Does the tech industry ruin cities?

[austlar1]

Hard to get a handle on exactly what Amazon does in Austin under their own banner or under the Whole Foods banner. I searched for Amazon tech related job openings in Austin and came up with 237 job openings at the Indeed web site. There seems to be quite a lot of variety. https://www.indeed.com/q-technology-...72dae5a6dfb6b7

[badrunner]

E-commerce has certainly "ruined" a lot of places by decimating brick and mortar retail. Mostly small towns and smaller cities though, not the tech hubs themselves.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by badrunner

E-commerce has certainly "ruined" a lot of places by decimating brick and mortar retail. Mostly small towns and smaller cities though, not the tech hubs themselves.

E-commerce merely finished off what Wal-Mart started 30 years ago and malls 50-60 years before that when it came to killing off vibrant downtowns.

[austlar1]

Two of the currently empty new-build office structures in Austin signed up Meta and Google respectively as sole tenants. Meta decided not to use their 600,000 plus sq. foot leased space at the massive mixed-use 6G project and are now trying to unload on the sublease market. Google is the sole tenant for similar square footage at the new Pelli/Clarke/Pelli designed "Sailboat" building overlooking Town Lake. The space remains unoccupied, but, so far Google has not put the space on the sublease market, fueling hopes that they will eventually utilize the space. Google is the primary tenant in a smaller nearby spec high rise building and has occupied that space for several years now. I guess these tech giants don't mind being in a downtown high rise, but they certainly don't seem interested in owning or developing high rise office properties. Probably a good idea, if the fate of 1980s era Texas banking giants who built huge and ill-advised vanity office projects is any guide.

[SIGSEGV]

Salesforce is the exception with respect to towers I guess....

[Steely Dan]

Google is taking over this Helmut Jahn designed, full city block-sized, 1.2M SF UFO in the heart of Chicago's loop.



Source: https://chicago.urbanize.city/post/g...-redevelopment

[austlar1]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

Salesforce is the exception with respect to towers I guess....

That didn't work out so well for them either.
https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco...n-downtown-sf/

[craigs]

Originally Posted by austlar1

That didn't work out so well for them either.
https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco...n-downtown-sf/

That's "Salesforce East," though, not the iconic supertall that they had purpose-built to dominate the San Francisco skyline called "Salesforce Tower." That article is behind a paywall, but as far as I know, they are consolidating workers in their main tower.

[homebucket]

Salesforce also currently owns, and used to occupy 50 Fremont St as well, aka Salesforce West. Previously it occupied 400,000 sq ft of it before putting it up for lease in order to cut office space.

In the pre-pandemic times, Salesforce used to occupy the 3 main buildings you see on the left half of this photo I took (counterclockwise from the top Salesforce Tower, Salesforce West, Salesforce East). The one on the right is 181 Fremont, previously occupied by the Instagram division of Meta. It's now partially leased by Zendesk, and possibly soon, ByteDance aka TikTok. The tower on the bottom right is the infamous Millennium Tower.





PC: homebucket

[mhays]

Amazon has towers in the Seattle area of:
--600' (Bellevue)
--600' (Bellevue, topping out this year)
--520' (Seattle)
--520' (Seattle)
--520' (Seattle)
--At least 16 of 12-24 stories

These are all fairly stubby...i.e. done for efficiency rather than splash, using every inch of the allowable square footage and height.

[austlar1]

Not sure how much downtown SF real estate Salesforce actually owns or owned. Salesforce Tower was developed by Hines Properties out of Houston.This article says Salesforce had over 500,000 square feet of office space on SF sublease market in March of 2024. Salesforce Tower actually appears to be owned by an entity known as BXP, formerly called Boston Properties, rather than by Salesforce. Salesforce must be the marquee tenant for the famous building that bears its name. Salesforce has 163,000 square feet listed on sublease market at Salesforce Tower/415 Mission St and well over 300,000 square feet on sublease market at other locations in downtown SF. This would seem to reinforce the notion that tech companies prefer to lease high end real estate rather than own it or develop it. Google might be an exception.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/04/11/sa...lesforce-east/

[mhays]

The San Francisco area compounds these issues by making growth extremely difficult and expensive, the biggest reason for its off-the-charts housing costs. Seattle and others make growth expensive, but not on the same level, and construction is allowed to keep up with demand far more easily via zoned capacity and simpler and more predictable entitlement processes.

Both San Francisco and Seattle also have a "live and let live (or die)" policy about street behavior, and non-deadly winter weather. Both cities (meaning the cities of) have shifted toward the center in recent elections in response.

[Doc_Love]

Imo the business model the company follows especially the industry leaders can have a positive, or negative impact on the cities they call their home or do business in. Companies that keep R&D & white collar jobs at home or in the western sphere of influence unbalance the economy. All the more so if outsourcing manufacturing to countries that have at least one of these traits poor/developing, endemically corrupt & authoritarian.

While there is nothing wrong with doing business in poor or developing countries to do so at the near complete exclusion of their home cities, countries or allies who play by the rules based international order isn’t healthy. Doing business in endemically corrupt countries on a massive scale drags corruption back into our economy and or gives the business unfair advantages that push others towards corruption. Again this has a destabilizing impact on local, regional and national economies. Doing a disproportionate amount of outsourcing to authoritarian regimes creates toxic relationships between key players at the cutting edge of the economy.

The world is what it is and your partners don’t have to be sister republics or clones of your means of governance. However the more of those 3 key traits a country possesses that a business’s model for success depends on by keeping operating costs down the more it hurts at home. Whether by ignoring laws abroad by paying bribes, leaning on toxic local government to keep wages low by force or other carrot and stick measures & gaining dominance over a sector by giving up trade secrets will end up hurting.

Is tech bad for a city no not at all it’s something that should be coveted as a mark of a successful economy the means that the company and by influence the greater industry employ to achieve it is the issue.

If all we have are the white collar jobs in a monogenetic industry then any disruptions can be very harmful to such dependent cities. A more balanced tech sector likely wouldn’t see such disruptions if more of the business as a whole is tied into the city’s and region’s economics as a whole would see a disruption but it wouldn’t be so threatening.

I’m not preaching isolationism but if you have expensive eggs make sure they’re put into secure baskets. Dealing with other economies that play by the rules or invest into up and coming economies that want to play by the rules so within the bilateral exchange all sides see the need to pull in the same general direction, despite domestic quirks.