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No Coding in Palo Alto? City Takes On Silicon Valley Growth (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes:The birthplace of Hewlett Packard and Xerox Parc and founding place of Facebook is now considering whether to enforce a zoning regulation banning firms whose "primary business is research and development, including software coding," according to the New York Times. As the Times wrote, "To repeat: The mayor is considering enforcing a ban on coding at ground zero of Silicon Valley." Palo Alto Mayor Patrick Burt told the Times: Big tech companies are choking off the downtown. It's not healthy. Palo Alto is a software capital. It has also become a company town, with Palantir Technologies renting 20 downtown buildings, as Marisa Kendall wrote. Other notable tech firms there include Tesla, SAP, Flipboard, VMWare and many others. It has become a center for automation and cars and is home to Ford's research and development center.
Now can we start tearing down research labs to build more NFL stadia...at the taxpayers' expense, of course.
No company that's not involved with tech is going to pay Palo Alto rent and have to employ people at Palo Alto wages so they can afford to live. It only works with tech.
The purpose of a downtown is to be a shopping and restaurant district. If you clog the place up with a bunch of tech firms, the city ceases to be viable for its residents. There's nothing nefarious here; there's just a desire for Palo Alto to remain a normal city with actual residents mixed in with those tech firms, rather than becoming just a place that people commute to.
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There are too many highly paid, white-collar professional workers living here and working at big, high-paid jobs; they clog our streets with their expensive cars and their expensive housing generates too much property tax revenue. Their high incomes generate too much opportunity in the services sector. We must make participation on the knowledge economy highly illegal.
...don't lay golden eggs.
That is tremendously unconstitutional.
Take all your high paying jobs and tax revenue from reasonably environmentally friendly industries and shove it!
In the past, many cities dealt with excessive demand for existing space by creating more space. The most obvious way to do this is to build taller buildings. We need to find a way to sideline the NIMBYs and BANANAs so that core cities can grow again, instead of sprawling into the suburbs.
To the money.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Don't want growth and prosperity in your area? Create a coding tax. You'll get extra tax dollars for a year or two and you can watch as you downtown empties out like a Walmart on Black Friday.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Downtown in most cities is where businesses are. Wall street is downtown. The US Capital is downtown. Detroit used to have factories downtown. Downtown isn't the shopping district, except where all the businesses left and they made it a shopping district to save it from abandonment.
Do you really want everyone in the same basket anyway? You know what the Eastern comrades are pointing at that place.
This is what I've never quite understood: why does it seem that zoning laws are allowed to ignore constitutional freedoms? Banning research and development, "including software coding" would seem to ignore the right to free speech, free assembly and the right to privacy (if it's my property and I'm not doing anything dangerous toward my neighbors, why does the city care what I'm doing inside?)
Look, I understand that we don't want coal factories building next to residences. That all makes sense to me, and I could see an argument that this doesn't restrict constitutional freedom. But where does a city get off telling a person they can't run a business (e.g. sole proprietorship) out of their home?
So while I'm afraid that Palo Alto could follow through on this threat, it boggles the mind how it could in the USA. I also think it would be royally dumb for them to kick out all of these businesses too, but that's a different discussion.
hope all the other tech companies pull out, killing PA's economy. Then we'll see how they like it.
Ask Palo Alto. They seem to have a plan.
if it is directed only at street level storefront space on University Ave (downtown) and surrounding areas, that's fine. If including the office space around downtown - that's dumb.
Palo Alto has done many dumber things, such as declaring itself a "Nuclear Free Zone". No nucleii allowed!
The zero growth advocacy and climate is similar to Santa Cruz. Their housing crisis is their own creation. The classic hippies vs. techies war.
People who have lived in Palo Alto for a very long time are understandably pissed that it isn't the town they moved into 40 years ago. I remember it before the first tech boom. University Avenue was mainly a place for Stanford Students to unwind at the local restaurants and sushi joints. Some nice independent bookstores and the Varsity Theater. It was a cleaned up but not super busy downtown.
take away the jobs, the residents in the area lose jobs, the city stops with services due to less taxes, etc.
nothing nefarious there either
You were making a joke, right? Downtowns are often also where service industries located, such as courts, lawyers, accountants, etc. Many focused the corporate offices into those so desirable downtown spaces.
