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'Google Buses' Are Bad For Cities, Says New York MTA Official
An anonymous reader writes "The Director of Sustainability for New York's MTA is calling out Google, Apple, and Yahoo for 'deliberately' building their campuses away from public amenities like restaurants, and public transportation. 'With very few honorable exceptions like Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, who recently moved his company headquarters from suburban Henderson to downtown Las Vegas, tech companies seem not to have gotten the memo that suburbs are old and bad news,' he writes. Instead of launching their own bus services to ferry people from the city to their campuses, as the tech companies have done, the Googles and Apples of the world should 'locate themselves in existing urban communities. Ideally, in blighted ones,' says Dutta." Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
If anyone is going to bring us Shadowrun-style corporate arcologies, it'll be Google.
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
I would rather the campus be located away from urban area. Less traffic, less driving, cheap/free parking, cheaper food, less chance of crime happening to me or my properly while at or traveling to work and for most people closer to home. This is double so if locally aimed marketing and walk in customers are not very frequent.
Really.
Why is commuting from suburbs to town centers good, but commuting from town center to a suburb bad?
Apparatchik from a tax-dependent transit agency is bad-mouthing private alternatives. HIs approval is neither sought nor required.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So tech companies don't want to be in high crime locations in the middle of neighborhoods that most of their workers wouldn't want to live or send their kids to school? Who woulda thunk it?
I'm already in the suburbs today and if I have to look for a new jobs I'm going to start to look even further from the city I live around. There is zero appeal to working in a city much less living in one.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
This: "Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses."
The Director of Sustainability demonstrates the ludicrous line of thought that puts stadiums downtown.
"Put your company and employees in a more expensive and crowded place (and *blighted?!* = more dangerous) because I say it's better", says a guy who works for a terribly-run monopoly that depends on people needing to get where he's telling them to build.
Yes, companies full of naive young people should locate to gnarly blighted urban ghettos and inner ring suburbs where they have less control over building design and negative value from the local amenities. Great idea. Let me know how that works out
Whiny mid-level mafia manager bemoans that his big city mafia has chased away business. Maybe if cities focused on becoming good places to do business again, business might move back. Just a thought.
Nonaggression works!
Maybe google employees don't want to get stabbed by the crazy homeless guy on the city bus.
Would be creating a virtual workplace with seamless interaction with coworkers. Why are we not working on this? We could live wherever we want, no commuting, no traffic pollution, no being forced to lived in high-priced areas where everything - housing, space, schools, parking - is at a premium. But the world seems content to move in the opposite direction: we have the internet, so let's move all the tech companies to one place.
I worked in Philadelphia for more than 20 years. I'd hate to go back to working in that hell-hole.
I paid a good chunk of my income in wage tax, got nothing for it, and arrived at work already aggravated by traffic.
I tried public transit. Expensive, filthy, slow and late, uncivilized and discourtous employees, it was worse than fighting traffic.
'...locate themselves in existing urban communities. Ideally, in blighted ones,'
You mean you want Google to locate its campuses in urban blighted areas (slums). No modern tech company will do that, no one would work for them. It is all about attracting the best and brightest minds. I have a suggestion, why don't you clean up your cities and get rid of the blighted areas and maybe companies will want to locate there.
Moving businesses to the suburbs is exactly what we need. Who, in their right mind, want to actually exist in a large, urban area?!? Satellite urban centers are the best bet; lower crime, less pollution, less traffic, blah blah blah blah... Most people want to bail and move to the burbs or the country as soon as they can afford to do it. I will never succumb to a large city. Worst habitat ever.
Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
Certain businesses? Which sort? The kind that benefit from building all those amenities from scratch? I call bullshit unless you are operating an airport, naval base, or some other ridiculously large and specialized enterprise. Google, Apple, etc simply balked at the rent/taxes they would have to pay to locate somewhere with a good workforce, and instead camps outside the city limits and cherry picks employees with private buses to take advantage of the city without having to pay for it. If the suburbs were such an appealing location, why aren't the employees there too?
Cities are expensive, crowded, dirty, and noisy. I'd rather live/work outside of a "city" than work in and either commute or use public transport. The expense is the biggest concern.
-SaNo
Here's one, for example... on the other hand, with Kelo v. City of New London, maybe someone could just step in and "help", as in "we're from the Government, and we're here to help"...
like a yard sale... they don't have that blighted urban smell... as strongly.. promised land of the freeland freeloaders taken by force from natives http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=unrepentant&sm=3 makes us the blight. with history racing up to correct itself & us there may never be a better time to consider ourselves in relation to all living things? history must be righted before future really starts? that's crazy like creation can be felt in our hearts now... see you there... bet early & often do not get shut out down up
You can move my job into the center of the city right after you double my salary to afford either A.) the increased price of moving my habitation to the same said middle of city or B.) the increased fuel, vehicular upkeep, lost time, etc. of commuting all the way in.
Building your business I the middle of a blighted area, for the greater good of that area, makes no sense.
You won't be able to recruit and retain talent if they don't want to live there, your costs will be higher, and you will be victimized by crime more often.
There is nothing wrong with responding to the incentives that you face, which include building your business in a spot that is good for your business.
If you want Google or Apple to move, make it worth their while. Otherwise, quit asking them to do things that are not in their best interest.
I have to spend 2 hr's getting down town to a switch site today. I will be doing this for over a week and its a waste. I am even using public transit as driving here would take even longer. Now outside the city (Toronto) I can drive around a lot better. I agree the public transit is better in the city but overall i hate coming into the city. This is why I love even out side of the bedroom city/suburban areas. Moving out of the main city has MANY advantages such as easier communities that make people HAPPY.
Not to mention the higher taxes inside of cities. In Cleveland, for example, Progressive Insurance wanted to put a big office building right in downtown Cleveland. Then they looked at the taxes they would be paying. The City of Cleveland refused to make an exemption for them. That is fully within their rights, of course. Anyway, where was the office built?
Right outside of the Cleveland city limits. Close to the city, but not where they'd have to pay the extra taxes. Cleveland City Council was pissed of course but they only have themselves to blame.
