
One Thing Silicon Valley Can’t Seem to Fix - gk1
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/opinion/sunday/silicon-valley-architecture-campus.html
======
Decade
The common complaint among the politicians is that tech companies are
skinflint. The bad laws are maintained (Marin County just exempted itself from
dense housing laws for the next 10 years[0]) because the people who care about
urbanism are not the people who give the many local campaign donations.

One major problem is, until recently, there has been no noticeable movement in
local government[1] to create good urban policies. I suggest joining the YIMBY
Party.[2]

[0] [http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Marin-bill-
SB106-...](http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Marin-bill-SB106-shows-
how-housing-crisis-was-11243458.php)

[1] [http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/07/07/housing-
cris...](http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/07/07/housing-crisis-
shortage-no-fix-000472)

[2] [http://www.sfyimby.org](http://www.sfyimby.org)

~~~
Zarath
Why is that a bad law? Not everyone wants to live in a concrete jungle. Nature
is good for your health.

~~~
nerfhammer
> concrete jungle

This is the sort of hyperbole that blocks reasonable policies

~~~
Spivak
Devil's advocate. If SF actually wanted to meet the demand for housing it
would be a concrete jungle. No value judgment, there are just a ton of people
that want to move there. But since we know that SF isn't going to do that to
preserve the character of the city the amount of available housing is
basically arbitrary. So you could build more housing, but since no matter what
prices are still going to be high and most people are still going to be left
out the only reason to really do it is if it benefits the city and/or current
residents.

~~~
Decade
One man’s concrete jungle is another man’s walkable and extremely lively
community.

Also, many people have pointed out, we don’t need to go full Manhattan to
satisfy _current_ demand. We can do it with mid-rise construction, that still
leaves lots of open spaces and views of the sky.

To do that, we have to recognize that “character” is not just the outside of
the building, increasingly a playground for the rich, but the life that goes
on inside them.

~~~
francisofascii
Exactly. Six stories is about right, imho.

------
moxious
Car culture forms a positive feedback loop and perpetuates itself just like
many other things. Everyone has a car. So you build a lot of parking and don't
worry if campus is miles away and not connected to transit. So everyone has to
have a car. And so on.

As long as it's the predominant style and no one minds the costs it'll go on
indefinitely. From other areas of the country (Washington DC, Los Angeles) it
can be really bad for a really long time...people will complain but they won't
change.

This being such an American cultural thing too, the pain threshold is very
high.

Most people take jobs despite bad commutes and inaccessibility without a car.
So people are actively voting their priorities and this isn't one of them. Bad
for time, money, and environment, but hey life is busy, most everyone has
other fish to fry.

~~~
rsj_hn
That's a pretty misanthropic, and frankly, uninformed view. People know their
interests.

The tradeoff is transportation versus land. You want to stop paying rent, but
can't afford to buy your own place so you decide to buy farther out and spend
more time traveling.

We got a middle class in this country due to the Automobile and the suburbs,
which let people get out from under the thumb of the landlord and buy their
own land. Cars -- and transportation more generally -- is a produced good.
Land is not a produced good. For all the complaints about sprawl, an economy
in which we substitute produced goods for non-produced goods that are
inherited from wealthy families is a better economy.

Now you can argue that we should be using more electric vehicles, or fixed
track vehicles, and all of that is worthy of discussion. But you cannot argue
against _sprawl_. We continue to spread out as a society so that each person
buys their own plot of land instead of paying endless rent to the landlords
who monopolize the land in the city center. We continue to try to improve
transportation and communication so that those who own key locations cannot
extract the same rents from us as they used to. This is a virtuous feedback
loop, and those wanting everyone to live as renters in large urban centers
don't understand that this creates a permanent rentier class of landlords with
unlimited power of taxation, and a permanent underclass of tenants who don't
get to keep the gains of their increasing productivity. That's how you get
serfs. That's why landlords have always opposed transportation innovation,
whether it be opposition to the creation/subsidy of roads or of rail.

