17 ms·

Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

195 points by cyphunk 8y ago

woodpanel 8y ago
Rightly so. Berlin has an amazing start up scene, certainly unique for and unrivaled in Germany. That being said, Berlin hosts a lot of NIMBYism. Particularly by people who gentrified the city in the first place and immediately turned to become fierce gentrification enemies. Essentially locking in their gains.
- simonh 8y ago
  Though presumably not financial gains? Gentrification usually implies skyrocketing property valuations, so early movers should stand to win big from the trend. I used to know someone that bought a flat in Soho, central London, in the mid-90s. She sold it when she married 8 years later and made over half a million quid. No idea what it would be worth now.
  - detaro 8y ago
    People generally do not own their flats in German cities, its almost entirely a rental market. Can't find entirely up-to-date numbers, but <20 %, probably closer to 15 % in Berlin (including people owning single-family homes in the periphery)
  - thomasz 8y ago
    Germany in general, and Berlin in particular has a very low percentage of home owners. Therefore, financial profit from gentrification goes to a small elite, maybe the upper 15%.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    Berlin has a very different attitude to all of this than the UK. Rent control; graffiti isn’t property damage; very low rates of property ownership; city centre anarchist camps (at least, I think that’s what I saw); blurred Google Street View images all over the place… I have recently moved here from the UK and it feels like much I have barely scratched the surface of the differences. I doubt the concept of gentrification translates as well as a dictionary might suggest.
  - woodpanel 8y ago
    It's gentrificators that become anti-gentrification activists once they secured their gain. The "gain" in this case is: 1) Getting to transform a neighbourhood (that you weren't a part of before) however it fancies you, while simultaneously prohibiting those that come after you from doing the same. 2) locking in the low rents you have to pay. While keeping supply of housing artificially low you're thus increasing the rent-gap between what you have to pay and those that move in after you. As the other commenters noted, Germany has a low home-ownership rate (good thing IMO but a whole different story). Because of strict laws on how to increase rents, gentrificators can secure themselves the low rents from before gentrification. It is not uncommon that one neighbour tenant in the same house pays two times your rent.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - killjoywashere 8y ago
      > It is not uncommon that one neighbour tenant in the same house pays two times your rent In the US, it is not uncommon that one neighbor homeowner next door pays two times your mortgage. I would be interested in your story about home-ownership, but difference in pricing due to time of arrival doesn't seem like a differentiator between renting and buying.
      - woodpanel 8y ago
        if I get you right, you want to know the reasons why I‘m in favor of low-ownership rates. On top of my head: - Economics of scale: housing companies provide more quality/ € than your landlord that owns one flat or even what most owner-occupiers can reasonably provide for themself. - Real Estate is a Commodity, yes. Owning that is an investment, yes. But living in one isn‘t. It’s a product that you use. We should stop telling people otherwise. A house is not your retirement. - Austria, Germany and Switzerland are the countries with the world‘s lowest home-ownership rate. Putting them in that order, you also get their GDPs (Switzerland being the richest) as well as the lowest ownership-rate. That clarifies some myths: a) that low rate has anything to do with WW2 (it doesn’t) b) that high ownership rates benefit the people (it doesn’t, Third world countries have ownership rates topping 90%)
- camillomiller 8y ago
  This makes no sense. Berlin is a rent city, not a ownership one. So what’s the incredible gain to lock?
  - woodpanel 8y ago
    Please see my other comments. But building on the idea, that because Germany/Berlin being a tenant place there are no gains to lock in - that logic would then conclude that there can't be gentrification at all. Which is of course nonsensical. Gentrificators don't need to be property owners, in fact gentrification theory explicitly states the opposite: that it's usually new tenants that change poor/working-class neighborhoods and spark the gentrification process. Those tenants are so called "pioneers", usually high educated, creative class, affluent and thus able to buy property even after the gentrification process has started.
  - manfredo 8y ago
    Berlin has extensive rent control. So it likely the same situation as San Francisco: a significant portion of renters enjoy a privileged rent price and aren't affected by rising housing costs. While people in non-rent controlled cities like Seattle accept development, people in rent controlled cities oppose development because they don't want their neighborhood to change and they are insulated from rising rents.
    - camillomiller 8y ago
      The situation in both Seattle and San Francisco is effed-up big time, and that's because of Big Tech. There's no comparison yet with Berlin, and Berliners simply showed that social cohesion still counts. It's a fight against tone deaf giants that can't see themselves doing any harm ever in the name of progress. What happened to Google in Berlin was the best possible outcome.
      - manfredo 8y ago