This stuff matters to businesses. It affects everything they do and it affects the end cost to the customer. After all - a customer, in order to purchase a product or service, needs to pay for all of the costs required to provide that good or service. That includes taxes the business must pay. People always clamoring for more taxes on business never seem to realize that in their fervor to punish businesses for being successful, the real person who is being punished is the customer. Not the business.
In a competitive market a company cannot afford to be paying unnecessary taxes.
Businesses aren't the only things leaving NYC either; many high profile wealthy people are leaving, or have left, for the same reason. Same in California.
Love sees no species.
The cost of living and working is substantially higher in NYC, Chicago, LA, DC, etc. than in their suburbs. It makes no sense for a company to move into NYC where the costs are so high when it can provide incentives to live and work 1 hour away where the costs are much cheaper. Everything from building costs to payroll costs will be lower and the people just as happy or more so because the lower pay will correspond with lower cost of living and stress.
Suburbs do have their own public amenities, so his argument is completely fallacious in that respect. I'm sure plenty of residence of Fairfax VA would find it hilarious that businesses that choose to locate there as opposed to downtown DC are "avoiding public amenities like restaurants and transit."
Perhaps if we sold Detroit to Google, they could fix it. They'd be near the Canadian border, so it could draw employees from both countries.
He is bad mouthing private busses being used as a band-aid for poor land use planning and sprawl.
> Googles and Apples of the world should 'locate themselves in existing urban communities. Ideally, in blighted ones,' says Dutta."
Yeah, that'll be a big attraction to hirees. "Come work at Google, in the armpit of Northern California. I love the smell of aged garbage in the morning."
Instead of trying to force or guilt companies into coming back to urban, why not try attracting them instead?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This clod is just upset they're doing it themselves instead of participating in the meme to have government provide the mass transit, when it magically becomes holy and good because the clod says so.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I lived and worked in downtown SF for 10 years. It's a complete shithole on market st. near the tenderloin and SOMA. I witnessed several daytime muggings, had my car window smashed and items stolen more than once while working late. Someone menaced me with a knife while walking home one night which prompted me to start carrying a 6 in folding knife with me everywhere. The worst thing is that it's never going to change as long as the city has tax dollars. Local government is corrupt and works closely to with corrupt non-profits to ensure the homeless/crime problems in the downtown area never get fixed. I don't blame tech companies for not wanting to locate in a city like San Francisco.
Almost daily I read something telling me that my car will become obsolete, my suburban house will plummet in value, and my suburban lifestyle is heading the way of the dodo. Meanwhile, the suburban neighborhood I currently live in didn't exist 10 years ago. Could it be that people actually like living in the suburbs?
The problem with this "urban utopia" concept is that cities suck. They are generally crowded, noisy, smelly, expensive, and all-around unpleasant. Sure, if you are young and don't mind having 3-4 roommates, or you are a history professor type that loves walking everywhere - they by all means - live in a city.
I loved NYC until I had to work there. Holy crap - what a disaster that place is. The experience was so bad, I ran to the suburbs to raise kids - and I'm never going back.
It's no surprise that tech companies, flush with cash, can seek better alternatives. I actually applaud these companies. There are talented employees all over the country - not just in cities. If companies want to bus in their workers - that's great. Government should just get out of the way and keep the roads paved.
Just as a little counter point. In our fair city, the current fad is 'urban intensification'. As they build more and more apartment buildings, they pave everything because the 20 story buildings are shoulder to shoulder. So the huge trees are chopped down. In addition there is no way to cope with the volume of people needing to get in and out of these areas during rush hours. Public transit can't grow fast enough to cope. This is the standard nonsense that proponents provide. The reality is that public transit is insufficient.
The neighboring residential areas get deluged with people trying to flow out of the area during rush hours. What once was a beautiful downtown full with wonderful large trees is well on its way to the standard concrete paved, sunlight blocked, traffic jammed std ugly big city core.
Not saying that urban sprawl isn't a problem, just that those proposing the alternative gloss over significant problems. To me they are both equally poor situations and I hope that something truly better evolves.....
I believe he's saying, "If you're bussing your employees from the city to the suburbs, why not put the company in the city?"
If people would RTFA:
"Members of the current generation of in-demand workers wants to live in a city like San Francisco. They prefer an urban lifestyle to a suburban one. They want to be able to walk to grocery stores, restaurants, theaters, etc. They prefer traveling to work using collective transportation, rather than driving -- perhaps, in part, because they can be productive on the way."
Because, if what everyone is saying is so true ("Why be in an urban hell?"), then why are there so many buses heading *from* places like SF to the 'burbs? Clearly the employees like the amenities that the urban areas provide, otherwise they wouldn't live there, and there wouldn't be enough employees to justify a separate bus system to move them to the suburban campuses, no?
And this is exactly what Twitter just did (got a sweet deal in The Mission, not exactly a wonderful area before), but that's created a whole host of other problems. However, rents have shot up, so what he's proposing is working there. Apartments are now fetching $2000/month+ rent in what was a cheap area. These companies have power, and when they bring that power, other businesses follow. And the point of the article is: if the employees recognize this and are living in the cities, why aren't the businesses going there?
A ton of these companies' employees live in the suburbs! I've never in my life heard of an employee living in the city and commuting out of it to a suburb to go to work at a mega corporation. They live in the suburbs! It's a shorter drive with less traffic! What kind of idiot would live in some dumpy, crime infested, noisy, overpriced city with no parking when their work is outside the city? That is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've heard today.
Yeah, Google should move to the inner city so their employees can drive an hour each way and stop at 50 stop lights on the way to work while enjoying such lovely sights as abandoned buildings and homeless people. And make sure you park your Lexus in the middle of the worst neighborhood regularly every single workday. That's safe.
Suburbs that can attract businesses to relocate are nascent cities themselves. He's asking you to trade small, new places with few urban problems for large older cruddy places with all the same problems they haven't been able to solve for centuries. No thanks.
I worked for a Dot-com that shared the building with a methadone clinic. I would not recommended it.
