
LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google, Netflix - guyhance
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-amazon-netflix-land-grab-20190616-story.html
======
lacker
This article is written awkwardly enough that it's hard to tell what the facts
are.

 _Companies including Google, Amazon and Netflix have agreed to rent entire
buildings before construction has even begun.... Content creators, as such
businesses are known, have rented more than 4 million square feet of Los
Angeles County office space in the last three years, real estate brokerage
CBRE said._

Google is not typically known as a "content creator" business. What sort of
companies count towards this 4 million square feet figure?

Later the article refers to "FAANG-type tenants". FAANG is an acronym
referring to 5 specific companies. What is a "FAANG-type tenant"? One of those
five companies? Any tech company?

It also isn't clear from this article whether this 4 million square feet is a
lot. I poked around and from [https://www.reonomy.com/properties/commercial-
real-estate/us...](https://www.reonomy.com/properties/commercial-real-
estate/us/california/los-angeles/1) it looks like about 250 million square
feet of commercial real estate changes hands in LA every year. So this tech
effect is almost 2% of the real estate market.

~~~
notatoad
I think FAANG-type is defined a bit further down, he's talking about companies
that have enough power and/or hype that they drive real estate demand in their
surrounding areas.

>“The Netflix, Google and Amazons of the world are not going to their service
providers,” he said. “Their service providers are going to them.”

It all seems pretty meaningless though. This is just a PR piece for CBRE, not
any sort of journalism.

~~~
choonway
You can add Boeing and Seattle to that list.

~~~
metildaa
Eh, Boeing has huge scale, but they havw a worse version of Amazon's
recruiting problem. Terrible work environment for most employees (unless you
like knuckledragger drivel), poor quality work by other teams being swept
under the rug by managers, and large relocation/sign on bonuses being dangled
in front of potential employees for year long commitments post-move.

------
awinder

      “The idea of getting on 
      escalators like you did in the 
      1950s and ’60s is not
      happening,” said executive Bert 
      Dezzutti of Brookfield Office 
      Properties. “People desire to 
      move around and be untethered.
      You’re not using lazy old 
      escalators anymore.”
    

This can’t seriously be a thing right, this is the story of 1 crazy man and
his vendetta against escalators and not an entire community gone mad...

~~~
lozenge
Who wants an escalator in an office building with more than two floors? They
are literally designed to make it take longer to reach your destination than
an elevator.

~~~
jrockway
I worked at Google NYC for 6 years. It's a 16 story building that was designed
to be a freight transfer terminal.

The elevators were very very slow. It was often significantly faster to walk
up 10 flights of stairs than to wait. I would have killed for an escalator.

(In all fairness to the facilities team, they built new banks of elevators on
a very regular basis. Still slow, depending on which floor you wanted to go
to. But I'm sure it's much better now.)

~~~
hammock
SimTower with the critical insight... people will prefer escalators to
elevators when they are going 5 or less floors.

------
crazygringo
> _One perhaps surprising trend is the excommunication of escalators, which
> were long considered luxurious amenities. “The idea of getting on escalators
> like you did in the 1950s and ’60s is not happening,” said executive Bert
> Dezzutti of Brookfield Office Properties. “People desire to move around and
> be untethered. You’re not using lazy old escalators anymore.”_

I never though about it before but that actually _is_ a fascinating cultural
shift.

White-collar workers today spend so much time _sitting_ , and are so conscious
of health and wanting to be active, that escalators aren't a luxury -- they're
the antithesis of a healthy lifestyle.

If buildings necessarily express the values of the people in them, well values
have changed. It's the age of Fitbit and walking around dense city centers and
walking up stairs -- not being sedentary and driving and just _standing_ on an
escalator.

(While elevators are still mandated for disabilities, which escalators were
never good for anyways.)

~~~
caymanjim
This anti-escalator movement sounds like complete nonsense to me. First of
all, office buildings almost never have escalators. They never did, and they
never will. When a company buys an old mall or movie theatre or something else
that had an escalator, it doesn't surprise me that they might gut them and not
replace them, but it's not because this generation doesn't want escalators.
They didn't build escalators in offices in the 50s and 60s either. This is
just retail space undergoing renovation.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
They're an expensive maintenance chore. A broken down escalator drags down the
whole property

~~~
mdxchhcxdm
“An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see
an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs.
Sorry for the convenience.”

\- Mitch Hedberg

~~~
shmolyneaux
One issue that isn't capture by that quote is that an escalator cannot be used
while being repaired. If the maintenance person is away while the escalator is
part-way through being repaired it's very reasonable to see a "Temporarily Out
of Order" sign.

~~~
masklinn
Also escalators tend to be pretty bad at being stairs if you're not fit and
healthy (and even then…), they usually have much higher steps and sharper
edges than normal stairs, and are thus significantly less accessible when
they're not operating.

------
logfromblammo
~From playing Dwarf Fortress, I learned that ramps are better at reducing
pathing collisions than stairs. If these buildings take out their escalators
and put in stairs or elevators instead, they might not see visible congestion,
but their framerate will drop into the basement.~

But seriously, this is mainly about shopping mall conversions. I have only
ever worked in a partially-converted shopping mall for a few months, but I
thought it was great office space compared to floors in purpose-built office
buildings, mainly because it still partially functioned as a mall. There was a
sandwich restaurant, a movie theater, and a motor vehicles branch, and it had
a public transit bus stop. The biggest problem was a lack of windows and
natural light. I would argue that keeping the gross features of the interior
space intact--such as the escalators--would make a better office space, as the
mall was already designed to be attractive to visitors and move them around
efficiently.

Besides that, the conference rooms have to be named after some of the former
mall tenants. That's an unbreakable rule.

------
jdsully
Interesting that escalators are considered passé now. Bloomberg was incredibly
proud of their curved escalators and pointed them out repeatedly.

------
dqpb
I don't know, if the alternative is elevators, that can quickly become a
bottleneck shit show.

------
reaperducer
_LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google,
Netflix_

That's nothing. In Chicago, a real estate developer transformed a 10-story-
tall refrigerator into offices for Google.

[https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2013/06/17/meatpacking-d...](https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2013/06/17/meatpacking-
district-warehouse-tower-quickly-becoming-a-chic-loft-office-building/)

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/dieqU](http://archive.is/dieqU)

~~~
thanatos_dem
Thanks for this. Drives me crazy that LA Times hard blocks all website access
if you’re in incognito mode

------
mrosett
The title of this post (at time of commenting) is exceptionally misleading. A
more accurate one is "Landlords rip out escalators and walls to attract
tenants like Google and Netflix", which is the one from the original article.

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we've updated it from the submitted “Google and Netflix Turning Real
Estate Market in LA into the Bay Area” to the original (edited for length).

~~~
jfengel
It does sound like the "LA" part of the original title is kind of important,
though. It's implicit in the source (latimes.com), but the architectural
details are only part of the story. The real point of the story, as I see it,
is that these architectural changes are happening in Los Angeles. That's a new
development in the type of business that LA caters to: it motivates
architectural changes, and will motivate all kinds of other changes as the
people actually occupy those buildings.

~~~
sctb
I think you're probably right that the domain is too subtle for this
point—we've added an “LA”.

~~~
gowld
It's still a confusing title. The article is about retail conversions, which
of course require cutting the interior to remove useless parts. The interior
space of the old buildings isn't the important part, except for one quote by
the escalator hater.