        The situation in San Francisco is mostly due to NIMBYism and a refusal to build housing. Tech jobs don't magically make housing prices rise - shortages of housing make housing prices rise. Seattle is handling this better than SF, in large part because SF had messed with the natural interaction of supply and demand. Given what the above commenter wrote, Berlin looks like it is in the same situation as SF: trying to solve a housing shortage by discouraging demand rather than increasing supply.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  It is too soon to declare this was a 'good idea'. Historically investment in a city has benefited a city. This is the opposite. I wonder who was behind the protest, was it the established tech players and wanted to keep competition out? This seems like a mild form of isolationism, and again, if we use history, this seems like a bad idea.
- chobeat 8y ago
  It's also that Berlin is heavily radicalized and can radicalize even the worst STEMlord. So after moving here it's not rare to get into politics and understand that, on a local scale, your decisions matter.
simonh 8y ago
I'd be interested to hear the opinions of any Berlin residents. Vocal NIMBY minority driving away new jobs and beneficial development? Genuine victory in preserving local culture and character? Bit of both? Other?
- flohofwoe 8y ago
  It's a good thing IMHO, Berlin is already overrun by IT tech and really needs a bit more diversity in that regard. The city is getting too expensive too fast, rent is exploding, and 'normal people' are driven out and entire areas are becoming 'elite ghettos'. There's plenty of smaller cities within a few hundred kilometers that would actually benefit from a Google Campus, and where Google might be better welcome.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    It is replacing entire industries worldwide. It's making many urban industries obsolete.
    - flohofwoe 8y ago
      Sure but Berlin is already close to an IT monoculture. More of the same just makes things worse when the IT industry will be made obsolete by something else.
      - pgeorgi 8y ago
        Establishing hubs elsewhere would be good for the rest of the country, too. For example in the coal mining regions that fear getting the short end of the stick in the transition to renewable energy. Compared to the situation in the US ("fly-over states"), it's still trivial to get to your trendy night time activities: Eastern coal mining hubs are 2 hours or less by car from Berlin, and less from Dresden or Leipzig. Western coal mining is in an area with one of the highest population density of the country. That makes me think that the regular "who wants to move there" argument isn't as convincing here as in the US.
- 8y ago
doombolt 8y ago
Why not build in e.g. Leipzig or other beautiful but jobs-starved city? Come to think of it, why no campuses in Italy or Spain? Those countries have kinda lowish expenses, good weather and people will pay a premium to be able to move there. Instead everybody is opening in London and Switzerland which are overpriced and kinda meh.
- meguest 8y ago
  Spain and Italy currently have weakened economies caused by large unemployment and government debt. Italy in particular is at risk of defaulting on its debts (which are 131% of GDP compared to 87.7% for the U.K and 64.1% in Germany as of 2017) and the ECB and other lenders are going to be reluctant to lend to them. This is turn puts the banks and all kinds of public services at risk.
  - doombolt 8y ago
    I don't understand why it will be harder to attract software developers to Italy versus Poland. Weather and environment are much nicer and if this job ends you just move elsewhere. I would easily move to a cheap locale even if tech scene there is not abundant. I'd not move to London or Switzerland since you will always be 2nd class citizen compared to e.g. bankers. Which is just non issue in southern europe. Weak economic is a thing you leverage.
    - travelbuffoon 8y ago
      > 2nd class citizen Huh? Also, those places are way more international than most places in Europe, which makes relocation more attractive. Good luck attracting non-Italians to Italy, or non-Polish to Poland.
      - doombolt 8y ago
        Is not it obvious? When you tell you do software in Perugia you sound important, when you tell the same in London you basically say you're a nobody. I would gladly move to Italy with its amazing culture. I would not move to a place so diverse and full of recent immigrants that it no longer has any specific culture. Am I unique here? And yes, people relocate to Poland a lot, from ex-USSR countries for example.
jschuur 8y ago
If I read the article correctly, this wasn't about building a new 'Google campus' (i.e. a huge building to house a large number of Google employees as their main regional HQ). This was about building Campus Berlin, an incubator for startups like they pioneered first in London and then brought to other cities. See https://www.campus.co/berlin/de https://www.campus.co/berlin/de and https://www.campus.co/london/en https://www.campus.co/london/en. It's easy to misunderstand this because of what the term 'campus' is typically associated with. I live in London, and when I say 'I'm going to Google's Campus', I often need to qualify that I'm not going to their main office complex at King's Cross. There may still be very valid reasons to protest Google in Berlin, but I wonder if the people objecting understood the distinction: that this wasn't a hub for all of Google's employees, but rather a place that would help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources. The kind of smaller startups that would be home at a Campus style incubator would not be fueling high paid Google salaries and would be a lot less likely to drive up rents e.g..
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