Since daytime parking was left empty at night, restaurants around theaters and galleries made sense. Those restaurants that chose to stay open past lunch for the office throngs, that is.
Shopping served the office lemmings well, and could encourage some to linger after work, buy, catch a bite, and commute home after the rush.
Then there are the megacities, which have their own population, and serve it 24x7.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The issue is that:
1) There isn't sufficient money to pay for decent transit.
The county pays for BART to go to San Jose, but isn't doing shit for any of the peninsula cities transit issues.
2) Corporations have been converting retail space (i.e. stuff that actually serves residents) into office space with ~10x the density.
This screws residents.
3) Because of the lack of decent transit, increasing density isn't possible without *severe* impacts to traffic.
And yes, it already takes 15+ minutes to go about two miles on a number of arterial roads.
The traffic is REALLY FRACKING BAD.
So, if you're crying about NIMBYs, shut the eff up, and look at the fact that there are *real* problems here that density cannot solve until the infrastruture to support that density arrives.
I'd rather have cheap housing with increased density. Since that cannot happen reasonably right now, I'd like for the retail -> office space conversions to stop.
Downtown is only a shopping and restaurant district in third-world European shitholes where all the real businesses and jobs have left. In the productive world, cities are where many (not all) productive people go to be productive. Yes, there will be places to shop and to eat, but only trashy European shitholes have shopping and eating as the main attraction.
So, once Palo Alto chases out all of its businesses and sinks into urban decay, do we get to have our own Devil's Night here on the west coast? A friend on mine from Detroit has told me that it's a heck of a show, even if you're not actually participating in the festivities yourself.
Imagine all the people...
In a small town, which is what Palo Alto is, the downtown is the retail center.
Office parks do fine for offices, and are typically, at least in most *towns* not in downtown.
Liberals yell and scream about equality and people needing good paying jobs. Then a bunch of high paying jobs move in. Now they complain people are making too much money and too many people have a high standard of living. They're only happy if jobs provide just enough income to make people comfortable, but yet still reliant on government services to buy votes with. Not to mention that those jobs are union controlled and sending parts of people's paychecks to the pockets of the union leaders. Success is the enemy. You can't control the successful.
Many cyber criminals prefer doing their dirty work on marketing companies because some offices have access to special tools used by the police, so they give those retards those tools then voilá... You have an army of trolls. Actually, Google Brasil is strongly aiming their forces to hire a prostiture and make me tell her my video game ideas. Amazing. Another awesome thing is a bunch of retards from an office named DNA in here, they even have workers using fake names.Once, a manager was using the name of an old friend who even passed away. I want to kill that guy... And now that a lot of .Net opportunities are showing up here, they are managing to make me get a job as PHP developer tpogether with a reatard head addicted to cocaine and pedophilia, to make me lose another good opportunity again. Hey "amigo", be careful because I train my "chi" since I'm a little turd."
... you'd understand that house prices are becoming unbearable, especially for families, but bearable for startups and research branches of big companies. So the mayor is studying ways to avoid an active-by-day deserted-by-night city. Probably this won't go through exactly as is, but these companies may be asked to leave certain residential areas.
Otherwise known as HELL ON EARTH!
I am still trying to get over the surprise that Palo Alto has something considered to be a "downtown."
In a small town, which is what Palo Alto is, the downtown is the retail center. Office parks do fine for offices, and are typically, at least in most *towns* not in downtown.
Bullshit. Every small town I know has offices downtown and then retail there to support them. That's how towns form.
Could somebody model this in Sim City, let it run for about 20 years in sim-time, and get back to us with hard data?
I can understand how the mayor feels because software coding is just like finance, it does nothing to contribute to the economy other than offer a service. We need a manufacturing economy to bring jobs back. Service economies are third world. However, banning sets a dangerous precedent.
Please do this and point all the companies that move out to Champaign, Illinois.
Massively cheaper cost of living and home to an excellent university that turns out lots of CS majors and other technical types every year.
Sincerely,
The residents of Champaign-Urbana Illinois and surrounding towns. We'd love to have your problems..
VMware isn't spelled with a capital "W". #pet #peeve
This is crazy and so heavy handed. Building up would be a much better solution than this.
