of density and complexity, they are soul-crushing.
But I'm glad you like it there. Please stay.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
You didn't try very hard to get the lay of the land, if you're saying those things about NY. NY is a great place to raise kids. Lots for them to see and do and be stimulated by. The neighborhood I live in is bursting at the seams with young families. They have phenomenal playgrounds to play at, like the sort of stuff I used to dream about as a kid. They have massive parks to play in, classes to take, activities to do. If you prefer lower-density neighborhoods, there's always Staten Island, Far Rockaway in Queens, Riverdale in the Bronx, or NJ.
And for adult interests like art, culture, and cuisine I can walk to world class cuisine, any kind of cuisine, in less than 5 minutes from my house and pay less than you would at McDonald's. And the art and culture you can usually get for free, especially in the summertime when they have free concerts and performances galore.
I grew up out West in the 70's and I know all the stereotypes about the big, bad city, and I can tell you that not one of them is true.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
I find the phrase 'soul crushing sprawl' offensive, because it's not as described.
I grew up in Silicon Valley and it's a wonderful place to live with a lot of amenities. Some people have no idea how good they have it. Not everyone wants to overpay for a tiny apartment surrounded by cement. San Francisco is crowded, dirty and has terrible traffic and high crime. The only place in the valley that comes even close to this description is in East San Jose.
Silicon Valley lives in a bit of a bubble. The tech industry keeps the real estate market from experiencing the real estate and job boom and bust cycle nearly as much as the rest of the country. As a result the area continues to remain firmly middle, upper middle class and affluent with a lot of amenities. If you're a family person, not a scenester and enjoy green trees, wide open avenues, spacious housing, easy access to open space preserves and the coast, great restaurants, safe neighborhoods and comparatively low crime, the Valley is a great place to live.
I grew up in San Fran
I'm having trouble believing that anyone who grew up in SF calls it "San Fran".
if you're older, you most likely have a family and can't live in the city
Neal Stephenson wrote about the quasi-warehousing of lower income people who took up residence in storage facilities as a result of overpopulation and technological de-industrialization, leaving an ever greater percentage of the expanding population to scrap for diminishing benefits from the promise of capitalism in a resource limited, efficiency oriented world.
Does the exodus of high tech, high dollar employment from business parks during a period of industrial employment stagnation in high wage countries signal the beginning of such a transmogrification?
An alternative exists in the resurgence of communities that reinvigorate themselves based on the arts, crafts and self-contained wealth of their own making. It's out there, but in smaller communities where people that eschew the bustle of overcrowded interdependence develop the skills necessary to provide unique products and skills that mass production can't supply.
Again only an idiot would call an 50 acre industrial fabrication factory complex, which happens to have a lot of computers, a "tech company"
A modern US manufacturing plant looks a lot more like a "tech company" than Yelp. There will be industrial robots, driverless vehicles, and CNC machine tools. Probably not too many people. If it's a plant that makes some low-cost consumer product, the machinery will be pumping product through at very high speeds, far faster than humans can work. That's "tech".
Many "tech companies" do less tech and more sales than is generally realized. Yelp is a straight-up sales operation. Google is a large advertising direct sales force backed by a much smaller technical staff. Google's New York operation is mostly sales reps. Most Apple employees are on the retail side and make, GlassDoor says, $11.80/hour.
I've known a lot of people from major cities, and after age 25, they virtually all would go home after a day at work, occasionally do things that are replicable in a decent suburb, and only did "big city" stuff as often as someone in driving distance would. People are welcome to adore cities, but they're not intrinsically superior -- any more than it's "better" to prefer cats over dogs, blue over green, chocolate ice cream over cherry, or other things.
My brother and I are from the North Bay (Sonoma County), but have tried living in major cities only to find we were miserable there. When we were growing up here in SoCo, as long as a kid had a bike and non-paranoid parents, we could ride to a friend's place, the skateboarding park (once it was created), library, movies, bookstores, playgrounds, arcade, Boys & Girls club, run around with other kids in the area (building bike ramps for jumping, video games, etc.), join a sports team, go to game nights at a local hobby store -- plus take a bus to a major mall (fun place to hang out back then), ice arena, miniature golf, arcade, or waterslide park. Folks that figure they were "bored" as suburban kids should keep in mind that kids with enough free time living *anywhere* get bored; the lack of boredom as a kid is now believed to be harmful for their ability to solve problems creatively later in life.
Teens/adults can additionally hang out downtown shopping/socializing/eating, visit wineries or breweries, see plays, tale college classes or go to seminars (there's a state university & a great community college), golf, go surfing or explore the rock formations at the beach, attend all kinds of concerts, kayak, hike in the wilderness, ride a horse competitively (any discipline), trail ride horseback, go camping, mountain bike, bike on paths in state parks (something I loved as a kid), eat at top-notch restaurants, etc. or take a quick 40-min highway drive to SF for everything they have there. Tons of stuff to do regardless of whether one has money or not, basically.
Those aspects seem pretty standard for the East Bay, North Bay, and the SF Peninsula regions.
Oh, in addition for the North Bay, *most* people up here love to drive on our highways (other than 101/37 at commute time), as traffic goes full-speed, we're surrounded by nature and can pick between long straightaways, curvy, hilly, or a mix of all 3. Personally, I don't mind being in highway traffic as long as I can comfortably have my window open, as I just put the radio on and enjoy the scenery, and driving is easy/brief enough to be no big deal. It's just when I have to drive in a major city that I tend to stress out; I could easily see how someone from a place like that would hate driving.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
There are plenty of childfree women these days, but we don't walk around proclaiming it because a lot of people still react by either insisting we don't know what we want & will change our minds or by becoming nasty towards us. Likewise, plenty of men (including geeks) *do* want kids if you ask them about it, and if they marry a woman that's on the fence, many of the guys will pester her until she gives in or the marriage fails.
That said, I'm a (childfree) woman that prefers living in a somewhat-rural suburb because I love driving my own car, living in a single-family home, and being near nature, and I really don't enjoy the crowds, noise, or problems of big cities. The cities are fine for folks that do love them, but it's just not for me.
Regarding tech industries being in cities, I think it's very similar to what it was like 14 years ago, when all of the tech companies last flooded into San Francisco... They'll stay there while the social networking & social-gaming boom is going on, then a lot of them will return to the business parks, hopefully including up here in the North Bay/Telecom Valley region.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Only three other American cities have that high of an educated workforce. 'Nuff said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_class#Places_of_high_Creative_Class_populations:
In Cities and the Creative Class, Florida devotes several chapters to discussion of the three main prerequisites of creative cities (though there are many additional qualities which distinguish creative magnets). For a city to attract the Creative Class, he argues, it must possess "the three 'T's": Talent (a highly talented/educated/skilled population), Tolerance (a diverse community, which has a 'live and let live' ethos), and Technology (the technological infrastructure necessary to fuel an entrepreneurial culture).
I would add that the increased possibility of serendipitous interactivity with other Creatives in an urban environment may be one of the underlying factors that leads to the selection of certain cities and not others.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
I want to wake up to woman sucking my dick with her shaved pussy in my face.
I just moved to Silicon Valley at the beginning of the year, so YMMV. Still, we found a house to rent only 5 miles away from work, the weather is relentlessly awesome, the schools are great, and everyone is friendly.
San Francisco is cold every time we visit. It's tough to get past that.