1. Downtown Real Estate, BIG $$$ per square foot, and other city related expenses.
2. How's the public Transit in the city? Good enough to ferry a few thousand workers (potentially), runs on a schedule that suits the workers needs for timing and flexibility? Has a cost that's cheaper than it would cost to drive (including Vehicle Fuel, Insurance, Up keep, parking)
3. Your Google's and Apples are BIG facilities, Space and Power Hungry
4. How is the infrastructure, its often better outside the city than in the city
5. Where do the workers live, if they are mostly in the suburbs, why force them into the city to work?
Foxconn is already doing arcologies. Workers never have to leave the company's premises. I don't know whether they already include graveyards.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
"preferably blighted ones". Yeah that's exactly where I want to work.
system says large companies should move to where we want to operate and pay to fix the city.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...Cities are bad for companies. Especially in New York and California.
...coming form the commentariat here. Not really surprising, but apparently entirely missing the point. The point he's making is that companies in the tech sector - which generally try to make a big deal about sustainability - are locating away from existing infrastructure, which creates a whole host direct and indirect costs.
His point about community is also spot on. Why are Google and Apple and other tech companies running buses into San Francisco? Because their staff wants the advantages of urban living. There are still blighted cities in America, but the era of universal urban decay is over - East and West cost cities are seeing increases in population and business activity. Today's 20 and 30 year olds don't see cities as irredeemable hellholes, but as vibrant, convenient communities. They'll take the downsides of urban living if it means they're not commuting an hour each way in traffic and can walk to various amenities. That kind of vibrant urban community depends on interaction. It's in distinct contrast to the suburban bubble model, which is what the tech companies are building.
According to the mayor NYC will be under water due to global warming' so smart to stay away.
How are suburbs old/bad news? If google moves to a suburb then the entire community will be comprised of google workers(not unlike coal towns of past). My own community growing up had two main employers in town, a penitentiary and Intel which led to a very high income nice place to live.
Business doesn't get to decide where the best place for them to locate is... the government's central planners know much better than they do!
Move the tech companies into town and shortly none of the current residents can afford to live there.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
It is really, really short-sighted to build major facilities far away from higher order transit. It happens simply to take advantage of externalities. Google and others build away from elsewhere because it shifts the full cost of low-density development onto the public.
I find the other comments here overwhelmingly miss the point. Yes, America is all about suburban development and cheap energy. But it doesn't scale, and it's already well past its heyday.
The core problem that I think is being addressed is this -- if your urban area doesn't have a good mix of uses (work, leisure, living space, etc.) then it eventually starts decaying. San Francisco is the exception to this rule...the Google and Apple employees want to live the hipster city lifestyle and make enough money to do it. These companies save on insane SF rents by locating out in the suburbs where land is a little cheaper. The same is happening with the big investment banks in NYC -- there's no longer a physical reason to be right next to the stock exchange (though your data center still needs to be.) A lot of banks relocated further uptown, or to NJ or CT especially after 9/11. The difference is that there aren't "Goldman Sachs buses" or "UBS buses", but most people employed at these places have enough money to live wherever they want and commute on their own.
Other "less desirable" cities have the problem of people not wanting to live in the urban core, the reverse of what's going on in San Francisco. I've never actually been to San Jose/Cupertino/Mountain View/wherever in SV, but I imagine it's something like where I live (Long Island, suburban NYC.) We have some very nice places on LI and other communities surrounding NYC, but it's mostly very expensive sprawly development you find around most big cities. Tons of people use public transportation to get into the city every day, mainly because much of the area was at least somewhat designed around it. There are big employers on Long Island too, but not as many reverse commuters. The problem is, if businesses are downtown but _everyone_ goes home to their suburban towns after work, nothing is left to prop up the city center after the offices are done for the night. Google and Apple want to attract the hipsters, so they choose to ferry them from their hipster neighborhoods to the relatively boring suburbs. Most other employers in most other locations cater to the suburbanites, As a result, those cities' urban cores decay and become shells after 6 PM on weekdays. Fewer residents --> fewer businesses to cater to their needs --> crime and urban decay. Look at Buffalo and Detroit as extreme examples of this -- the suburbs surrounding the city have basically become the only sustainable parts of the city. Atlanta is basically a city of suburbs with no comprehensive public transportation and nightmare traffic as a result. Urban planning is really tricky to get right.
It's not an easy problem to solve. Everyone wants it both ways -- the 2 acre mansion PLUS the urban hipster bar/club scene. But the MTA is right in saying that Google buses are bad for (most) cities. The most sustainable development is a mix of uses in both city and suburban settings.
When push comes to shove, Progressive Insurance abandoned the principles behind their name?
Or did they?
Aren't today's "progressives" really nothing more than class warrior statists shouting "higher taxes for thee, but not for me"?
Its not even a "private alternative". I can't pay someone to take these Google buses if I am not one of the sanctioned few who work in the pearly gates of Apple, Google, Yahoo, etc... Its not even close to the services to the MTA provides, if you actually took the MTA you would understand that.
I take it everyday and so does everyone else here. This is the great thing about NYC that people out in the burbs don't get. Except for the gilded few that get whisked around in limos and choppers in NYC public transit is the one thing most New Yorkers have in common and it makes for better citizens here. You can just see it in the amount of charitable giving, the lower crime, and the gregariousness of people that live here.
I have lived in 5 different states and 8 different cities. I grew up in North Dallas, the home of the suburb. I can say with experience that this guy has a point because I have lived on both sides of the fence of this argument.
More people are NOT moving to cities, in general. NY, where this person is from, is the exception.
http://www.newgeography.com/co...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
' tech companies seem not to have gotten the memo that suburbs are old and bad news,'
Well ok, you must have not gotten the memo on how big cities are over priced, over taxed - cesspools..
Thank you kindly, but Ill take my suburbs any day.
As someone who was recently visited San Francisco for a prolonged period of time, here's my take on the whole Google Bus fracas:
1. There is very little affordable housing in San Francisco.
A. Rents for $3K/month are not unheard of. This is a combination of greed on the part of the property owners and the county's ridiculously high property tax rates.
B. City planning commission approval for any project is long, drawn out, costly affair, and seems to follow a "Build nothing, anywhere, for any reason" policy. It has actually forced the elimination of planned affordable housing in order to make a project "fit" its vision.