Maybe that far West section of Palo Alto out towards Russian Ridge. The East part, along the bay, with all the businesses and where the downtown, is completely indistinguishable from Mountain View or Menlo Park - or basically anything south of SFO and north of San Jose. It literally runs right into its neighbors and one side of the street representing the border is indistiguishable from the other side in another city.
It's as far from a "small town" as Lynwood or Monterey Park are; nominally they are "cities", in reality they are incorporated neighborhoods in a much bigger, continuous metropolis. You wouldn't know it's a new place/city/town exept for a map or maybe a label on the street sign.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Already the city has been under pressure to increase its housing. A planning commissioner recently resigned in part out of frustration with the city’s anti-growth politics.
Apparently the city is a NIMBY/Nogrowth zone
Coding is a combination of writing and math... can you ban writing and math?
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
no longer a problem because slick drag-and-drop tools have made coders obsolete.
Table-ized A.I.
Surprise surprise, if your employees commute into town and incur huge negative externalities, that town is going to vote you out.
Cities or states that depend heavily on a single industry tend to be susceptible to boom and bust cycles. If 80% of the local economy is in oil and oil prices take a dive then the whole area suffers a lot. Same thing can happen in Silicon Valley. If 90% of the area is software related, then if a tech bubble bursts it can send everything into the toilet. Sounds like they want to put a damper on the biggest section of their industry so that other kinds of companies will get all the new growth for awhile.
#1. Because they provide tax revenues from many businesses that otherwise would enjoy income only in the evenings (e.g., restaurants).
#2. Because they work inside existing buildings, without crowding out retail "frontage" on main streets.
#3. Because being together creates interchange of information and ideas, leading to even more new tech startsup.
#4: Because programming (aka coding) is becoming embedded in the mid-level jobs of nearly everyone working at a desk in that city.
#5: Because these four things improve Palo Alto's sales tax (8.75%) revenues, in addition to major local property taxes from those very businesses.
I suspect the writer of the original story doesn't understand the issues, and if there IS a "zoning regulation banning firms whose 'primary business is research and development, including software coding,' it's likely to be challenged, successfully, in court, on First Amendment grounds. The proof would be on Palo Alto city government to show the putative harm to University Ave. businesses. And, that their neglect of that ordinance for decades has been their own fault.
> Wall street is downtown.
I wouldn't consider anything past Canal as 'downtown', that's financial district.
> US Capital is downtown
Again, no. It's again, on the south side of downtown.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Your language of hatred does nothing to boost the significance of your opinion.
Was founded on the East Coast... Harvard, specifically. Unless there's a Palo Alto branch of Harvard I've never heard of....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
In a small town, which is what Palo Alto is, the downtown is the retail center. Office parks do fine for offices, and are typically, at least in most *towns* not in downtown.
Palo Alto ain't that small. On the freeway, it has 3 or 4 exits on Bayshore and 2 on the 280. There are quite a few miles on El Camino Real that one would have to drive between where Mountain View ends (San Antonio Road) and where Menlo Park starts (Sand Hill Road).
Retail center - if you are thinking about the mall, what you have is the Stanford Shopping Mall right on El Camino Real. Downtown, or University Avenue, just has those restaurants and mini art stores that hippies visit, and where one can rarely, if ever, find any parking. As far as offices go, there is a great length along El Camino Real that they can have offices - or even on Oregon Expressway: I hardly see why it has to be in University Avenue
nominally they are "cities", in reality they are incorporated neighborhoods in a much bigger, continuous metropolis. You wouldn't know it's a new place/city/town exept for a map or maybe a label on the street sign.
Or the "Welcome to XXX" sign along El Camino Real (assuming you're reading signs in the medium or along the curb rather than watching traffic).
(Or the color and/or font of the street sign, but see previous parenthetical note.)
... how an overdose of concentration on one particular industry branch can turn your prospering city into a sort of a post-apocalyptic no-go-zone, quickly. I think there is good reason to ensure that there is more in a city than just one kind of employers.
> Wall street is downtown.
I wouldn't consider anything past Canal as 'downtown', that's financial district.
Manhattan has three basic divisions, "uptown," "midtown," and "downtown." The financial district is contained within the geographic area of "downtown" (which starts at the Battery and has a nebulous northern border somewhere between the Village and 34th St).