It is also why we have a history of diffusion. The built up areas of cities
house fewer people per square meter of land than they did 100 years ago, and
there it's also fewer than 100 years before that, etc. Sprawl has been
happening since Roman Times, and landlords have been screaming against it for
all of history.

~~~
closeparen
Thank you. This is a point that usually gets missed on HN: car culture creates
_massive_ amounts of housing supply. It's hard enough to build at pace with
urbanization. The contention for urban housing would be truly hopeless without
the suburbs. Restricting a city's housing supply to what bicycles and buses
could reasonably serve is equivalent to killing several hundred residential
skyscrapers.

Nevertheless, this isn't the middle ages, it's not that important to own
_land_. Condos in high-rises work too.

The current policy of low height limits is a lucrative handout to landlords:
it keeps their competition small, just like restricting transportation does.

~~~
rsj_hn
Unfortunately you can't blame this on zoning laws, because if you compare
areas with and without strict zoning laws, you don't see much difference in
this regard. E.g. San Francisco, for most of it's history, didn't have strict
zoning laws. Yet, like most cities, you pretty much never tear down a whole
neighborhood of two story buildings to replace them with 4 story buildings.
Once an area is built up, it's built up. Whatever height/density there is
tends to stay there. The way cities grow is by growing out -- recruiting new
land -- and also via infill. Existing structures just aren't torn down that
often. It happens, in the sense that houses are condemned and sometimes
replaced with something bigger. But we don't see it happening at a fast rate,
whether there are laws against it or not.

Zoning laws are relevant at the margin -- when you add to the city, are you
adding 2 story buildings or 4 story buildings. But once the neighborhood is
built, that's the neighborhood for the next 100 years, whether there are
strict zoning laws there or not. Assume no zoning laws at all. You as a
contractor will need to contact all the individual owners and negotiate some
deal with them to tear down a perfectly good property and replace it with
something a bit taller. How likely is that to pencil out? You might be able to
tear down _one_ building, but not the whole neighborhood. The neighborhood
will stay the way it is.

There is also another issue at play, which is that once the first tall
building is built, the land values go up in the other buildings around it.
Land is one of those things where you don't need to actually build the housing
in order for the landowner to benefit financially. The developer, after
tearing down the first building will have to pay much more to buy out the
second. And even more to buy out the third. Very quickly, the arbitrage
profits that would drive a market solution disappear, so you don't get market
solutions that support tearing down existing buildings on a mass scale.
Historically, cities were changed like this after fires or earthquakes, but
not in response to market forces. All those people who think that the reason
Palo Alto is full of single family homes is just zoning, and if we were to get
rid of zoning, Palo Alto would be filled with sky scrapers are in for a big
disappointment. Market forces don't work very well here. Regardless of what
happens with Zoning, Palo Alto will remain pretty much the same for a very
long time, barring a massive fire. Even Nero had to start a fire, and he
wasn't constrained by zoning.

~~~
Decade
I wouldn’t say San Francisco is exactly lacking in zoning ([http://sf-
planning.org/zoning-map](http://sf-planning.org/zoning-map)), and whatever it
lacks in specific law, it makes up with the most horrendous process
imaginable. ([http://sf.streetsblog.org/2017/03/30/yimby-asks-how-do-we-
ge...](http://sf.streetsblog.org/2017/03/30/yimby-asks-how-do-we-get-the-
housing-we-need/))

~~~
DrScump
From the second link:

"Much of the planning code needs to be tossed out. “Keep the seismic codes,”
said Pinkston, and get rid of everything else. "

That strategy gets you more _Ghost Ship_ warehouses.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Oakland_warehouse_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Oakland_warehouse_fire)

~~~
Decade
I think she was exaggerating, slightly. In reality, we have a lot of laws
that, on the face, have some purpose, but are being used in terrible ways.
Even the fire code, frequently, is used to make places less safe.[0]

For the most egregious example, the California Environmental Quality Act was
supposed to preserve the good parts of the environment, but the overwhelming
majority of the times that it is used, and the overwhelming cost of complying
with it, is against development inside cities where there is no pristine
nature to protect.[1]

[0] [https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/28/how-fire-
chief...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/28/how-fire-chiefs-and-
traffic-engineers-make-places-less-safe)

[1] [http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/sd-
ut...](http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/sd-utbg-ceqa-
obstacles-peters-20170302-story.html)

------
pg_bot
There is no guarantee that Silicon Valley will be the center of tech
innovation in America forever. There are a couple of economic trends that put
California at a disadvantage in the near future.

1.) You can build a great product with fewer Engineers than ever before. A
single highly skilled engineer can run a company that reaches millions of
customers.

2.) California's Prop 13[0] hinders new entrants to California by so much that
it becomes uneconomical for new talent to locate there.

3.) You need less capital to run an online business than 5-10 years ago. If
you know how to manage your own servers it is pretty cheap to run a website.
(even with high availability constraints)

4.) Open source software and online education have improved greatly in the
last 5 years. Anyone can truly learn anything given time and motivation.

I think it is highly likely that newer successful technology companies become
more evenly distributed across the country due to these factors.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_\(1978\))

