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When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, patting themselves on the back for yet another example of "innovation." Countless employees, tech bloggers, and design fanatics are already lauding the "futuristic" building and its many "groundbreaking" features. But few are aware that Apple's monumental project is already outdated, mimicking a half-century of stagnant suburban corporate campuses that isolated themselves—by design—from the communities their products were supposed to impact.
In the 1940s and '50s, when American corporations first flirted with a move to the 'burbs, CEOs realized that horizontal architecture immersed in a park-like buffer lent big business a sheen of wholesome goodness. The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities. At the same time, the increasing diversity of urban populations meant it was getting harder and harder to maintain an all-white workforce. One by one, major companies headed out of town for greener pastures, luring desired employees into their gilded cages with the types of office perks familiar to any Googler.
Rockstar coders don't do suburbs?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:25PM
Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?
Because it works. You'd think the author could try a cost/benefit analysis first. But maybe that's too hard for them.
My view is that the vast majority of businesses with an actual headquarters have very good reason to keep the community from interacting with that headquarters except by very controlled routes to reduce crime, espionage, and protests inside the headquarters. Also, while it's not a general rule, a lot of times work is done at a business's headquarters. Having strangers just wander in and out can distract from that. A suburb, pastoral-style headquarters looks nice too.
But maybe distractions are overrated. What I've been hearing from people on SN is that they don't mind at all their bosses and coworkers coming by and asking every ten minutes what's the progress on that two month programming project that requires intense concentration. They'll like flying fish or something slipping effortlessly from peering through a ten page log to figure out why that tricky race condition is happening to "HOW'S THAT LOCAL SPORTS TEAM!"
Headquarters are also a prestige thing. Nobody wants their pride and joy in the middle of a slum.
Moving on, if the pastoral look was so terrible, then why do 90-95% of college campuses go over the deep end with that very approach?
Finally, the article repeatedly alludes to "problems" but never mentions any of relevance. For example,
As more and more companies created their own pastoral digs, mid-size cities like Hartford, Cleveland, Birmingham, and St. Louis were left with huge commercial vacancies in once-bustling downtowns. “These cities lost their tax bases at the very time when their infrastructure had started to fall apart and they were dealing with the increasing social problems of the 1960s and ’70s—homelessness, expanding drug use, all that stuff,” Mozingo says. “When these corporations moved out, there were many serious academic studies and journalistic accounts of these devastated downtowns.”
Looks like a cause and effect confusion. These cities stop maintaining infrastructure or doing anything about their crime problems. And coincidentally, the businesses left. Which is cause and which is effect? I'd say the cities that stopped doing their job are the cause not the effect. Are companies supposed to take over their communities Robocop-style and fix them? Are they just supposed to sign the tax checks and ignore the muggings and shitty community environment? And how again are half century old problems relevant to today? All of the cities listed have pretty much fixed their problems.
My view on this is that we've picked off the low-lying fruit from urban planning. Public infrastructure, transportation, architecture, etc is pretty much optimized for the location until something big happens, like say huge, long term increase in cost of oil, developing a cheap building material superior to steel and concrete, telecommuting becomes the normal mode of employment, massive human die-offs, etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:40PM
In reality, you can rarely label one the cause and the other the effect. Rather, it's more like:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @04:01PM
I came across The War on Crime, not crime itself, fueled Detroit's post-1967 decline [mlive.com] yesterday. The article admits it has no numbers to back up its theory that "tough on crime" can lead to urban decay. Was an interesting read, seemed relevant. The main part of the theory is that "tough on crime" destroys communities and families by arresting people and putting them "in the system" for things that would have previously been overlooked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:07PM
To a degree, yes, inasmuch a tough on crime stances contribute to the destruction on families, but Detroit actually reduced softened its stance on crime during that period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman_Young [wikipedia.org]
and I'm actually struck by how much resemblance it has to the BLM movement now.
What would be interesting is a comparison between cities that prospered during that same (Denver and Seattle come to mind) and seeing what details could be fleshed out.
