High Tech Companies Becoming Fools For the City 276
theodp writes "Drawn by amenities and talent, the WSJ reports that tech firms are saying goodbye to office parks and opting for cities. Pinterest, Zynga, Yelp, Square, Twitter, and Salesforce.com are some of the more notable tech companies who are taking up residence in San Francisco. New York City's Silicon Alley is now home to more than 500 new start-up companies like Kickstarter and Tumblr, not to mention the gigantic Google satellite in the old Port Authority Building. London, Seattle, and even downtown Las Vegas are also seeing infusions of techies. So, why are tech companies eschewing Silicon Valley and going all Fool for the City? 'Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl,' Paul Graham presciently explained in 2006. 'It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities. But a competitor that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage.'"
Soul Crushing? (Score:3, Insightful)
'Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl,' ...
And a city is "soul-crushing urban sprawl".
Big difference!
Re:Soul Crushing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even Manhattan is so small that you can walk across it in less than an hour. The length of it can be walked in 3. That's hardly "sprawl".
The soul-crushing part rather depends on the person, but I don't know many who pine for the suburbs. People roughly fall into urban and rural preferences... I'm sure there are people who revel in suburban life, but it's just not something you run into that often (and I live in the suburbs). Most of the people I know moved to the suburbs because they have kids and want access to the good schools. Of course, I have selection bias since I myself have kids and therefore mostly meet other parents. I confess to knowing one neighbor who retired to our suburb because they were tired of Manhattan.
Soul-crushing? (Score:5, Insightful)
I grew up in midwest suburbs, and I don't think my childhood was "soul crushing". If you don't like the suburbs, well that's fine. You are welcome to not live there. But I just don't get the hateful crusade against them. I personally enjoyed having a decent sized yard as a kid.
Re:finally (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate the suburbs.
I like having my own garage and not being robbed even if I accidentally leave the door wide open.
amenities = low rent? (Score:4, Insightful)
Drawn by amenities
Locally the only amenity offered by "the big city" over the suburbs is incredibly low rent because no one wants to work there. Crippling decaying infrastructure, one of the worst ranked school systems in the nation (no one between 25-50 wants to live here unless they're rich enough for private schools), extremely high crime, police don't respond to anyone not actively bleeding or shooting (that was weird to discover), one of the most racially segregated cities in the North (burbs are much more multicultural, weird but true), no parking so only locals are allowed, filthy, crippling tax/license/fee burdens, larger scale corruption in govt (note the burbs are almost as corrupt, just not quite as big). So why would anyone voluntarily work there? Oh, I see, rents are about a tenth the cost of equivalent rent in the burbs, assuming you can find burb space at similar level of squalor.
Don't ague that world class cities are better than my "top 20 city". World class cities are surrounded by world class suburbs, so Again the only reason to locate in the city is low rents.
There are exceptions where there are pretty good high rent locations squashed up against water features. They don't matter, less than 1% of the population lives and works there. For the 99% of the remaining population, the big cities suck.
Re:Soul Crushing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, here's what I think they're after: City centers (assuming there is a city center, not all cities have them), tend to be areas filled with the things that make the city unique: tourist attractions, public artwork, nifty historical architecture, headquarters skyscrapers of well-known businesses, etc. Suburban office parks tend to be identical no matter where you go: big glass boxes, concrete and glass boxes, brick and glass boxes, sometimes some marble veneers on the glass boxes, mixed with a variety of chain restaurants to feed the lunch crowd.
Another way of looking at it: If you work in a suburban office park, describe how it's different in any significant way from the one portrayed in Office Space.
Re:High cost of living is attractive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those areas have high costs of living BECAUSE they are attractive! People don't bust their ass at Stanford and MIT so they can live in North Dakota. If you want the best talent you have to be in place where the best talent wants to be. People from elite schools aren't interested in living in some hill billy backwater just so they can save 3% on sales tax or some other pissant shit low income tea party losers whine about. My guess is you've never lived in a world class city before.