C. NIMBYs in the local neighborhoods block everything left, right, and center to preserve their property values.
D. If the planning commission approves it, the builder then has to get the local NIMBYs to approve it.
2. Because of 1, there is a huge amount of competition for any housing, let alone affordable housing, in the San Francisco area.
3. Because of 1 and 2, a huge population is forced to commute from the housing they can just barely afford to their low paying jobs.
4. Google and the other tech companies actually pay pretty well, so their employees can afford to pay the ridiculous rents that non-rent controlled affordable housing commands, thus providing the property owners with income that counter-balances the ridiculously high property taxes that SF charges.
5. Because of 4 and 1A, a huge number of property owners are more than willing to charge what the market will bear for rents.
6. Because of 5, lower-income people can't find affordable housing
7. Each Google Bus removes 120 cars per day from the roads, lowering commute times and traffic congestion (which has NOTHING on Seattle, btw.)
8. Because of short-sight policies (1, 2, 3), and people who don't understand the phrase "unintended consequences," San Francisco itself has created the mess that Google and other employers are attempting to alleviate through the buses.
9. I am damn glad I do not live in San Francisco, where you just about have to get the approval of your neighborhood NIMBYs in order to put a lawn gnome next to your rosebush - because they are absolutely terrified that any "improvement" to the neighborhood will either increase (result in higher property taxes) or decrease (lessen the enventual resale value) of their property.
If only the Wayne family still had money.
We have no power in the 'burbs....
The comments so far seem ludicrous. This isn't about a government shakedown or some other Libertarian fever dream, it is about putting people's workplaces near where they live, which saves time, energy, and money and generally makes people happier. The problem with Google, Apple, and the other Bay Area tech companies is that their employees live in the urban core, but they work out in the suburbs. This drives up property values downtown, but deprives the city of the tax revenue that it needs to support the tech workers living environment. If Google and Apple were downtown in high-rises instead of sprawing suburban campuses, more employees could bike or walk to work, spend their lunch breaks in the city they live in, and the rest could get to work on existing public transit instead of having to run two sets of buses on the same streets. Suburban campuses are great for companies whose employees live in the suburbs, but it makes more sense for urban employees to have urban employers.
Anyone find it more then a little self serving that the leaders of dense urban cities are saying suburbs are bad?
Why then does anyone move to them? Why do people live in them? Sure, cities have lots of nice things. But they also have things that suburbs do not. Such as backyards. Parks that aren't full of hobos. Quiet streets where your children can play without instantly dying.
How many people in NYC enjoy a weekend BBQ with friends? Pretty much none.
So why is google in one place rather then another? Space... building their complexes in San Francisco would be prohibitive. And more importantly... san francisco is a hassle. You have problems there that you don't have in the suburbs. Such as thousands of bicyclists intentionally trying to slow traffic down... ON PURPOSE. Which is a thing in san francisco.
And so with that and the various transit unions acting up... google decided to run their own shuttle service to help their employees get to work.
Reasonable.
And what do we get out of the urban leaders? "this" shit.
I hope cartoon lightening strikes them from comic little thunder clouds... and gets them all sooty.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
duh, programmers make enough money that they can afford to live and work in places they don't have to worry about getting mugged by some crackhead
yea let's open up a corporate office right in the middle of some section 8 apartments.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Whether cities are good for mankind in the first place? Or is that one of those "assumed truths" of liberalism that is unquestionable?
(from metro Detroit Area personally)
I want to set up my company in a blighted city with little to no street lights, high crime, under-staffed, and under-funded Police, Fire, and EMS departments and subject my employees to over-priced parking lots and high crime.
Maybe these cities need to take a closer look at themselves and see why people and companies are fleeing the cities for the suburbs instead? I know I don't want to pay federal, and State, AND city income taxes, especially to a city you couldn't pay me enough to live in.
Sooo....people in those "high crime" locations are stuck there, doomed to live in poverty forever. Is that it? Because businesses would never bring any money, jobs, and tax revenue there. Why? Oh yeah, because of the "high crime", poverty, undesirables, etc etc etc. You don't see the circular logic here? Really?
Yes I guess it's much better to find cheap space, move in, take over, inflate the prices to where nobody can afford to live there no matter who they work for (have you been to Silicon Valley recently? ANYWHERE in Silicon Valley...?) ... and then watch the bubble collapse every 10 years. Yeah. Much better plan.
He's saying that businesses should buy more expensive property at higher tax rates, in a slum, tear it all down, and rebuild everything new.
In other words: these companies should take it upon themselves to finance urban renewal.
Now I'm all for corporations being better citizens, and giving more back to the communities, but it is laughable to take an area the city can't take care of, and expect a corporation to somehow improve the area by moving in. Corporations aren't in business to make the area's neighborhoods better; that's the job of the city government.
I've seen a number of big, respected corporations in slums. (The Prudential is HQ'd at Broad & Market in Newark - hardly a shining pillar of civilization). The proximity of the company did nothing for the area.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
"You're not paying our taxes, and it's not fair!"
How much do you suppose it would cost for Google to relocate their HQ? Or Apple? The infrastructure alone would cost so much to replicate, it would probably put them into bankruptcy. Okay, they may have made a mistake in choosing their locations initially, but I don't see them changing at this point, the investment has been made...get over it.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
I live in what used to be a "high crime area". The east village new york... You wouldn't have any idea of that today because of the massive investment and insane urban growth that has occurred in the last 20 or so years. My point is that urban areas in the US are filled with space that could be acquired cheaply and could work with the community to become "gentrified".
Mostly what suburban dwellers call "high crime" I see as areas where there are some minorities and some people that work blue collar jobs (god forbid right, sheesh). It most is this reflexive overestimation of the danger that other people that don't look exactly lime them that the suburbs foster. America is full of this jaded thinking, I grew up with it too.
I have never worked for a tech giant in any location, but from what I read they seem to like the "captive" workforce. They provide all the amenities like cafeterias with food better than most fast lunch options, on-premise childcare, cough-and-cold clinics, and so on.
