4 ms·

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 witho

by kylec 10y ago

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. Same here. People talk about how difficult it is to live in the city and work in the suburbs, claiming that if the company just moved to the city then everyone would be happy. But it's perhaps even more difficult to live in the suburbs and work in the city, and many people, including myself, would rather find a different job in the suburbs than have to put up with a commute like that.

Johnny555 10y ago
Few people think that moving an office from a suburb to a city will make everyone happy, clearly those that live in the suburb next to the office will not be happy that they have a longer commute. But unless the company is small enough that a significant portion of its employees live in that suburb, moving to the city has the potential to ease the commutes of many more employees since the city in general has more housing density, and better transit connections. I worked at a company that moved from one suburb 40 miles away across the bay to another. Within a year they lost about 30% of their employees that didn't want to make the commute or move. Since I lived in the city, the only different in my commute was taking a different train system... and the new location was a bit more bike friendly from the train to the office, so made my commute better. So while you may not want to give up your 10 minute suburban commute, the employee living 2 suburbs over that fights traffic ever day for his 30 minute commute to the company may be happy to take the train his suburb to the city to the new location. Public planning and transit is not about making your commute better for your job at one particular employer, but about making the commute better on aggregate for everyone. The Bay Area is not a good example of good transit oriented planning, or Google would have been allowed to build housing near its campus, Apple wouldn't have been allowed to build a 13,000 employee office even farther from BART+Caltrain than its current office, and the 49ers wouldn't have been a 70,000 person stadium without regard to existing transit connections. Since communities largely do their own city planning, they optimize for their own growth and tax base, ignoring issues of traffic.

by kylec 10y ago

Johnny555 10y ago

Few people think that moving an office from a suburb to a city will make everyone happy, clearly those that live in the suburb next to the office will not be happy that they have a longer commute. But unless the company is small enough that a significant portion of its employees live in that suburb, moving to the city has the potential to ease the commutes of many more employees since the city in general has more housing density, and better transit connections. I worked at a company that moved from one suburb 40 miles away across the bay to another. Within a year they lost about 30% of their employees that didn't want to make the commute or move. Since I lived in the city, the only different in my commute was taking a different train system... and the new location was a bit more bike friendly from the train to the office, so made my commute better. So while you may not want to give up your 10 minute suburban commute, the employee living 2 suburbs over that fights traffic ever day for his 30 minute commute to the company may be happy to take the train his suburb to the city to the new location. Public planning and transit is not about making your commute better for your job at one particular employer, but about making the commute better on aggregate for everyone. The Bay Area is not a good example of good transit oriented planning, or Google would have been allowed to build housing near its campus, Apple wouldn't have been allowed to build a 13,000 employee office even farther from BART+Caltrain than its current office, and the 49ers wouldn't have been a 70,000 person stadium without regard to existing transit connections. Since communities largely do their own city planning, they optimize for their own growth and tax base, ignoring issues of traffic.