As an Xoogler, I think this is great news. By the time I left a year ago, there were far too many far-flung buildings in Sunnyvale, with new ones opening all the time (and my group was -- and still is -- slated to move into exile in Sunnyvale).
These were the worst of both worlds -- you still had to deal with a Bay Area cost of living and commute, but you were too far to easily collaborate with other groups, or take advantage of events & resources on the main GooglePlex (TGIF at Charlies, author talks, various events, picking up dogfood hardware, etc.) Not to mention fragmented bus routes.
They acknowledge that. That was their point, that in both scenarios you get that downside but then pointed out a series of upsides of being on the actual Google Campus.
Did you stop reading halfway through the sentence?
I wonder how Bay Area land usage would change if property owners were paying tax at the market rate for their use of the land. They would likely move more employees to other offices, as they faced more competitive market forces. On some tracts, Google and Intuit are paying a property tax rate 10-100x lower than local homeowners and businesses who moved in recently.[1]
A "split roll" - modifying the existing system for corporations, keeping the existing for residential -- would level the playing field for large incumbents and new market entrants, paying for office space at a much higher rate.
[1] The assessed value of one 13.7-acre tract underlying part of Google’s headquarters is $789,635, producing an estimated tax rate of 1.3 cents a square foot, far less than most neighboring properties.
In interviews, commercial real estate experts said that both Google and the property’s owner, Richard Peery, a septuagenarian Palo Alto real estate developer and billionaire, were saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Commercial landowners often pass the cost of property tax on to their tenants.
1. 10x the tax would be $80 million. Google had $74.5 billion revenue in FY 2015. Paying the additional tax wouldn't change that. It's rounding error -- just a cost of doing business. On the other hand, Google relocating out of the Bay area would take a lot of good jobs and housing demand with it. That might impact local tax revenue more significantly than the savings companies like Google receive. In the end, a bit of free market economics occurs in city planning departments.
2. Most significant commercial leases are triple net. The tenant is responsible for taxes, maintenance, and insurance on the building.
Yes, higher operational costs in the Bay Area - market-rate property taxes, for example, would encourage Google and other large incumbents to grow or relocate employees to more favorable locales, all things being equal. Of course, there could be a specific machine learning expert that the company receiving Bay Area-tied subsidies must have, or a startup they would like to acquire, whose employees refuse to work outside the Mountain View office. By paying market rate rents, these companies would look more closely outside the area and existing office space made available to new players - these new market entrants are paying market-rate anyways. "Triple net" only affects long term leases (usually 20-30 years, often longer) and as the real estate consultants cited by the NYT, usually corporate space is not passed onto the lessee (e.g. they would pay more for the lower tax base). Startups and new mom-and-pop shops suffer (maybe the VC can became a long-vested landlord?).
Good point about local planning departments and equilibrium achieved that way. Decreasing tax revenue with fixed costs (sewage, schools, highway, park maintenance) should encourage planning committees to greenlight more new development or better, zoning rights, to increase tax revenue. But this assumes that the new construction would cover their outgoing expenses (families require schools, and everyone needs transit and police services). Thus, you see only a few luxury condos being added like in the San Antonio shopping area in Mountain View.
But the property taxes paid by the companies are relatively trivial, as compared to the property taxes paid by the EMPLOYEES. Shouldn't the property taxes paid by the employees be what's shifting employees to other cities?
Of course, you could argue that the salaries are raised to compensate for cost of living, but then you're back to saying that the companies are footing the bill anyway, and apparently happy to keep doing so.
Incidentally, property taxes are fairly low in the Bay Area. My house cost more than 5x what my sister's house in Ohio did, but my property taxes are less than half.
Wouldn't it be bad for the same reason that it's bad for residential? Residentially, it feels unfair to get priced out of your home due to forces outside your control. I can't help feeling bad for a local mom and pop store getting priced out for the same reason. There are tons of little local downtowns that are rapidly going from small stores to rows of Gap and Abercrombie as landlords see opportunities. This would just exacerbate that.
