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Google has largely ruined Boulder, CO after building a huge new sprawling thing and effectively dictating to locals and politicians exactly how they want the ne

Google has largely ruined Boulder, CO after building a huge new sprawling thing and effectively dictating to locals and politicians exactly how they want the neighborhood and city to be structured going forward. Everyone who isn't a googler hates them and wishes we hadn't allowed that, much less given them massive amounts of corporate welfare. Resist googlers if you can, they destroy communities.

airstrike 9y ago
Fearmongering much?
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  SFBA, Seattle, Major Colorado Metros, Austin, Nashville, Cambridge/Boston, Raleigh-Durham. That's not fear. That's pattern recognition. > Fast-growing technology sector is fueling a housing boom in cities across America https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/fast-growing-technology-sector-is-fueling-a-housing-boom-in-cities-across-america/2017/01/26/5c72c276-a5d8-11e6-8042-f4d111c862d1_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/fast-growing-techn...
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    Places that have gotten expensive because they've become desirable places to live and convinced lots of people to move there? The horror! The only real problem here is shitty local governance and NIMBYism that refuses to acknowledge reality and build more housing. In the end, it doesn't stop people from moving there, it just drives up costs and drives out natives and people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. If you want affordable housing markets, you have to build housing in response to demand. Regardless, we're talking about NYC here, so the fact that Google is buying some building instead of leasing like they have been is a total non-story. It'll have zero effect on NYC.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      They've only become desirable because of an influx of tech employers. Ergo, it makes sense for non-tech employed citizens to not want those employers to locate there (or expand). Also, existing citizens who own and live in these locations take priority over people who want to move in. No one is entitled to additional housing when tech companies foist externalities of additional workers (workers who could work remotely!) on a geographic region.
      - RangerScience 9y ago
        > existing citizens who own and live in these locations take priority Yep, wealthy land owners, clearly the group that needs protecting. Actually, can anyone name a major US city where most of the growth came from itself, rather than an influx?
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        > Yep, wealthy land owners, clearly the group that needs protecting. Wealthy land owners = citizens who have most of their personal wealth/retirements savings tied up in the equity of their home that has slowly appreciated over years or decades. How terribly different than tech companies and employees using copyright (source code) and vast quantities of data to reap enormous returns and salaries (respectively). This isn't David vs Goliath. This is New Boss vs Old Boss. Big Tech needs to get over itself. It's the new bad guy.
        davidcbc 9y ago
        So NYC aside, what is your answer for cities? How does a city improve itself without bringing in new jobs and tax revenue? Should a city just let buildings sit there and rot instead of selling them to a company that wants to create hundreds or thousands of jobs?
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        No tax credits for businesses (See: Amazon). You pay a tax per head of employee you intend to employee onsite that covers infrastructure and subsidizing affordable housing. If you're a going concern, affordability should not be an issue. Otherwise, you're straining infrastructure and housing with marginal benefits to the host city. Hire remote instead.
finkin1 9y ago
I live in Boulder and don't share this sentiment whatsoever. Google already has a large campus here and they're expanding into an area that frankly needed to be renovated anyway. Their entire new + old complex is supposed to house ~2,000 employees. If adding 1.5k employees and a new building is "largely ruining Boulder" in your eyes you should see a doctor.
- eternalcode 9y ago
  I would suggest seeing a Geologist perhaps. Get it? Boulder? Geologist?
- hueving 9y ago
  >If adding 1.5k employees and a new building is "largely ruining Boulder" in your eyes you should see a doctor. Put some effort into understanding perspectives before resorting to derision. Bringing thousands of highly paid employees into a smaller city is often not good for many who already lives there unless they own property. The majority of the new jobs will not go to existing residents, rents will increase, restaurants will get more expensive, traffic will get worse, and everything will get more crowded. For rich city-dwellers, the above might sound like nothing, but for people who seek smaller cities it will suck because it quickly erodes the character of the city.
  - finkin1 9y ago
    I appreciate you trying to make OP's case, and I'm genuinely interested in changing my mind about this. What do you think should be done? Should growing companies be prevented from expanding because it might 'erode the character of the city'? I'm not in favor of the city subsidizing a company's growth, even if it does stimulate the economy in the long-run, but I just can't get behind any policy that would prevent a growing company due to something as nebulous as the erosion of the city's character.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      What should be done is that cities should relax zoning laws, and allow more housing to be built in high demand areas. That way the city can fit everyone, cheaply.
stevenleeg 9y ago
New York is a much larger city than Boulder. I'd assume Google would have a much tougher time trying to tell the NYC government how to operate considering how small their presence is relative to the city, even if we're just talking about Manhattan.
- danharaj 9y ago
  I find the tech scene in NYC to be a lot more tolerable than other places. It seems like many of us here understand that we're small fish compared to, say, the sharks on Wall Street.
  - ionforce 9y ago
    An interesting thing to note about tech in NYC is that it's not at all like tech in the west coast where it's tech for tech's sake. In NYC it's always in support of some other industry. Definitely gives off a different vibe.
    - hueving 9y ago
      Yeah, unfortunately it puts you lower on the totem pole as a software engineer. This results in lower salaries in general for developers there compared to the bay.