My suspicion is it relates more with the stability to be found in suburbia, and that living in large cities is unnatural to a degree, but people forsake that in the name of high paying jobs.
Once the jobs leave, there is no longer much reason to be there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2016, @05:18AM
I lived in Denver, then Seattle, and now Denver again. Here are a few things I have observed.
Neither city has a particularly large black population. Denver is mostly white and Latino, Seattle is mostly white and Asian. Because of that neither city has experienced the race-related problems of cities such as Detroit, Baltimore, or St. Louis. Regardless of your position on WHY there are race-related problems, you have to admit that there ARE race-related problems. While "just don't have a lot of black people" is no kind of solution, it is an explanation.
Both cities' recent economic booms are primarily driven by technology. Much as industry was growing in the 50s, tech has been growing in the 21st century. People with high-paying jobs don't cause social problems, at least not directly.
Although Denver is not a "West coast" city, both do have the laid-back style associated with the West coast. There is just less anger and tension floating around in the air. Denver has gotten significantly worse about this over the past decade or two, but it is still a whole lot lower-key than cities in the North and East. Seattle is more passive-aggressive, but at least it's passive aggressive. When you don't believe everyone else is out to get you, you are less likely to cause trouble.
Both cities are of moderate size. The statistics are a little confused, especially for Seattle because the "metropolitan" area is considered to include Tacoma but Tacoma is really a totally separate thing. But neither city has much more than three million people in and around it. It is generally just easier to manage a small city than a large one.
This also means that there was enough spare capacity in the city to absorb some population growth. The price of a modest but clean and safe apartment in Denver has risen from about $500 per month 20 years ago to around $1000 per month now. A modest but clean and safe house will cost about $250K to $300K, also about twice as much as it would have 20 years ago. While this is a big rise, it's still affordable on a middle-class salary. You do not have anything like the housing pressures found in large cities. Seattle housing prices are about 50% more, but that is still manageable.
Because housing is lower-cost, it's harder to get trapped. If your neighborhood doesn't suit you, you can leave.
Both cities spent the 50s through the 70s generally being backwaters, especially with regard to manufacturing. Seattle had Boeing but not much else, and Denver never really had a lot of manufacturing (there is some, of course, but it was never a manufacturing-driven city). As a result they did not experience the large population migration of other cities (followed by manufacturing decline) resulting in large decaying urban areas. That said, both cities DID have some decaying areas, which brings me to:
Both cities, especially Denver, have had outstanding urban renewal programs. Denver did it by demolishing the worst dump of a neighborhood downtown and putting a baseball park there, and then surrounding it with related businesses. And it's close enough to downtown that people can walk, or take public transit, a short distance there to see the game after work. This contrasts to, say, Atlanta, which put its new baseball stadium in a bad neighborhood but did not properly integrate it into the city as a whole. Now it's far and it's still in a bad neighborhood. Now another run-down industrial neighborhood to the north is undergoing the same transition.
Both cities have quality public transit, although they have taken different approaches. Seattle public transit can take you *anywhere* and within a reasonable time frame. Denver's is focused more around park & rides and getting commuters efficiently downtown for work, while assuming you will have a car to take you on your personal business. Denver has one of the best light rail systems in the country, and it's continuing to expand. Both cities also have a strong bicycling culture. It's certainly possible to waste a lot of time in traffic in Denver, but if you plan carefully, you don't have to. Less time commuting means more time with your kids and less stress and better quality of life.
That said all is not milk and honey. Both cities do have an increasing homelessness problem. Although some have pointed the finger at housing prices, I don't think that's it, because a modest apartment in Denver is affordable even on minimum wage. And if you couldn't manage minimum wage before, you were probably homeless already. I think it's more a matter of having demolished all the vacant property and put condos on it. While this has, in the short term, helped hold housing prices down, it has also flushed the homeless out of their old areas and into the downtown area. Both Seattle and Denver now have substantial homeless camps. It's just that now they are in the middle of town where you can see them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2016, @03:28PM
You've been out of Seattle too long. Your estimate of house prices is definitely low, unless you're including run-down places on the fringes.