It's even worse than that. There's a special property tax deal for parts of Shoreline. It used to be a landfill, and there were tax incentives to develop it. SGI, Goldman Sachs, and Google have profited from that.
>> They would likely move more employees to other offices, as they faced more competitive market forces.
Which usually means "outsourcing".
Cargill is famous for doing this. They recently "opened" an office in Bangalore and then said they were moving all their US teams to their "new office" in Bangalore. Is it outsourcing? Technically no. They get away with it because the people in their "new office" are Cargill employees.
It would be be funny to see the corporate equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Hertog (maybe a single office building hallway where some of the offices were used by one company and some by another? but there are coworking spaces and incubators where this actually happens!).
Doesn't that betray the notion of remote work and remote offices being as efficient as on-campus work interactions, or is there something about the units involved which make them exceptional in working under one roof?
I agree with your notion. However, lots of people and organizations make contrary claims. So maybe there are some kinds of teams which can perform relatively well as a dispersed team.
Looks good on the City of Mountain View. All those years of fighting against Google's expansion, awarding building rights to LinkedIn instead of Google and decrying how the city was becoming a "one company town". Looks like that's what they're getting anyway, only now Google gets the sweetheart (relatively speaking) deal that LinkedIn had, while the city loses the benefits of the more progressive Google plan that they rejected. At least they saved a few burrowing owls, though - worth it?
Literally anything is possible in a contract. Recall that for instance, the Canadian government blocked a RIM sale to China. It's not unreasonable for MV to have a clause in the contract that the winner of the land development bid must agree to transfer restrictions XYZ.
Poland Embassador for HN here (self appointed). While we acknowledge that multiple members of our glorious nation work in that area, we do not consider this a sufficient reason to consolidate Mountain View with the rest of our territories.
Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus is also just north of the 101 Shoreline Blvd exit - currently, it and LinkedIn HQ are only about 1 mile apart, possibly within walking distance. If and when this deal goes through, this won't be the case anymore, and so LinkedIn will be isolated from other Microsoft offices.
I guess it is too early for LinkedIn to be making decisions as part of Microsoft...
I could see the whole operation moving over near LinkedIn's new digs near Maude...Microsoft's "campus" off of Shoreline is definitely "meh". Microsoft seems to be investing elsewhere for new digs anyway; they have a new building on the Sunnyvale side of Moffett.
There has not been much announced in way of what Microsoft intends to do with LinkedIn, so you haven't missed much. The acquisition hasn't gone through yet.
- Xbox hardware and accessories (Xbox software was in Redmond)
- Windows Phone online services
- Microsoft Research Silicon Valley (but that was closed in the first round of layoffs several months after I left)
SVC was originally built for Hotmail and WebTV (remember that?).
Microsoft also had separate offices in Sunnyvale (in the big cluster of relative skyscrapers just south of Moffett Field), which I believe were mostly folks who came from Skype and/or Nokia.
PowerPoint, for all platforms (not just OS X and iOS) is developed at that office too. PowerPoint has actually been in the bay area since it was acquired.
The Web TV stuff was sold to Ericcson a few years ago, and they moved to an office in San Jose at the end of 2015.
I think the Sunnyvale office was mostly teams working on Bing, as well as handful of smaller acquisitions.
They have 4 office buildings and one cafeteria/commons building on that campus - space for around 1500 employees.
It's worth noting that Microsoft's bay area presence is already pretty fragmented, though. They have some more office space a couple exits down 101 in Sunnyvale (not walkable to the MV campus at all), a Skype office in Palo Alto, Yammer in SF, etc. They've also announced plans to renovate and expand the Mountain View campus: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/01/21/microsoft...
there are roughly 3000 microsoft folks in the bay area. most are at the mountain view campus next to linkedin and moffett towers across the airstrip. but also a bunch in san francisco (yammer) and palo alto (skype).
Not very big at the moment. They would never relocate from Redmond but a satellite office (from my naive uninformed perspective) isn't out of the question.
LinkedIn's SV presence (they also have SF, NY etc) is a lot larger than MS's valley presence and MS could probably consolidate with the LI folks' future offices without problem.
