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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 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.
I hate the suburbs.
I like having my own garage and not being robbed even if I accidentally leave the door wide open.
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
Those areas have high costs of living BECAUSE they are attractive! People don't bust their ass at Stanford and MIT so they can live in North Dakota. If you want the best talent you have to be in place where the best talent wants to be. People from elite schools aren't interested in living in some hill billy backwater just so they can save 3% on sales tax or some other pissant shit low income tea party losers whine about. My guess is you've never lived in a world class city before.
other way around.. attractive places have high cost of living, because, gosh, people want to live there and there's a limited supply.
Compare the weather somewhere like La Jolla/UCSD to Baltimore/JHU. If you were a researcher, you'll probably spend your time in the lab, but when you do emerge, it's generally a heck of a lot nicer in La Jolla than B'more.
Last month, they had several thousand people outside at 10PM watching MSL land. Could you reliably plan such an event anywhere else in the U.S.? In the summer: Thunderstorms and rain in the east coast would be typical. Devoured by bugs in the midwest, potentially combined with thunderstorms. Houston? N.O. pretty hot and muggy to be sitting around outside for 3 hours.
Sure there are times of year when the mid-atlantic is gorgeous. about 4-6 weeks in the spring and 4-6 weeks in the fall. California, by and large (the expensive places to live, anyway) is *mostly* good weather, with 4-6 weeks of bad weather sprinkled in.
OK... so that's climate. What about transportation hubs: Check.. got them in CA. What about access to universities: Check. Even with all the lame-ass things they're doing to the UC and CSU budgets in the legislature, it's still a pretty good place to go to school, and for all the whining, public schools in CA are fairly good (particularly in nicer neighborhoods.. those suburban office park locales for instance).
What about food to eat? California produces just about any food you care to name, and unless you've lived there AND somewhere else, you don't truly appreciate how much fresh produce is around. Sure, these days, they air-freight stuff from Chile and other places just about anywhere, but that hasn't always been the case. California has a longer tradition of using it (perhaps Sicily has a similar culture, but the choice is more limited), so it's just more prevalent. At the very top income end, of course, you can get anything (I've seen strawberries from Oxnard, advertised as such, in the Harrods food hall), but the overall "quality of life" thing comes from what everyone eats. They closed the last Wonder Bread factory in California a few years ago because of lack of demand.
What about activities, when you're not heads down coding the latest hit? How many places can you surf,bike, rock climb, and ski, all in the same day? You want music? Theater?. Sure, we don't have "Broadway" or the "West End", but just about everything else.
No, the reason those companies are moving into inner cities is two fold: Cheap office rent (as noted above by another poster)(Short term optimization for revenue.. it will take a while before they lose employees because it's not cheap for them); Finance Envy (That 3.0 GPA loser roommate is making 10M a year as a trader on the 50th floor in a big tall building, so I'm going to put my company on the 100th floor of a bigger taller building and show that dork who's really superior); Access to capital markets. (We just hired a bunch of MBAs to make a BILLION dollars with our IPO, and they think we should be local to the bankers)