You're essentially claiming that "Times Square" is not located in midtown, it's in the theater district, or that Harlem is not "uptown."
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Is the Mayor drinking lead-contaminated water or something? Because this sounds extremely stupid. Or does he not want all the municipal revenue from these huge companies in his city?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The issue here is simple. The ultra-rich residents of University Avenue don't want people with mere $100K+ incomes clogging up "their" street and using "their" shops.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The ultra-rich residents of University Avenue don't want people with mere $100K+ incomes clogging up "their" street and using "their" shops.
As a $50K per year virtual ditch digger who commutes in from San Jose, I have no problems eating at the Panda Express on El Camino and Cambridge in Palo Alto.
So they zone out coding.
Bank headquarters have coders. They do coding.
The manufacture of any tech device - microwaves, fridges, stoves, washers, dryers, garage door openers, etc... all have coding...
So the tech coding moves to Louisana, lotsa cheap land now...
Any business could have a guy who 'codes" that prepares an Excel worksheet....
So they really do want to return to hand-crafted wagons, horses and the Amish lifestyle?
But Palo Alto doesn't have any headroom to grow.
Did you miss the second sentence: "The most obvious way to do this is to build taller buildings"?
Detroit used to have factories downtown.
If by "downtown" you mean within the city limits then that was true a loooong time ago. But Downtown Detroit hasn't had factories of any meaningful scale for ages. The actual factories tended to be in other nearby places like Hamtramack, Highland Park, River Rouge, and other areas. Detroit's downtown has been greatly revitalized in the last 15 years in spite of what many of you who haven't actually visited may have heard but very little manufacturing actually occurs in Detroit proper. Instead most of it happens in the greater Detroit metro area which has a far larger population than the city itself.
Palo Alto used to be a hippy town. Jobs used to live in a smaller house on a corner of Santa Rita. Now Zuckerburg bought a city block. Philz coffee is everywhere, There are still a bunch of crappy hotels to bull doze on El Camino. Maybe a grocery store will move in, no that is what Mountain View and Menlo Park is for. and the farm market?, the merchants add 50% to all of their items than the San Pedro Sq one - gotta love it. I used to live in Palo Alto, now I drive through thinking that the city sucks, but all those big beautiful houses are all paid for in cash. The city won't collapse. It still is a lot better than Sunnyvale, Menlo Park, Mountain View, and Santa Clara. But hey, I don't drive in on Page Mill or
University everyday, probably not as bad as Shoreline for the Google people strolling in at 9:00.
Palo Alto is still the only city a business license isn't needed for a house business. Has its own Fiber ring that is freaking expensive.
Don't hate them, in fact I wouldn't care about them. Great weather, hiking at Baylands and the Dish, and new restaurants every year. The people who buy into Palo Alto are already complaining about the traffic from the heavy density housing areas near San Antonio. Housing isn't the issue, buisiness aren't the issue. Too many people have too much money to live there.
Now let's try the new restaurants out at Wolfe and Stevens Creek, and someday Sunnyvale will finish their downtown project. There's always Costco (not in Palo Alto either)
Everything The Government does is Stupid?
Left The Capitalists Free Reign, they know what is Best?
Is this Fox News.
The Concern is That these High Priced Businesses drive op Rents, Squeeze out other Business, and Push out the People who live there.
Then what? The City is a Ghost town after the next Bubble? It is a on factory Town that dies when the "mill" moves?
Or Maybe they will not Move if they no longer have to pay Taxes.
Build Skyscrapers?
So destroy the city and quality of life because what? They already have to import workers.
Controlled sustainable growth, Crazy talk huh?
Look, I understand that we don't want coal factories building next to residences.
Same basic principle just with a different cause and effect. Too much of any single type of business can actually be bad for a city in the long run. The canonical example is a city like Flint Michigan. Flint had a lot of automotive assembly business and the city came to depend on it. Then at some point business conditions caused the companies for various reasons to relocate and the city has fallen on hard times ever since. It might be hard to imagine but it does happen. Plus it can make it really hard to get vital services that aren't provided by highly paid engineers. If the rent is $3000/month how exactly is a janitor getting paid $30,000/year expected to live in that city? It's easy to forget that just because a job doesn't pay well doesn't mean it isn't still vital.