umanwizard 9y ago
You don't have a clue about New York.
jsky_goog 9y ago
The new office has been open for 3 months and Google has had a presence in Boulder for a decade. Google is pretty far from "dictating...how they want want the neighborhood and city to be structured". The city council has promoted low growth and high housing prices for decades and will continue to do so.
geofft 9y ago
The real answer is for cities to be built up so much that even a Google-sized company is a drop in the bucket. Google NYC right now is about one city block (111 8th), expanding to two. That's a tiny part of Manhattan, which isn't even all of NYC. My old church is located under the old Citigroup Center skyscraper at 601 Lexington, which is also an entire block; Citigroup used to have both that building and the block across the street, 399 Park, for a couple of decades. When they moved out of those buildings to another neighborhood in Manhattan, that caused a drop in noon mass attendance but that was really about it. Their presence didn't destroy the neighborhood, let alone the city, and their move didn't destroy it either. The fact that NYC is capable of handling Citigroup-sized companies and Google-sized companies moving in and barely even noticing is one of the deep reasons I like living in NYC. I wish more other cities would do the same, because I don't think there's anything unique to NYC about the ability to do this. Maybe population - although the Denver-Aurora-Bolder metropolitan area, at 3M, isn't that much smaller than NYC (8.5M). The internet is telling me the Google Boulder office can support up to 1,500 employees. You shouldn't give them corporate welfare, but also you should just be able to accommodate them without that, they're not that big. It should just be a building, and you should have lots of those.
- workthrowaway27 9y ago
  NYC metro area population is ~21M. It's way more dense than Colorado, so it's not surprising that a large company moving into NYC doesn't change it much.
- blackguardx 9y ago
  Boulder has a population of ~100,000. I don't oppose the Google office, but their workforce will grow to represent 1-2% of the city's populace. That isn't a "drop in the bucket."
  - geofft 9y ago
    Sure - I'm advocating that more cities should grow to the point that it is a drop in the bucket, by inviting not only Google but other companies and not treating any of them as special. Or, sure, they can decide that being a 100K-person town is what they want their city to be, and use zoning to actively resist any single employer having over 1K people in the town. But this isn't a Google-specific problem, and if you try to address it with Google-specific solutions (either "Take special measures to invite Google because they'll bring in high-paying jobs" or "Take special measures to exclude Google because they'll destroy your city"), you'll be in trouble when some other, possibly non-tech, employer comes along in the future.
Xorlev 9y ago
I've lived and worked in Colorado my whole life, joined Google Boulder about 8 months ago. Spent a ton of time in Boulder before that; my wife is from Boulder proper. Honestly? Google is barely a speck in the whirlwind of changes that Boulder is undergoing. Tech is a huge part of it, but you can't throw that entirely at Google's feet. There's been Silicon Valley expats and tons of other folks moving to Boulder for years. Back on Google for a moment: Lets talk neighborhood. The older Google buildings are renovated, small buildings. One of them was a Circuit City that closed. That should already give you a good idea of the area. It isn't trendy downtown, just primarily commercial space. The new Google building is larger, about 3 blocks away, and located in what was a basically condemned. There's empty, undeveloped lots across from it on one side, and a huge sprawling Whole Foods with a massive parking lot on the other side. Google's new building is flanked by a large Target. Overall, the building is not actually that large. It's 4 floors and built as two halves joined in the center with a bridge. It isn't the trendy part of town. It's developed a nice building in an otherwise lower-traffic area. I know there's follow-on effects from employing new folks in the area (housing, traffic, etc.), but I don't see how that's overall different from the general influx of folks into Boulder. Perhaps it's myopic of me, but I don't see "us" (as if us vs. them is a productive use of time) being a negative force. Google Boulder employs lots of folks, and the vast majority of them have lived in Colorado for more than the last few years. I'd like to know what we're doing to destroy communities and how we can prevent that.
- hueving 9y ago
  >I'd like to know what we're doing to destroy communities and how we can prevent that. Stop moving into small cities with workers paid significantly above the average of the existing residents. Restaurants open that they can't afford, the limited housing stock gets bid up quickly, good schools get overcrowded, etc. It's not a pleasant answer, but realistically that's ultimately what upsets a good chunk of the people that complain. If you bring in 2,000 people into any small city who make $200k/year+ when the average is down around $50k/year, it's going to result in a backlash and there is nothing you can really do unless you ban your employees from spending money there. The only real strategy is to pretend you are concerned and wait for the problem to gentrify away.
oh_sigh 9y ago
What? Googles new office on 30th and pearl is hardly 'sprawling' - the target and wholefoods that are right next to it each take up a much bigger footprint than the office, and that is just the buildings themselves - Target and WF have surface parking which takes up huge amounts of real estate for almost zero value - whereas the Google building has 3 or 4 levels of parking underneath it, reducing their overall footprint. Man, if only Google left this lot condemned and abandoned, along with the defunct car dealership across the corner which is just an empty lot. Boulder would be so much better off. You can verify all this with the satellite photos and street view.
- 1024core 9y ago
  > the target and wholefoods that are right next to it each take up a much bigger footprint than the office, and that is just the buildings themselves That's the problem: WF and Target pay minimum wages, and that seems to be OK with the OP. Paying more than minimum wages is the problem. S/he wants everyone to be poor.
gowld 9y ago
So, what's your opinion of Boulder residents who are interested in software? They should leave Boulder? Are they not part of Boulder's character?