Is it the city sucks to house X thousand workers in one place, or is it that they think they benefit from creating an island that's hard to leave (and they make it so you don't need to)?
I haven't heard of it yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't start offering their own charter schools, at least for elementary ages. My son is in third grade and it seems like school is frequently closed for various days off that I don't get as vacation time. With an on-campus school, he would either not have that time off ("Lean in") or it would just be taken care of by the on-campus after school care they would provide so that I could keep working until 6 or 7 PM without needing to rush home to pick him up.
Plus it would aid in employee retention -- would you want to leave Google for another job if it meant junior couldn't attend Google School anymore. Sure, charter status would require them to let you keep attending, but since you'd be commuting to some other all-encompassing campus in a totally different suburb, the logistics would fail.
most of the IT jobs that people call me about are located in outer suburbs nowhere near a bus stop let alone a commuter train station. some one called me from southern maryland. Another company called from rural Wisconsin called me. There is no shopping center or restaurants near by. no way to take the bus to the nearby town because the bus only runs from like 7 AM to 9:10 AM and 4:30 PM to 6:05 PM.
at least some tech offices in Northern Virginia are near shopping centers unlike the rural parts of the United States of America. No offense to the badger state. I'm sure Milwaukee is a nice to like and work in.
sorry for the rant
Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
Or maybe business doesn't give a fuck about externalities and only wants to maximize its bottom line, no matter what.
The obvious solution is to solve this via costs. Make them pay extra taxes if they put up their headquarters somewhere inconvenient, where it causes trouble to the community (due to traffic, etc.)
Oh wait, all the communities have long lost their spine and are all joined in the race-to-the-bottom competition to attract companies...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Hipster dipshits who think they can have a life and work in tech aren't worth the effort of relocating a business downtown. They aren't the core heavy lifters for the business.
". . . the Googles and Apples of the world should 'locate themselves in existing urban communities. Ideally, in blighted ones," says Dutta, The Director of Sustainability for New York's MTA
I love the article that says businesses should move to blighted areas. Yes, that would be a big recruiting attraction for potential employees! I'd imagine downtown Detroit will become a big hotspot!!
First, lots of hi-tech HQs are downtown in various cities. Google's New York office is in Chesea, not exactly an outer suburb. London & Dublin offices are also central.
Second, if he has a problem with private busses to suburban employers, he's a senior official at the transit authority. Stop whining and work on the problem! He should be thinking about whether new light rail lines could be built to carry that trafiic, not about whether he can talk companies into moving.
Of all the employees at the Google Mountain View site, how many live in San Francisco? How many live in other communities surrounding the HQ? And don't want to live in a city. Should Google bus in its employees living in Santa Cruz instead?
The concept of locating in an urban center where all the hipster employees want to live is a clever way of managing wages. Hire all the cheap college grads who don't mind cramped accommodations and whose idea of 'amenities' is a supply of bars within walking distance. But once they get married, have kids and maybe a few hobbies that take a bit more room, they'll have to commute. Or leave and find a more convenient job. Which might have been the plan all along.
Google (and other companies) are thinking ahead. They look at the long term mix of their workforce and the logistics associated with them over time.
Have gnu, will travel.
Have you been to a downtown? City governments love it when people are there. Parking meters with high rates and low maximum times abound. Better than that, SMART METERS(tm). Smart meters are a new kind of blight on downtowns: if you put several dollars in, and only stay 5 minutes, it senses you have moved your car, and swallows the time down to zero, so the next person pays full shot! It also helps them pay patrol people so if you are half a second late, $50 fine and $100 tow! We won't get into how much more expensive it is to build downtown, how many more zone restrictions, land use restricitons, height, noise and power restrictions come downtown. Lets not forget about the higher tax rate, lack of parking for employees, and bigger challenge for deliveries. Lets not forget too that most technical people find 'suits' to be annoying, pretensions, overbearing, and mostly wrong most of the time. Suits (stupidly) treat people who don't like wearing them as underlings. An example: I personally find that the single use for a tie is to restrict blood and oxygen to the brain, but a suit will insist on their use, use their pull to try and mandate use, and will cheerfully see people walk out the door than have their power challenged. Utterly stupid. I know why cities want companies downtown, and there is nothing good in it for companies.
There's a lot to be said on all sides of this issue. But here's a point of view I see underrepresented: people who live in the city and commute away from it are supporting the city far more than those who live in the 'burbs and commute in to work. Buying lunch downtown during workdays is not a match for paying property taxes and having educated people vote for competent city officials (this isn't an argument to disenfranchise uneducated people, it's an argument to make sure everyone's educated, which also depends on a solid tax base).
Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
Maybe it's not about the mix of amenities and something much more basic -- space. Looking at many of these tech companies, they have sprawling campuses that would be cost prohibitive to do in a heavily urban area (although doing so in a blighted area might work). When this happens, the city cries foul and talks about lost revenue for property taxes (and income taxes if the city has them). But, it isn't really about taxes, it is about space. Besides, cities often give tax breaks for companies to locate in the city so the tax issue is usually moot.
Cities build vertically, but most tech campuses are horizontal. It mimics the campuses of many colleges and universities, which given the relatively young age of the workers, coincides with an environment they are used to. If you are trying to encourage creativity and the like, tall skyscrapers aren't the way to do it. That reinforces rigidity.
Besides, why blame the tech companies, many businesses locate out of the city limits. The difference is they expect you to drive yourself to get there instead of providing their own bus service.
So which 10 acres of downtown would you like Google to demolish to build their urban campus?
Also, I thought gentrification was a bad thing? Now they want to bring MORE people into the city to drive up the rent even higher?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Sounds like the MTA is looking to be paid off by Google before they take the new Communist administration of New York City for a spin and try to hustle Google in its new NYC location. Watch for Google "sponsoring" all kinds of bull shit money-wasting programs around the city to "help the community" (the key word we now use for paying off hustlers).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Google Pittsburgh located itself in a blighted area as well as a number of other Google locations have done the same. I think its a very narrow view to call out google on this if you look at the issue more globally.
i would assume cost is a huge factor. sub urban areas are much cheaper than in-city areas... especially for super large buildings like google HQ. it is probably much cheaper(and safer) to bus people from the city to the HQ than it is to have the HQ located in the city. if cities want people to start locating huge corporations inside the city, they will need to offer the things the companies are looking for: security, price, space, safety, and position. for the most part, cities cannot offer any of these, whereas suburbs can offer all of them.