  > help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources. Another way of looking at that, is "gentrify the vibrant neighbourhood by trucking in techbros to displace the artists". It's not new (1) I don't necessarily agree with that framing, but it is understandable and coherent, not a misunderstanding 1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18282143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18282143
  - aesh2Xa1 8y ago
    The article lists that reason (gentrification) explicitly. The only other one given in there is that Google is evil (data collection, tax evasion, etc.). Someone else pointed out that the type of hosted campus would not lead to the same gentrification when the startups don't offer high salaries, but I think the point is still valid. At least, I do not know of another Google campus where this was not the case... I could be wrong. As an aside, I dislike the term "techbro." It's obviously pejorative and I hardly ever see anything kind used to describe men working in the IT/CS sector. Just that and "neckbeard."
keiferski 8y ago
I’m honestly kind of surprised at Google’s complete lack of cultural or diplomatic knowledge about Berlin. Kreuzberg is/was the center of artistic culture in the city, and choosing to have a presence there, no matter how small, would clearly be viewed as a corporate American attack on local countercultural values. As another commenter stated, they could have avoided this entire issue by picking somewhere in Mitte or a western suburb.
- ff10 8y ago
  ... or Adlershof for that matter.
  - eecc 8y ago
    Yeah but XBerg is so hip & happening and whoever lobbied for this move at Google must have loved their stay at one of the many AirBnB apartments in the area! /s
- ThePhysicist 8y ago
  Don't know, it has probably more to do with the fact that it's Google trying to open something there. Otto Bock (market leader in prosthetics and wheelchairs) just bought a old brewery for several hundred million € in Prenzlauer Berg [1] with the goal to convert it into a research center. I don't remember any kind of protest or outrage against that. 1: https://www.ottobock.com/en/press/press-releases/ottobock-revitalises-the-boetzow-quarter.html https://www.ottobock.com/en/press/press-releases/ottobock-re...
  - keiferski 8y ago
    1. Prenzlauerberg is known as an upper-middle class/family/“safe” area, not a haven for artists or counterculture. 2. A prosthetics company is a far cry from the omnipresent, omnipotent entity that is Google. Everyone on planet Earth knows what Google is. Many people take issue with their behavior.
    - ThePhysicist 8y ago
narrator 8y ago
Google people want to work where there is culture because they don't have any. They just consume it with algorithms, extract the value, reprocess it and redistribute it. They pull everything out of context so it looses its broader meaning. For instance, if I google image search for "women in bikinis" I get hundreds of thousands of women in bikinis, but not the broader narrative of their lives and personalities. It is completely decontextualized and drops all the other dimensions of the context in which these photos were taken. In the same way, Google employees lack context because everything is a component, they moved from somewhere else and have been assimilated into the great corporate standardization. They crave things with context, but when they try and coexist with it, their enormous economic superiority draws the interest of the whole world to extract from that environment that which promotes their ability to decontextualize and conform the world around them and the decontextualization whirlwind grows around them.
- throwaway93u9 8y ago
  You forgot to give the entire context for your comment, which completely decontextualizes it and drops all other dimensions in which this comment was taken. ;-)
- brainwad 8y ago
  You see the simple answer to your query because Google decides what to show based on what users will prefer, and most users just don't give a fuck about "the broader narrative of their lives and personalities".
  - oytis 8y ago
    I would also assume that people interested in broader narrative of women's lives and personalities will not expect to find such narrative by googling for images of women in bikinis.
  - narrator 8y ago
    Sure, but the people of Berlin do care about the larger context that produces the creativity. The woman in a bikini didn't generate spontaneously from a generative adversarial neural net. She had to have good genetics, not overeat and workout. Thus, there was a bigger context that created that woman in a bikini picture that is lost by the algorithm. The algorithm extracts and decontextualizes. The google algorithm for selecting property is the same. Consume culture, extract, decontextualize, strip mine all the culture off the top but let other people nurture it, until they are priced out of the market. They should set up the next Google headquarters in the middle of the sahara in shipping containers, preferably one of those places without a lot of sand that's just flat with gravel in all directions. Watch all the nerds walk back and forth to their shipping containers while looking at their cell phones and drinking their soylent unless the company pays for culture to be brought in.
deleted 8y ago
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sarabande 8y ago
