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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.
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.
'...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.
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
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."
> 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.
Really.
Apparently the thousands of tech workers that Google, Apple, and others are shuttling from SF to the Peninsula want to live in a city.
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.
Great idea! Didn't google recently buy a robotics company??? Introducing the Google ED-209! Now with android support!
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?
I worked for a Dot-com that shared the building with a methadone clinic. I would not recommended it.
Less traffic in the suburbs? In what country? In US suburbs, nobody can take public transportation anywhere, so the streets and highways are choked with single-occupancy cars. The transit infrastructure is all about getting from the inner suburbs to the city center. Suburb-to-suburb commuting by public transit means turning a 30-minute drive into a three hour trip downtown and back.
Back when the transit systems were designed, they never anticipated the commuting patterns we have today.
Also, reverse commuting isn't just for hipsters. Outer-ring suburbs are too expensive for low-wage workers.
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
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
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.
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
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.
make it worth their while. ... quit asking them to do things that are not in their best interest.
And that narrow view sums up the problem. Where is your sense of social responsibility? Or if not that, can you at least muster some enlightened self interest? You know, the thought that improving a neighborhood is in fact in your own interest, and that just moving into a neighborhood will improve it? That's assuming the business isn't one of those irresponsible sorts that sets a bad example by spewing pollution into the environment and then walking away from the mess they made, leaving it for the public or natural processes to clean up.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.
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.
make it worth their while. ... quit asking them to do things that are not in their best interest.
And that narrow view sums up the problem. Where is your sense of social responsibility? Or if not that, can you at least muster some enlightened self interest? You know, the thought that improving a neighborhood is in fact in your own interest, and that just moving into a neighborhood will improve it? That's assuming the business isn't one of those irresponsible sorts that sets a bad example by spewing pollution into the environment and then walking away from the mess they made, leaving it for the public or natural processes to clean up.
Except that spending my money to improve a crap hole neighborhood is almost certainly not in my best interests. It would cost far more money, have far greater risks and likely benefit me not at all beyond a PR move. Building a new corporate HQ in a blighted area is almost always going to be a moronically bad idea for nearly everyone concerned except the city which gets to tax you to hell and gone for the privilege. On top of that you're almost certainly going to have greater security concerns and far higher crime rates to deal with.
Can you imagine the recruiting message for getting new employees to work at said HQ? Come work in beautiful downtown Crimeville! AKs provided for your security! Only 12 muggings this week!
Yep, awesome idea.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
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.
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
I agree with you on the public transit experience, specifically with the nature of people they tend to employ. It seems as if these jobs are given away to people as some last ditch effort to try to keep them out of the legal system and/or our jails.
Imagine my shock the first day I arrived in London and had to interact with one of the service men behind the glass in one of the tube stations. He was helpful, well spoken, detailed, and treated me as well a maitre d' of a 5 star restaurant would. The difference in competency was stupefying. This may be just an isolated incident, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
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!!
Why are you using social responsibility and a business in the same sentence?
A business is there ONLY to make money for itself and/or shareholders if it is public.
Its gift to society is generating jobs for people and helping to fund the community at large by taxes, etc.
But really...there is no social obligation by a business, that is something that is up to individual people in how they interact with each other.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
News flash: NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO LIVE IN HE SAME PLACE. If a company is located in the city, some employees will commute in from the suburbs. If a company is located in the suburbs, some employees will commute from their homes in the city.
What's the problem? Did this guy just discover "you can't please all the people all the time"? If so, he's about 150 years behind the curve.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Hmm..sounds more like the definition of a failed business.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
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.
No, we live in the city. Hell, in chicago, the city > suburb morning commute is rivals the suburb>city morning commute. Our generation will NOT be putting up stupid suburban office warts. Those are for olds.
Why are you using social responsibility and a business in the same sentence?
A business is there ONLY to make money for itself and/or shareholders if it is public.
Its gift to society is generating jobs for people and helping to fund the community at large by taxes, etc.
But really...there is no social obligation by a business, that is something that is up to individual people in how they interact with each other.
Hiring employees is not a "gift to society" It is a means of increasing the value to the shareholders. Without at least some employees, it's hard to turn a profit. As for socially responsible, well, that's interesting. Companies can choose to be socially responsible or let the public rise up and enact legislation forcing them to do so. Companies don't operate in a vacuum. Everybody complains about OSHA and the EPA, but they only exist because companies weren't socially responsible in the past and once the government gets involved, it's like opening pandora's box.
Put differently, being socially responsible increases shareholder value in the long run.
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.
I agree in that a business should not have "social responsibility" any more than they should be required to provide healthcare or any other benefits beyond a paycheck. However, I do like it when a company works social responsibility into their business model - the more you do for a community, the more they (hopefully) patronize your business and everybody wins.
