19 ms·

Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?

213 points by bootload 10y ago

chiph 10y ago
Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham was designed along these lines. It's very tranquil, but difficult to go anywhere for lunch as the drive just takes too long. Which might have been part of the master plan all along...
- beachstartup 10y ago
  another idea from the early 20th century: company towns running on company scrip.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Pretty sure these run on good old $USD. Company towns were either a necessity or in cases, a Utopian effort.
    - galago 10y ago
      I think beachstartup may be referring to mechanisms that create dependency.
      - beachstartup 10y ago
        why ruin the pedant party with all this higher level thinking?
    - wizardforhire 10y ago
      Pretty sure company towns were run by greedy corporations that could get away with their creation in a time without legislation. A lot of good people and small children lost their lives fighting company towns. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre ...as for the U.S. Dollar argument. Previously on Hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681
      - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
        Re: Ludlow : "...the culmination of a bloody widespread strike..." My grandfather was involved in the Mid-Continent strike, which wasn't as bloody but he was blackballed from working in oil again. J.D. Rockfeller II was a notorious Social Darwinist ( the founder of some Social Hygiene organization so probably also a eugenicist ). Eugenics was a Progressive idea. Many company owners - Henry Ford being one of them - ran company towns for Progressive/Utopian reasons. Some mining towns would not have existed had the miners had to have arranged their own housing and depend on random strangers to provide supply. Of course some had to "sold their soul to the company store" but it's like most things - a spectrum and not a given. And it was not all just about greed. It was more likely to be about stubbornness, anyway.
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  Part of the reason I refused to relocate to Raleigh is that the office was so isolated. It wasn't just getting food, though that was certainly a hassle whenever I was visiting that office. It was also the infeasibility of finding a place to live that would leave me with less than an hour total time spent in the car per day. Let alone a location that would let me walk or take a bus to work, which is my strong preference. I'm in a dense city now, and my total commute is admittedly longer than an hour, but half of it is walking and the other half is reading a book or knitting, so it hardly ever feels like a waste of time.
  - foobarian 10y ago
    I ruled out RTP because of the 4hr round-trip to the ocean. Too bad, the sea shore there is beautiful. [Edit: clarified round trip.]
    - GiorgioG 10y ago
      4 hour drive to the ocean? Does your car have a 30mph speed limiter? Raleigh to Wrightsville Beach is 2 Hours, 1 min according to Google Maps.
      - mirekrusin 10y ago
        So 4h per day drive, unless you sleep under the desk.
    - TylerE 10y ago
      Huh? Even all the way from Durham you can be in Wilmington in 2 hours and a few minutes. 4 hours will get you almost all the way to Charleston, SC which is way way way far away.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        Presumably foobarian would also like to get back from the ocean also.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Is it because that's the way Walt Disney did it?
pesenti 10y ago
Many of these buildings are in truly breathtaking locations... but depressingly isolated. The most beautiful I have visited: The John Deere HQ (featured in the article) is almost worth the trip to Moline, IL https://www.google.com/search?q=Eero+Saarinen%E2%80%99s+project+for+the+John+Deere+World+Headquarters&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi6uNKg2-XPAhUMcD4KHUhUAQMQsAQIOg&biw=1440&bih=799 https://www.google.com/search?q=Eero+Saarinen%E2%80%99s+proj... The IBM research center in Yorktown Heights is a section of a circle https://www.google.com/search?q=yorktown+heights+ibm&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=799&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQ2t632-XPAhVCjz4KHRorDVIQ_AUICCgD&dpr=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=yorktown+heights+ibm&espv=2&... The IBM research center in Almaden is in an amazing CA county park https://www.google.com/search?q=almaden+research+center&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=799&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjmoPL13OXPAhUEdD4KHW2IAR8Q_AUICCgD https://www.google.com/search?q=almaden+research+center&espv...
- andars 10y ago
  The Almaden research center has a great location, but isn't in a state park. It's near a county park, which might be what you are thinking of.
  - pesenti 10y ago
    Oh right, thanks! Corrected.
  - smaili 10y ago
    Beat me to it! There also used to be one on Cottle Road but was closed down.
    - andars 10y ago
      IIRC correctly (not sure on this one), there also used to be an IBM campus a few miles to the west and there still is another campus on Bailey a few miles east. Pretty incredible that there used to be 4 (maybe 3) large-scale IBM campuses all within a ~10 mile radius.
- 10y ago
ryhamz 10y ago
"The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities" There are definitely places that want to give employees less leverage by being the only employer in the area, at least for their given field. e.g. If you don't like your job at Epic in Wisconsin, you're more likely to be looking at relocation. Meanwhile, I have contacts 10 minutes down the street by foot.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  > There are definitely places that want to give employees less leverage by being the only employer in the area, at least for their given field. I'd like to see the evidence for this determining a business location.
  - R_haterade 10y ago
    It often ends up being more of a moat for an existing location. I live surrounded one such moat--the closest thing to a rust-belt city in the midsouth. I'd have to move 1.5 hours to find another job in my field, and I'd still be commuting another 30 minutes or so.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      I can see it winding up being that way, but I'm not convinced that any business picked a location for such a reason. For one thing, it would be hard to convince workers to move there. Businesses do pick locations based on availability of workers, not lack of them.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    It was a key part of IBM's business model. Mainframes in Poughkeepsie and Binghamton, NY, semiconductors in Fishkill & Burlington, AS/400 in Minnesota, x86 in RTP.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      Can I ask for some more direct evidence - like an interview with a decision maker, some memos, sworn testimony, a copy of an official IBM strategy paper, a history of IBM by a respected historian? Sorry for being a bit demanding here, but I hear an awful lot of things about business that are accepted wisdom, but upon digging deeper find there is no basis in fact for them.
aub3bhat 10y ago
In a stark contrast, I think is Google's 111 8th Ave Port authority NYC building, its one of the best workplaces. All advantages of having a huge building (Bigger area than new Apple spaceship campus), while still being in an extremely vibrant and well connected neighborhood.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  I work in said building and love it. Absolutely a top notch office in a top notch location. Unfortunately the historical circumstances of the building (see video below) make it pretty much one of a kind; there simply aren't any more buildings like this for other tech companies to use. And good luck trying to build a new building of this scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVx59XOZtSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVx59XOZtSA
  - aub3bhat 10y ago
    I work on 12th floor in the same building:D
- coredog64 10y ago
  What will be the ratio of offices with windows in the spaceship vs. 111 8th avenue?
  - saalweachter 10y ago
    111 uses an open floor plan with conference rooms in the middle on most floors. Most desks are located near large windows and natural light, but they aren't really in offices if that's a big selling point for you.
stevewilhelm 10y ago
It's pretty damn nice run on open space trails before biking to work, have your kids walk themselves to school, have time to coach a soccer practice on a natural lawn pitch, BBQ dinner in the back yard where you grow many of the ingredients, and then go to bed with the windows open. All of this is possible if you work at the Apple, Google, FB, Intuit, Microsoft, LinkedIn, etc. campuses.
- astrange 10y ago
  I can't see how you can do this in the South Bay unless you already had $2 million to buy the house with the yard. If you do, why did you move here instead of early retiring?
  - paulsutter 10y ago
    It would be hard to retire anywhere with the 20% down needed to buy the house, and it will be easier to retire ten years later if you do buy the house.
    - pmorici 10y ago
      You realize that in most areas of the US you can buy a perfectly nice house for $200k right? Assuming you had $2 Million in assets to start that would still leave you with $1.8 Million which assuming modest returns of 2.5-5% would still leave you with a yearly income of $45k-$90k which is an obscene amount of money if you mortgage is paid off.
      - nostrademons 10y ago
        I think his point is that if you happen to have $400K in the bank, you can buy a $2M house in Silicon Valley with 20% down, make $400-500K/year combined, and in 10 years retire with $2M in the bank and the house paid off. While if you live elsewhere in the country, you could buy the $200K house free-and-clear, make maybe $150K/year combined, and...well, in 10 years you'd also retire with about $1.5M in the bank and the house paid off.
dpitkin 10y ago
GE just moved HQ into the city of Boston, article seems to be cherry picking through history and unfairly picking on Apple, HP was pretty innovative and started in the suburbs. The interstate system and WW2 as a source of innovation seem to be also overlooked in the time period examined.
- devonkim 10y ago
  As HP's ability to innovate in technology (as opposed to business operations and cost-cutting) waned, it primarily put engineers in lower cost of living areas like Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. This pattern is consistent with almost all has-been tech employers that steadily transition more into traditional sales-driven cultures. Conversely, just because you start moving your company back towards a major metro area with more talent doesn't necessarily mean that they'll start an upward trend either.
friendlygrammar 10y ago
