No Coding in Palo Alto? City Takes On Silicon Valley Growth (siliconbeat.com) 305
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.
Gotta love America (Score:5, Interesting)
Lol (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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More so, if companies like Palantir move out, who do they think is going to buy lunch at all the lovely downtown restaurants? Do they really think their downtown will improve by kicking all the jobs out of it?
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If you remove the tech companies, all you'll have in Palo Alto is Stanford and the surroundings. Oh, and biotech. I wonder who will be left to stroll all those University Avenue restaurants?
More seriously, the Bay Area no longer looks like a tech hub. I remember in the 90s, when I lived there, wherever I drove around Santa Clara, Milpitas or Sunnyvale, a company that I may have read about or whose ad I may have seen in BYTE or PC Magazine would suddenly pop out of nowhere. That's what would scream out
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Biotech types are only slightly less nerdy and unhip than computer people. If the luddite hipster brigade successfully chases the (software)tech people out, it's only a matter of time before they set their sights on the biotech people. Neither group is, by and large, cool, hip, or fabulous enough for their standards. So really, this sort of crap really needs to be stopped before it can gain any kind of momentum.
Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the difference between a city and an industrial park?
One has residents, and infrastructure for residents. The other does not.
I did not read TFA, (it's traditional), but it sounds like this mayor wants to do the following:
1) light commercial zones must not be exploited for yet more satellite office buildings, and needs to stay as strip malls, gas stations, dollar general stores, et al.
2) satellite office construction projects will have to seek different zoning from light commercial, to avoid having the problems proposal 1) seeks to address.
The headline sounds sensational-- "oh noes! Coders not welcome in Palo alto!"
I read him differently. "People actually live in Palo alto. They need to be able to buy gas and groceries without having to drive all the way to San jose. Light commercial zoning currently covers both the circle k, and pallantir's new office building. There is only so much real estate in Palo alto. Only so much of that can be light commercial. Only so much of the limited light commercial property can be office buildings, if people are going to live in Palo alto, they need light commercial that actually sells products, like a circle k does. We want to make it so new office proposals do not eliminate all other forms of light commercial, no matter how much money they have to wave around."
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Or maybe Palo Alto doesn't want to go the way of Detroit when software industry collapses, as any industry eventually will. Manufacturing stuff, physical or intangible, for export is lucrative but means your destiny is dependent on things beyond your control. Having most money circulate locally isn't as profitable but a lot safer.
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More seriously, the Bay Area no longer looks like a tech hub. I remember in the 90s, when I lived there, wherever I drove around Santa Clara, Milpitas or Sunnyvale, a company that I may have read about or whose ad I may have seen in BYTE or PC Magazine would suddenly pop out of nowhere. That's what would scream out tech to me. If you drove up the Bayshore Freeway near Lawrence Expressway, you could see the S3 headquarters and Microcenter right from the freeway.
Microcenter closed a while ago - they always se
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Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they really think their downtown will improve by kicking all the jobs out of it?
It's time to make Silicon Valley a Silicon Desert.
Look at the City of San Francisco. They want all the tech companies to come in, giving lots of tax breaks and other incentives so they can pride themselves on having all this innovation. But then they complain about all the tech workers coming in and living in the city. Then they complain about buses picking up workers. Did you ever hear a greenie complain about people using a bus? Well, go to SF.
Palo Alto is doing the same thing now. They want all the tech money, but not the tech companies. And watch them whining when large companies decide to move out.
Just imagine Cisco, Google, Facebook and Apple deciding to move out of the area completely, with all their workers. Imagine how many mortgages will be under water, how many folks will lose their jobs, how many tax revenue these cities will have to do without.
Palo Alto should shut the F up really quick.
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I get your point, but are any of these companies Palo Alto based? Cisco, the last time I looked, owned much to all of Tasman Drive throughout Santa Clara. Google owns what used to be Silicon Graphics' buildings on Shoreline in Mountain View. Apple - they have that campus off the 280 and De Anza, but I recall them looking towards building another office in Cupertino - what happened to that? Facebook, it wasn't around when I was, but from what I know, they're in Mountain View, right?
But yeah, if these c
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I get your point, but are any of these companies Palo Alto based?
Nope. But a lot of their workers are. And those are the ones that are bringing the revenues. Spending their paychecks in the city. Paying property taxes, utility bills. The companies themselves usually don't pay a lot to a city directly. It's all indirect.
That's why I'm saying: remove the 10 biggest tech companies and Silicon Valley will become a silicon desert with a huge housing crash.
Just take a look at Detroit to see how quick a booming economy can crash.
Re:Lol (Score:4, Insightful)
The government isn't the one complaining. they're happy to have the company busses and are renting the bus stops to them. THe people complaining are low income/long term residents being priced out in rent- the bus complaints are just another factor of the rent complaints.