"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.
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...
Oh come now, are you telling me you wouldn't want Google to park itself in South L.A.? I mean come on, think of the attraction that would have for all those 20 somethings. "Why play the video game when you can live it? Grand Theft Auto: Google edition"
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
The real problem with the "social responsibility" approach is that it leads to conclusions that the busybody do-gooders won't like. The option that is actually socially responsible is to take the the cheaper option. If an option is more expensive, there's probably a good reason (like overloaded infastructure).
Giving gifts to your local equivalent of downtown Detroit is NOT social responsibility. It's just some hipsters personal agenda.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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 was a picture posted today of a Washington Metro (subway) station manager flipping off a passenger asking a question.
I've noticed this too; mass transit employees in the eastern US (at least) tend to be exceedingly assholish, with a few exceptions. One notable one is the folks who run the MARC trains, the commuter rail from Maryland to Washington DC; they are *excellent*.
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?
Your sense of altruism is admirable. Good idea for an individual, but horrible for business. The only way to succeed in business is to minimize expense and maximize profit. To work for the greater good is more suited for nonprofits (even if I personally agree with the idea).
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
Wrong,
He is badmouthing poor Transit infrastructure planning that he is responsible for and asking for people to pay his company for substandard service that can be provided with cheaper alternatives.
I also think it is funny that he is referring to south bay as the suburbs of San Francisco. Realize that San Jose (South Bay) is a larger city than San Francisco, Cupertino (Apple) is just minutes from downtown San Jose, and within a mile of the actual city border. San Fransisco has INSANE property values and would be very difficult for a company to build a building that can host 10K+ employees there. It was hard enough for apple to get permission to build in Cupertino.
To say the younger crowd is interested in living and working in the city isn't quite right. Many of the younger crowd prefers to live and work in the "suburbs" to the convenience of living, shopping and parking all without the burdens of getting mugged, having my car broken into and having streets that smell of urine. Frankly NYC and SF are both hellholes to be tolerated at best. I would never live in San Francisco as it is way too expensive, the schools are bad - and frankly anything that is worth going into the city for I can drive there, enjoy the evening and then Go home to a nice safe place in south bay.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I am rather equally okay with "I pay more tax but get more stuff for it" and "I pay less tax and have to procure stuff on my own". I am also quite okay with "I pay tax to pay for things like police and schools for poor communities who can't afford these things on their own".
What I am not okay with is "I pay tax that gets embezzled", "I pay tax that goes to pay incompetent teachers and for bad schools", and so on. The trouble with the high-tax-high-services model is that it is vulnerable to diversion in a way that the other model isn't.
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
Actually, two of the three airports ARE on public transit: the Newark airport and JFK. There aren't two airports in the NYC metro area, there's 3. Just look at the NYC sectional chart and read the SFRA rules.
It is shameful, however, that none of them are on the subway, and only 2 of the 3 have trains connecting them to to the rest of the subway system. (LGA seems to only be accessible by bus.) Public transit in NYC is a complete mess. Part of this is due to the idiotic feature that a large part of the metro area is on the other side of a state line. New Jersey should simply be eliminated as a state, with the northern half being given to the NYC area to form a new state (along with NYC and Long Island), separate from the rest of New York state. Having a metro area divided up between 3 states makes no sense at all and should be rectified.
"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.
Really.
Apparently the thousands of tech workers that Google, Apple, and others are shuttling from SF to the Peninsula want to live in a city.
What percent of Google employees live in San Francisco and work in Mountain View?
According to the article, apparently it's too many, regardless of the percentage.
The truth is that only a very tiny minority cares about the social responsibility of the business when they do their shopping. The overwhelming majority cares only about whether they get the best deal for their money. People shop at places like Walmart not because they like the idea that Walmart invests a smidgen of their profit in the local community, but because they have lowest prices most of the time.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
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
http://travel.cnn.com/tokyo/life/japans-corporate-graveyards-806101
Why are you using social responsibility and a business in the same sentence?
Because there is no reason you shouldn't have a social responsibility as a business. In fact when corporations were first created they were only created when they demonstrated a public good to society.
You yourself even say that its responsible for the community by paying taxes however a significant number of huge corporations pay nothing in taxes therefore even your meager expectations aren't being fulfilled.
Our generation will NOT be putting up stupid suburban office warts. Those are for olds.
tl;dr
You don't have kids yet.
I've heard stories from people who worked in one of the not-so-nice areas of Milwaukee. They'd often bring people in for interviews, but the candidate would no--show: they'd drive into the neighborhood and turn around to go back to their hotel. While they had 24/7 security patrolling the area they still had occasional bullet holes in the walls of the building.