O/T fun: my girlfriend worked for MS but got bored, so interviewed at Google and LinkedIn...by walking! Google offered to send a Tesla to bring her the two blocks to the interview but she thought it wouldn't be cool to be picked up in the work parking lot. She chose LinkedIn.
The deal involves 2.5 million square feet of office space. In comparison, the Empire State Building has 2.2 million square feet. So this is a pretty big deal. (I'm trying to imagine what Mountain View would look like with the Empire State Building beside 101.)
Oh man. One of my favorite memories was the look on the Internap security guy's face when we parked a 19ft box truck at their loading dock on the 10th floor of the Port Authority building. "the truck is WHERE?"
Sure, but you're building on a dramatically smaller piece of land so your total overall parking requirement doesn't change. 4 stories of 100,000sqft vs 40 stories of 10,000sqft hold the same number of workers, but the tower only uses 1/10th of the footprint.
The fun part is when you start building a lot of these towers very close to each other and then all of a sudden your parking needs plummet because transit is way more effective.
It's not going to happen in the Valley though, they're stuck with gross office parks.
After reading about the history of the deal, my gut is Linkedin comes out way ahead. They dumped the distraction of a complex real-estate deal and dumped a real-estate strategy that was probably hatched around the time of its IPO. A lot has changed since then.
I often wonder why Google puts up with the Mountain View city council. They should just relocate their headquarters to another part of the state and be done with them. I'm sure there are a number of cities around that area, with huge parcels of undeveloped or neglected land, that would gleefully welcome a brand new Google headquarters. They've gotten too big for that area and their recent real estate acquisitions in Mountain View looks like just a bunch of dispersed buildings.
"huge parcels of undeveloped or neglected land." None of that exists anymore in the bay area. Part of the reason you keep hearing about the housing crisis here, it's all pretty much been developed.
Still plenty of NIMBYism. I know they're not "huge", but it's amazing how many weed-filled parcels you see along El Camino in Menlo Park, San Carlos, etc.
LinkedIn has roughly 10k employees - they're in an arms race for office space with Google and Apple in the area, but it sounds like this agreement should resolve most of the issues with Google and LinkedIn. Being that LinkedIn's headquarters is currently blocks away from the Googleplex and considering Google's dominance of the land north of the 101, it has left LinkedIn with little room to grow in its main cluster of buildings, and so it has been forced to look in Sunnyvale. Unfortunately, Apple has also expanded quite significantly into Sunnyvale in search of more land.
According to LinkedIn (this is a cool use of their website), of 12K employees listed the top 3 functions, covering 75% of employees, are Sales (4K), Engineering (3K), and HR (2K).
I don't get these engineer counts. Neither at LinkedIn or at Twitter, or even Etsy. What are they doing? Sure, there's behind-the-scenes analytics, and a good sized ops team. Does talent and capability fall off quickly when teams scale up?
Mostly because teams become more specialized as company sizes grow. While in an early stage startup you might have "the ops guy" who runs all the infrastructure, within LinkedIn there's a team that runs Kafka, a team that runs database operations, a team that runs Voldemort, a team that runs Pinot, a team that runs Hadoop, a team that runs the ads platform, a team for the feed, a team for messaging, a team for search and so on. Even if most teams are rather small (eg. two pizza rule), with many teams it eventually adds up.
Furthermore, as you point out, the more teams you have, the more overhead there is in cross-team collaboration, which means that engineering output is sub-linear with the number of engineers due to having more meetings. It's not really about talent, but mostly about having to spend more time coordinating. For example, in a small company, say that you want to create a new feature, then you just do it and check with one or two other people if need be. In a larger company, you might need to have meetings with other teams to deal with provisioning hardware resources, security review, data schema review, compliance with privacy regulations, code reviews, etc.
It's a very different thing from coding by yourself or in a small team/company.
It's not HR in the sense you think. LinkedIn makes the majority of their money selling recruiting tools. That requires scads of talent management experts.