You can tell that a bunch of people only upvoted because of the title and never read the article because the article itself is trash.
- mjevans 10y ago
  It took me a good while to read it because it is rather information sparse (lots of puffery and filler content). It's also setup with more of a story to the situation that shows a biased view of 'how we got here'. I wonder if that 'storytelling' is something readers expect / prefer in general or if it's a crutch that is commonly used by in depth reporters who should instead be primarily presenting information with a great depth.
CaliforniaKarl 10y ago
Here's a close-to-home example: the Stanford Research Park. It meets (in my opinion) the isolation requirement, but here's why I find it interesting: On a map, the area has amazing transit accessibility. But, almost all of that transit is commute-time-only express routes. There is very little integration between the research park and the surrounding communities. Maybe it's not on such a grand scale as the examples from the article, but things like this are closer than you think.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Ignoring the commute-hour-only Stanford Marguerite shuttle, there's walking/biking/Ubering around 1.2 miles to the California Avenue Caltrain, or 3 miles to downtown Palo Alto... jobs at SRP generally pay pretty well. You can also walk about 0.4 miles to a Marguerite line that isn't commute-only.
- randycupertino 10y ago
  Where is the Stanford Research park? My girlfriend works on Stanford campus and she complains about feeling isolated- she says it's like working on Mars. She works on Galvez and parks at the Stock Farm lot. But no running out on her lunch break to do errands- once you're on campus you're effectively trapped there.
  - travem 10y ago
    > Where is the Stanford Research park? Check out http://stanfordresearchpark.com/explore http://stanfordresearchpark.com/explore There are a bunch of companies located here including parc, VMware, nest, SAP, Tesla, HPE, etc.
  - CaliforniaKarl 10y ago
    Galvez cuts through most of East campus (either as Galvez St or as Galvez Mall), and the Stock Farm lot is on the far west end of campus, so with that much distance between car and work, I can understand that feeling! In that case (I commute into campus by bus), I'd use one of the Zipcars on campus to do lunchtime errands.
ams6110 10y ago
Maybe most people prefer suburbia? I know I do.
- slyall 10y ago
  Most people prefer a mansion, a giant salary, etc. But doesn't mean they get it. The problem is that if you want to be at the interesting end of IT you probably need to be somewhere with a decent population (1m+ , maybe closer to 3m+) to have multiple employer options. You might also want to be in a largish place for cultural options (rock concerts, professional sports teams, varied cuisine, minority hobbies, whatever). Trouble is that big places have various combinations of traffic, high house prices, long commutes etc. So suddenly the nice house in the suburbs you can afford is a 60 minute drive to work and on the weekend you spend all day in your car driving the kids (until aged 16) from place to place.
- kylec 10y ago
  In articles and discussions like this I often feel like I'm in the minority by preferring to live and work in lower density areas. Living, or simply visiting, cities is stressful to me, and the benefits of doing so are not worth the downsides. I like being able to drive 10 minutes to work, or 5 minutes to the grocery store, and not have to worry fighting traffic or finding parking. I like that there are walking trails behind my employer's office. I like that in the evenings or in the weekends I can drive into the mountains or to the coast. These things would not be possible if I lived in a city.
bluedino 10y ago
How many options would Apple have to get 3 million sq ft in a city in the Bay Area? The majority of employees are going to commute anyway so why not just have them go to a suburb?
- sparky_ 10y ago
  This. Considering the only options for a "city" are San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, Apple has quite literally no chance of snapping up that much raw square footage without moving out into the more suburban areas of the valley. Even if they were able to purchase and lease literally every high-rise building in, say, downtown San Jose, they would not come close to this pure amount of real estate.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  By locating in a suburban area, they are forcing almost all employees to drive (or take commuter shuttles). But if they moved to an urban area, many employees could find housing nearby, and many more could find good transit options. As it is, they're located is a mostly low density suburban area 5 miles from the nearest commuter rail station.
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    The area is far more bike-able than SF, in my opinion. Less vehicular manslaughter too.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    >many employees could find housing nearby If they were willing to absorb a 50-100% increase in housing costs or downgrade their living spaces (giving up things like "going for walks at night without getting stabbed"), maybe. Living close to an urban office is an extreme luxury good that'll give any mainstream luxury car a run for its money. >good transit options The Bay Area has some of the best transit options in the country, and they are to stand with one arm over your head and one arm on your backpack, pressed up against hundreds of strangers, and just try to keep your balance and avoid eye contact while the bus or train lurches around for 30+ minutes. After walking or riding your bike for ~20. I like driving, so maybe I'm just having trouble empathizing with people who feel forced to do it, but is a ~10 minute drive to a suburban office park really as miserable to you as the ~50 minute BART commute from Berkeley to SF? If I had a suburban employer with a giant free parking lot (i.e. letting me live anywhere) moving to a downtown office in a hot real estate market without at least a 2x salary increase, I'd quit in a heartbeat.
trjordan 10y ago
This is a weird article. It assumes that this style is bad up front, then mocks all the different ways in which it was defined as good. "People like green spaces, how crazy is that?" I like cities, but I also really enjoyed the couple of times I've worked at parks like this. There's a lot to be said for a predictable commute and a window full of green things. I've found that harder to come by when I work in cities.
- narrator 10y ago
  Yeah, it's seems like the author has a solution looking for a problem. These companies have plenty of money. If their employees didn't like these suburban campuses they would move to cities.
  - kristopolous 10y ago
    Or perhaps the best catches would never walk in for the interview because they find it a synthetic asphyxiating saccharine fabrication, centered around an automobile and isolation. The best people out there can make money literally from anywhere, why the heck would they go to some compound of industrialized personalization like that?
    - refurb 10y ago
      This may come as a shock, but there are people out there that like things you don't like!
      - kristopolous 10y ago
        The OP had a fairly significant self selection bias. The notion that the current employees would want to move to the cities using that argument could be replaced with anything. "Night shifts" or "working in the nude"; they accepted the job under these conditions. The preference is baked into the premise
    - WWKong 10y ago
      Or perhaps some of the best people actually like living and working in the suburbs? Maybe their lifestyle and situations are different from yours?
turar 10y ago
It takes time for these shifts to play out, but I'd say the reverse is already happening. For a couple of examples that the article provided (Apple, Google), one can find a lot more examples of opposite -- stalwart companies moving back to the city core: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-company-moves-suburbs-to-city-20160615-htmlstory.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-company-moves-subu... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/economy/why-corporate-america-is-leaving-the-suburbs-for-the-city.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/economy/why-corpo... http://www.downtowndenver.com/homepage/moving-day-why-more-companies-are-committing-to-downtown-denver http://www.downtowndenver.com/homepage/moving-day-why-more-c... http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-urban-downtown-economic-development.html http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-urban-downtown-eco...
MustardTiger 10y ago
Is that site satire or not? I honestly can't even tell any more.
- chillwaves 10y ago
  No.
greglindahl 10y ago
IBM Watson's HQ is Aster Place, in the East Village of NYC. Many other companies have opened offices more "downtown" than their existing offices. I can cherry-pick data as well as the next person...
- TillE 10y ago
  It's not "cherry picking". Basically all of Silicon Valley is suburban.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    Yeah, so how do you square that with the fast-growing startup culture in San Francisco? Not to mention Palantir clustering in downtown Palo Alto...
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      Startups are not big companies, which is what the article was largely talking about.
      - greglindahl 10y ago
        ... numerous bigger companies followed the startups into SOMA, and some of the startups have grown big already.
Tiktaalik 10y ago
As the revitalization of American cities continues at what point do these campuses become white elephants for these tech companies in the Valley? If urban centres continue to gain in popularity I could imagine suburban companies needing to open urban satellite offices to be able to retain talent that is reluctant to change their urban lifestyle or waste a significant portion of their day in a commute. Many of my friends have gone to work at such places, but did so grudgingly. If they had had an urban alternative they'd have taken it. Others have chosen not to pursue job opportunities that would have necessitated long commutes.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  > I could imagine suburban companies needing to open urban satellite offices to be able to retain talent This change is well under way. I'm in Manhattan and a good number of tech companies have large offices here, most prominently Google.
- massysett 10y ago
  Marriott is headquartered in a DC suburb and they have explicitly said they need to move to a more urban location to attract millennials.
  - mason240 10y ago
    As soon those millennials have kids they will be heading back out to where they can live with a house and yard.
deleted 10y ago
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hogrammer 10y ago
Adobe, which is doing very well, moved its HQ to downtown San Jose. Google now resides in the suburban industrial park Adobe used to inhabit.
