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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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..
That is tremendously unconstitutional.
While I appreciate the point, it's no more unconstitutional than any other zoning ordnance or land use regulation.
That said, it's a perfect demonstration of why you want government to have as little power as possible.
#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.
Works for Houston
http://thefederalist.com/2016/...
As to your point, I just love the idea of the politically connected driving me from my home or destroying my business.
... 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?
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.
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.
There is a reason the car industry that remains in America is not in Detroit (some is near).
Detroit thought they had an immortal golden goose. Turns out they were wrong.
Cities need to remember that business can vote with its feet.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Brilliant idea. Until there's an earthquake.
Tokyo has many skyscrapers, and in 2011 was hit by the 9.0 Tohoku Earthquake, one of the biggest quakes in recorded history. Number of Tokyo skyscrapers that collapsed: 0.
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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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
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.