Are these 2K HR employees helping other companies in recruitment? (some Linkedin Service that I don't know about?) Because otherwise these numbers would seem excessive to me.
What restricts someone from constructing a tall building?
If I buy a piece of land, and it's my property, I can do whatever I what with it right? Who can stop me from constructing a tall building on my own property?
The United States is a free country right? I assume a free country respects property owner's freedom to whatever[1] they want with their land?
[1] Of course excluding actions would cause significant harm to one's neighbors, like environmental pollution.
I was actually asking that question in a rhetorical sense.
I'm well aware of zoning laws. I think when they're taken too far, they impinge on personal liberty.
There are localities that mandate that every house be painted the same color. The Bay Area zoning laws benefit a few (the landlords) at great cost to everyone else who lives there, and stunts the growth of the regional economy. (If taller building were allowed and property prices were more sane, there would be more companies and more people, thus leading to economic growth).
I think what we need is a constitutional limit on state power in the United States. The Tenth Amendment[1] and the Enumerated Powers Clause[2] limit federal overreach, but there is no analogous limit on state power in the U.S. Constitution. The states' powers are not enumerated, well-defined or limited in any way, and states are free to legislate on almost anything (unless it infringes on an enumerated right of the people or a right covered under Ninth Amendment[3]).
> I'm well aware of zoning laws. I think when they're taken too far, they impinge on personal liberty.
Well then it's a good thing we have courts to decide what "too far" is. The Supreme Court has decided that zoning laws are not inherently unconstitutional (Euclid v. Amber), but they've struck down more infringing laws on multiple occasions. Maybe you don't agree with the exact balance they've chosen, but that's your problem, not a fatal flaw of our government.
> I think what we need is a constitutional limit on state power in the United States.
We already have one: the Supremacy Clause. Federal laws and the national constitution override state laws in all cases. If a certain right is not granted either by a state or by the Supremacy Clause, it's because both the state and the Federal government have decided that particular right isn't a natural one. Again, you seem to be taking your particular conceptions of liberty and what the law should be, and deciding the government is flawed for not obeying them. A lot of us like the current system.
If there's a particular right you feel should be Constitutionally protected against state laws, we have a system for that with Constitutional amendments enforced by the Supremacy Clause. Propose one to your representative if you like. But your suggestion of more non-specific Constitutional limits on state power is not going to win you many followers: the vague right-libertarianism of your attitude will alienate the Left, and the Right will balk at your suggestion of more Federal limits on state power. You're walking a lonely road here.
You've got a lot of good points. I agree that the current system works very well, and I personally appreciate it deeply (esp. considering how well-functioning it is, compared to many other countries today). But there's always room for improvement, and I was just suggesting something that I think could be an improvement.
Why do you think having federal government pass laws to override local government is less threatening to personal liberty than allowing local governments to manage themselves?
The Bill of Rights[1] restricts both federal and state power. It, empowered by the Fourteenth[2], has been used by the courts to strike down state (and federal) laws as unconstitutional several times. This has overall been in the interest of the people, and have served to protect our individual liberty -- wouldn't you say so? And the rights of the people enumerated Bill of Rights is supreme over all laws whether passed by Congress, state government, or local government.
What I'm essentially arguing for is for a sort of massive expansion of individual liberty through federal restriction of state power, by for example, having a list of "Enumerated Powers of the States" similar to the federal Enumerated Powers clause added to the Constitution, and establishing (just as in the Tenth Amendment) that all powers not specifically delegated to the states are reserved to the people. This would expands personal liberty, as it would put well-defined limits on what the states can legislate on.
Of course excluding actions would cause harm to their neighbors with their actions.
What would you call it when your new 50 story building leaves neighboring properties in permanent shadow, or get in the way of their previous panoramic views of the bay?
Most of the other comments are off base for Mountain View/Sunnyvale shoreline area. Google and Linkedin can't build tall buildings here because their campuses are next to Moffett federal airfield and the surrounding area is subject to building height restrictions.
There's a map for this, I'll edit my comment when I find it.