~~~
hkmurakami
Devils advocate time :)

1) This leads to increased competition like the one we have seen with multiple
companies competing in the same growing market. The one(s) with venture
backing can often muscle out companies with a more compelling product, which
will maintain the importance of being proximal to capital (i.e. SV). An
example of this is Balanced Payments vs Stripe, imo.

2) My parents moved to SV in the 70's and were shocked at how expensive
apartments were and how high the cost of living was (they moved from the
Northeast). I had a converstation with my dad about prohibitive housing costs
here in 2005. It's not readily apparent to me if things really will ever come
to a true breaking point. (also population dynamics wise, many baby boomers
are going to perish within the next 20 years)

3) Related to #1, when many teams can build competing products for cheap, what
will separate them will frequently be their sales and marketing muscle. This
in turn is often backed by capital in a short-term-unsustainable manner than
drives out competition.

4) Building is often the easy part, other than the small number of truly
exceptional viral consumer products.

Having written all this, I don't really disagree with any of your points,
though I think that you exhibit egalitarian idealism often found in hacker
types :)

------
WalterBright
The way to build a new business complex (like the saucer) is to build
apartment towers next to it. Or a transit station next to it. Otherwise, the
traffic going to the saucer will be tremendous.

Long ago when I worked at Boeing, so many people would leave at the same time
that it would take 15 minutes just to exit the parking lot. This was despite
Boeing staggering the shift ends to alleviate it. People would _run_ to their
cars in a desperate attempt to get ahead of the wave.

~~~
nightski
Ok that sounds awful (running to your car to beat the traffic). However, so
does living in an apartment on the corporate campus.

~~~
Inconel
I always try to live as close to work as possible so living in an apartment on
a corporate campus actually sounds pretty appealing to me but can you expand
on why you think it sounds awful? I'm not dismissing your view, I just want to
know if there are negatives about it that I haven't considered.

~~~
halfjoking
My coworkers might gossip about the number of prostitutes I hire to visit my
apartment.

I would have to explain at the water cooler that I only hire the prostitutes
to indulge strange sexual fetishes and I won't be spreading STDs because you
can't get STDs from the strange things I do.

------
njarboe
"In 2015, for example, the amount of time San Franciscans spent commuting
amounted to more than $5.3 million in lost productivity, a 55 percent increase
over 2011."

Editing, even at the New York Times, is becoming a lost art. I'm sure there
are many high net worth individual San Franciscans who personally lose $5.3
million in productivity commuting each year. Even $5.3 billion would seem low
to me. Clicking on the link over the "more than $5.3 million" phrase does lead
one to a very beautiful report that contains the above quote, but I would not
say that makes it true. Maybe we are heading to a Wikipedia like world where
quoting something published makes a fact a valid reference rather than if it
is true or not.

Quick estimate:

400000 people * 50 weeks/year * 5 days/week * 1 hour/day * 25 dollars/hour =
$2.5 billion/year

------
intopieces
Zoning laws need to reverse. They need to mandate a maximum number of parking
spaces be 60% of head count in 2020, then reduce 5% every 5 years until the
maximum is 40% of headcount.

I really don't see any other way. You just have to force it.