I have no well informed opinion about Palo Alto in particular. I've never been there and know little about the city or its problems. But it is reasonable for a city planner to worry about having too much of the economy and city planning dependent on a single company or single industry.
But where does a city get off telling a person they can't run a business (e.g. sole proprietorship) out of their home?
When that sole proprietorship causes problems. For example if I ran a business out of my house and started using my garage as a shipping dock and having contractors show up daily and basically making the area no longer resemble a residence, my neighbors would be well within their rights to complain and the city likely would take action. If I'm a coder who never leaves the house and basically is quiet as a church mouse then it's unlikely the municipality would care.
So hire programmers instead, since the ban apparently only mentions coders. If someone applies for a job and their resume says they are a coder, that one goes int he rash. If they say they are a programmer, then they can be hired.
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You live in the bay area and eat Panda?
I bet you drive by 5 great, reasonably priced, chinese places to get to it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That is all.
Look all the problems San Francisco is having. More businesses moving into the centre, turns it into an industrial park that shuts down on the week-end. More businesses mean rents go up: Which is alleviated by taller buildings (another concrete jungle) or expanding the the centre, which knocks down older, unique buildings (another concrete jungle) and increases traveling time to work.
Some cities avoid this by building a support centre in the suburbs: It's a chicken and egg situation, since the infrastructure must exist before businesses move in, and it's difficult (and expensive) to build infrastructure before anyone moves in.
The number of people bleating about the right of corporations is disturbing: Is this really what drives the USA? Yes, you do want more businesses moving in (for jobs and revenue): No, corporations are not stakeholders in a city, despite the revenue they provide and services they consume. Wasn't there a big ruckus a few years ago because municipal councils declaring bankruptcy (or tripling taxes) were found to have given tax-exemptions to corporate land-owners? 'The campaign' (2012) reveals the pitfalls of buying corporate loyalty.
Silicon Prairie used to be Gateway country - the Sioux cities in both IA and SD.
Well, to be fair, most downtowns were/are a mixture of both. Shops on the bottom, housing in the upper floors of many buildings. Offices interspersed. Suburban sprawl really changed the way our cities are set-up.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
If there's an overdemand for supply - real estate in this case - and only a limited amount of it to go around, it drives up local inflation with disastrous consequences for the local population. That's what happened in SF.
Let's face it: Those firms don't really need to be in Palo Alto or San Francisco They do it because everyone else does it and if you're a startup you stand a much better chance of being bought out with that address. Think bubbles and herds.
Manhattan has three basic divisions, "uptown," "midtown," and "downtown." The financial district is contained within the geographic area of "downtown" (which starts at the Battery and has a nebulous northern border somewhere between the Village and 34th St).
The "Financial District" is not really "contained" in downtown anymore. The only major players left: Goldman, the NYSE, the AMEX. And Chase still has a building. The other major financial players have moved to midtown on Park Avenue, uptown from Grand Central and the Helmsley Building. For a while, they were building office parks in New Jersey. And what's taking their place? Residential. Yeah, those old office buildings have turned into luxury condos and co-ops.
For me, the upper limit of "Downtown" is the City Hall and Park Row where J&R used to be. Anything North of City Hall Park isn't proper Downtown. It's lower Chinatown, around Columbus Park where the old people do Tai Chi, whereas on the west side is TriBeCa.
Canal Street is the major dividing line running east-west, and hooks up with the Manhattan Bridge. North of that, you have more Chinatown, what's left of Little Italy, and SoHo to the West, and the Lower East Side to the East where you used to be able to get a cheap roach-filled apartment. Then you reach Houston Street, another major dividing line - North of it is Greenwich Village to the West, East Village to the East. The numbered streets start (Houston Street is essentially "0" street). It's all Village until you reach 14th Street.
It's kinda Midtown from there, 'cause it's no longer Village and damn-well ain't Downtown. But really it's Chelsea, Gramercy and Stuyvesant. Midtown, really, isn't until you get past Flat Iron to Nomad, Kips Bay and the Empire State Building at 34th Street. Then it's really Midtown, stretching up Northward until 59th Street which marks the lower end of Central Park... dividing the City between the Upper East Side to the East, and the Upper West Side to the, you get the idea. Get past the Park, you're in Harlem. North of that, Washington Heights and the GW Bridge to Chris Christie-land. Once you reach Inwood, there's nowhere else to go except across the Harlem River to the Bronx.
