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How tech jobs, housing and transit are shaping a megaregion
invite response
2014 Oct 21, 6:44am 6,058 views 20 comments
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New Renter
2014 Oct 21, 12:59pm
Companies need to open locations outside of the peninsula.
And develop proper work-from-home options.
Rin
2014 Oct 21, 1:07pm
Companies need to open locations outside of the peninsula.
And develop proper work-from-home options.
I've got a better idea ... let's end this notion of a Silicon Valley. There's little actual physical silicon wafers made there.
Ppl need to be distributed, across the country, from Idaho through Georgia. This will immediately lower the CoL for a tech worker.
If they can't get their work done remotely (and answer their co-workers/bosses IMs) then they're fired, end of story. It's actually rather simple. Remote workers need to be available during key hours or they're sacked.
Dan8267
2014 Oct 21, 1:23pm
let's end this notion of a Silicon Valley. There's little actual physical silicon wafers made there.
I thought it was a reference to all the silicon in California girls.
retire59
2014 Oct 22, 12:12am
They will be moving out of the SFBA and out of California, just a matter of time. The ridiculous cost of living threatens shareholder profits...cannot keep paying a software engineer 6 figue salary when places like India will be taking over this industry soon...and you will begin to see $50 software and laptops.
The electronic industry was a boom also until Sony, etc...same for cars until Honda, etc in the US. Just a matter of time and for the wise investor .... Timing. Pay attention to industrial history IMHO.
Rin
2014 Oct 22, 12:46am
let's end this notion of a Silicon Valley. There's little actual physical silicon wafers made there.
I thought it was a reference to all the silicon in California girls.
That's Silicone Valley, the San Fernando valley in SoCal.
HydroCabron
2014 Oct 22, 12:52am
They will be moving out of the SFBA and out of California, just a matter of time. The ridiculous cost of living threatens shareholder profits
I have been wondering for at least 15 years why there aren't large software firms in Montana, Iowa, Tennessee, and Oklahoma.
There is so much dark fiber out there that you can basically pick your city, and bandwidth will never be an issue. Nearly every cost drops: labor, infrastructure, power. Travel budgets might balloon due to the price of airline tickets in and out of less-served hubs, but that's it.
Turns out it still hasn't happened. More and more stuff happens in the bay area and silicon valley.
CEOs tend to locate a shop in a place where they want to live. Shareholder value is not the driver here.
Yet another piece of evidence supporting the conclusion that wealthy/successful people are no smarter than the rest of us.
John Bailo
2014 Oct 22, 12:58am
the peninsula.
Yes why are all these beloved 18th century port cities -- many of them peninsulas, isthmuses or islands -- still home to the most revenue generating businesses?!
With 1 Gig fiber and 300 mph maglev trains it would make more sense to move to small towns in inland states such as Nebraska where there is open land in all directions.
For the Bay Area, Levis Stadium, situated outside the Old Town and not only transit, but at the crossroads of highways seems like a welcome trend towards sanity.
Rin
2014 Oct 22, 1:48am
HydroCABRON not hydrocarbon says
Turns out it still hasn't happened. More and more stuff happens in the bay area and silicon valley.
CEOs tend to locate a shop in a place where they want to live. Shareholder value is not the driver here.
Right now, many banking back offices have moved to Delaware from greater NYC metro, to save on costs. But at the same time, for the big deal makers, NY is still the HQ and that's where the C-levels hang out. So it's happening to a certain degree, for certain sectors, but execs do like the marquee cities.
For Silicon Valley, it's that the financial arm, the VCs, have encamped there and thus, startups are concentrated in the region.
But if I were an investor, wanting to achieve growth w/o headcount restricting expanded operations, my first question would be ... why haven't they started an office, in let's say Ithaca NY and hired Cornell students as interns? or Burlington VT? etc.