airstrike 9y ago

Fearmongering much?

toomuchtodo 9y ago
SFBA, Seattle, Major Colorado Metros, Austin, Nashville, Cambridge/Boston, Raleigh-Durham. That's not fear. That's pattern recognition. > Fast-growing technology sector is fueling a housing boom in cities across America https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/fast-growing-technology-sector-is-fueling-a-housing-boom-in-cities-across-america/2017/01/26/5c72c276-a5d8-11e6-8042-f4d111c862d1_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/fast-growing-techn...
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  Places that have gotten expensive because they've become desirable places to live and convinced lots of people to move there? The horror! The only real problem here is shitty local governance and NIMBYism that refuses to acknowledge reality and build more housing. In the end, it doesn't stop people from moving there, it just drives up costs and drives out natives and people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. If you want affordable housing markets, you have to build housing in response to demand. Regardless, we're talking about NYC here, so the fact that Google is buying some building instead of leasing like they have been is a total non-story. It'll have zero effect on NYC.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    They've only become desirable because of an influx of tech employers. Ergo, it makes sense for non-tech employed citizens to not want those employers to locate there (or expand). Also, existing citizens who own and live in these locations take priority over people who want to move in. No one is entitled to additional housing when tech companies foist externalities of additional workers (workers who could work remotely!) on a geographic region.
    - RangerScience 9y ago
      > existing citizens who own and live in these locations take priority Yep, wealthy land owners, clearly the group that needs protecting. Actually, can anyone name a major US city where most of the growth came from itself, rather than an influx?
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        > Yep, wealthy land owners, clearly the group that needs protecting. Wealthy land owners = citizens who have most of their personal wealth/retirements savings tied up in the equity of their home that has slowly appreciated over years or decades. How terribly different than tech companies and employees using copyright (source code) and vast quantities of data to reap enormous returns and salaries (respectively). This isn't David vs Goliath. This is New Boss vs Old Boss. Big Tech needs to get over itself. It's the new bad guy.
        davidcbc 9y ago
        So NYC aside, what is your answer for cities? How does a city improve itself without bringing in new jobs and tax revenue? Should a city just let buildings sit there and rot instead of selling them to a company that wants to create hundreds or thousands of jobs?
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        No tax credits for businesses (See: Amazon). You pay a tax per head of employee you intend to employee onsite that covers infrastructure and subsidizing affordable housing. If you're a going concern, affordability should not be an issue. Otherwise, you're straining infrastructure and housing with marginal benefits to the host city. Hire remote instead.