One viewpoint from those who didn't want the start-up campus in Berlin, from the Berliner Morgenpost [https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article215652919/Nach-dem-Google-Rueckzug-waechst-der-Druck-auf-den-Senat.html https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article215652919/Nach-dem-G...]: Sehr viel drastischer formulierte es Ulrike Schneider, Aktivistin beim Initiativkreis „Google-Campus & Co verhindern“, die den Konzern beschimpfte: „Google ist und bleibt ein Scheiß-Konzern, der seine Gewinne mit Überwachung, Ausschnüffelei, Zusammenarbeit mit Militär und Geheimdiensten sowie Steuertricks macht.“ > Ulrike Schneider, an activist at the initiative group "Stop Google-Campus & Co", criticized the company even more drastically: "Google is and will always be a shit company, that makes its profit through monitoring, snooping, working with the military and secret services, and tax [evasion] tricks." I'm sure most local residents mostly care about rent prices going up in that area, though, rather than a specific anti-Google sentiment. They probably don't want it to be gentrified as another district, similar to what happened/is happening to Prenzlauer Berg.
- expertentipp 8y ago
  Berlin is going nuts in recent times, it's unbearable. There are literally billboards around the city agitating against Facebook and Google (sic!). Somehow, the same activists with dubious motivations don't mind domestic entities like infamous credit rating agency or the debt collection agency collecting the public media fee. The public media debt collection agency has the most complete database of who lives where and with whom in the whole country, probably the most comprehensive database on domestic households that exists in the world, certainly in the EU. What about it, fraudulent privacy zealots?
  - detaro 8y ago
    > the same activists with dubious motivations don't mind domestic entities [citation needed]. The examples you mention are widely disliked and fought too. + of course conflating privacy activists and those protesting Google here likely is not very accurate.
  - Faark 8y ago
    > public media debt collection agency You do notice this is kind of government work? (Organized in a way politicians are supposed to have little influence about broadcast content) I understand the US is special in regard of having very high distrust for the government, something not that pronounced in most European countries. My government does indeed know where I live and I don't have much of a problem with that in principle. That doesn't mean I approve of all the way that data is handled. They at least have some accountability towards us citizens, in contrast to some private company not contractually obliged to the public.
m23khan 8y ago
There is a city called Hamilton in Ontario, Canada. Houses a good University called McMaster and is near Waterloo University - premier Computer Science university in Canada. City (Hamilton) is fairly well developed with a functioning International Airport and since it was initially built around manufacturing, its prestige within Canada has suffered somewhat in last 20-25 years. If firms like Google would be so kind to invest there, the locals and the children of locals and other Canadians would welcome them with open arms.
- lg 8y ago
  note there's already a google office nearby in kitchener.
- GhostVII 8y ago
  Google already has an office in Kitchener/Waterloo (which they are expanding, afaik), and Toronto, so I don't think they would want to build an office in Hamilton, since it is pretty much right in the middle of those two offices.
  - mikelward 8y ago
    This isn't about a Google office, it's about an incubator for startups.
- slededit 8y ago
  Hamilton has a gritty feel Cap Hill used to have in Seattle before it was ruined. Great nightlife but always a slight worry you might get robbed. It has density without the cost so you can see uniqueness you won't get elsewhere.
cyphunk 8y ago
The problem with "guess they don't want jobs" argument is that Google is not like Ford Motor Company. When they move into your town and your rents double you can't just be retrained. When a company that requires special skills moves in they kick people that do not have those skills out.
- antt 8y ago
  >When they move into your town and your rents double you can't just be retrained. Why?
  - Sargos 8y ago
    It's not a politically correct thing to say but most people aren't smart enough to work in tech. It's a fairly top tier field unless you're doing something really, really basic.
    - wallflower 8y ago
      And not everyone working in tech has to work at a FAANG. Or wants to even try to pass their hiring interviews. There is plenty of work for utility programmers like me in all industries. Yes, you won’t be able to humble brag about your salary but we all do pretty well relative to the median.
    - antt 8y ago
      I fundamentally disagree. The only reason why tech is hard to get into is because tech education is so terrible that teaching someone to use Word is what passes for IT. Something that makes as much sense as writing dotted lines with chalk as a prerequisite for mathematics.
    - cyphunk 8y ago
      It's not about being smart enough. It's about time required to retrain and the cost to do so. Until Google, or PeidPeiper, have a on-job training program sufficient enough that they can walk into every Shop of Kreutzberg and say "here, we we'll teach you the skills you need just come work for us" -- we should assume their setting up shop will displace a ton of people. Until those companies add to that "and we'll pay your cost of living until you transition" their movement into a neighborhood should perceived as a Tax by the state.
nkkollaw 8y ago
As cool as Berlin art is, so is a Google campus for tech people and business in general? If I picture a gentrification activist I think about a purple-haired kid that wouldn't get a job if his life depended on it, making people that might be interested and have the skills to work at Google miss an opportunity. On the other hand, Google could have picked another spot instead of giving up? How is it..?
- nullpunkt 8y ago
  fucking retard
forkLding 8y ago
Interesting to see tech globalization increasingly at the crosshairs, used to be McDonalds, etc.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