Its the old complaint of the have's vs the have not's. Everything the successful people have is a annoyance to the people who don't. The reality is that our President
has reinforced the have not's into submission that you don't have to work hard if you don't want to. The have's will take care of you. But weather its Google busses or home prices rising because of success. Those that do not benefit will always complain. In reality their are no have's who really give a crap about the have not's.
The wealthy progressive hypocrites are simply the same as the conservative wealthy in terms of distancing themselves from the have not's. Yea, throw a few bones towards the have not's and call it solidarity. Obama does not even have a clue what poverty means, he has never understood anything other then how to manipulate support in his favor. Yes, he has a good line of BS and nothing else. The key to raising America's income standards is focusing on education like every other successful Country does. China did not accelerate in manufacturing and business by suppressing its people in education. Blacks have 25% unemployment because they are generally unprepared to get a job today. If you are a city and don't want to end up like Detroit. Then embrace those busses and hope that some of that success trickles down. Because otherwise Detroit will be a model for cities everywhere.
"The true mark of a great civilization is not when the poor can afford cars, it's when the wealthy choose public transportation."
When I changed jobs 3 years ago, I moved to Cleveland to be less than 8 miles from my office. That 7.6 mile drive routinely takes 25 - 30 minutes due to ridiculously configured (and excessively numerous) stoplights and the sheer volume of traffic. I am now moving away from Cleveland and adding 20 miles to my commute while adding only about 10 minutes to the time.
Add to that annoying reality the excessive taxes, crappy schools, encroaching crime and you begin to understand why few choose to live within city limits or in the near-city urban neighborhoods. I wish it would have worked for me, but I hate it. I'm out ...
If my company offered a bus service, I would gladly have taken it.
Let Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. put their facilities WHEREVER THEY DAMN WELL WANT TO. They don't need some government loser trying to dictate to them based on what that loser feels is right. Sheesh! We've gotten so far from the basic concept of freedom in this country it's pathetic. There's always some government minder lurking around the corner to cajole, nag and badger you or your company, or force you at the point of a gun, to do things their way. If Google wants to put a gigantic campus in the middle of the barren wasteland of Montana and fly employees to/from every day, let them! Some government flunky shouldn't be stepping in to condemn them for it.
I have three words to explain why these companies avoid cities: Quality of Life
Many of my friends work in and around Washington DC, and I hear horror stories about commute times and traffic jams. I moved down here from nowheresville Western MA where my commute was 20 minutes when there was no traffic and maybe 4o to an hour if there was and that sucked... but friends of mine down here? they're regularly looking at 2 hours + and anyone who wants to live close enough to only have an hour? yeah well, half a million might buy you a postage stamp to live on....
I telecommute today (live in VA and still work for a company in MA) and I tell you my quality of life is tenfold better not having to deal with commuting to/from the office and all the stress it caused. and yes, I know my piddly 20-60 minute commute is nothing compared to what a lot of folks put up with.
Big Cities are more hassle than they're worth for the most part
The Digital Sorceress
Why on earth would a New York City MTA executive tell companies they need to locate in big city downtowns? Surely he doesn't have an ulterior motive, does he? I wonder what the advice would be if we surveyed small-town mayors. Obviously biased news is not news.
Many cities in the United States want the economic growth that comes with population growth. They want to grow grow grow. It has nothing to do with environmental sustainability and everything to do with budget sustainability. It takes a large amount of infrastructure to stack millions of people into a few square miles. Infrastructure that requires high taxes.
1) Without a measure of goodness there is no way to determine "best", "worst" or even "better" or "worse".
2) The previous can be reversed to determine actual measure of goodness given a valuation of "best" or such.
It sounds like MTA director is about revenue, so good for him. He is not, however, qualified to make good decisions for startups in Silicon Valley. If he was, then he would be making Billions at Facebook instead of Pennies in civil service.
Perhaps he could investigate the root causes that drive the decisions, things like huge costs, poor infrastructure, and a low-quality work environment - and address those to get the start-ups back into downtown/old-town/urban restoration.
Maybe NYC and SF should build walls around their cities with barbed wire and mine fields to keep citizens from leaving. Then the companies will have to "pay their fair share". I hear it worked for East Germany.
Nothing makes it easier to recruit top talent than telling them "You'll have a hellish commute to a blighted community ... when can you start?"
Whiny libertarian leaning suburban people who don't know about public transit or running a business in a big city tell guy who does that he is wrong.
Judging from the clueless, anti-urban comments predominating here, maybe the site should be renamed "Slashyokel".
NYC used to be a very affordable place to live
Not in the last 40 years it hasn't been - not for anyplace I'd want to live anyway. Maybe if you lucked into a rent controlled apartment or something but affordable is not a word I would ever use to describe anything close to NYC. I almost moved out to NYC a few years back and shopped for houses on Long Island, Brooklyn and up towards White Plains. A very modest house cost 4X what it does out here in the midwest where I live now and I'm not even talking about places like Manhattan where the cost per square foot goes into the stratosphere. A house that would cost around $100K here costs around $400K anywhere close to NYC.
and now Manhattan is probably the safest city (or city portion, and definitely downtown area) in America.
You're going to have to provide a LOT of data to back that assertion up. Manhattan is like any big city downtown area with the same features and dangers. I can think of plenty of cities where I would feel more safe than Manhattan. Crime has obviously fallen in NYC but "safest city in America"? Color me dubious.
Come for the blight. Stay because you have to.
Seattle/Pacific Northwest, Western Washington is has a lot of tech companies. Guess where you do not find them? Correct, in downtown Seattle. In fact, you rarely find them in downtown any other cities around us, they are out in the suburbs. Microsoft, Nintend Amazon while it's headquarters are just off of downtown (in fact, just a few blocks away from me), it's warehouses are not in the city.