Re:amenities = low rent? (Score:4, Insightful)
I just have to make sure... you're talking about San Francisco, right? I lived there for more than a decade and never felt particularly unsafe, so I'm not sure what city you're talking about with this "extremely high crime."
no parking so only locals are allowed
This seems to be what your complaint really boils down to. Just take transit. Eventually you might find you prefer a 20-minute bus ride to an hour commute from some soul-crushing suburb, and you will start to appreciate the urban amenities that are available to you that are impossible for a car-dependent suburb to offer.
Re:High cost of living is attractive? (Score:2, Insightful)
other way around.. attractive places have high cost of living, because, gosh, people want to live there and there's a limited supply.
Compare the weather somewhere like La Jolla/UCSD to Baltimore/JHU. If you were a researcher, you'll probably spend your time in the lab, but when you do emerge, it's generally a heck of a lot nicer in La Jolla than B'more.
Last month, they had several thousand people outside at 10PM watching MSL land. Could you reliably plan such an event anywhere else in the U.S.? In the summer: Thunderstorms and rain in the east coast would be typical. Devoured by bugs in the midwest, potentially combined with thunderstorms. Houston? N.O. pretty hot and muggy to be sitting around outside for 3 hours.
Sure there are times of year when the mid-atlantic is gorgeous. about 4-6 weeks in the spring and 4-6 weeks in the fall. California, by and large (the expensive places to live, anyway) is *mostly* good weather, with 4-6 weeks of bad weather sprinkled in.
OK... so that's climate. What about transportation hubs: Check.. got them in CA. What about access to universities: Check. Even with all the lame-ass things they're doing to the UC and CSU budgets in the legislature, it's still a pretty good place to go to school, and for all the whining, public schools in CA are fairly good (particularly in nicer neighborhoods.. those suburban office park locales for instance).
What about food to eat? California produces just about any food you care to name, and unless you've lived there AND somewhere else, you don't truly appreciate how much fresh produce is around. Sure, these days, they air-freight stuff from Chile and other places just about anywhere, but that hasn't always been the case. California has a longer tradition of using it (perhaps Sicily has a similar culture, but the choice is more limited), so it's just more prevalent. At the very top income end, of course, you can get anything (I've seen strawberries from Oxnard, advertised as such, in the Harrods food hall), but the overall "quality of life" thing comes from what everyone eats. They closed the last Wonder Bread factory in California a few years ago because of lack of demand.
What about activities, when you're not heads down coding the latest hit? How many places can you surf,bike, rock climb, and ski, all in the same day? You want music? Theater?. Sure, we don't have "Broadway" or the "West End", but just about everything else.
No, the reason those companies are moving into inner cities is two fold: Cheap office rent (as noted above by another poster)(Short term optimization for revenue.. it will take a while before they lose employees because it's not cheap for them); Finance Envy (That 3.0 GPA loser roommate is making 10M a year as a trader on the 50th floor in a big tall building, so I'm going to put my company on the 100th floor of a bigger taller building and show that dork who's really superior); Access to capital markets. (We just hired a bunch of MBAs to make a BILLION dollars with our IPO, and they think we should be local to the bankers)
Re:Soul Crushing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, the parent poster misses the point. People like cities because that's where the cool stuff is concentrated. We aren't talking about cities in terms of the boundaries of the municipality but rather the city centers where culture thrives.
Restaurants, shops, galleries, theaters, sports venues, you name it. Who in their right mind would choose a sterile office park with a subway franchise as the only choice for lunch when you could be near world class cuisine? And be within walking distance of a cultural event after work?
Cities aren't soul crushing, they're the geographic locus of the human soul.
Re:Soul-crushing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only is it cheaper to live in suburbia than in The City, but it's also shittier than living in The Country which is still cheaper than living in suburbia. Suburbia is where people who work in the city live when they can't afford to live in the city except in squalor amidst the cockroaches, and where people who want to live in the country live when they have to work in the city and the commute would be too long.