finkin1 9y ago

I live in Boulder and don't share this sentiment whatsoever. Google already has a large campus here and they're expanding into an area that frankly needed to be renovated anyway. Their entire new + old complex is supposed to house ~2,000 employees. If adding 1.5k employees and a new building is "largely ruining Boulder" in your eyes you should see a doctor.

eternalcode 9y ago
I would suggest seeing a Geologist perhaps. Get it? Boulder? Geologist?
hueving 9y ago
>If adding 1.5k employees and a new building is "largely ruining Boulder" in your eyes you should see a doctor. Put some effort into understanding perspectives before resorting to derision. Bringing thousands of highly paid employees into a smaller city is often not good for many who already lives there unless they own property. The majority of the new jobs will not go to existing residents, rents will increase, restaurants will get more expensive, traffic will get worse, and everything will get more crowded. For rich city-dwellers, the above might sound like nothing, but for people who seek smaller cities it will suck because it quickly erodes the character of the city.
- finkin1 9y ago
  I appreciate you trying to make OP's case, and I'm genuinely interested in changing my mind about this. What do you think should be done? Should growing companies be prevented from expanding because it might 'erode the character of the city'? I'm not in favor of the city subsidizing a company's growth, even if it does stimulate the economy in the long-run, but I just can't get behind any policy that would prevent a growing company due to something as nebulous as the erosion of the city's character.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    What should be done is that cities should relax zoning laws, and allow more housing to be built in high demand areas. That way the city can fit everyone, cheaply.

stevenleeg 9y ago

New York is a much larger city than Boulder. I'd assume Google would have a much tougher time trying to tell the NYC government how to operate considering how small their presence is relative to the city, even if we're just talking about Manhattan.

danharaj 9y ago
I find the tech scene in NYC to be a lot more tolerable than other places. It seems like many of us here understand that we're small fish compared to, say, the sharks on Wall Street.
- ionforce 9y ago
  An interesting thing to note about tech in NYC is that it's not at all like tech in the west coast where it's tech for tech's sake. In NYC it's always in support of some other industry. Definitely gives off a different vibe.
  - hueving 9y ago
    Yeah, unfortunately it puts you lower on the totem pole as a software engineer. This results in lower salaries in general for developers there compared to the bay.

umanwizard 9y ago

You don't have a clue about New York.

jsky_goog 9y ago

The new office has been open for 3 months and Google has had a presence in Boulder for a decade. Google is pretty far from "dictating...how they want want the neighborhood and city to be structured". The city council has promoted low growth and high housing prices for decades and will continue to do so.

geofft 9y ago

The real answer is for cities to be built up so much that even a Google-sized company is a drop in the bucket. Google NYC right now is about one city block (111 8th), expanding to two. That's a tiny part of Manhattan, which isn't even all of NYC. My old church is located under the old Citigroup Center skyscraper at 601 Lexington, which is also an entire block; Citigroup used to have both that building and the block across the street, 399 Park, for a couple of decades. When they moved out of those buildings to another neighborhood in Manhattan, that caused a drop in noon mass attendance but that was really about it. Their presence didn't destroy the neighborhood, let alone the city, and their move didn't destroy it either. The fact that NYC is capable of handling Citigroup-sized companies and Google-sized companies moving in and barely even noticing is one of the deep reasons I like living in NYC. I wish more other cities would do the same, because I don't think there's anything unique to NYC about the ability to do this. Maybe population - although the Denver-Aurora-Bolder metropolitan area, at 3M, isn't that much smaller than NYC (8.5M). The internet is telling me the Google Boulder office can support up to 1,500 employees. You shouldn't give them corporate welfare, but also you should just be able to accommodate them without that, they're not that big. It should just be a building, and you should have lots of those.