The last thing I'd want is a breeder, growing from 50 employees to 500, in a place like SV, which would be $7.5M/yr to $75M/yr in headcount costs alone, nevermind all the other overhead in running an organization.
Rin
2014 Oct 22, 1:51am
Yes why are all these beloved 18th century port cities -- many of them peninsulas, isthmuses or islands -- still home to the most revenue generating businesses?
I think the only two left are Boston and NYC but neither of them, make their money off the ports.
Others like Bridgeport CT, Philly PA, Fall River MA, Providence RI, etc, are economic toilets.
Rin
2014 Oct 22, 2:01am
The last thing I'd want is a breeder, growing from 50 employees to 500, in a place like SV, which would be $7.5M/yr to $75M/yr in headcount costs alone, nevermind all the other overhead in running an organization.
My guess is that management is reasonably poor and thus, they can't handle, handing over tasks, to alternate offices. I'd once experienced this, between a CA and MA office when I was a contractor. Some manager in Cali would try to stonewall an effort by a Boston group and vice versa. Eventually, the office in MA was closed which I think was a part of the CA plan, sabotaging of another team, to increase their own importance.
Companies need to foot the bill for more efficient transportation. And, in my opinion, the Altamont should be a toll road.
They will be moving out of the SFBA and out of California, just a matter of time. The ridiculous cost of living threatens shareholder profits...cannot keep paying a software engineer 6 figue salary when places like India will be taking over this industry soon...and you will begin to see $50 software and laptops.
The electronic industry was a boom also until Sony, etc...same for cars until Honda, etc in the US. Just a matter of time and for the wise investor .... Timing. Pay attention to industrial history IMHO.
This SFBA native says it can't happen soon enough!
Rin
2014 Oct 23, 3:35am
From the other SV bashing thread
Silicon Valley should end.
I see no reason for ppl to move to an area where
1) Rent is equal to NYC
2) Ppl only socialize with their co-workers and no one else in the world
3) Have zero sense of community
4) Have a major city, San Francisco, which is mainly a west coast version of Philadelphia with rotten denizens, gangs, bums, and trash everywhere but unlike Philly (where CoL matches the look/feel of the place), it is overpriced.
5) Are a bunch of lonely men but with no legal esc*rting venues outside of a long drive to Nevada deserts.
B.A.C.A.H.
2014 Oct 23, 5:56am
I think you "don't get it" because you're not one of these:
- self-absorbed Hipster
- Mandarin
- Brahmin
not to parrot kotkin too much, but the SV rich are propping up the state from bankruptcy in exchange for policies that match their philosophies - i.e. green regulations and leftist social agendas.
they will never leave california, but their industry will continue to boom/bust with each iteration shrinking their skilled workforce further. the next downslope could leave only the business leaders, tech directors, and marketeers in SV and offload all of the work to out-of-state/country data centers and cheaper-labor coders.
agree that the groups listed by BACAH above should take notice - eventually, they will feel the effects of california's liberal regime.
Rin
2014 Oct 24, 1:30am
Actually, I'd say that the suburbs of Detroit, not the city itself, should be the next growth center for programming.
Here's why ... Ann Arbor Michigan is still an excellent engineering/science school (and a nice college town, in general) and one can hire a number of them, as interns and possibly, future full time workers. Though Ann Arbor's 2hrs away, there's also Wayne State, Michigan State, and other Univ of Michigan campuses, all in the area.
Since big auto had been in decline for some time, home prices in the metro region are very reasonable.
And finally, for partying, one can take the causeway to Windsor Ontario, just across the river. There are night clubs, strippers, and legal esc*rts over there. The city is reasonably safe, unlike Detroit which is a hellhole, and clean. And if you want a mega city, Toronto is some 4 hours away for a weekend getaway. That's not a bad package, once you factor out the notion of actually being in the cityside of Detroit.
Rin
2014 Oct 24, 4:41am
self-absorbed Hipster
In the northeast, hipsters have taken over Williamsburg Brooklyn.