~~~
closeparen
A suburban office with insufficient parking sounds like a great talent
repellant. I pity the poor souls who would have to work there (taking shitty
bus service or cycling unreasonable distances), but no vaguely competent
software engineer would be among them.

~~~
intopieces
A business that fails to innovate goes out of business. These kind of zoning
restrictions would hit all the businesses equally, and force them to improve
their work from home policies (isn't that what software engineers want
anyway?) and establish more organized/efficient ride sharing.

Besides, the new zoning restrictions would only apply to _new_ campuses being
built. And we already have cities like Palo Alto debating whether they even
_want_ more jobs in their city, and rightfully so. There are other places to
build your campus. Silicon Valley needs housing, not offices.

------
Smaug123
I think the title is a bit more clickbaity than HN really deserves. Perhaps
"Isolated Campuses: One Thing Silicon Valley Can't Seem to Fix"?

------
myrandomcomment
Apple was forced by local law to have the amount of parking the campus has.
Steve did not want it and did not want the ugly above ground garage. Maybe if
the cities involved approved high desntiy housing and more effect public
transport then things would get better. I live 50km from my office and it can
take 2+ hours. On the other hand last week I started my morning meeting in
Tokyo, then had a meeting in Osaka, dinner with friends in Nagoya and back to
my hotel in Tokyo for bed.

~~~
DrScump

      Steve did not want it and did not want the ugly above ground garage. 
    

So he chose to build in the midst of a mostly residential area far from any
mass transit (even bus service is minimal, with one line going up Wolfe and
another along Homestead) and with one freeway that is already a parking lot
during rush hours. _Winning!_

~~~
myrandomcomment
Right. So he should have done what? Moved the campus someplace how far from
his employee base?

Please let me know where in the Bay Area there is enough land for an Apple
size campus and working mass transit?

My last startup - we send out a survey of where everyone lived before we
moved. Guess what, screwed everywhere for all locations. Ending up paying each
employee for Bart/Caltrain pass. Did not cover more then 30%.

The system of transit is the issue and the government and politics around it.
Unless you are FB or Google that pays for private buses. That works so well
for the haves vs have nots. It just makes it worse.

In the USA public transit is a joke for 99% of the country and is likely not
to change. We are a car nation.

~~~
DrScump
There were large, sparse commercial parcels between 101 and the Bay with light
rail right there. Heck, the Sunnyvale Lockheed campus along Mathilda and Java
used to employ 20,000 by itself. That's one example.

At the time the spaceship site was chosen, there was a LOT of vacant
commercial space along the Central/Caltrain corridor, mostly single-story on
large parcels (with huge parking areas). Much is still mostly vacant -- ride
Caltrain on a weekday and watch the empty lots roll by.

North Santa Clara is even more sparse, with access to two freeways. A new
development is being discussed for the former dump site North of Levi's
stadium. But it doesn't have a Cupertino address like Jobs apparently wanted.

~~~
myrandomcomment
So at a previous startup we looked at offices in the area you talked about.
They sucked. Also the public transportation was a joke. For me at the time
Caltrain to Mt. View then slow VTA to a stop that was 1 mile from the 3
offices location we looked at. 2 hours train time and limited hours on service
compared to a real system in a large city.

As to access to freeways I can drop off in Cupertino pretty simply from
280/85/101/17 so it is really a central path. De Anza hits both the 85 and
280. If anything it is simpler then the Santa Clara parking lot of the 101 to
XYZ expressway or 101 to 237 to get to the far side. Their all parking lots.

~~~
DrScump
Neither 101 nor 17 goes through Cupertino or even near its borders.

I can't even parse your second paragraph.

As for "easy drop-off" from 280, remember Wolfe is quite busy _before_ the
Spaceship even opens at all, let alone staffs up fully.

 _Then_ , what?

Everybody packs Homestead from De Anza Blvd through all residential
neighborhoods? Or onto Homestead from the Lawrence Expressway end, which is
already busy thanks to the new, huge Kaiser medical center there? (Not to
mention that access to Lawrence from 280 is via surface streets, not direct-
linkage ramps).

------
francisofascii
I fear America's car dependent infrastructure will be its greatest folly. It
is disappointing. If Silicon Valley can't get this right, what chance the does
the rest of America have?

~~~
Decade
I think the great success of Silicon Valley was that government didn’t know
how to regulate it, so by default was pretty hands-off. Except for promoting
the welfare of laborers in general, like how non-compete clauses are illegal.

Governments have been regulating the built environment with zoning for 100
years, so that part is not as successful.

------
skybrian
Perhaps from a large company's point of view, parking lots are land held in
reserve that they could build on later? (Building parking garages if needed.)