workthrowaway27 9y ago
NYC metro area population is ~21M. It's way more dense than Colorado, so it's not surprising that a large company moving into NYC doesn't change it much.
blackguardx 9y ago
Boulder has a population of ~100,000. I don't oppose the Google office, but their workforce will grow to represent 1-2% of the city's populace. That isn't a "drop in the bucket."
- geofft 9y ago
  Sure - I'm advocating that more cities should grow to the point that it is a drop in the bucket, by inviting not only Google but other companies and not treating any of them as special. Or, sure, they can decide that being a 100K-person town is what they want their city to be, and use zoning to actively resist any single employer having over 1K people in the town. But this isn't a Google-specific problem, and if you try to address it with Google-specific solutions (either "Take special measures to invite Google because they'll bring in high-paying jobs" or "Take special measures to exclude Google because they'll destroy your city"), you'll be in trouble when some other, possibly non-tech, employer comes along in the future.

Xorlev 9y ago

I've lived and worked in Colorado my whole life, joined Google Boulder about 8 months ago. Spent a ton of time in Boulder before that; my wife is from Boulder proper. Honestly? Google is barely a speck in the whirlwind of changes that Boulder is undergoing. Tech is a huge part of it, but you can't throw that entirely at Google's feet. There's been Silicon Valley expats and tons of other folks moving to Boulder for years. Back on Google for a moment: Lets talk neighborhood. The older Google buildings are renovated, small buildings. One of them was a Circuit City that closed. That should already give you a good idea of the area. It isn't trendy downtown, just primarily commercial space. The new Google building is larger, about 3 blocks away, and located in what was a basically condemned. There's empty, undeveloped lots across from it on one side, and a huge sprawling Whole Foods with a massive parking lot on the other side. Google's new building is flanked by a large Target. Overall, the building is not actually that large. It's 4 floors and built as two halves joined in the center with a bridge. It isn't the trendy part of town. It's developed a nice building in an otherwise lower-traffic area. I know there's follow-on effects from employing new folks in the area (housing, traffic, etc.), but I don't see how that's overall different from the general influx of folks into Boulder. Perhaps it's myopic of me, but I don't see "us" (as if us vs. them is a productive use of time) being a negative force. Google Boulder employs lots of folks, and the vast majority of them have lived in Colorado for more than the last few years. I'd like to know what we're doing to destroy communities and how we can prevent that.

hueving 9y ago
>I'd like to know what we're doing to destroy communities and how we can prevent that. Stop moving into small cities with workers paid significantly above the average of the existing residents. Restaurants open that they can't afford, the limited housing stock gets bid up quickly, good schools get overcrowded, etc. It's not a pleasant answer, but realistically that's ultimately what upsets a good chunk of the people that complain. If you bring in 2,000 people into any small city who make $200k/year+ when the average is down around $50k/year, it's going to result in a backlash and there is nothing you can really do unless you ban your employees from spending money there. The only real strategy is to pretend you are concerned and wait for the problem to gentrify away.

oh_sigh 9y ago

What? Googles new office on 30th and pearl is hardly 'sprawling' - the target and wholefoods that are right next to it each take up a much bigger footprint than the office, and that is just the buildings themselves - Target and WF have surface parking which takes up huge amounts of real estate for almost zero value - whereas the Google building has 3 or 4 levels of parking underneath it, reducing their overall footprint. Man, if only Google left this lot condemned and abandoned, along with the defunct car dealership across the corner which is just an empty lot. Boulder would be so much better off. You can verify all this with the satellite photos and street view.

1024core 9y ago
> the target and wholefoods that are right next to it each take up a much bigger footprint than the office, and that is just the buildings themselves That's the problem: WF and Target pay minimum wages, and that seems to be OK with the OP. Paying more than minimum wages is the problem. S/he wants everyone to be poor.

gowld 9y ago

So, what's your opinion of Boulder residents who are interested in software? They should leave Boulder? Are they not part of Boulder's character?