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If you build an office in the middle of a city, sometimes you need to be part of the city... The employees can always bring a lunch to work if they don't want

If you build an office in the middle of a city, sometimes you need to be part of the city... The employees can always bring a lunch to work if they don't want to spend money going out to restaurants. Yes, it would suck if you expected free food and got stuck at this FB office. But, it would also suck if Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale became full of offices and private cafeterias and lost all essence of a "downtown". I mean Palo Alto is already full of Palantir buildings.

hocuspocus 8y ago
> But, it would also suck if Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale became full of offices and private cafeterias and lost all essence of a "downtown". I mean Palo Alto is already full of Palantir buildings. As an outsider who never lived in the US, I think they are already well beyond saving. At least this isn't my idea of a "downtown". It's not like you can somehow rekindle social diversity in those cities at this point. Outside of tech workers, almost nobody can afford living there. I believe most of these restaurant employees wouldn't mind working at a private cafeteria instead.
closeparen 8y ago
Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale residents start frothing at the mouth when development threatens to make any part of their city look like a downtown. They are deeply committed to preventing any hint of such a thing. At most, they want a 1950s small-town Main St.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  San Antonio Center is very much starting to look like a downtown, complete with the dense apartment blocks over street-level retail, underground parking garages, 11-story apartment buildings, and pedestrian-only alleyways. It's still sort of a hybrid development, because the Walmart side of the block hasn't been redeveloped yet and features a giant parking lot and all around them are tiny 1950s-style strip malls and small apartment complexes that literally were built in the 60s, but you can see in both the zoning codes and satellite photos of the area redeveloped that they were going for a real city in density & usage. I remember thinking, when initial development started around 2010/2011 and all the news was about traffic on 101 and Google shuttle buses making life hell in the Mission, that it looked like the solution was to bring the City to Mountain View rather than bring all the workers from the City. They get away with this because the area was basically barren strip mall & parking lot before redevelopment - it was the old Sears store, plus Shockley Semiconductor (which I think had been turned into a small grocer that nobody except tech tourists visited), plus a few other old-economy retailers that were going bankrupt. There weren't actually any neighbors to get mad, plus I doubt they'd shed a tear.

hocuspocus 8y ago

> But, it would also suck if Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale became full of offices and private cafeterias and lost all essence of a "downtown". I mean Palo Alto is already full of Palantir buildings. As an outsider who never lived in the US, I think they are already well beyond saving. At least this isn't my idea of a "downtown". It's not like you can somehow rekindle social diversity in those cities at this point. Outside of tech workers, almost nobody can afford living there. I believe most of these restaurant employees wouldn't mind working at a private cafeteria instead.

closeparen 8y ago

Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale residents start frothing at the mouth when development threatens to make any part of their city look like a downtown. They are deeply committed to preventing any hint of such a thing. At most, they want a 1950s small-town Main St.

nostrademons 8y ago
San Antonio Center is very much starting to look like a downtown, complete with the dense apartment blocks over street-level retail, underground parking garages, 11-story apartment buildings, and pedestrian-only alleyways. It's still sort of a hybrid development, because the Walmart side of the block hasn't been redeveloped yet and features a giant parking lot and all around them are tiny 1950s-style strip malls and small apartment complexes that literally were built in the 60s, but you can see in both the zoning codes and satellite photos of the area redeveloped that they were going for a real city in density & usage. I remember thinking, when initial development started around 2010/2011 and all the news was about traffic on 101 and Google shuttle buses making life hell in the Mission, that it looked like the solution was to bring the City to Mountain View rather than bring all the workers from the City. They get away with this because the area was basically barren strip mall & parking lot before redevelopment - it was the old Sears store, plus Shockley Semiconductor (which I think had been turned into a small grocer that nobody except tech tourists visited), plus a few other old-economy retailers that were going bankrupt. There weren't actually any neighbors to get mad, plus I doubt they'd shed a tear.