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Maybe if the idiots in charge of the various local governments in the Bay Area didn't make it basically impossible to build any new residential supply, rents wouldn't be so high and people wouldn't have a reason to complain.
Re:Lol (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The density allowed. Over 90% of San Francisco is zones for a max of 3 stories. You don't need all the owners to be willing to sell, you nearly need a percentage of them to be. There's enough profits to be made by tearing down old 2-3 story buildings and replacing them with 10 story ones to let the market do the rest.
Re:Lol (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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What exactly *is* "low income?"
Is it some arbitrary dollar amount, or is it the condition of income insufficiency for basic needs, like shelter?
Think about that when you say there is no low income in silly valley.
People can make 300k a year there, and be forced to live under a bridge, due to systemic housing shortages.
When you cannot afford basic needs, you are low income. End of story. Contrary to what your economics teacher said, purpetual growth is not sustainable. You end up with situations like this,
Why would you want tech companies in the downtown? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Why would you want tech companies in the downto (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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 "ci
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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.)
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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 rar
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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 pa
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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, restaura
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> 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.
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> 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."
Downtown Detroit (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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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 comm
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#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 thin
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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.
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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.
Solution: build some buildings (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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But Palo Alto doesn't have any headroom to grow. South West of the city is Stanford, and that's pretty much off limits for these purposes. North West is Menlo Park, Atherton and Redwood City. North East is East Palo Alto, w/ Ikea and aside from that, that city's high crime reputation. South East is Mountain View and South is Los Altos and if you go to the other side of 280, Los Altos Hills and Woodside. So these companies would then have to move there.
Just send these companies off to Berkeley and San
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Brilliant idea. Until there's an earthquake.
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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.
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That pretty much sums it up, yes, but there's a lot more wrong than that.
Just Say No (Score:2)
To the money.
Just raise taxes (Score:3)
Does Zoning Abrogate First Amendment? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If they embrace growth (ironic?) they'd let the businesses build taller buildings and thus have been use of land keeping the charm of Palo Alto.
It's called evolution.
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Not if you remember the .com bust. Monoculture is not healthy.
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Businesses/Industry/Residences are taxed differently, so there's always that note. There's always city/state/national facilities like plumbing, roads, telecoms, safety inspectors, firemen, etc.. all who have to be paid out largely from the taxes represented by there properties. Flip side, if you were in an apartment and the unit beside you was used to make commercial porn (and all the fun that could bleed out from that), wouldn't you like the lever to shut it down if they got too loud, lavish, bad actors in
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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.
You missed the correct amendment. It is the 5th amendment... Very specifically the taking clause that would prevent Palo Alto from taking the use of my property without compensating me for it. I don't think Palo Alto could afford to pay companies for their now worthless buildings as what else could you use them for?
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I'm not sure the 5th works either since they're not "taking" the property they're just restricting what you can do with it. Which might seem like the same thing when you don't have any other use for the property but from a legal perspective, its still yours.
As for the first, I'm pretty sure freedom of speech doesn't cover zoning regulations to start with since that's not "speech" by any definition I've ever heard. Privacy protection might help you hide your activities if you're planning to go against the
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I'm not sure the 5th works either since they're not "taking" the property they're just restricting what you can do with it.
A legal technicality. Mere possession is perhaps the least significant part of ownership. The essence of a property right is that the owner gets to decide how the property will be used. Of course, others get to decide how their property is used, so whatever action you want to take has to satisfy the rights of everyone whose property is involved, not just your own. However, when some authority figure tells you that you aren't allowed to use your property in a way which would not infringe on anyone else's rig
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In theory, because if you can't do it in this particular location, there is another location where you can-- in the interests of the common good.
Many of the restrictions are based on problems that have occurred in the past. In my "town", realtor "offices" are under scrutiny. They crowd out other merchants and are effectively only an advertisement. A city has a need to control growth, character, and sustainability-- and zoning is an effective tool for that.
Sure, it can go overboard, but you need to have s
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Actually, zoning laws are quite valid, where the lawmakers can justify it. We don't want garbage dumps next to homes, nor cemeteries in the town square. But, this kind of absurd law...and Palo Alto's failure to enforce it for years (decades?) makes it moot.
Re:Does Zoning Abrogate First Amendment? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [ucla.edu] of the boundary between speech and conduct.
Cities need diversity to thrive (Score:2)
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
Depends on the scope (Score:2)
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 understandab
As an actual Palo Alto resident (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Devil's Night... (Score:2)
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.
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Urban decay is all but a guarantee eventually without business/economic diversity. Cities no longer exist that where one-trick ponies who's industries collapsed. Being close to another town with different industries may save you from complete collapse, but it'd still hurt hard turning you into a bedroom community. Do you realize just how well you evangelize for the wrong side of the argument?