The town so nice, they named it twice. What I'd do for a slice.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
...talk about cutting your own throat.
As far as offices go, there is a great length along El Camino Real that they can have offices - or even on Oregon Expressway: I hardly see why it has to be in University Avenue
It's because all the startups want to be there (within walking distance of caltrain). The only other Palo Alto corridor available is probably California Ave (where they also have a restaurant row). I suspect too many rich property owners with multi-million dollar houses live along the Oregon expressway corridor for the politicians to even proposed that...
If you haven't been following, El Camino Real through Silicon Valley is slated to become apartment/express-bus row. Nearly all stripmalls tracks along El Camino Real are being purchased by large developers like Pegasus and torn down for apartment complexes. Pretty soon there won't be any small-business/retail/restaurants on El Camino Real and you'll have to go to the various downtowns along the Peninsula and suffer their overpriced concept restaurants (because they are the only ones that can afford enough rent to avoid becoming office space).
I assumed it was just bloatware Samsung created for smartphones, which everyone disabled because it's terrible.
If they have offices and presumably staff, someone must be paying Flipboard money.
What a weird world we live in.
I have a problem with eating Panda Express anywhere at any time... it's gross.
fwiw, I live in Houston but have broads in Atlanta.
Yes, in so much as it's a health and safety issue. Fire in a theater and all that rot. Someone else in this thread already pointed it out but part of the purpose of zoning is to make sure there are places to buy food, gas, etc. Police and Fire Departments are kinda nice too.
Beyond that you're raising a straw man. You can say what ever the hell you want in Palo Alto (within reason as per above). This is about your right to conduct certain forms of business. That's got less than nothing to do with free speech.
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if they could move they would. And you do not want what Palo Alto will have if they don't put their foot down. They're trying to make sure there are grocery stores, gas stations, schools, etc. So that people can actually live a reasonable distance from where they work. You do _not_ want Palo Alto's problems. Hows a 4 hour drive for groceries sound?
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Offices, yes, but offices for things like lawyers or accountants or maybe dentists or barbers—the sorts of offices that normal people would visit on a regular basis. They're not retail, but they're still in the overarching "personal services" category of businesses. Banks also fall into that category (as long as they're branches and not just bank office buildings).
Those sorts of businesses need to be clustered together because they depend on mutual business for their success. For example, restaurants do well when they are near movie theaters (particularly if they have pizza by the slice and other quick food) because kids want to grab something quick to eat before (or after) seeing a movie. Downtowns work when their businesses complement one another.
Tech firms don't belong in the core part of the downtown for the same reason that manufacturing plants don't belong there. Non-employees don't go downtown to visit a Google or Apple or Cisco office. Those sorts of offices should be within a reasonable distance from at least some services (particularly food) because that makes life easier for the workers, but such businesses can easily be a few blocks removed from the main strip without adversely affecting the success of the business. And if they start using space that would normally be used by retail and personal services businesses, they start to adversely affect those other businesses, eventually leading to the total collapse of the downtown area.
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I'm not sure if you've ever lived in New York. Uptown is considered pretty much the area on either side of the park. You can be "uptown" on 60th street but way uptown is 85th. Extends all the way to Columbia on the west side, south of 110th street. North of that is Harlem. Then the Bronx. Midtown is around 14th to 59th with the Empire state building smack in the middle. Downtown goes a little south of the village, near Canal. South of that is more or less the Financial District. But you know, New York -- it's too big for just three or four divisions. Upper east, upper west, off Central Park, East Village, Greenwich, Chelsea, Soho, etc etc.
why does it seem that zoning laws are allowed to ignore constitutional freedoms? Banning research and development, "including software coding" would seem to ignore the right to free speech, free assembly....Look, I understand that we don't want coal factories building next to residences.
Banning extremely profitable companies is a really stupid idea but violating free speech? Really? How does restricting the allowed uses for a building in anyway violate free speech? Having a right to free speech and free assembly does not mean that you can do this at all times in all locations...and if it ever was interpreted in the extremely broad terms you suggest why can't we have "coal factories" next to residential buildings? If it is 'free speech' to allow software companies everywhere why not "coal factories" as well?