The head of a government-run transit monopoly is upset someone else is providing a competing service.
Liberty in your lifetime
Really.
Apparently the thousands of tech workers that Google, Apple, and others are shuttling from SF to the Peninsula want to live in a city.
On the other hand, the vast majority of employees at Google's Mountain View campus do not live in the city, and don't want to. There are enough who do to make it worthwhile to run buses, but most don't.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Where do you think the raw materials for their projects come from????
Ding ding ding.
Henhouse locks are bad for foxes, says a leading fox union spokesman. There's a shocker..
Organization? You must be joking..
Give it some more thought. You are speaking from a viewpoint of classical economics, in which rationalism is defined as self-interest. But we didn't evolve to behave that way. Why? Why give to charity? Why take personal risks to help others in danger? Most of all, why have children? Because rational self-interest is not the optimal behavior for maximum survival. Selfishness is not, in fact, always rational for that reason. We invest in relationships because the payback is greater than the expenditure, and not in just an immediate sense. You don't just receive help from friends when you need help, you sometimes receive help from strangers who see that you are generous. This is true for individuals and groups, including corporations.
The business world is littered with failed businesses that stayed within the letter of the law yet ripped off customers and in general played hardball. Then there are the businesses that cheated and got away with a good deal of it. We've bailed out some of these businesses, thanks to them acheiving "too big to fail" status, but they can't count on it. GM could probably get another government bailout if it needed one. Could Bank of America?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Newark IS in NYC; it's part of the NYC metro area.
But otherwise, yes, the whole public trans setup in NYC is rather broken, especially at the 3 airports.
Sure. But you certainly don't help from strangers who want your business to survive. Good luck with that philosophy.
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
Not really. It actually involves not building any more skyscrapers hosting cubicle farms. Especially when all the "work" done there does not require physical presence at all. To paraphrase you, "building more office space downtown makes traffic worse".
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.
No, from what I can tell, NYC is not like that at all. (For reference, I live in northern NJ, an hour's bus or train ride from Manhattan (commutable distance), so I don't actually live there but I'm close and I've been there enough times to know what it's like generally.) In downtown and midtown Manhattan, where all the fancy businesses are (including Google), there are apartments and condos, but the cost for them is astronomical because it's so close to everything. There are some crappier parts of this part of the island, but the nice businesses aren't located there. Most people with money, but not quite so much of it, live farther north, on either side of Central Park, called the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and commute by subway. In the part of town, for instance near Google, where all these nice businesses are located, you're not going to see a bunch of bums or gangs of unruly kids; this is a very expensive, "upscale" area. (Don't get too enamored; due to the city's age, even though it's horribly expensive in these areas, it's still pretty dirty overall. Remember, a few decades ago many of these areas were very run-down; back in the 80s Times Square was filled with seedy porn shops and peepshows and a lot of prostitution, and these days that's all gone as its turned into a glitzy tourist destination. They haven't cleaned everything up yet, as they apparently aren't that good at that.)
Also, there isn't much room for parking (though there are some lots where you can park for $50/day or something like that), but not many people bother, since they take public transit it. Remember, unlike San Diego, NYC does have subways, and they really do work and transport a huge number of people daily, though they are noisy and the subway stations kinda dirty and smelly at times. At least it's not nearly as bad as the 80s when the subway cars were covered in grafitti and muggings were common (remember Bernard Goetz). It also has lots of buses for routes that aren't served conveniently by the subways.
So no, NYC isn't quite like other American cities, which by and large do not have very good public transit. It's not all that great in NYC either, but it's great compared to other American cities which are positively horrible. However, the whole living in the suburbs thing is common here too, due to the astronomical costs inside Manhattan; lots of people commute in by train or bus every day from northern NJ, Queens, Bronx, northern Manhattan (incl. Harlem), "upstate" NY (White Plains area), even western Connecticut (Stamford area). One advantage here, however, is that if you commute by public transit, you don't have to drive, and many of the trains are actually really nice; I'd much rather sit in a comfortable train seat with my laptop and surf or work on a project or just read a book, rather than sit in the driver's seat of a car and battle rush-hour traffic. Of course, these nice trains aren't cheap, but if you compare to your gas and insurance costs (insurance costs more by the mile; you get a discount for driving less miles/year), it isn't so bad, and if you can figure out how to eliminate one of your cars (have 1 car for a 2-adult family, instead of 2 as usual), the train fare will probably end up being cheaper.
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.
Some would argue ED is what really big guns and fast cars are supposed to mitigate.
Our generation will NOT be putting up stupid suburban office warts. Those are for olds.
tl;dr
You don't have kids yet.
Moderators, please mod this up to a thousand. Thank you.
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.