195 points by cyphunk 8y ago

Rightly so. Berlin has an amazing start up scene, certainly unique for and unrivaled in Germany. That being said, Berlin hosts a lot of NIMBYism. Particularly by people who gentrified the city in the first place and immediately turned to become fierce gentrification enemies. Essentially locking in their gains.

simonh 8y ago
Though presumably not financial gains? Gentrification usually implies skyrocketing property valuations, so early movers should stand to win big from the trend. I used to know someone that bought a flat in Soho, central London, in the mid-90s. She sold it when she married 8 years later and made over half a million quid. No idea what it would be worth now.
- detaro 8y ago
  People generally do not own their flats in German cities, its almost entirely a rental market. Can't find entirely up-to-date numbers, but <20 %, probably closer to 15 % in Berlin (including people owning single-family homes in the periphery)
- thomasz 8y ago
  Germany in general, and Berlin in particular has a very low percentage of home owners. Therefore, financial profit from gentrification goes to a small elite, maybe the upper 15%.
- ben_w 8y ago
  Berlin has a very different attitude to all of this than the UK. Rent control; graffiti isn’t property damage; very low rates of property ownership; city centre anarchist camps (at least, I think that’s what I saw); blurred Google Street View images all over the place… I have recently moved here from the UK and it feels like much I have barely scratched the surface of the differences. I doubt the concept of gentrification translates as well as a dictionary might suggest.
- woodpanel 8y ago
  It's gentrificators that become anti-gentrification activists once they secured their gain. The "gain" in this case is: 1) Getting to transform a neighbourhood (that you weren't a part of before) however it fancies you, while simultaneously prohibiting those that come after you from doing the same. 2) locking in the low rents you have to pay. While keeping supply of housing artificially low you're thus increasing the rent-gap between what you have to pay and those that move in after you. As the other commenters noted, Germany has a low home-ownership rate (good thing IMO but a whole different story). Because of strict laws on how to increase rents, gentrificators can secure themselves the low rents from before gentrification. It is not uncommon that one neighbour tenant in the same house pays two times your rent.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    > It is not uncommon that one neighbour tenant in the same house pays two times your rent In the US, it is not uncommon that one neighbor homeowner next door pays two times your mortgage. I would be interested in your story about home-ownership, but difference in pricing due to time of arrival doesn't seem like a differentiator between renting and buying.
    - woodpanel 8y ago
      if I get you right, you want to know the reasons why I‘m in favor of low-ownership rates. On top of my head: - Economics of scale: housing companies provide more quality/ € than your landlord that owns one flat or even what most owner-occupiers can reasonably provide for themself. - Real Estate is a Commodity, yes. Owning that is an investment, yes. But living in one isn‘t. It’s a product that you use. We should stop telling people otherwise. A house is not your retirement. - Austria, Germany and Switzerland are the countries with the world‘s lowest home-ownership rate. Putting them in that order, you also get their GDPs (Switzerland being the richest) as well as the lowest ownership-rate. That clarifies some myths: a) that low rate has anything to do with WW2 (it doesn’t) b) that high ownership rates benefit the people (it doesn’t, Third world countries have ownership rates topping 90%)
camillomiller 8y ago
This makes no sense. Berlin is a rent city, not a ownership one. So what’s the incredible gain to lock?
- woodpanel 8y ago
  Please see my other comments. But building on the idea, that because Germany/Berlin being a tenant place there are no gains to lock in - that logic would then conclude that there can't be gentrification at all. Which is of course nonsensical. Gentrificators don't need to be property owners, in fact gentrification theory explicitly states the opposite: that it's usually new tenants that change poor/working-class neighborhoods and spark the gentrification process. Those tenants are so called "pioneers", usually high educated, creative class, affluent and thus able to buy property even after the gentrification process has started.
- manfredo 8y ago
  Berlin has extensive rent control. So it likely the same situation as San Francisco: a significant portion of renters enjoy a privileged rent price and aren't affected by rising housing costs. While people in non-rent controlled cities like Seattle accept development, people in rent controlled cities oppose development because they don't want their neighborhood to change and they are insulated from rising rents.
  - camillomiller 8y ago
    The situation in both Seattle and San Francisco is effed-up big time, and that's because of Big Tech. There's no comparison yet with Berlin, and Berliners simply showed that social cohesion still counts. It's a fight against tone deaf giants that can't see themselves doing any harm ever in the name of progress. What happened to Google in Berlin was the best possible outcome.
    - manfredo 8y ago
      The situation in San Francisco is mostly due to NIMBYism and a refusal to build housing. Tech jobs don't magically make housing prices rise - shortages of housing make housing prices rise. Seattle is handling this better than SF, in large part because SF had messed with the natural interaction of supply and demand. Given what the above commenter wrote, Berlin looks like it is in the same situation as SF: trying to solve a housing shortage by discouraging demand rather than increasing supply.
mkirklions 8y ago
It is too soon to declare this was a 'good idea'. Historically investment in a city has benefited a city. This is the opposite. I wonder who was behind the protest, was it the established tech players and wanted to keep competition out? This seems like a mild form of isolationism, and again, if we use history, this seems like a bad idea.
chobeat 8y ago
It's also that Berlin is heavily radicalized and can radicalize even the worst STEMlord. So after moving here it's not rare to get into politics and understand that, on a local scale, your decisions matter.