fromMars 10y ago
I've happily relocated to suburbia since starting a family with small children. As others have mentioned, I enjoy the open spaces, lack of crowds, and lines when I want to go out and do something. I consider cities like NY and SF to be great places to live if single but basically untenable with a family except in certain circumstances. There are some great cities like Seattle and Tokyo where I might be willing to raise my family but in general I am glad that tech companies aren't in city centers.
- laurentoget 10y ago
  People did have children and they lived in cities before suburbs were developed in the 1940s and 1950s, though, so it has to be possible.
  - ryuker16 10y ago
    They likely didnt have much of a choice due to lower car ownership. I cant imagine commuting in a 1940s car for hours each day.
    - Symbiote 10y ago
      Cars? The first suburbs were enabled by trains, not cars, and were developed and promoted by the railway company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-land
      - ryuker16 10y ago
        Trains in the USA suck in most cities for commutes. Theyre still stuck in the 1950s compared to asia or europe for ccommuting
  - mtbcoder 10y ago
    I suppose one could argue that cities in the early - mid 20th century weren't as heavily populated. I could be wrong, but I would also assume that noise levels were much lower and the streets much less congested. Looking at old pictures of city life, you often see kids playing in the streets. I don't think that would be possible today.
unit91 10y ago
Author's theory: the Big Guy moved the company HQ to the suburbs because he's out to get you, especially if you aren't white. My theory: the Big Guy moved out of downtown because land and taxes are cheaper, many (most?) people enjoy seeing green as opposed to concrete, and the commute is often (not always) better, since most people live in the suburbs anyway. Couple that with an up-and-coming municipality willing to subsidize the building and infrastructure and you've got quite a lot of cash left in the budget. What do you do with it? Build an impressive structure, with the perks and eye-candy to lure the talent you're hoping to hire and retain.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  Author seems to have an issue with park space too. As if more dead concrete is what we need.
- _sh 10y ago
  Whatever the causes may be, the effects are the same: these large institutional office parks are designed to isolate employees and reinforce the automobile-centric suburban lifestyle. The author's point is that the so-called great innovators of today--Apple and Google are cited--are really doing nothing to innovate the workspace, despite having plenty of opportunity to do so.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    But what would the opportunity costs of that be? Their core competencies are not in "innovating the workspace". There's a chance they could come up with something cool, but an equal chance they'd come up with something bad. For the most part, it seems like doing this is not hurting recruitment.
  - mzw_mzw 10y ago
    >The author's point is that the so-called great innovators of today--Apple and Google are cited--are really doing nothing to innovate the workspace, despite having plenty of opportunity to do so. Somehow I suspect that this "innovation" they are required to do just happens to line up perfectly with the author's own personal and political preferences.
tgarma1234 10y ago
It took decades to construct the images of "success". I know that whenever I am associated with one of these awesome brands in a super sterile corporate location I feel like I have made it. Even though I hate admitting that.
- trgn 10y ago
  I get it, it gets to me too. It's too bad that the current aesthetic of success is so dumb and infantile though. The aesthetic of success of 14th century Venice was totally badass. Or 16th century Antwerp. Or 19th century Budapest. How is it that a place so enormously wealthy like SV looks so disposable.
irrational 10y ago
Nike is located 8 miles from downtown Portland in the suburbs of Beaverton. The light rail line runs from downtown to a forest near the campus so those who want to live in a urban environment can do so. One of the benefits to Nike is they can expand their campus more readily in a suburban environment. They recently bought up all the land around their campus and are building a bunch of new buildings. It would have been difficult to do that in an urban environment. But, unlike the suburbs described in the article, the area around the Nike campus is not middle-class white, but tends to be lower-class hispanic. You have to go about 3 miles north or south of campus to get to the middle-class neighborhoods. The farther you go to the east or west of the campus the lower income you get until you hit the agricultural land to the west or get closer to portland to the east.
- mjevans 10y ago
  A major Intel's RnD facility is also in the area, further west (It's in the next city over) a bit north of that line. At least at the time I lived in the area the stops that would service them weren't well connected to it. There may have been some buses, but if I'd had to make that commute I'd have taken a bike on to the rail system with me.
yellowapple 10y ago
"Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?" Hmm, maybe because some of us actually appreciate not being in some smog-chocked urban hellhole? I mean, if I'm going to commute somewhere, I'd rather commute to some place where there's actually, you know, grass and trees and stuff. I lived in one of those suburbias for quite a bit of my life. They're perfectly fine places with plenty of room to stretch out and enjoy some air that's actually fresh. Hell, some of them even have actual wildlife; fancy that? But apparently the city-slickers are too good for that, what with their fancy concrete and smoke and noise and light pollution. I just love the implication that everything that isn't a city center is devoid of luxuries like clean water or smooth-flowing traffic. Yes, us suburban and rural peasants are apparently stupid for believing that there's an actual alternative to being stuck in yet another skyscraper between bouts of fighting for elbow room on buses and trains (both of which exist even in rural areas, let alone suburban, by the way; the article seems reluctant to admit such amenities exist anywhere outside of the Big City™). Yes, keep pretending that the city life is the only life worthwhile. More room for me out here in the woods.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  They dislike it because its boring and lacks entertainment. Also having to drive long distances or having nothing within walking distance sucks.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  I should also add.... severe shortage of single women. Women like cities even more than men.
mc32 10y ago
Two words: It's cheaper! But seriously, it's cheaper and you get to build your own building if you like, maybe bespoke, rather than lease someone else's building. It's not like most US cities will not have a tortuous approval process and a long approval process and unions, etc. to contend with and extra taxes... What's the next question, why aren't companies building right next to the Capitol? Maybe we should be like Paris and London and Tokyo and have everything important, the important institutions, important buildings and important people all living in one important city. Let's all move to DC and concentrate everything! On the other hand, we have the Packard building and numerous others in Detroit or Phily.
- inglor 10y ago
  This - so much. If my company grows I don't really see how we can _afford_ taking a much bigger office as large office spaces are really expensive in city centers to being with - not to mention supply isn't exactly great. Building your own office is so much cheaper if you do it where real estate is cheap and you have a very good bargaining spot where you can actually barter for lower taxes.
  - smokeyj 10y ago
    I'm still not sure what happens in an office that couldn't be done online.
    - ed312 10y ago
      not all jobs are tech jobs.
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        I'm in IT, give me a year and 35k and everyone in the office at my clients wouldn't have to come to work. A big part is control. During hurricane sandy they made the office workers sit in a unlit office for a week just beacuse.
      - smokeyj 10y ago
losteverything 10y ago
I bet some of these buildings have some very rare / famous art. I recall the original one-of-a-kind American flags in the executive offices of the AT&T basking ridge NJ.
cossatot 10y ago
I'd work in the suburbs for that sweet bowl desk.
zxcvvcxz 10y ago
> Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia? > Stuck This already implies a negative connotation of "1950s suburbia". Like we ought to move on, just cause. What about the flip-side of this question: what is it about a 1950s suburbia that helps America's Most Innovative Companies? I'll offer some ideas. Maybe it's a lot more stable socially, so there's most local community trust and engagement, and more mental energy to devote to one's work. Families are stable and know and support each other, e.g. community caregiving responsibilities for children. As well, there's less distracting "events" going on than in a typical city. And so more mental thought and energy can go into work. As well, it's cheaper to not be in a crammed urban center. This also helps play into a certain level of "mental safety" if you will that enables one to focus more on their work - what else are you gonna focus on?
benou 10y ago
This is not about "city = good, suburbs = bad". It is about "walled garden = bad". The point of the article is that all those campuses are isolated from the local community, and it is not good because it does not help to develop better infrastructure and it isolates people. At the end of the article the author mentions 2 SV projects which actually do things differently: Box HQ and Facebook HQ. In SV. Not in SF. To give you a personal example, what surprised me moving from Europe to SV is the bus service: public bus service is terrible in SV, and what is the answer from big corp to help their employees to commute? Having their own shuttles service... What usually happens in Europe is that the people, the corp, the city, the county etc. interact to build a public bus system. It then allows sharing between companies and benefits everyone. But in the case of those gated communities they do not do that.
- VLM 10y ago