Free speech does not just mean freeing the speech you like to hear it also means freeing all the stuff you hate to hear as well. When it comes to the exchange of ideas and thoughts freedom cannot be beaten. When it comes to letting businesses choosing their location total freedom is a really bad idea. This means that some human somewhere will have the power to decide what to allow and what to prevent and humans are sometimes utter idiots. The way to deal with this is to remove that idiot from a position where they make decisions not to decide that nobody is capable of making such decisions.
And all the people also want to live there within walking distance of Caltrain. This in part points to a completely broken public transit system. For comparison purposes, let's compare the peninsula area with Manhattan.
Manhattan:
The peninsula (or at least the part on the Bay side of the mountains):
Now admittedly, Caltrain does have a useful purpose—as a means of moving people long distances. What's missing is a parallel subway system for short trips. If we had that—if BART extended down the peninsula like it should with connections at every Caltrain station plus a couple of stops in between each station—then we could remove about two-thirds of the Caltrain stations (turning them into BART-only stations with no Caltrain stops), allowing them to run the long-haul trains at full speed for longer stretches, which would dramatically improve travel time for everyone (albeit at the cost of an extra connection for many) and would also dramatically increase the number of desirable locations to locate businesses.
Ideally, there would be a parallel BART run at Alameda de las Pulgas, meeting 280 by the time you get as far north as San Bruno, with additional stops at (among others) Lake Merced, Taraval St., Noriega St., Judah St., Geary/Lands End, Presidio, Fisherman's Wharf, and several other spots along the Embarcadero, before terminating at the Transbay terminal where it would meet a proposed spur from the existing BART line. At the other end of that line, it should split at Fremont Ave. in Sunnyvale as follows:
Ideally, there should also be a northern parallel run that goes just north of the 101, branching off from the existing line at Millbrae. This run should swing by the main Google campus before crossing under the 101 near Ellis (to avoid going under Moffett and to allow a stop near the Google Quad Campus and various other large companies in the Bermuda Triangle) and should meet the existing light rail at Middlefield. The light rail takes care of the northernmost route, so the northern BART route should instead follow Maude to Wolfe to Arques to Scott to Central to the new Santa Clara BART station which will be a short people-mover trip from SJC.
There should be short north-south connecting trains at some or all of San Bruno, Millbrae, San Mateo, Palo Alto, and somewhere near the border of Sunnyvale and Mountain View. There should also be a north-south branch from the Santa Clara station to the Westfield Valley Fair station, following Winchester through Campbell, and Los Gatos before going under the Santa Cruz Mountains (non
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But corporate offices absolutely don't belong there. For the reasons you mentioned, service industries and retail work well together. People get food or shop for shoes on their way back from meeting with their accountant. They don't stop at a corporate office on their way back from meeting with their accountant unless they work there, so there's no synergy between corporate offices and the other firms in a downtown area. The corporate offices benefit greatly from being near food, but the reverse isn't true unless the restaurant isn't getting enough business to stay full (which usually points to inadequate parking—something else that corporate offices tend to make worse).
Shopping doesn't benefit that much from being near those corporate offices, either. When you get done with work, most people want to get home. They don't want to go shopping. Now they might be hungry, in which case those shopping areas benefit from being near food, but hungry people will go to get food anyway even if it isn't in the next building over from the corporate office, so the proximity there makes very little difference.
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Halle-effing-luyah.
This, all the way
Holy fuck its like you've never been in an actual city.
Hey buddy, buildings can have more than one level and each level can have different usages. E.g. it's actually not uncommon to find buildings in downtowns that have retail on the street level, commercial offices above the retail and then apartments above the offices. Shit, they can even put a parking garage in the basement as well!
I'm up the road in SF and the company I work for has its office in a building that has hospitality on the ground floor and apartments on the top floors. Us workers don't sit around in a company cafeteria at lunch, we go out and stretch our legs and get at from one of the many local restaurants or takeout places within a few blocks of our office. At the end of the day we walk, bicycle, skate or catch a bus home and at the end of the week we often all go for a few drinks at one of the many bars nearby.
I doubt that these retail and hospitality businesses would be viable without the thousands of office workers that patronise them during the week.