Unless of course you're under the delusion that somehow IT/software development is the inevitable apex of human accom
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Re:Devil's Night... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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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.
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The Freeways of Palo Alto... (Score:2)
Model needed (Score:3)
Understandable (Score:2)
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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.
Presumably manufacturing stuff that has no processors in it, otherwise, you'd have to write software for those processors, thus reducing the contribution to the economy of that manufacturing.
(And what about the engineering work done designing the stuff being made? Does that also do nothing to contribute to the economy other than offer a service?)
And the number of jobs offered by a manufacturing economy depends on the volume of production and the productivity of the labor - the higher the productivity, th
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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.
I'm a programmer, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised by my not understanding.
You're saying that having many many programmers that are really well paid and who provide a service with no requirements other than infrastructure (energy as clean as you provide and no manufacturing needs) who live, buy stuff, pay taxes, and all that - is a bad thing.
But having less well paid blue collar workers who buy less stuff, pay less taxes, and whose jobs require the inflow of goods and the outflow of goods (ie. who have mor
Dear Palo Alto: (Score:4, Interesting)
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..
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For those not from Kansas City. Leawood is basically a very rich strip of land between the Missouri/Kansas border and the 'Kansas City Country Club'.
Mansions, old big money, absolutely no business. Sticks so far up their butts, they have to get splinters in their esophagus.
For the bay area the analogous city(s) would be 'Pacifica', maybe 'Half Moon Bay'. Run the numbers on those two.
KC has been calling itself the 'Silicon Prairie' for decades. It's still deluded bullshit.
Also don't look at the loca
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I don't live in the bay area, but not KC either. There are shades of grey between 'cow town' and 'crazy'.
Si Prairie (Score:2)
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In Minnesota maybe, a place with much deeper issues.
3m hired 100 California engineers in the 80s and tracked them. By the end of the second winter they had 1 left. He was from there originally.
Dontyaknow, have some lutefisk, a hot dish...
Edit (Score:2)
VMware isn't spelled with a capital "W". #pet #peeve
NIMBY/No Growth zone (Score:2)
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
Diversity (Score:2)
Facebook (Score:2)
Was founded on the East Coast... Harvard, specifically. Unless there's a Palo Alto branch of Harvard I've never heard of....
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Palo Alto, VA, maybe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto,_Virginia [wikipedia.org]
The company I work for is located on the East Coast. At one point, they got confused between Palo Alto, CA, and Palo Alto, VA. They sent a team out to Palo Alto, VA, and found empty fields. I told management on the conference call that places in different states can have the same name.
Ask Detroit... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Democrats and unions killed the Detroit that the auto companies built.
Democrats maybe, but not necessarily unions.
The problem Detroit had is similar to what Palo Alto is having now - lack of space. After WWII the auto companies needed to build big, new assembly lines to meet the post-war demand. There simply wasn't any place in Detroit to build those huge factories - so they moved away from the city. People who wanted to work for a living followed the jobs, what was left is history.
Does Palo Alto have lead water pipes? (Score:2)
Possible Loophole? (Score:2)
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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They are also too close to one anther, geographically, which is turning downtown into a monoculture.
Of course, this proximity enables 'stealing' employees and using the culture as a revolving door for talent. And salary.
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Companies needing to compete on wages sounds like excellent news for employees. I've recently been looking for a job in an area that has a few small tech companies but not enough to drive up wages. As a result, they all offer similar salaries that are 25% below the national average.
Re:Interesting thinking; Lousy Language (Score:2)
Your language of hatred does nothing to boost the significance of your opinion.
Re:Wow, Commiefornia! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wow, Commiefornia! (Score:5, Insightful)
Works for Houston
http://thefederalist.com/2016/... [thefederalist.com]
As to your point, I just love the idea of the politically connected driving me from my home or destroying my business.
Re:Wow, Commiefornia! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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The bigger problem is the lack of transit, which is necessary to enable the density increase.
Palo Alto has plenty of transit systems: Caltrain, VTA, Dumbarton Express, Stanford Shuttles and employer buses (Google/VMware).
And with the county spending on Bart to San Jose and ignoring Mountain View, PA, etc. it doesn't seem like that will change.
BART was originally supposed to encircle the San Francisco Bay Area, but the Peninsula route got nixed in the 1970's and the San Jose route is 30+ years late. The only major transit system upgrade through Mountain View and Palo Alto is the electrician of Caltrain.
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None of which work well enough to allow for a density increase.
Until more people get out of their cars to use public transit, there's isn't enough demand to upgrade existing infrastructure for higher density. One reason for building mixed developments along the major transit lines is to simulate the demand.
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