  "isolated from the local community" What is there about the local community that is good, if most agree with the echo chamber view that all good exclusively comes from a small number of hyper selective ivies with very peculiar demographics? If the local community were good, why won't they get hired, why are they only vitally important to be nearby, yet not actually in contact? What is the metric or method where the quality of software, for instance, depends directly on distance to X, Y, Z? Why could someone possibly think X, Y, and Z only exist in urban areas? Ignorance not being much of a defense. If good can only come from young elite freshly grad white males as employees, is working near/in the ghetto a peculiar form of penance? "We wouldn't let them get an education for skin color reasons but we are good people because we will permit them empty the trash bins after hours out of the goodness of our hearts". "We don't hire coloreds or foreigners or girls here for culture fit reasons, only guys from the same frat at the same elite school, but we are a block away from several ethnic restaurants" appears to be the new "some of my best friends are blacks" for racists who don't get that they sound racist. Burb people and non-startup people are much more open minded than city people on average, more flexible, willing to try something new, a new lifestyle in a new area in new construction, etc. The article assumes parks and nature are an inherent evil, which seems outright weird. Also a severe case of neophillia where any historic architecture is inherently evil, but I like old buildings, they look cool... Something new is guaranteed to be new, not guaranteed to be better. Also history is long and something new is almost certainly a historical rehash that failed because of X, Y, and Z. History is circular not linear. "I wanna make a village (where I'm chief)" isn't innovative in 2016, it was innovative in 6000 BC. Its just part of the fad rotation today, and like all fads it can be ignored with little loss. Having worked in suburban office parks and extremely urban areas I'm mystified at the isolation thing. It seems to exist entirely in some peoples minds but not in reality. "support companies" seem to grow fabulously, sprawl like, profitably in the burbs almost despite local government opposition, endless buildings of retail and restaurants and bars. The city mostly seems to be where those employers go to die even after obtaining sometimes massive government subsidies. Observation would imply that something is killing those businesses in the city and expanding them in the burbs and its probably not the theoretical "isolation" that observably seems to exist primarily in reverse. If burb offices are isolating, why is the economic growth in the immediate area so explosive compared to the dying subsidized urban areas?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mzw_mzw 10y ago
Eyerolling politicized nonsense. So what if they are out in the suburbs? This weird, near-religious attitude about where people live gives off a really bad odor. Not to mention "isolated from the communities they impact"? What? People in the suburbs of Silicon Valley don't use iPhones? John Deere needs to be located downtown so it can relate to, uh... farmers? It's nuts. The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake. That entire website should be deleted and "Hunter Oatman-Stanford" (what a name!) should give up writing in shame, retreat to a monastery and think long and hard about where it all went wrong.
- mc32 10y ago
  >The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake The thing is, the phenomenon is pretty much world-wide, thus easy to prove/disprove. You see it in Mexico, in France, in Germany in Japan. Some of these places don't have the dreaded "Other" to dread, so they cannot have that motivation, unless the author thinks many, more or less homogenous places, are acting preemptively against a possible future Other.
  - wizardforhire 10y ago
    Racism is what classism becomes. In America the two are confounded. People hate other people for a lot of reasons. All you're proving is that there is a lot of hate in this world.
    - mc32 10y ago
      So we're going in circles? The author ascribes it to racism not "people hate each other". However, I think racism is a facile explanation to trot out [perhaps even socially expected]. Also, I don't have to hate to not want to live next to you, nor do I have to hate my family if I don't want to live next to them.
  - ryuker16 10y ago
    Redlining and block busting emptied out alot of prime city real estate.
jeffdavis 10y ago
In a city, there's so much out of your control. You have to fight the government and the city residents and who knows what kind of obstacles you may face. If the rent is cheap, then great, you have a lot of employees close by. If not, you have just made life for them more difficult and given them a longer commute by fighting their way into the city. All because nobody in the city wants to build more residential. If it works out and the city actually wants you there, then great. But I am not surprised Apple didn't want to try their luck in SF.
kkoomi 10y ago
Reminds me of a quote by Alfred North Whitehead: "Man's best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in small communities, or else by those who, having had such environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities; for what is wanted is contact with the elemental processes of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed." - Alfred North Whitehead, source 'Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead'
- ryuker16 10y ago
  UsA cities used to be dirty and over polluted hence the utter dislike some writers had for cities. Not to mention blacks, jews, and Irish.....
filereaper 10y ago
IBM has many campuses like these, frankly I really like them. They isolate you from the hustle and bustle of city life, the parks nearby are a nice retreat during the day. Less traffic on the commute uptown. Also cubicles, love them, can concentrate on the hard stuff. Its not glorious stuff but highly effective, guess I'm in the wrong century.
deanCommie 10y ago
Amazon isn't: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/amazons-south-lake-union-turf-do-you-recognize-this-place/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/amazons-south-...
crispyambulance 10y ago
Well, that's a nice article. I have to say, however, that the vast majority of tech companies aren't in 1950's suburbia, they're located in late 20th century office parks: single story "flex space" buildings built on concrete slabs with plentiful parking, a truck dock or two, drop ceilings with good HVAC and fluorescent lighting over a sea of cubicles. The stuff in the article would be known by realtors as "trophy buildings". Some lucky folks get to work in one of those but most people even in the innovative companies work in flex space in the exburbs. This architecture is so boring that no one wants to even talk about it. Its just a place to show up for work. In your car, of course. Actual 1950's suburbia, these days, consists of charming inner-ring "streetcar" suburbs. They would be classified by most folks today as "walkable" upscale neighborhoods. Some outer suburban areas are now getting the "new urbanist" treatment to make them more like streetcar suburbs, but sadly these developments are NOT YET getting to the exburban office parks off the highway exits.
Balgair 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House Good read, and I'd love an update some day. I think that the only thing that has changed is that we sometimes use pink/red bricks now in these large glass/steel boxes.
mathattack 10y ago
There are alternatives. Palantir taking multiple buildings in Palo Alto is one. They're getting a lot of heat from the locals for it. City building isn't a great option either. Is the answer mass-telecommuting?
kylec 10y ago
I have a theory: the people who love open offices are the same people who love living and working in a city. It feels like the same sort of debate, just on a different scale.
rbc 10y ago
It reads like it might be mostly a summary of the Louise Mozingo book mentioned at the beginning of the article. I haven't read the book, so I can't be sure about that. Mozingo is cited a number of times. It also seems to take a very pro-density position. I suppose high density will benefit some industries more than others.
mindcrime 10y ago
The interesting thing to me, about this article, are the subtle undercurrents which are never really stated, but rather seem to be assumed. And they're part of a narrative that seems to be gaining steam, but which doesn't seem to be objectively true in any general sense. 1. Suburbs are bad. 2. Everyone should live and work downtown in/near an urban core. 3. Cars are evil; no one should drive to work. 4. Offices need to be in converted warehouses, with exposed ducting and beams and what-not, and have "character". I personally think all of those things can be true, some of the time, but I don't think any of them are true all of the time. And I think they're all getting undue weight vis-a-vis the prevailing zeitgeist.
int_19h 10y ago
Microsoft campus is in the middle of very stereotypical suburbia, and it's lovely, and a non-insubstantial factor my continued employment there. In contrast, I would turn down pretty much any place in Seattle proper, after having some experience working in downtown Vancouver. At the same time, I know many people that do prefer to work in a middle of a city. And there's nothing wrong with that. Different strokes for different folks and all that. Perhaps the author should make fewer assumptions about what other people do and don't like?
slackstation 10y ago
For centers of innovation and insight into the future, startups collectively shoot themselves in the foot by centering on some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It'd be far more logical for VCs to pick a far more livable, affordable area so that their investments could go further, last longer and have a higher chance of success. VC firms are really just high risk money lenders that have a seat on the boards of the companies they lend to. One could take a dystopian view that VC firms like the super high burn rate that having a startup in the Bay Area entails because the high costs makes companies more dependant on round after round of capital thus giving higher and higher percentages to the VC firms of the companies that do eventually make it. That's a little dark, even for me. More likely, we've made this hellscape of $4k 1bdrm apartments because VC firms are comfortable in their big, well appreciating homes in choice parts of the Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area and they don't want to drive very far to meet with the companies in their portfolio. This and other factors (NIMBYism) creates the situation to this day. If VCs were brave and smart, they would try and find a longer term solution to the problem. Find a city nearby that has significantly lower cost of living. I'm actually looking forward to the VC bubble bursting again so that companies would be forced to get scrappy again and start solving this problem themselves. If I were founding or running a startup today, I would in a location that 1hr or two away from the major startup centers in a place where my workers wouldn't have to spend 50%+ of their salaries making NIMBY owners richer.