Downtown Palo Alto is a horrible place to put a business. No parking, no mass transit, crowded, overpriced. Only suitable for hipster for startups, should they have the immense amount of money necessary to rent there, but startups are bad for the city as 99% of them go bust.
Downtown offices include not just legal, government, and services, but corporate as well. The same needs, food, parking, shopping, these are needed by all.
Most (actually all) large downtown corporate offices provision parking for virtually all their employees. It's inefficient to not do so. It's the small offices and service employees that scramble for parking.
Everything you declare a benefit of those non - corporate offices is only in greater amount when corporate offices are included. Except for the demand for land.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Problem with that scheme and even I know this despite never having visited California or ever resident in North America is that the morons that built BART decided to use Indian gauge, rather than standard gauge. It has been discussed at great length before on slashdot, but basically adds substantial cost to BART.
They just can't resist the urge to strangle the golden goose, then complain when the eggs don't come forth anymore.
Is Silicon Valley defined as strictly the 408 area code? Meaning Mountain View and Fremont ain't parts of it? Or Scotts Valley - one time home of Borland and Seagate?
Small town of 65k + population? I don't want to live in your world.
Re Microcenter, it's interesting that the one in the world's tech capital would have closed, when everywhere else in the US, they're doing just fine. We have 2 in Atlanta, for instance, although none in the Carolinas. That is always the first place I look for stuff, not just due to price, but b'cos I'm more likely to find something that's exactly what I need. Like an SD card adapter that has both SD and micro SD slots, and plugs into either a USB Type A or a micro USB slot. Something one won't find in Best Buy, but probably would on Amazon
Or did the Mayor get sold some bad Crack?
We TOLD him "ONLY USE REPUTABLE DEALERS" not the cut rate guys.
University ave and the one parallel to that on the south. Nola (map it) is in downtown. So is the apple store, and even Gordon Biersch.
That isn't quite true. Most functional European towns have offices of architectural, retail, financial, design bureaus, construction engineering firms etc, above the 1st floor retail. Those are mostly small companies 10 employees, and occupy second of 3rd floor, just above retail, and there are at least 2-4 floors of residential on top. Then you may have a building here and there where all the 2-4 stories above the retail are offices - like import/export, larger design and construction bureaus, small software companies or ISPs, larger accounting firms,
Oh the horrors, parking on 445 Bryant and having to walk 3 minutes to a restaurant. The parking on Bryant has always had available spaces.
My guess is that this is the heart of the issue. Downtown Palo Alto AKA University Ave. is a pretty vibrant place all day and into the night. But if you were to put offices there like you have in the financial district in San Francisco then you'll find the area is dead after 6PM when all the workers leave.
No shit, I live in a small city with about half a million people and downtown already barely resembles what he describes. Barbershops and dentists downtown?? The first level might have some convenience stores, high end retail, and restaurants but that is about it. The floors above the first are always residential or dense commercial office buildings.
Only app writers can app apps that app other apps. Palo Alto wants app appers, not luddite program coders. (I've been reading too much Slashdot)
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
There's no reason that any extension (beyond the current planned extension) would have to do so, of course. You could just decide that everything newly added to the system will use a normal gauge, albeit with a higher maintenance cost from having to maintain two different train designs. And then at some point you could start single-tracking the leg to that last station while you upgrade to standard gauge, progressively shifting the transfer point farther and farther back one station at a time until you've standardized things.
Even better, you could come up with trains that could switch gauges at a junction point, then build all the new stuff with the new gauge and start upgrading the old rails without interrupting service at all (other than single-tracking while the crews are actually at work) by adding a section of new rail, then removing a section of old rail, shifting the overlap point. And then your next batch of cars (along with any cars that don't have to service the old rails) can be the normal gauge.
Then again, most of the cost of wide gauge is caused by economies of scale, not by the gauge per se. If BART were all over the Bay and were ordering 4,000 cars at a time instead of 700, the tooling cost of setting up for the wide gauge would be distributed over ~6x as many cars, and the price per car would come way down. Obviously that wouldn't make it possible to cut costs by selling their used trains to other cities or borrow other cities' trains to fill in for malfunctioning hardware, but it would still go a long way towards reducing the cost difference.
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Oops. Just noticed I didn't finish one sentence there.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I wish there were a "like" button.
University ave and the one parallel to that on the south.
Hamilton. City Hall is on Hamilton.