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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
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.
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.
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
I like that part, too. I also like the good schools, the relatively clean air, the quiet, and the ease of getting away from people if you want.
I hate that Chiles is considered an acceptable place to eat. I hate driving everywhere... the sheer insanity of driving to a gym so that you can exercise! I hate the lack of economic and ethnic diversity (though we are in an "old" suburb with at least some of that). Most of all, I hate the static blandness of it all. Same chain stores as you get anywhere else in the US. When we have house guests, we have to all drive somewhere to do something unique... often that means going... to the city!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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
I hate driving everywhere... the sheer insanity of driving to a gym so that you can exercise!
You have a house. Why not buy some gym equipment and setup an exercise area? Heck it would easily pay itself back considering how expensive gym memberships are.
"Sprawl" to me means largely unplanned ad-hoc development. No through-streets, so all the developments dump onto congested main roads. Poor conditions for pedestrians, and terrible public transit, so you have to drive everywhere. Little or no public space, and when it does exist it is just as ad-hoc as the other development.
Older suburbs are a bit less sprawly, if only because they were originally developed by railroad companies and so have sidewalks, small downtowns, and often still have an operating commuter rail line.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
no one is moving to Oakland
The hip stuff in the SF Bay Area is in Oakland now. NIMBY, Art Murmur, warehouse parties, etc. Space in SF is too expensive. Big art projects are moving up to the Richmond shipyard area. SOMA in SF hasn't had an art scene since the 1990s, before the dot-com boom moved in and took over.
(It's working out well for some friends of mine. One bought a loft in a bad neighborhood across from the Maritime Hall in SOMA before the dot-com boom. The tallest building in SF is now across the street from her. She's going to be able to retire from the value of that loft.)
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.
Well, you're wrong and right. You can buy all the equipment you need for $1-2k*. BUT, working out at home is the most un-motivating, depressing thing ever. So if one starts, they'll never stick to it for more than a few months. It's nice to have a social scene and people to talk to at the gym. But then again, in most gyms, 50% of the people who go are either scumbags or are very superficial. So maybe it's not a bad idea to work out at home and skip that part!
As engineering students are always taught, there are trade-offs to everything!
* Treadmill: $800
multi-use Bench for bench presses, dumbell presses, etc.: $150
Dumbells (that mult-weight one): $100
Stand for barbell excercises (like bench, squats, etc): $150.