213 points by bootload 10y ago

chiph 10y ago

Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham was designed along these lines. It's very tranquil, but difficult to go anywhere for lunch as the drive just takes too long. Which might have been part of the master plan all along...

beachstartup 10y ago
another idea from the early 20th century: company towns running on company scrip.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Pretty sure these run on good old $USD. Company towns were either a necessity or in cases, a Utopian effort.
  - galago 10y ago
    I think beachstartup may be referring to mechanisms that create dependency.
    - beachstartup 10y ago
      why ruin the pedant party with all this higher level thinking?
  - wizardforhire 10y ago
    Pretty sure company towns were run by greedy corporations that could get away with their creation in a time without legislation. A lot of good people and small children lost their lives fighting company towns. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre ...as for the U.S. Dollar argument. Previously on Hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Re: Ludlow : "...the culmination of a bloody widespread strike..." My grandfather was involved in the Mid-Continent strike, which wasn't as bloody but he was blackballed from working in oil again. J.D. Rockfeller II was a notorious Social Darwinist ( the founder of some Social Hygiene organization so probably also a eugenicist ). Eugenics was a Progressive idea. Many company owners - Henry Ford being one of them - ran company towns for Progressive/Utopian reasons. Some mining towns would not have existed had the miners had to have arranged their own housing and depend on random strangers to provide supply. Of course some had to "sold their soul to the company store" but it's like most things - a spectrum and not a given. And it was not all just about greed. It was more likely to be about stubbornness, anyway.
bunderbunder 10y ago
Part of the reason I refused to relocate to Raleigh is that the office was so isolated. It wasn't just getting food, though that was certainly a hassle whenever I was visiting that office. It was also the infeasibility of finding a place to live that would leave me with less than an hour total time spent in the car per day. Let alone a location that would let me walk or take a bus to work, which is my strong preference. I'm in a dense city now, and my total commute is admittedly longer than an hour, but half of it is walking and the other half is reading a book or knitting, so it hardly ever feels like a waste of time.
- foobarian 10y ago
  I ruled out RTP because of the 4hr round-trip to the ocean. Too bad, the sea shore there is beautiful. [Edit: clarified round trip.]
  - GiorgioG 10y ago
    4 hour drive to the ocean? Does your car have a 30mph speed limiter? Raleigh to Wrightsville Beach is 2 Hours, 1 min according to Google Maps.
    - mirekrusin 10y ago
      So 4h per day drive, unless you sleep under the desk.
  - TylerE 10y ago
    Huh? Even all the way from Durham you can be in Wilmington in 2 hours and a few minutes. 4 hours will get you almost all the way to Charleston, SC which is way way way far away.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
      Presumably foobarian would also like to get back from the ocean also.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

Is it because that's the way Walt Disney did it?

pesenti 10y ago

Many of these buildings are in truly breathtaking locations... but depressingly isolated. The most beautiful I have visited: The John Deere HQ (featured in the article) is almost worth the trip to Moline, IL https://www.google.com/search?q=Eero+Saarinen%E2%80%99s+project+for+the+John+Deere+World+Headquarters&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi6uNKg2-XPAhUMcD4KHUhUAQMQsAQIOg&biw=1440&bih=799 https://www.google.com/search?q=Eero+Saarinen%E2%80%99s+proj... The IBM research center in Yorktown Heights is a section of a circle https://www.google.com/search?q=yorktown+heights+ibm&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=799&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQ2t632-XPAhVCjz4KHRorDVIQ_AUICCgD&dpr=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=yorktown+heights+ibm&espv=2&... The IBM research center in Almaden is in an amazing CA county park https://www.google.com/search?q=almaden+research+center&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=799&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjmoPL13OXPAhUEdD4KHW2IAR8Q_AUICCgD https://www.google.com/search?q=almaden+research+center&espv...

andars 10y ago
The Almaden research center has a great location, but isn't in a state park. It's near a county park, which might be what you are thinking of.
- pesenti 10y ago
  Oh right, thanks! Corrected.
- smaili 10y ago
  Beat me to it! There also used to be one on Cottle Road but was closed down.
  - andars 10y ago
    IIRC correctly (not sure on this one), there also used to be an IBM campus a few miles to the west and there still is another campus on Bailey a few miles east. Pretty incredible that there used to be 4 (maybe 3) large-scale IBM campuses all within a ~10 mile radius.
10y ago

ryhamz 10y ago

"The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities" There are definitely places that want to give employees less leverage by being the only employer in the area, at least for their given field. e.g. If you don't like your job at Epic in Wisconsin, you're more likely to be looking at relocation. Meanwhile, I have contacts 10 minutes down the street by foot.

WalterBright 10y ago
> There are definitely places that want to give employees less leverage by being the only employer in the area, at least for their given field. I'd like to see the evidence for this determining a business location.
- R_haterade 10y ago
  It often ends up being more of a moat for an existing location. I live surrounded one such moat--the closest thing to a rust-belt city in the midsouth. I'd have to move 1.5 hours to find another job in my field, and I'd still be commuting another 30 minutes or so.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    I can see it winding up being that way, but I'm not convinced that any business picked a location for such a reason. For one thing, it would be hard to convince workers to move there. Businesses do pick locations based on availability of workers, not lack of them.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  It was a key part of IBM's business model. Mainframes in Poughkeepsie and Binghamton, NY, semiconductors in Fishkill & Burlington, AS/400 in Minnesota, x86 in RTP.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    Can I ask for some more direct evidence - like an interview with a decision maker, some memos, sworn testimony, a copy of an official IBM strategy paper, a history of IBM by a respected historian? Sorry for being a bit demanding here, but I hear an awful lot of things about business that are accepted wisdom, but upon digging deeper find there is no basis in fact for them.

aub3bhat 10y ago

In a stark contrast, I think is Google's 111 8th Ave Port authority NYC building, its one of the best workplaces. All advantages of having a huge building (Bigger area than new Apple spaceship campus), while still being in an extremely vibrant and well connected neighborhood.

CydeWeys 10y ago
I work in said building and love it. Absolutely a top notch office in a top notch location. Unfortunately the historical circumstances of the building (see video below) make it pretty much one of a kind; there simply aren't any more buildings like this for other tech companies to use. And good luck trying to build a new building of this scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVx59XOZtSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVx59XOZtSA
- aub3bhat 10y ago
  I work on 12th floor in the same building:D
coredog64 10y ago
What will be the ratio of offices with windows in the spaceship vs. 111 8th avenue?
- saalweachter 10y ago
  111 uses an open floor plan with conference rooms in the middle on most floors. Most desks are located near large windows and natural light, but they aren't really in offices if that's a big selling point for you.

stevewilhelm 10y ago

It's pretty damn nice run on open space trails before biking to work, have your kids walk themselves to school, have time to coach a soccer practice on a natural lawn pitch, BBQ dinner in the back yard where you grow many of the ingredients, and then go to bed with the windows open. All of this is possible if you work at the Apple, Google, FB, Intuit, Microsoft, LinkedIn, etc. campuses.

astrange 10y ago
I can't see how you can do this in the South Bay unless you already had $2 million to buy the house with the yard. If you do, why did you move here instead of early retiring?
- paulsutter 10y ago
  It would be hard to retire anywhere with the 20% down needed to buy the house, and it will be easier to retire ten years later if you do buy the house.
  - pmorici 10y ago
    You realize that in most areas of the US you can buy a perfectly nice house for $200k right? Assuming you had $2 Million in assets to start that would still leave you with $1.8 Million which assuming modest returns of 2.5-5% would still leave you with a yearly income of $45k-$90k which is an obscene amount of money if you mortgage is paid off.
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      I think his point is that if you happen to have $400K in the bank, you can buy a $2M house in Silicon Valley with 20% down, make $400-500K/year combined, and in 10 years retire with $2M in the bank and the house paid off. While if you live elsewhere in the country, you could buy the $200K house free-and-clear, make maybe $150K/year combined, and...well, in 10 years you'd also retire with about $1.5M in the bank and the house paid off.

dpitkin 10y ago

GE just moved HQ into the city of Boston, article seems to be cherry picking through history and unfairly picking on Apple, HP was pretty innovative and started in the suburbs. The interstate system and WW2 as a source of innovation seem to be also overlooked in the time period examined.

devonkim 10y ago
As HP's ability to innovate in technology (as opposed to business operations and cost-cutting) waned, it primarily put engineers in lower cost of living areas like Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. This pattern is consistent with almost all has-been tech employers that steadily transition more into traditional sales-driven cultures. Conversely, just because you start moving your company back towards a major metro area with more talent doesn't necessarily mean that they'll start an upward trend either.

friendlygrammar 10y ago

You can tell that a bunch of people only upvoted because of the title and never read the article because the article itself is trash.

mjevans 10y ago
It took me a good while to read it because it is rather information sparse (lots of puffery and filler content). It's also setup with more of a story to the situation that shows a biased view of 'how we got here'. I wonder if that 'storytelling' is something readers expect / prefer in general or if it's a crutch that is commonly used by in depth reporters who should instead be primarily presenting information with a great depth.