Edit: I found the map (http://i.imgur.com/B48yRGK.jpg), the maximum building height for this area is 182 feet above sea level. The Google campus sits around 15 feet above sea level and LinkedIn around 50. That works out to a max height of around 10 stories for the Google area, 7 stories for LinkedIn. So actually, it's higher than I thought.
There are quite a few tallish (7-10 story) buildings along 237 and Central expressway that seem to skirt this restriction.
This has got to be wrong. Have you seen the "Moffett Towers" buildings that are actually bordering Moffett Field? Google's buildings are 2 floor max; Moffett Towers has 6-8 floor buildings.
Google's current buildings were built years (or decades) ago, long before the current space crunch, and say nothing about current City policy. The maximum height in the current North Bayshore Precise Plan is 140 feet above ground (155 feet above sea level), which takes it pretty close to the federally imposed limit.
Which confirms the fact that current zoning code is more restrictive than the federal guidelines for the airfield, in direct contradiction to the claim that Moffett was restricting the heights rather than the city.
There was a skyscraper in downtown San Jose that was proposed a few years ago that was designed to the maximum height allowed by San Jose airport. After the designs were finalized, the FAA decided that the maximum height was too high, and lowered it a few feet, leading the developer to almost abandon the project, before redesigning it at some expense.
Lesson: it's a mistake to design to the limit.
I suppose in some idealized, maximally YIMBY world, the difference between 8 stories and 10 represents some horrible market interference by "NIMBY asshats". But in the real world, Google would be foolish to build above 8 stories no matter what the Mountain View city council says. The Precise Plan just reflects the practical limits of building in that area.
That's not true. There are at least seven four storey buildings (Alza, Crittenden) on the main campus, and there's also a new 5 storey building on Pear Ave. But almost none of their buildings were built new, most were already built and acquired. Their proposals for new buildings have mostly been around 6-8 storeys, but they've had problems getting the city to approve their plans. I believe the LinkedIn land they acquired also already has approval for taller buildings.
You're right, the other comments aren't incorrect (I wrote that word earlier), it's just in this spot there's federal restrictions on building height that prevent certain developments.
The citizens of Mountain View want nothing to do with tall buildings. They only have a handful that are over 5 stories.
A 12-story building was planned back in 2012 and they almost had a protest over it. The name of the town is 'Mountain View' and not 'city skyline view', after all.
This shocked me the first time I went out to SV. I thought the bay would be a deep body of water with a shoreline, and it's basically a mud flat / salt factory. Really disappointing. Many cities built along rivers have better water views & access.
As a Seattle refugee, I still don't understand why there are so few boats on the bay.
I get that the Bay is not Lake Washington.. but seriously, lakes vary in height too, and still have docks.
Somehow the bay has almost no docks, no boating (except some sailboats way up north in SF), no recreation at all. Is it water quality? Chop? Regulation?
there is a marina in redwood city, but notice how shallow the bay is south of SFO (aside from the channel) - much of that is mudflats (lakes don't have tides), marine preserves, etc.
Damn. DAMN. I didn't realize it was that shallow. (I'm familiar with the RWC Marina as I bike by there on my commute, and in college I rowed out of Seaport). Thanks. Obviously it goes without saying that if the water is only (say) 5m deep, there's a hell of a lot of crap between 0m and the 5m floor.
The changing height is not as much of an issue; plenty of lakes vary in height by 5-10ft and docks accommodate it just fine.
The muddy marsh/salt ponds surprised me too! But there are a few spots where the actual Bay (open water) is visible... e.g. Baylands Nature Preserve in Palo Alto. Also nearby hills have views -- I used to take walks to the top of the hill behind Google's Crittenden buildings, from where you can see a good bit of the southern Bay and up the peninsula northward. (Those hills also used to be MTV's garbage dump, so it could be worse!)
Then why not build down instead of up? Besides the obvious suckitude that is working under ground? Build 5 floors of prisms and light pipes above ground and send sunlight down 20 stories or whatever the math works out to.