simonh 8y ago

I'd be interested to hear the opinions of any Berlin residents. Vocal NIMBY minority driving away new jobs and beneficial development? Genuine victory in preserving local culture and character? Bit of both? Other?

flohofwoe 8y ago
It's a good thing IMHO, Berlin is already overrun by IT tech and really needs a bit more diversity in that regard. The city is getting too expensive too fast, rent is exploding, and 'normal people' are driven out and entire areas are becoming 'elite ghettos'. There's plenty of smaller cities within a few hundred kilometers that would actually benefit from a Google Campus, and where Google might be better welcome.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  It is replacing entire industries worldwide. It's making many urban industries obsolete.
  - flohofwoe 8y ago
    Sure but Berlin is already close to an IT monoculture. More of the same just makes things worse when the IT industry will be made obsolete by something else.
    - pgeorgi 8y ago
      Establishing hubs elsewhere would be good for the rest of the country, too. For example in the coal mining regions that fear getting the short end of the stick in the transition to renewable energy. Compared to the situation in the US ("fly-over states"), it's still trivial to get to your trendy night time activities: Eastern coal mining hubs are 2 hours or less by car from Berlin, and less from Dresden or Leipzig. Western coal mining is in an area with one of the highest population density of the country. That makes me think that the regular "who wants to move there" argument isn't as convincing here as in the US.
8y ago

doombolt 8y ago

Why not build in e.g. Leipzig or other beautiful but jobs-starved city? Come to think of it, why no campuses in Italy or Spain? Those countries have kinda lowish expenses, good weather and people will pay a premium to be able to move there. Instead everybody is opening in London and Switzerland which are overpriced and kinda meh.

meguest 8y ago
Spain and Italy currently have weakened economies caused by large unemployment and government debt. Italy in particular is at risk of defaulting on its debts (which are 131% of GDP compared to 87.7% for the U.K and 64.1% in Germany as of 2017) and the ECB and other lenders are going to be reluctant to lend to them. This is turn puts the banks and all kinds of public services at risk.
- doombolt 8y ago
  I don't understand why it will be harder to attract software developers to Italy versus Poland. Weather and environment are much nicer and if this job ends you just move elsewhere. I would easily move to a cheap locale even if tech scene there is not abundant. I'd not move to London or Switzerland since you will always be 2nd class citizen compared to e.g. bankers. Which is just non issue in southern europe. Weak economic is a thing you leverage.
  - travelbuffoon 8y ago
    > 2nd class citizen Huh? Also, those places are way more international than most places in Europe, which makes relocation more attractive. Good luck attracting non-Italians to Italy, or non-Polish to Poland.
    - doombolt 8y ago
      Is not it obvious? When you tell you do software in Perugia you sound important, when you tell the same in London you basically say you're a nobody. I would gladly move to Italy with its amazing culture. I would not move to a place so diverse and full of recent immigrants that it no longer has any specific culture. Am I unique here? And yes, people relocate to Poland a lot, from ex-USSR countries for example.

jschuur 8y ago

If I read the article correctly, this wasn't about building a new 'Google campus' (i.e. a huge building to house a large number of Google employees as their main regional HQ). This was about building Campus Berlin, an incubator for startups like they pioneered first in London and then brought to other cities. See https://www.campus.co/berlin/de https://www.campus.co/berlin/de and https://www.campus.co/london/en https://www.campus.co/london/en. It's easy to misunderstand this because of what the term 'campus' is typically associated with. I live in London, and when I say 'I'm going to Google's Campus', I often need to qualify that I'm not going to their main office complex at King's Cross. There may still be very valid reasons to protest Google in Berlin, but I wonder if the people objecting understood the distinction: that this wasn't a hub for all of Google's employees, but rather a place that would help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources. The kind of smaller startups that would be home at a Campus style incubator would not be fueling high paid Google salaries and would be a lot less likely to drive up rents e.g..

SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
> help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources. Another way of looking at that, is "gentrify the vibrant neighbourhood by trucking in techbros to displace the artists". It's not new (1) I don't necessarily agree with that framing, but it is understandable and coherent, not a misunderstanding 1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18282143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18282143
- aesh2Xa1 8y ago
  The article lists that reason (gentrification) explicitly. The only other one given in there is that Google is evil (data collection, tax evasion, etc.). Someone else pointed out that the type of hosted campus would not lead to the same gentrification when the startups don't offer high salaries, but I think the point is still valid. At least, I do not know of another Google campus where this was not the case... I could be wrong. As an aside, I dislike the term "techbro." It's obviously pejorative and I hardly ever see anything kind used to describe men working in the IT/CS sector. Just that and "neckbeard."

keiferski 8y ago

I’m honestly kind of surprised at Google’s complete lack of cultural or diplomatic knowledge about Berlin. Kreuzberg is/was the center of artistic culture in the city, and choosing to have a presence there, no matter how small, would clearly be viewed as a corporate American attack on local countercultural values. As another commenter stated, they could have avoided this entire issue by picking somewhere in Mitte or a western suburb.

ff10 8y ago
... or Adlershof for that matter.
- eecc 8y ago
  Yeah but XBerg is so hip & happening and whoever lobbied for this move at Google must have loved their stay at one of the many AirBnB apartments in the area! /s
ThePhysicist 8y ago
Don't know, it has probably more to do with the fact that it's Google trying to open something there. Otto Bock (market leader in prosthetics and wheelchairs) just bought a old brewery for several hundred million € in Prenzlauer Berg [1] with the goal to convert it into a research center. I don't remember any kind of protest or outrage against that. 1: https://www.ottobock.com/en/press/press-releases/ottobock-revitalises-the-boetzow-quarter.html https://www.ottobock.com/en/press/press-releases/ottobock-re...
- keiferski 8y ago
  1. Prenzlauerberg is known as an upper-middle class/family/“safe” area, not a haven for artists or counterculture. 2. A prosthetics company is a far cry from the omnipresent, omnipotent entity that is Google. Everyone on planet Earth knows what Google is. Many people take issue with their behavior.
  - ThePhysicist 8y ago

narrator 8y ago

Google people want to work where there is culture because they don't have any. They just consume it with algorithms, extract the value, reprocess it and redistribute it. They pull everything out of context so it looses its broader meaning. For instance, if I google image search for "women in bikinis" I get hundreds of thousands of women in bikinis, but not the broader narrative of their lives and personalities. It is completely decontextualized and drops all the other dimensions of the context in which these photos were taken. In the same way, Google employees lack context because everything is a component, they moved from somewhere else and have been assimilated into the great corporate standardization. They crave things with context, but when they try and coexist with it, their enormous economic superiority draws the interest of the whole world to extract from that environment that which promotes their ability to decontextualize and conform the world around them and the decontextualization whirlwind grows around them.

throwaway93u9 8y ago
You forgot to give the entire context for your comment, which completely decontextualizes it and drops all other dimensions in which this comment was taken. ;-)
brainwad 8y ago
You see the simple answer to your query because Google decides what to show based on what users will prefer, and most users just don't give a fuck about "the broader narrative of their lives and personalities".
- oytis 8y ago
  I would also assume that people interested in broader narrative of women's lives and personalities will not expect to find such narrative by googling for images of women in bikinis.
- narrator 8y ago
  Sure, but the people of Berlin do care about the larger context that produces the creativity. The woman in a bikini didn't generate spontaneously from a generative adversarial neural net. She had to have good genetics, not overeat and workout. Thus, there was a bigger context that created that woman in a bikini picture that is lost by the algorithm. The algorithm extracts and decontextualizes. The google algorithm for selecting property is the same. Consume culture, extract, decontextualize, strip mine all the culture off the top but let other people nurture it, until they are priced out of the market. They should set up the next Google headquarters in the middle of the sahara in shipping containers, preferably one of those places without a lot of sand that's just flat with gravel in all directions. Watch all the nerds walk back and forth to their shipping containers while looking at their cell phones and drinking their soylent unless the company pays for culture to be brought in.