CaliforniaKarl 10y ago

Here's a close-to-home example: the Stanford Research Park. It meets (in my opinion) the isolation requirement, but here's why I find it interesting: On a map, the area has amazing transit accessibility. But, almost all of that transit is commute-time-only express routes. There is very little integration between the research park and the surrounding communities. Maybe it's not on such a grand scale as the examples from the article, but things like this are closer than you think.

greglindahl 10y ago
Ignoring the commute-hour-only Stanford Marguerite shuttle, there's walking/biking/Ubering around 1.2 miles to the California Avenue Caltrain, or 3 miles to downtown Palo Alto... jobs at SRP generally pay pretty well. You can also walk about 0.4 miles to a Marguerite line that isn't commute-only.
randycupertino 10y ago
Where is the Stanford Research park? My girlfriend works on Stanford campus and she complains about feeling isolated- she says it's like working on Mars. She works on Galvez and parks at the Stock Farm lot. But no running out on her lunch break to do errands- once you're on campus you're effectively trapped there.
- travem 10y ago
  > Where is the Stanford Research park? Check out http://stanfordresearchpark.com/explore http://stanfordresearchpark.com/explore There are a bunch of companies located here including parc, VMware, nest, SAP, Tesla, HPE, etc.
- CaliforniaKarl 10y ago
  Galvez cuts through most of East campus (either as Galvez St or as Galvez Mall), and the Stock Farm lot is on the far west end of campus, so with that much distance between car and work, I can understand that feeling! In that case (I commute into campus by bus), I'd use one of the Zipcars on campus to do lunchtime errands.

ams6110 10y ago

Maybe most people prefer suburbia? I know I do.

slyall 10y ago
Most people prefer a mansion, a giant salary, etc. But doesn't mean they get it. The problem is that if you want to be at the interesting end of IT you probably need to be somewhere with a decent population (1m+ , maybe closer to 3m+) to have multiple employer options. You might also want to be in a largish place for cultural options (rock concerts, professional sports teams, varied cuisine, minority hobbies, whatever). Trouble is that big places have various combinations of traffic, high house prices, long commutes etc. So suddenly the nice house in the suburbs you can afford is a 60 minute drive to work and on the weekend you spend all day in your car driving the kids (until aged 16) from place to place.
kylec 10y ago
In articles and discussions like this I often feel like I'm in the minority by preferring to live and work in lower density areas. Living, or simply visiting, cities is stressful to me, and the benefits of doing so are not worth the downsides. I like being able to drive 10 minutes to work, or 5 minutes to the grocery store, and not have to worry fighting traffic or finding parking. I like that there are walking trails behind my employer's office. I like that in the evenings or in the weekends I can drive into the mountains or to the coast. These things would not be possible if I lived in a city.

bluedino 10y ago

How many options would Apple have to get 3 million sq ft in a city in the Bay Area? The majority of employees are going to commute anyway so why not just have them go to a suburb?

sparky_ 10y ago
This. Considering the only options for a "city" are San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, Apple has quite literally no chance of snapping up that much raw square footage without moving out into the more suburban areas of the valley. Even if they were able to purchase and lease literally every high-rise building in, say, downtown San Jose, they would not come close to this pure amount of real estate.
Johnny555 10y ago
By locating in a suburban area, they are forcing almost all employees to drive (or take commuter shuttles). But if they moved to an urban area, many employees could find housing nearby, and many more could find good transit options. As it is, they're located is a mostly low density suburban area 5 miles from the nearest commuter rail station.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  The area is far more bike-able than SF, in my opinion. Less vehicular manslaughter too.
- closeparen 10y ago
  >many employees could find housing nearby If they were willing to absorb a 50-100% increase in housing costs or downgrade their living spaces (giving up things like "going for walks at night without getting stabbed"), maybe. Living close to an urban office is an extreme luxury good that'll give any mainstream luxury car a run for its money. >good transit options The Bay Area has some of the best transit options in the country, and they are to stand with one arm over your head and one arm on your backpack, pressed up against hundreds of strangers, and just try to keep your balance and avoid eye contact while the bus or train lurches around for 30+ minutes. After walking or riding your bike for ~20. I like driving, so maybe I'm just having trouble empathizing with people who feel forced to do it, but is a ~10 minute drive to a suburban office park really as miserable to you as the ~50 minute BART commute from Berkeley to SF? If I had a suburban employer with a giant free parking lot (i.e. letting me live anywhere) moving to a downtown office in a hot real estate market without at least a 2x salary increase, I'd quit in a heartbeat.

trjordan 10y ago

This is a weird article. It assumes that this style is bad up front, then mocks all the different ways in which it was defined as good. "People like green spaces, how crazy is that?" I like cities, but I also really enjoyed the couple of times I've worked at parks like this. There's a lot to be said for a predictable commute and a window full of green things. I've found that harder to come by when I work in cities.

narrator 10y ago
Yeah, it's seems like the author has a solution looking for a problem. These companies have plenty of money. If their employees didn't like these suburban campuses they would move to cities.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  Or perhaps the best catches would never walk in for the interview because they find it a synthetic asphyxiating saccharine fabrication, centered around an automobile and isolation. The best people out there can make money literally from anywhere, why the heck would they go to some compound of industrialized personalization like that?
  - refurb 10y ago
    This may come as a shock, but there are people out there that like things you don't like!
    - kristopolous 10y ago
      The OP had a fairly significant self selection bias. The notion that the current employees would want to move to the cities using that argument could be replaced with anything. "Night shifts" or "working in the nude"; they accepted the job under these conditions. The preference is baked into the premise
  - WWKong 10y ago
    Or perhaps some of the best people actually like living and working in the suburbs? Maybe their lifestyle and situations are different from yours?

turar 10y ago

It takes time for these shifts to play out, but I'd say the reverse is already happening. For a couple of examples that the article provided (Apple, Google), one can find a lot more examples of opposite -- stalwart companies moving back to the city core: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-company-moves-suburbs-to-city-20160615-htmlstory.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-company-moves-subu... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/economy/why-corporate-america-is-leaving-the-suburbs-for-the-city.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/economy/why-corpo... http://www.downtowndenver.com/homepage/moving-day-why-more-companies-are-committing-to-downtown-denver http://www.downtowndenver.com/homepage/moving-day-why-more-c... http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-urban-downtown-economic-development.html http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-urban-downtown-eco...

MustardTiger 10y ago

Is that site satire or not? I honestly can't even tell any more.

chillwaves 10y ago
No.

greglindahl 10y ago

IBM Watson's HQ is Aster Place, in the East Village of NYC. Many other companies have opened offices more "downtown" than their existing offices. I can cherry-pick data as well as the next person...

TillE 10y ago
It's not "cherry picking". Basically all of Silicon Valley is suburban.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Yeah, so how do you square that with the fast-growing startup culture in San Francisco? Not to mention Palantir clustering in downtown Palo Alto...
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Startups are not big companies, which is what the article was largely talking about.
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      ... numerous bigger companies followed the startups into SOMA, and some of the startups have grown big already.

Tiktaalik 10y ago

As the revitalization of American cities continues at what point do these campuses become white elephants for these tech companies in the Valley? If urban centres continue to gain in popularity I could imagine suburban companies needing to open urban satellite offices to be able to retain talent that is reluctant to change their urban lifestyle or waste a significant portion of their day in a commute. Many of my friends have gone to work at such places, but did so grudgingly. If they had had an urban alternative they'd have taken it. Others have chosen not to pursue job opportunities that would have necessitated long commutes.

CydeWeys 10y ago
> I could imagine suburban companies needing to open urban satellite offices to be able to retain talent This change is well under way. I'm in Manhattan and a good number of tech companies have large offices here, most prominently Google.
massysett 10y ago
Marriott is headquartered in a DC suburb and they have explicitly said they need to move to a more urban location to attract millennials.
- mason240 10y ago
  As soon those millennials have kids they will be heading back out to where they can live with a house and yard.