~~~
intopieces
If they own the land, what prevents them from just putting trees there instead
of a parking lot? Surely the cities don't forbid trees.

~~~
skybrian
They often require parking spaces, though.

------
conorcleary
Guys... Bell Labs is designed to look like a football. Not a mystery, nor
should it be part of this article as 'weird'.

------
Animats
Why are cars a problem? The US hit "peak car" a few years ago. The US
population is leveling off. Millennials aren't buying cars in a big way.
Electric cars are gaining market share and dropping in price. Self-driving
cars are getting close. The US already has a mostly adequate highway system.
What's broken?

~~~
Decade
The “peak car” was a temporary dip associated with the Great Recession and
crippling student loan payments. Since the recovery, once they get a good job,
almost every millennial I know has a car. Even my brother, who advocates for
dense car-free communities, owns and uses a car. It has become a real pain,
here where there aren’t enough parking spaces for all those cars.

Electric cars don’t eliminate the central maladies of private car ownership.
Self-driving cars are an excuse to justify maintaining unhealthy built
environments, and like the Hyperloop I don’t trust in it until it is actually
usable. The highway system is clogged and cannot be expanded in the
destinations where people need to go. There are many things that are broken.

[http://www.autonews.com/article/20170227/RETAIL/302279963/th...](http://www.autonews.com/article/20170227/RETAIL/302279963/the-
millennials-are-coming)

[https://www.citylab.com/life/2011/10/suburban-sprawl-
ponzi-s...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2011/10/suburban-sprawl-ponzi-
scheme/242/)

------
valuearb
Cars are freedom. Build more freeways, and use tolls to pay for them.

~~~
Smaug123
That viewpoint simply baffles me.

As a European who is in the Bay Area for a few weeks, I find the roads in the
Bay Area to be really, really depressing. I also find them harder to use than
the European variants:

* the Bay Area freeways don't seem to have consistent rules about when a lane is going to appear or disappear or peel off from the main freeway (so I constantly end up in the wrong lane; please, please correct me if I'm wrong!);

* the very frequent merge/exits mean that there's not really a taboo on undertaking, which doubles the amount of awareness I need to maintain (as well as "everyone overtaking me", I also need to track "everyone undertaking me" too, which isn't true in the UK).

The rule "stick to the rightmost lane which lets you maintain the speed you
want to maintain" simply doesn't work for me because that lane regularly peels
off to become a different road, and it's less effective anyway given that
everyone undertakes all the time. On motorways in the UK, it's rarer for lanes
to split off from the main road, and it's signalled much further in advance so
you reliably have time to change lanes comfortably when you get caught in the
wrong one.

I infinitely prefer public transport where it exists; if that means taking a
taxi for the last short bit of the ride, so be it. Personal preference, but I
just can't fathom how anyone could prefer cars over a well-run public
transport system. (Of course, there are times when you just need a car or a
van - hauling personal freight, for instance. But the vast, vast majority of
traffic doesn't fall into that category: in the UK, over the past four years
or so, I've needed a car about five times in total.)

~~~
throwanem
Same - I actually state my preference for public transit over driving in my
résumé, and Baltimore's system is surprisingly good - not on the same scale of
comprehensiveness as NYC's, but then we're a much smaller town, too. I don't
understand the car preference either; although for years I did consulting work
that involved site visits, and racking up 200 miles a day in the car was not
uncommon, even at the time I regarded that more as a penance than a privilege.
Latterly I feel that I've done just about a lifetime's worth of driving, and
any further is a waste of time tolerable only in the rare case when no other
alternative can be found.

"Undertaking"? This is not a term with which I'm familiar; based on context,
it seems to mean dropping back to change lanes behind a car, by contrast with
"overtaking", to accelerate and pass in order to change lanes ahead. Is that a
correct understanding?

~~~
Smaug123
"Undertaking" might be a UK-specific term, I don't know; it means "overtaking
but on an inside lane relative to you, rather than an outside lane".

~~~
throwanem
Oh! We just call that "passing on the right", and it's frowned upon here as
well; some municipalities even have it on the books as a moving violation, but
everyone does it anyway.