Mountain view borders the coastline of the bay. I just used a tool[1] to find the level above sea they are, and it shows ~ 8 ft. I imagine there are problems building below sea level when you are only a few hundred feet from the coast.
Biggest question I had when I first arrived in bay area. Gov. Regulation are the reason why it is a bit harder to have taller buildings, tech companies have lot of money to go for more land grab is the main reason.
If you are building a building with X floor area the city government requires you to have f(x) area as open land. If you want to build a very tall building it will have to look like the Saruman's Tower. This regulation is part of the reason why Sunnyvale or Mountain View do not look like SF. It is also the reason why property prices are so expensive. The good part however is that it means less crime, better neighbourhoods and overall good quality of life.
Are the better neighborhoods, crime rates, and qualities of life a result of lower-rise buildings, or because the cost of living is so high that only the wealthy or upper-income can afford to live there?
Asking the real questions. I'm not sure what the correlation between tall buildings and crime is. "Better neighborhoods" is usually code for the sorts of things people don't say in public and it seems to be that quality of life is more dictated by your level of income rather than where you live.
It's happening. I think the one thing people need to realize is the big "space crunch" in the Bay Area is a relatively recent issue. There is NIMBYism to be sure, but development is slowly catching up. Look at the Sunnyvale side of Moffett Field, it has rapidly grown a collection of tall buildings.
The potential issue that was brought up in Mountain View is an unwillingness to become a "company town" for Google. Residents can remember being a "company town" (to a lesser extent) for SGI and then SGI went poof, leaving the Shoreline area vacant for a time. I actually think it is good for residents to be suspicious of tying their fates to one very large employer; nothing lasts forever.
The same issue may one day impact Cupertino...how many companies could or would want to acquire a single property as big as the "spaceship" campus? Apple isn't going away anytime soon, but this is still a valid concern.
Would it really be that bad for them if Google went belly up sometime in the future? Sure their property values might decline, but in the interim they'd go up. Is it that bad if property values go from x, to x + y, back to x, as opposed to just staying at x? In the interim, allowing Google to expand means they'd get a bunch of new infrastructure, run down parts of the city would be rehabilitated, the area would gentrify some. I'm not sure how these people are acting/voting in their own interest.
The land they just gave to Google was going to be used for more buildings. I doubt they were going to build skyscrapers, nor could they with the amount of additional parking space that would be needed. The North Bayshore area isn't really accessible except by highways, and even those are pretty much at capacity - in fact, the city council has approved only a limited amount of office space due to the strain on transportation infrastructure.
Indeed, their plan that the city rejected did include an additional off ramp.
But highways are nonetheless terribly inefficient. One extra lane or off ramp isn't enough to handle all of Google's traffic. They've already widened 101 around Google, rebuilt the whole Shoreline/85/101 interchange area to add more lanes, etc. The bottleneck is the off ramps themselves and the local streets -- they cause traffic to back up onto the freeway and make all lanes congested.
The real solution is to allow more housing to be built close to the campus, and elsewhere in Mountain View, so that more people can walk/bike/take transit. The land use just across 101 is really inefficient right now.
Indeed, there's been discussion about connecting Moffett Blvd to the North Bayshore neighborhood a new bridge over the creek that would connect to La Avenida. And creating a spur of the Light Rail system into the neighborhood as well.
Not entirely - both LinkedIn and Google faced building restrictions because of traffic volumes. This makes it easier for Google to solve the traffic volumes and get something built.
Telling 10,000 employees to move to Redmond isn't particularly practical or likely. Particularly when they could likely find jobs with other Silicon Valley companies instead.
microsoft has a history of leaving large acquisitions where they are. skype (global), powerpoint, hotmail, yahoo ads, & webTV (mountain view), yammer (sf), dynamics (north dakota, but grew in redmond), an app virtualization thing (boston)
These were the worst of both worlds -- you still had to deal with a Bay Area cost of living and commute, but you were too far to easily collaborate with other groups, or take advantage of events & resources on the main GooglePlex (TGIF at Charlies, author talks, various events, picking up dogfood hardware, etc.) Not to mention fragmented bus routes.