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hogrammer 10y ago

Adobe, which is doing very well, moved its HQ to downtown San Jose. Google now resides in the suburban industrial park Adobe used to inhabit.

fromMars 10y ago

I've happily relocated to suburbia since starting a family with small children. As others have mentioned, I enjoy the open spaces, lack of crowds, and lines when I want to go out and do something. I consider cities like NY and SF to be great places to live if single but basically untenable with a family except in certain circumstances. There are some great cities like Seattle and Tokyo where I might be willing to raise my family but in general I am glad that tech companies aren't in city centers.

laurentoget 10y ago
People did have children and they lived in cities before suburbs were developed in the 1940s and 1950s, though, so it has to be possible.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  They likely didnt have much of a choice due to lower car ownership. I cant imagine commuting in a 1940s car for hours each day.
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    Cars? The first suburbs were enabled by trains, not cars, and were developed and promoted by the railway company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-land
    - ryuker16 10y ago
      Trains in the USA suck in most cities for commutes. Theyre still stuck in the 1950s compared to asia or europe for ccommuting
- mtbcoder 10y ago
  I suppose one could argue that cities in the early - mid 20th century weren't as heavily populated. I could be wrong, but I would also assume that noise levels were much lower and the streets much less congested. Looking at old pictures of city life, you often see kids playing in the streets. I don't think that would be possible today.

unit91 10y ago

Author's theory: the Big Guy moved the company HQ to the suburbs because he's out to get you, especially if you aren't white. My theory: the Big Guy moved out of downtown because land and taxes are cheaper, many (most?) people enjoy seeing green as opposed to concrete, and the commute is often (not always) better, since most people live in the suburbs anyway. Couple that with an up-and-coming municipality willing to subsidize the building and infrastructure and you've got quite a lot of cash left in the budget. What do you do with it? Build an impressive structure, with the perks and eye-candy to lure the talent you're hoping to hire and retain.

sliverstorm 10y ago
Author seems to have an issue with park space too. As if more dead concrete is what we need.
_sh 10y ago
Whatever the causes may be, the effects are the same: these large institutional office parks are designed to isolate employees and reinforce the automobile-centric suburban lifestyle. The author's point is that the so-called great innovators of today--Apple and Google are cited--are really doing nothing to innovate the workspace, despite having plenty of opportunity to do so.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  But what would the opportunity costs of that be? Their core competencies are not in "innovating the workspace". There's a chance they could come up with something cool, but an equal chance they'd come up with something bad. For the most part, it seems like doing this is not hurting recruitment.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  >The author's point is that the so-called great innovators of today--Apple and Google are cited--are really doing nothing to innovate the workspace, despite having plenty of opportunity to do so. Somehow I suspect that this "innovation" they are required to do just happens to line up perfectly with the author's own personal and political preferences.

tgarma1234 10y ago

It took decades to construct the images of "success". I know that whenever I am associated with one of these awesome brands in a super sterile corporate location I feel like I have made it. Even though I hate admitting that.

trgn 10y ago
I get it, it gets to me too. It's too bad that the current aesthetic of success is so dumb and infantile though. The aesthetic of success of 14th century Venice was totally badass. Or 16th century Antwerp. Or 19th century Budapest. How is it that a place so enormously wealthy like SV looks so disposable.

irrational 10y ago

Nike is located 8 miles from downtown Portland in the suburbs of Beaverton. The light rail line runs from downtown to a forest near the campus so those who want to live in a urban environment can do so. One of the benefits to Nike is they can expand their campus more readily in a suburban environment. They recently bought up all the land around their campus and are building a bunch of new buildings. It would have been difficult to do that in an urban environment. But, unlike the suburbs described in the article, the area around the Nike campus is not middle-class white, but tends to be lower-class hispanic. You have to go about 3 miles north or south of campus to get to the middle-class neighborhoods. The farther you go to the east or west of the campus the lower income you get until you hit the agricultural land to the west or get closer to portland to the east.

mjevans 10y ago
A major Intel's RnD facility is also in the area, further west (It's in the next city over) a bit north of that line. At least at the time I lived in the area the stops that would service them weren't well connected to it. There may have been some buses, but if I'd had to make that commute I'd have taken a bike on to the rail system with me.

yellowapple 10y ago

"Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?" Hmm, maybe because some of us actually appreciate not being in some smog-chocked urban hellhole? I mean, if I'm going to commute somewhere, I'd rather commute to some place where there's actually, you know, grass and trees and stuff. I lived in one of those suburbias for quite a bit of my life. They're perfectly fine places with plenty of room to stretch out and enjoy some air that's actually fresh. Hell, some of them even have actual wildlife; fancy that? But apparently the city-slickers are too good for that, what with their fancy concrete and smoke and noise and light pollution. I just love the implication that everything that isn't a city center is devoid of luxuries like clean water or smooth-flowing traffic. Yes, us suburban and rural peasants are apparently stupid for believing that there's an actual alternative to being stuck in yet another skyscraper between bouts of fighting for elbow room on buses and trains (both of which exist even in rural areas, let alone suburban, by the way; the article seems reluctant to admit such amenities exist anywhere outside of the Big City™). Yes, keep pretending that the city life is the only life worthwhile. More room for me out here in the woods.

ryuker16 10y ago
They dislike it because its boring and lacks entertainment. Also having to drive long distances or having nothing within walking distance sucks.
ryuker16 10y ago
I should also add.... severe shortage of single women. Women like cities even more than men.

mc32 10y ago

Two words: It's cheaper! But seriously, it's cheaper and you get to build your own building if you like, maybe bespoke, rather than lease someone else's building. It's not like most US cities will not have a tortuous approval process and a long approval process and unions, etc. to contend with and extra taxes... What's the next question, why aren't companies building right next to the Capitol? Maybe we should be like Paris and London and Tokyo and have everything important, the important institutions, important buildings and important people all living in one important city. Let's all move to DC and concentrate everything! On the other hand, we have the Packard building and numerous others in Detroit or Phily.

inglor 10y ago
This - so much. If my company grows I don't really see how we can _afford_ taking a much bigger office as large office spaces are really expensive in city centers to being with - not to mention supply isn't exactly great. Building your own office is so much cheaper if you do it where real estate is cheap and you have a very good bargaining spot where you can actually barter for lower taxes.
- smokeyj 10y ago
  I'm still not sure what happens in an office that couldn't be done online.
  - ed312 10y ago
    not all jobs are tech jobs.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      I'm in IT, give me a year and 35k and everyone in the office at my clients wouldn't have to come to work. A big part is control. During hurricane sandy they made the office workers sit in a unlit office for a week just beacuse.
    - smokeyj 10y ago

losteverything 10y ago

I bet some of these buildings have some very rare / famous art. I recall the original one-of-a-kind American flags in the executive offices of the AT&T basking ridge NJ.

cossatot 10y ago

I'd work in the suburbs for that sweet bowl desk.

zxcvvcxz 10y ago

> Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia? > Stuck This already implies a negative connotation of "1950s suburbia". Like we ought to move on, just cause. What about the flip-side of this question: what is it about a 1950s suburbia that helps America's Most Innovative Companies? I'll offer some ideas. Maybe it's a lot more stable socially, so there's most local community trust and engagement, and more mental energy to devote to one's work. Families are stable and know and support each other, e.g. community caregiving responsibilities for children. As well, there's less distracting "events" going on than in a typical city. And so more mental thought and energy can go into work. As well, it's cheaper to not be in a crammed urban center. This also helps play into a certain level of "mental safety" if you will that enables one to focus more on their work - what else are you gonna focus on?

benou 10y ago

This is not about "city = good, suburbs = bad". It is about "walled garden = bad". The point of the article is that all those campuses are isolated from the local community, and it is not good because it does not help to develop better infrastructure and it isolates people. At the end of the article the author mentions 2 SV projects which actually do things differently: Box HQ and Facebook HQ. In SV. Not in SF. To give you a personal example, what surprised me moving from Europe to SV is the bus service: public bus service is terrible in SV, and what is the answer from big corp to help their employees to commute? Having their own shuttles service... What usually happens in Europe is that the people, the corp, the city, the county etc. interact to build a public bus system. It then allows sharing between companies and benefits everyone. But in the case of those gated communities they do not do that.

