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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.
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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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.
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.
Wow, you're ignorant. I actually live in the area. The citys are all for the buses and want to expand the programs. The protestors are locals. Of course there are low income residents of SF- they live with roommates, with their parents, or in rent control. They're being priced out, and that's why they're angry. They don't actually care about the buses- they're angry at the raise in rents, and the symbol of them are the big tech companies. They think that without the buses the tech workers would move further into the valley and lower rents in SF. Not realistic, but they're angry and desperate.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.