Rin
2014 Oct 24, 5:27am
suburbs of Detroit
Except ... the weather.
From what I'd heard, Chicago is a bit worse, and Minneapolis's winters are brutal.
But still, if one's not from California and had grown up in the northeast or midwest, then winters are a part of life.
Despite having grown up in MA and having had worked up and down the NE corridor, what's surprised me was the number of Univ of Michigan or Michigan State alumni, who hang out and stick together for life in the northeast. Now, if they could have found equivalent jobs in the Detroit 'burbs, obviously away from the city (which is a war zone), I'm sure that many wouldn't mind being back there, as long term friendships beat the loneliness of a Silicon Valley and sometimes, the greater NYC lifestyle.
As Silicon Valley sprawls out of the confines of the South Bay, business advocates and city planners in the East Bay's Tri-Valley region, a region immediately northeast of Silicon Valley, centered around the cities San Ramon, Danville, Dublin, Livermore and Pleasanton are angling to leverage transit, housing and sophisticated federal laboratories to grow the local tech industry.
Though the Tri-Valley's billion-dollar research tenants offer a potential leg up, the business push also comes as outlying regions from Santa Cruz to the San Joaquin Valley up to Davis also look to strengthen ties to Silicon Valley. It all adds fuel to demographers' predictions that Northern California will likely look like a 24 million-resident "Megaregion" in just a few decades.
Housing, that most basic necessity, has become so expensive in the Peninsula, the South Bay and San Francisco that area workers are pushed to far-flung suburbs in the Tri-Valley, or even farther toward Sacramento or the Central Valley. That disconnect between where jobs are located and where housing is located, in turn, manifests day-to-day in gridlocked highways or packed public transit (in the select areas that effective public transit is an option).
For the Tri-Valley, all those forces resulted in a 66 percent increase in the number of commuters heading to Silicon Valley each day, according to the new Bay Area Council report. The region itself also grew its employment number 21 percent from 2000-2012, adding 40,000 jobs.
In addition to giving researchers some leash to develop promising products outside the lab, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratory's 1,200-person Livermore site are also embarking on a joint effort to add up to 200,000 square feet of R&D office and laboratory space to better connect with the outside world.
In reporting this story, I heard from people who didn't want to be quoted because they weren't authorized to speak on the matter that Google Inc. and IBM Corp. could be two tenants in the new space. IBM has already worked with Sandia on a deep computing project. A Google spokesperson declined to comment.
Bibeau said the laboratories are awaiting permitting clearance on the office expansion, which they hope to receive in the next 6-9 months before an anticipated 18-24 months of construction.
Drawbacks of sprawl:
Even a relatively short commute in Silicon Valley proper — say, from the suburbs of San Jose to work in a tech hub like Palo Alto — can take upwards of an hour on an average day by car.
Those going from downtown area to downtown area might get lucky with a shorter Caltrain commute. But light rail, buses and even carpool lanes generally don't offer quicker alternatives.
Those dynamics are becoming even more extreme in the Tri-Valley area, where commuters from the Central Valley now converge with East Bay traffic heading into San Francisco, the Peninsula or the South Bay. The new Bay Area Council report indicates that commuters to San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have increased 66 percent since 2007, while the amount of time spent sitting in gridlocked traffic on Highway 580, a north-south artery in the East Ba, has increased 26 percent since 2011.
"First we bragged about 580 and 680 and being at the crossroads and all that," Kaye said. "We do have a good transportation system, but it's clogged right now."
As I have reported, unaffordable housing is a huge driver of traffic throughout the Bay Area. "Megacommutes," where workers travel more than 50 miles to work, are increasing in large metro areas nationwide, but Northern California's fairly unique concentration of so many mid-sized or large cities have strained existing infrastructure.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/10/silicon-valley-sprawls-east-how-tech-jobs-housing.html?page=all
#housing