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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.
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..
... 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.
My company opened another office in the Houston metro, and when we were looking for locations, one of our candidates was in a new industrial park that was literally across the street from a group of multi-million dollar homes (and not in the California sense where an 800sqft shithole sells for half a mil, but in the rural US sense of a 5k sqft mcmansion on 5 acres). I had someone explain the zoning laws (or lack thereof) to me and had my mind blown. NIMBY definitely does NOT seem to be a thing down there.
It's rather mind boggling to me, but it seems to work for them.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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
Sometimes speech is also conduct, and conduct can be regulated. For instance, if I call you up and say "give me a million BTC or else I'm going to kill your family", surely that's speech but it's also criminal conduct (e.g. 18 USC 875 for Americans, YMMV elsewhere). Similarly, if two coffeehouse owners in a small town meet over lattes and one says "Let's raise prices a quarter" and the other says "Sure, we'll change ours next week", surely that's speech, they are just talking, but it's also criminal conduct (15 USC 1). Or urging a specific person to commit suicide. The fact that all of these crimes are accomplished by talking doesn't magically throw First Amendment protection over conspiracy to fix consumer prices.
The same is true in civil, as opposed to criminal, law. Libel, defamation, and slander are tortious, even though they are obviously speech. So are tax fraud, misleading investors and filing false business reports, even if you use a printed medium to convey them. Publishing your company's trade secrets as a book (or a newspaper) won't get you off the hook, neither will failing to pay generally-owed taxes or follow generally-applicable laws (like zoning) for your magazine. I mean, no one (I think?) believes that the NYT or /. can just ignore the zoning laws and set up whatever, wherever any more than they can violate labor law or building codes or tax law (right?).
Eugene Volokh did a fairly thorough review of the boundary between speech and conduct.
Increase the density allowed and allow building of mid and high rise appartments inside of SF and other bay area suburbs. Not an instant fix, but it would fix it over a decade.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I agree; 40 years ago, who would have dreamed that the auto industry would move most their production away from Detroit? That most of the city's factories would be vacant and collapsing? We've already seen the largest company in the world go bankrupt and be purchased by the US government.
Who would have dreamed so many factories would abandon the US entirely?
In much the same way, software development and R&D may well collapse in Silicon Valley.
Nobody has a crystal ball. Diversification in a financial portfolio has always been good advice; how would it be any different for your tax base?
At the end of the day, skilled people have the freedom to move as opportunities do. Cities can't.
While Silicon Valley is in a golden age, who is to say if or when those jobs will abandon the Bay Area entirely?
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.