Also, the cost of buildings downtown are expensive. Rent is horrible. If i had a big company I needed workers for, I'd go to the outskirts and pay way less, be even able to buy the land instead of renting. And lets see, Nintendo did that, built it's place way out in Redmond, decades ago before there was the big population explosion we got in Seattle in the late 80's to 90's. Microsoft has it's campus in Redmond also, way the fuck away from everyone. Amazon doesn't have it's warehouses in Seattle, but does have it's corporate office, which I imagine has way less employees that any of their other buildings. Plus it's about 5 blocks from me. =)
Plus there is no room to park in Seattle, and I doubt that is any different then most major cities.
I'm going to point out any big ass company that decides to rent in a city for more $$$ then the outskirts of a city/suburbs is stupid.
Be seeing you...
Really, make your blight more attractive to buyers and solve your own problem instead of using your government soapbox in a false flag effort.
The hippies, homeless people and Black Panther wannabes aren't really paying property taxes, are they?
The corporates and the people who work for them are.
So who's to say the people running the city government won't tell the former to go fuck themselves in favour of the latter? That'd be consistent with the logic of the free market a-la-USA.
but the metro area I live in (Georgia) is not safe for kids in town. to be fair it's a lot less bad than it was when I was a student at Georgia Tech in the late 80s but most people w/kids & good jobs lives in east Cobb (us) or north Fulton (which has been trying for decades to split off from south/city). and before you say I don't know what I'm talking about I spend plenty of time in town - I work in Buckhead & have had GT season tickets for 15+ yrs/seen Midtown's renaissance (was actually working in Biltmore in early 00s when all that started). great to eat & visit but raise kids? no way...
There is a lot of propaganda being pushed by major cities telling us that everyone who is anyone wants to live the "city lifestyle". Much of the media is located in and influenced by the major cities of metro areas, not the suburbs, so we are constantly being told that you are boring or unsophisticated if you prefer the suburbs. The hope is that people will want to be part of the "in" crowd, move to the city and increase tax revenue.
Further, it's the only "modern city" where neither or the airports are on the subway .... it's easier to take mass transit from Newark into NYC than it is from La Guardia or JFK.
Google did not build their campus anywhere. They moved in buildings that SGI did not need anymore.
Why not let your employees telecommute.
Seriously, how many people working there actually *have* to be there to perform some job function? I'm willing to bet most could easily work remotely.
This will help traffic. No commute for the employee, and less traffic on the road for those that really do need to be on-site.
The employee get's to live where they want to live.
The "green" crowd is happy because of less greenhouse gasses and consumption of energy.
The business will not have to house so many people, will save on utility bills, office supplies, insurance and rent - lowering operating costs.
The only people this does not appeal to is the boss-man fucktard overlord types that need to see an army of people sitting beneath them slaving feverishly away at killing time and trying to look busy.
How else are they going get their ego boost?
That's exactly where I want to go to work ... in a blighted neighborhood. And I want to ride public transit to get there. Uh huh.
moving in tech companies is much cheaper than blowing up a levee
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Yes, I want to move my company and all of its resources (i.e. employes) to your shitty city center which is plagued by over crowding due to idiots who think stacking people on top of each other is a good idea.
You can keep your transportation, supply, environmental and crime problems for yourself. The rest of us don't need to move to your shithole just to make it not as bad for you.
Its your fault you live in an over crowded concrete desert, not mine. You don't like your city, get a clue and move like everyone else.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Translate: we need more tax revenues so that we can create more pointless political appointment (hack) jobs for the incompetent/corrupt in return for political favors (payoffs).
And from the sustainability guy no less.
This is an organization that's so mismanaged that when I go to register my car (something that has nothing to do with the MTA as I typically don't drive anywhere near the city), I get assessed a fee to the MTA that costs more than the registration because they can't manage themselves properly. Oh, and they still can't figure out how to keep from raising fares.
Anglospeak amarewill lifeating, constant evolvatizing langwich. deal.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"Googles and Apples of the world should 'locate themselves in existing urban communities. Ideally, in blighted ones,' says Dutta."" Right so I can live in a place I think is nice but am forced to work somewhere that is awful? No thanks.
-Xen
What a load of masturbatory crap
"The Director of Sustainability". What is that?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
" Ideally, in blighted ones"
Where do you live, Mr. Dutta? If you don't live in a blighted area, then you're not doing your part.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
They can work on the bus. There is no need to drive it all the way into town.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
says person employed by government bus company.
lose != loose
Give someone a title like that and they must, almost by definition, have absurd opinions.
That google disagrees and has good reasons to want to be in the burbs? Being a city is NOT an absolute good, no matter how much you hated growing up in the 'burbs.
You can't blame Cleveland, the companies are trying to make everything a race to the bottom.
Not a bottom - an equilibrium. They didn't move where there were NO taxes. They moved to where the taxes were reasonable.
you know what would happen.
Yes, eventually everyone would be paying reasonable taxes instead of rates that are way too high for a business to be competitive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Based on the number of aggressive response, in psychos live in suburban areas. Would you prefer to live around psychos for years or get $30 stolen from your wallet once in a decade...
http://travel.cnn.com/tokyo/life/japans-corporate-graveyards-806101
Are you confused as to what the word private means? If it was available to any arbitrary person, then it would be public.
Your tripe about the train in NY making people better reeks to anyone who actually rides it. People don't talk to each or even so much as make eye contact. That doesn't make better citizens.
I stopped reading when you implied that riding the train breeds gregariousness and lowers the crime rate.
The head of a government-run transit monopoly is upset someone else is providing a competing service.
Liberty in your lifetime
He has two primary responsibilities: 1) To reduce the environmental footprint of the MTA and 2) to verifiably measure the carbon benefits that accrue to the region, due to the MTA. In a carbon-constrained future, this could generate resources.
Neither of which gets me to work on time. Get rid of him.
"Are these buses running off of fuel made from baby seals?"
Let's hope so. Like whale oil, it's a renewable resource and therefore inherently "green."
Where do you think the raw materials for their projects come from????
Then let first the city planners fix the traffic issues if they want any new business going in there.