If you include old condos and apartments, you might be closer. But an actual house? No.
As for Seattle's public transit, I've taken it. A lot. It can take you ... well, almost anywhere. But a reasonable time frame? Only if you're not in a hurry, and have something constructive to do while you're waiting. Obtaining a cheap motorcycle saved me hours every day compared to their buses.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:51PM
"tough on crime" not only destroys communities, but it does so by destroying trust in law enforcement.
Police Brutality. Arbitrary arrests, even if you are acquitted. Using jail time as an extra judicial punishment fully expecting that the arrestee will be released.
Detaining people whose skin color is not compliant with unwritten law. Stop and frisk / harass.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:21PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:48PM
nice ascii art! Around here (rust belt, finally starting to recover), that cycle is now working the other way--a few smart companies are moving offices back to downtown, developers are renovating beautiful old buildings. This increases tax revenue for the city and that part of town starts to improve.
Random other thoughts:
+ Managers & C-level execs moved to the 'burbs and wanted to shorten their commute. While this might never be spoken, it seems like one of those things that could be a large influence behind the scenes?
+ Going back to WWII era, many aircraft production plants (high tech in that era) were located downtown--because the workers didn't have cars.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Thursday October 20 2016, @10:40PM
How did you get that past the lameness filter? I have never been able to do any ascii art and all of those spaces should trigger it.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2016, @09:39AM
Well, I just pasted it in (I used an editor to create it since the input box here has a proportional font), previewed (several times, actually, because of edits in the surrounding text) and submitted. No filter error to work around.
Actually my surprise was that the first line was immediately correct; my experience with ecode tags is that leading spaces from the first line usually get eaten; I was prepared to play tricks for that one, but it turned out unnecessary.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 21 2016, @12:03AM
Who or what decides how our cities are designed? Is it ruthless capitalists doing the design for purposes of more control over employees? Is there little planned design, just slowly evolving changes from thousands of small decisions, rather like how ants build ant mounds? Is it social expectations? The article takes the tone that the rich and powerful are responsible for the miserable design elements, even that they do some of it deliberately, for nefarious reasons. I'm sure there's plenty of nefariousness, but I don't quite buy that, don't think they have that much power over society.
Much current house design is driven by foolish customer expectations. Home builders wow customers with appearances. Never ceases to amaze me how important mere appearance is to most people. Shouldn't a home buyer be more interested in the estimated monthly bill to heat and cool the home? Or whether the home was built in a flood plain? Whether it has a good foundation? Building code saves a lot of people's asses on many of those issues. But I also appreciate that like many other things, politics is in the building code too. CEOs have more power, but I think they aren't that much brighter than the average home buyer, and are near as bad suckers for appearances, can be even worse, far worse, on vanity.
As for road routing, I see expedience and history determining much of that. In the eastern US, older roads are crooked and meandering, following paths of least resistance. People did not have the resources or equipment to move lots of earth, roads had to go around obstacles, not through them. In the central US, the first roads were laid down on a grid, with a certain contempt for what puny obstacles there were in the plains. Current roads follow that grid closely. Always easier and cheaper to expand existing right of way than try to build a wholly new route.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 21 2016, @01:55PM
The article takes the tone that the rich and powerful are responsible for the miserable design elements
Why should we accept the claim that the design elements mentioned are miserable? As to the rest of your post, these concerns don't seem that relevant. As you say, building codes have gone a long way to solving those problems. And if the business hasn't done due diligence on an important asset like its headquarters, it's probably made other bad decisions on a similar scale. Bankruptcy solves that sort of thing rather quickly. Road routing seems a similar ancient problem that really doesn't have much to do with the article. The interesting thing is that the only design elements that are mentioned in a positive way are "high density", "mixed-used", "public space", and access to mass transition. None of the first three sound that important or appealing to a company's headquarters (especially in the pastoral design). Access to mass transportation could be useful, but that depends on the support that the company gets from the community. It sounds like architecture and city planning are in a huge stall here with a lack of serious ideas. I guess we'll need some serious shake up from technology development to get to interesting, fresh design elements again.