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sarabande 8y ago

One viewpoint from those who didn't want the start-up campus in Berlin, from the Berliner Morgenpost [https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article215652919/Nach-dem-Google-Rueckzug-waechst-der-Druck-auf-den-Senat.html https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article215652919/Nach-dem-G...]: Sehr viel drastischer formulierte es Ulrike Schneider, Aktivistin beim Initiativkreis „Google-Campus & Co verhindern“, die den Konzern beschimpfte: „Google ist und bleibt ein Scheiß-Konzern, der seine Gewinne mit Überwachung, Ausschnüffelei, Zusammenarbeit mit Militär und Geheimdiensten sowie Steuertricks macht.“ > Ulrike Schneider, an activist at the initiative group "Stop Google-Campus & Co", criticized the company even more drastically: "Google is and will always be a shit company, that makes its profit through monitoring, snooping, working with the military and secret services, and tax [evasion] tricks." I'm sure most local residents mostly care about rent prices going up in that area, though, rather than a specific anti-Google sentiment. They probably don't want it to be gentrified as another district, similar to what happened/is happening to Prenzlauer Berg.

expertentipp 8y ago
Berlin is going nuts in recent times, it's unbearable. There are literally billboards around the city agitating against Facebook and Google (sic!). Somehow, the same activists with dubious motivations don't mind domestic entities like infamous credit rating agency or the debt collection agency collecting the public media fee. The public media debt collection agency has the most complete database of who lives where and with whom in the whole country, probably the most comprehensive database on domestic households that exists in the world, certainly in the EU. What about it, fraudulent privacy zealots?
- detaro 8y ago
  > the same activists with dubious motivations don't mind domestic entities [citation needed]. The examples you mention are widely disliked and fought too. + of course conflating privacy activists and those protesting Google here likely is not very accurate.
- Faark 8y ago
  > public media debt collection agency You do notice this is kind of government work? (Organized in a way politicians are supposed to have little influence about broadcast content) I understand the US is special in regard of having very high distrust for the government, something not that pronounced in most European countries. My government does indeed know where I live and I don't have much of a problem with that in principle. That doesn't mean I approve of all the way that data is handled. They at least have some accountability towards us citizens, in contrast to some private company not contractually obliged to the public.

m23khan 8y ago

There is a city called Hamilton in Ontario, Canada. Houses a good University called McMaster and is near Waterloo University - premier Computer Science university in Canada. City (Hamilton) is fairly well developed with a functioning International Airport and since it was initially built around manufacturing, its prestige within Canada has suffered somewhat in last 20-25 years. If firms like Google would be so kind to invest there, the locals and the children of locals and other Canadians would welcome them with open arms.

lg 8y ago
note there's already a google office nearby in kitchener.
GhostVII 8y ago
Google already has an office in Kitchener/Waterloo (which they are expanding, afaik), and Toronto, so I don't think they would want to build an office in Hamilton, since it is pretty much right in the middle of those two offices.
- mikelward 8y ago
  This isn't about a Google office, it's about an incubator for startups.
slededit 8y ago
Hamilton has a gritty feel Cap Hill used to have in Seattle before it was ruined. Great nightlife but always a slight worry you might get robbed. It has density without the cost so you can see uniqueness you won't get elsewhere.

cyphunk 8y ago

The problem with "guess they don't want jobs" argument is that Google is not like Ford Motor Company. When they move into your town and your rents double you can't just be retrained. When a company that requires special skills moves in they kick people that do not have those skills out.

antt 8y ago
>When they move into your town and your rents double you can't just be retrained. Why?
- Sargos 8y ago
  It's not a politically correct thing to say but most people aren't smart enough to work in tech. It's a fairly top tier field unless you're doing something really, really basic.
  - wallflower 8y ago
    And not everyone working in tech has to work at a FAANG. Or wants to even try to pass their hiring interviews. There is plenty of work for utility programmers like me in all industries. Yes, you won’t be able to humble brag about your salary but we all do pretty well relative to the median.
  - antt 8y ago
    I fundamentally disagree. The only reason why tech is hard to get into is because tech education is so terrible that teaching someone to use Word is what passes for IT. Something that makes as much sense as writing dotted lines with chalk as a prerequisite for mathematics.
  - cyphunk 8y ago
    It's not about being smart enough. It's about time required to retrain and the cost to do so. Until Google, or PeidPeiper, have a on-job training program sufficient enough that they can walk into every Shop of Kreutzberg and say "here, we we'll teach you the skills you need just come work for us" -- we should assume their setting up shop will displace a ton of people. Until those companies add to that "and we'll pay your cost of living until you transition" their movement into a neighborhood should perceived as a Tax by the state.

nkkollaw 8y ago

As cool as Berlin art is, so is a Google campus for tech people and business in general? If I picture a gentrification activist I think about a purple-haired kid that wouldn't get a job if his life depended on it, making people that might be interested and have the skills to work at Google miss an opportunity. On the other hand, Google could have picked another spot instead of giving up? How is it..?

nullpunkt 8y ago
fucking retard

forkLding 8y ago

Interesting to see tech globalization increasingly at the crosshairs, used to be McDonalds, etc.

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