Fixing traffic involves getting rid of cars and encouraging public transit, walking, and cycling.
Building more roads and highways makes traffic worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Just ask LA how well building more highways has helped with traffic.
You give them billions and billions in tax credits to build out of cities, then call them out for doing something you are giving them an incentive to do?
Henhouse locks are bad for foxes, says a leading fox union spokesman. There's a shocker..
Organization? You must be joking..
No surprise here. Had a tech company in San Francisco try to recruit me recently. I told them that they would be unable to pay me what I would require to live in the San Francisco Bay area. Because they would have to pay me close to half a million a year so that I could enjoy a similar lifestyle that I currently have in non-urban part of the country--and then I'd STILL have to put up with the traffic and the other urban BS. Riding in a limo to get anywhere only helps so much when it still takes forever to get there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
This is what happens when a city plans for and creates public housing. Like it or not, the reality is that cheap housing with tightly packed living space will always attract crime and generally be terrible places to live. See: every housing project ever. This is why companies build in the burbs.
so, is he suggesting that the urban-displacement problem would be better if the companies had the square-footage equivalent of their campuses IN downtown, and many more of their employees living there also? Or that they should build in the periphery of the city, and cause rent escalation in those depressed areas? They might still need buses then as services (including transit) are poor. Or that the suburbs should somehow be 'forced' to develop services so more people (want to) live there? (Has he looked at property values in Mountain View recently?) Or that they find a green-field site and build little FoxConns because all their employees would love to live in a company town with nothing else to do?
Google and Apple are centrally located in well-populated cities. Why is it their fault that regional transit is so poor? Why has there been not a single significant regional transit in half a century (basically since BART, though it has expanded a little)?
Perhaps the regional transit directors should be asking how badly they have failed if shared buses on fixed timetables are carrying 30%+ of what CalTrain carries. Those people clearly WOULD ride public transit if it worked and had decent service and coverage. Has he looked at what regional transit actually looks like in a well-developed city (e.g. the RER in Paris, the metro in Seoul or Shenzhen, the S-Bahn in Munich or Berlin), and then compared it to what's available to those who work at these tech companies?
sheesh
Oh please please please.
so what property do you demolish to build these new offices - not going to be popular if Google demolishes a load of affordable housing in NYC or SF. Interesting that in London Google is building new offices round the back of St Pancras which was a sketchy area until recently
I've lived in a couple cities in Michigan and I lived in San Diego years ago. In both cases, I've found myself gradually moving further and further from the city to nicer and nicer apartments, with longer commutes. At one point I lived 5 miles from my job in San Diego, but had to deal with bums being passed out the courtyard of my apartment, a gang of kids running across the top of the parallel parked cars, including mine, and other such nonsense.
Living in the city sucked. Parking on the street sucked. Public transport was sort-of an option, but certainly not an appealing one.
So I live many miles from work to this day. Rather than wanting to live in the city, I'd like to find a job in the suburbs.
and Google, Apple, etc. are providing mass transit from one city to another within the region. I used to commute (drive) from the South bay (Morgan Hill) to Cupertino daily, which (on a good day) meant 1.5 hours of driving to go 30 miles. I couldn't afford to live in (and frankly didn't like) Cupertino, and the mass transit in the bay area is a joke (I'd be looking at 3 hours between the train and bus for the same commute).
When Apple started their bus service I used it and never looked back. And doing so eliminated (at the time) about 150 cars from the road for a single route, and there are now (I think) 10 different direct routes, with double-decker buses (80 vs. 50 people per bus) plus shuttle service to traditional mass transit locations.
If anything, the new buses and shuttles have probably only served to increase ridership on public transit while removing a shitload of cars from the road. How is that bad, exactly?
I print, therefore I am.
What is this 'driving' you keep talking about? If the campus is in the inner city then the employees can use public transport. But if there is nothing in the city, there won't be any public transport. You Americans have a chicken and egg situation here, since you killed the chicken and ate the egg, but it's not my problem.
You fell for the elaborate reverse-double-troll.
Because of the Internet, employees of information businesses are able to accomplish most if not all of their need to be present at other businesses for meetings without the need to physically travel there. The main exception to this is food and exercise. Enlightened high-tech companies have realized that providing a gym and a cafeteria will satisfy those needs (and others like doing laundry, and day care). Employees don't need to go anywhere else, so they don't need transportation other than their commute, which is easier to do if you don't have to drive through a city.
This is different than what these old cities evolved to support: Lots of physical transportation, to provide people with the ability to go attend meetings and appointments at nearby offices in densely populated areas. Telepresence invalidates a major portion of that model, and the inner-city is feeling that competition. This is the same thing that happened to newspapers, and other print media. It's happening to television networks.
The old ways are going away because they can't compete with the new paradigm. They need to reinvent themselves, or they need to stop wasting our resources.
It's hard to come up with a location that is good for everybody. Locate in the city and it's good for the transit users but bad for the people who drive to work. Locate in a distant location and it's the other way around. C-level executives mostly drive, so they are the ones who get their wish.
After having lived in cities overseas (Asia and Europe), honestly most US cities are unworkable, unsustainable, unlivable hell holes. If anyone is responsible for making them so, or reversing this, it's cities themselves first rather than tech companies.
Part of why I'd sooner move our tech company overseas to downtown Taipei, Singapore or similar than move it to downtown SF or NYC.
Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
As is, any decent business that intends to be economical, will build in a place that is of advantage to them, while convenient to their clientele.
If a city area does not have the attributes a company is looking for, why would they locate anywhere else? If they are willing to bus in their employees, bully for them! The city should be happy that there's an employer willing to add to the local economy.
If a city truly wants to revitalize an area, they need to make it appealing to a company to set up there. Tax incentives, for example. Perhaps a city could petition for companies of certain types and demographics to build a neighborhood of sorts, including residential units for employees of the core.
Want to build a community? Plan it out, and fill in the blocks. Leaving it to market whims, and dumb luck doesn't exactly promote growth.
...just wow. Spend more money on physical security, while exposing your precious, hard won talent to indigents, whores & crackheads. Where is NYC MTA getting these brain donors?