Frank talk about Cities/Suburbs (Score:1, Insightful)
Places like Pinterest, Yelp, Twitter, might as well be call "Hipster" because moving to the cities is as noted above, a way to get cheap and short-term young workers. It is not a sustainable strategy.
Cities have higher rents than suburbs (duh, land is more expensive there, and decent districts are in short supply). By contrast there is far greater square footage of safe places to work in suburbs.
Cities draw young unmarried workers seeking the opposite sex. Suburbs draw married/cohabitating couples seeking decent places for their children. As the workforce ages it demands suburbs. Particularly for women who find cities threatening after they've found a mate.
Cities are filled with Black, and Hispanic populations who are MUCH MUCH MUCH higher in criminality than White middle class suburb populations. And not all cities are the same. Portland, Seattle, and other Whitopia Cities are far safer (this includes San Francisco) than 90% Black Detroit, or Cleveland, or Birmingham Alabama, or much of metro Atlanta. Inner-ring suburbs that are mostly Black, filled with over 90% illegitimate kids, no adult male presence in their lives, gangs ruling everything, massive dysfunction, can be far more violent (look at murder rates) than places like San Francisco, which has a low murder rate (the result of Blacks in particular being ethnically cleansed out of the place by rising property prices). Oakland across the bay is the mirror image of San Francisco -- poor, Black, Hyper-violent.
And a good deal of the Silicon Valley is being over-run by the Mexodus, transforming a great deal of it into Tijuana Norte. With all the gang and drug violence. That makes retaining skilled workers difficult. No one wants to risk getting mugged or shot just walking to their car. Mexicans leaving places like Michoacan or Chiapas retain the characteristics: gang violence, corruption, drug trafficking, of their homeland (where recently two bloggers were butchered and hung upside down as corpses from a bridge).
A lot of what is driving this move to cities, and lets be honest, no one is moving to Oakland, is a desire to avoid the Mexicanization of much of the inner-ring suburbs which has transformed them into a variation of Tijuana. No one wants to work in Tijuana. An expensive, mostly White, and thus safer city like Portland beats a place like East Palo Alto. But for a company to thrive long term it must have long-term employees who can stay and keep their expertise, and that means a safe suburb with a reasonable commute. No one can afford to live in San Francisco who has not inherited a trust fund, places like Portland or Seattle are little better. And Chicago is sliding into Detroit-like decay before our eyes. Two people were shot just blocks from Obama's mansion in less than two weeks.
Re:amenities = low rent? (Score:2, Insightful)
When I lived there I could drive to work including parking in fifteen minutes or take bus, light rail, and a bus for over an hour.
If you're telling the truth, your data/anecdote is of times past because there is nowhere in SF you can drive and park in 15 minutes that would take over an hour by public transit. To be honest, your story doesn't pass the smell test.
But disregarding that, I think what many SF commuters overlook is the speed of foot power.
I used to walk 25 minutes one-way to work. One of my co-workers was surprised I'd walk from Polk Gulch to the Financial District. He kept remarking how far that was. I could have taken public transit (MUNI) but that would mean waiting for the bus (5-10 minutes), taking the bus (10-15 minutes), and walking the rest of the way (5-7 minutes) for a boundary total of 20-32 minutes. Much faster (and fun) walking.
But now I ride my bike. I obey the traffic signals but because I don't have to queue behind automobiles (which even motorcycles have to do) my commute is 4 minutes to work (downhill) and 6 minutes back.
Re:Soul Crushing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Soul Crushing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone is ignoring the insane cost of cities (especially Manhattan). I pay less monthly in mortgage now for a huge house in Austin than i would have paid for a small 2 bedroom in Manhattan. Forcing people to move in to the cities is effectively cutting their income or quality of life. They should be resisting...
Cities were fun when I was 20. It's just insanely impractical now. I prefer to be "near" one, where "near" means I can visit on the weekends with some investment, but I'd rather live and work where I'm isolated from the costs, crowds, and crime.