VLM 10y ago
"isolated from the local community" What is there about the local community that is good, if most agree with the echo chamber view that all good exclusively comes from a small number of hyper selective ivies with very peculiar demographics? If the local community were good, why won't they get hired, why are they only vitally important to be nearby, yet not actually in contact? What is the metric or method where the quality of software, for instance, depends directly on distance to X, Y, Z? Why could someone possibly think X, Y, and Z only exist in urban areas? Ignorance not being much of a defense. If good can only come from young elite freshly grad white males as employees, is working near/in the ghetto a peculiar form of penance? "We wouldn't let them get an education for skin color reasons but we are good people because we will permit them empty the trash bins after hours out of the goodness of our hearts". "We don't hire coloreds or foreigners or girls here for culture fit reasons, only guys from the same frat at the same elite school, but we are a block away from several ethnic restaurants" appears to be the new "some of my best friends are blacks" for racists who don't get that they sound racist. Burb people and non-startup people are much more open minded than city people on average, more flexible, willing to try something new, a new lifestyle in a new area in new construction, etc. The article assumes parks and nature are an inherent evil, which seems outright weird. Also a severe case of neophillia where any historic architecture is inherently evil, but I like old buildings, they look cool... Something new is guaranteed to be new, not guaranteed to be better. Also history is long and something new is almost certainly a historical rehash that failed because of X, Y, and Z. History is circular not linear. "I wanna make a village (where I'm chief)" isn't innovative in 2016, it was innovative in 6000 BC. Its just part of the fad rotation today, and like all fads it can be ignored with little loss. Having worked in suburban office parks and extremely urban areas I'm mystified at the isolation thing. It seems to exist entirely in some peoples minds but not in reality. "support companies" seem to grow fabulously, sprawl like, profitably in the burbs almost despite local government opposition, endless buildings of retail and restaurants and bars. The city mostly seems to be where those employers go to die even after obtaining sometimes massive government subsidies. Observation would imply that something is killing those businesses in the city and expanding them in the burbs and its probably not the theoretical "isolation" that observably seems to exist primarily in reverse. If burb offices are isolating, why is the economic growth in the immediate area so explosive compared to the dying subsidized urban areas?

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mzw_mzw 10y ago

Eyerolling politicized nonsense. So what if they are out in the suburbs? This weird, near-religious attitude about where people live gives off a really bad odor. Not to mention "isolated from the communities they impact"? What? People in the suburbs of Silicon Valley don't use iPhones? John Deere needs to be located downtown so it can relate to, uh... farmers? It's nuts. The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake. That entire website should be deleted and "Hunter Oatman-Stanford" (what a name!) should give up writing in shame, retreat to a monastery and think long and hard about where it all went wrong.

mc32 10y ago
>The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake The thing is, the phenomenon is pretty much world-wide, thus easy to prove/disprove. You see it in Mexico, in France, in Germany in Japan. Some of these places don't have the dreaded "Other" to dread, so they cannot have that motivation, unless the author thinks many, more or less homogenous places, are acting preemptively against a possible future Other.
- wizardforhire 10y ago
  Racism is what classism becomes. In America the two are confounded. People hate other people for a lot of reasons. All you're proving is that there is a lot of hate in this world.
  - mc32 10y ago
    So we're going in circles? The author ascribes it to racism not "people hate each other". However, I think racism is a facile explanation to trot out [perhaps even socially expected]. Also, I don't have to hate to not want to live next to you, nor do I have to hate my family if I don't want to live next to them.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  Redlining and block busting emptied out alot of prime city real estate.

jeffdavis 10y ago

In a city, there's so much out of your control. You have to fight the government and the city residents and who knows what kind of obstacles you may face. If the rent is cheap, then great, you have a lot of employees close by. If not, you have just made life for them more difficult and given them a longer commute by fighting their way into the city. All because nobody in the city wants to build more residential. If it works out and the city actually wants you there, then great. But I am not surprised Apple didn't want to try their luck in SF.

kkoomi 10y ago

Reminds me of a quote by Alfred North Whitehead: "Man's best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in small communities, or else by those who, having had such environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities; for what is wanted is contact with the elemental processes of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed." - Alfred North Whitehead, source 'Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead'

ryuker16 10y ago
UsA cities used to be dirty and over polluted hence the utter dislike some writers had for cities. Not to mention blacks, jews, and Irish.....

filereaper 10y ago

IBM has many campuses like these, frankly I really like them. They isolate you from the hustle and bustle of city life, the parks nearby are a nice retreat during the day. Less traffic on the commute uptown. Also cubicles, love them, can concentrate on the hard stuff. Its not glorious stuff but highly effective, guess I'm in the wrong century.

deanCommie 10y ago

Amazon isn't: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/amazons-south-lake-union-turf-do-you-recognize-this-place/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/amazons-south-...

crispyambulance 10y ago

Well, that's a nice article. I have to say, however, that the vast majority of tech companies aren't in 1950's suburbia, they're located in late 20th century office parks: single story "flex space" buildings built on concrete slabs with plentiful parking, a truck dock or two, drop ceilings with good HVAC and fluorescent lighting over a sea of cubicles. The stuff in the article would be known by realtors as "trophy buildings". Some lucky folks get to work in one of those but most people even in the innovative companies work in flex space in the exburbs. This architecture is so boring that no one wants to even talk about it. Its just a place to show up for work. In your car, of course. Actual 1950's suburbia, these days, consists of charming inner-ring "streetcar" suburbs. They would be classified by most folks today as "walkable" upscale neighborhoods. Some outer suburban areas are now getting the "new urbanist" treatment to make them more like streetcar suburbs, but sadly these developments are NOT YET getting to the exburban office parks off the highway exits.

Balgair 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House Good read, and I'd love an update some day. I think that the only thing that has changed is that we sometimes use pink/red bricks now in these large glass/steel boxes.

mathattack 10y ago

There are alternatives. Palantir taking multiple buildings in Palo Alto is one. They're getting a lot of heat from the locals for it. City building isn't a great option either. Is the answer mass-telecommuting?

kylec 10y ago

I have a theory: the people who love open offices are the same people who love living and working in a city. It feels like the same sort of debate, just on a different scale.

rbc 10y ago

It reads like it might be mostly a summary of the Louise Mozingo book mentioned at the beginning of the article. I haven't read the book, so I can't be sure about that. Mozingo is cited a number of times. It also seems to take a very pro-density position. I suppose high density will benefit some industries more than others.

mindcrime 10y ago

The interesting thing to me, about this article, are the subtle undercurrents which are never really stated, but rather seem to be assumed. And they're part of a narrative that seems to be gaining steam, but which doesn't seem to be objectively true in any general sense. 1. Suburbs are bad. 2. Everyone should live and work downtown in/near an urban core. 3. Cars are evil; no one should drive to work. 4. Offices need to be in converted warehouses, with exposed ducting and beams and what-not, and have "character". I personally think all of those things can be true, some of the time, but I don't think any of them are true all of the time. And I think they're all getting undue weight vis-a-vis the prevailing zeitgeist.

int_19h 10y ago

Microsoft campus is in the middle of very stereotypical suburbia, and it's lovely, and a non-insubstantial factor my continued employment there. In contrast, I would turn down pretty much any place in Seattle proper, after having some experience working in downtown Vancouver. At the same time, I know many people that do prefer to work in a middle of a city. And there's nothing wrong with that. Different strokes for different folks and all that. Perhaps the author should make fewer assumptions about what other people do and don't like?

slackstation 10y ago

For centers of innovation and insight into the future, startups collectively shoot themselves in the foot by centering on some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It'd be far more logical for VCs to pick a far more livable, affordable area so that their investments could go further, last longer and have a higher chance of success. VC firms are really just high risk money lenders that have a seat on the boards of the companies they lend to. One could take a dystopian view that VC firms like the super high burn rate that having a startup in the Bay Area entails because the high costs makes companies more dependant on round after round of capital thus giving higher and higher percentages to the VC firms of the companies that do eventually make it. That's a little dark, even for me. More likely, we've made this hellscape of $4k 1bdrm apartments because VC firms are comfortable in their big, well appreciating homes in choice parts of the Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area and they don't want to drive very far to meet with the companies in their portfolio. This and other factors (NIMBYism) creates the situation to this day. If VCs were brave and smart, they would try and find a longer term solution to the problem. Find a city nearby that has significantly lower cost of living. I'm actually looking forward to the VC bubble bursting again so that companies would be forced to get scrappy again and start solving this problem themselves. If I were founding or running a startup today, I would in a location that 1hr or two away from the major startup centers in a place where my workers wouldn't have to spend 50%+ of their salaries making NIMBY owners richer.