Large pensions & sovereign wealth funds are so desperate for yield vs. low treasuries that they have pushed income producing commercial real estate values to all time highs.
As a result these fund managers are then forced to take on larger risks to cover their liabilities by making larger portfolio allocations into public techs like Google, and privates like AirBNB & Uber.
And this dry powder has helped the technology companies get so insanely big and sophisticated that they are hiring away the best fund guys to manage their own treasury desks and drive commercial real estate transactions like this one!
Funds would have KILLED to get a deal with Google locked into a long term lease.
But because Google is taking themselves off the market as a tenant, the funds again have to go and chase riskier yield, like larger allocations in tech . . . the entire macroeconomy is just turning into a bizarre Möbius strip . . .
It also means it is a great time to be able to produce value and be in control of its distribution (eg. start your startup and control the equity). People with lots of money are hungry for yields and will push your valuation higher and higher.
I've read about this a few time this year, do you think there will be some "tipping point" or crisis about these funds not being able to generate wealth?
Probably - interest rates rise a bit, the markets start going down rather than up, the pension funds end up needing topping up / bailing out. The economist Minsky had an interesting theory that in stable prosperous times people borrow to buy office blocks and the like until the degree of leverage makes the system unstable and it all goes wrong. Unless you have govt intervention to stop that which seems kind of absent in the west at the moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsky_moment
Google (ABC) doesn't actually derive much[0] value from investment in their shares: they have long been profitable and I'd be surprised if they issued new shares in the recent past. The investment just goes to some other investor who's selling stock to invest in real estate (or whatever).
[0]: Their stock options do become vastly more useful as currency to attract employees, though.
I’m sorry you did this. Someday, you’ll be sorry you did this. Historically speaking, there is a correction every year. Corrections last on average no more than 54 days. After a correction, the stock market will go back to rising. Timing the market is near impossible, but leaving the market is just asking to lose money. With some reading and some fear management, you could be extremely successful in the stock market. But you have to learn to buy and hold.
I personally think that all stock advice is bullshit; if anyone had a working strategy, they'd use it and it would get priced into the market, making it worthless for the next guy.
but my favorite investment method is 're-balancing' between non-correlated asset classes. Set X percent of your money in equities and the rest in bond funds, for example, then if stock rises vs bonds, sell stock and buy bond funds until you are back to the same percentage.
The idea here is to force yourself to (slowly) sell into bull markets, and (slowly) buy into bear markets. I think that's the closest you can come to "buy low, sell high"
There are some other considerations such as having non tax-deductible mortgage debt. Should I buy later I can convert that to tax-deductible investment debt.
(I'm not in the USA).
Also had a lot in a single stock which was going a bit risky for me. (Although my greedy side said hold it, it could be worth a lot in the future). If I buy in again, maybe I will go for an Index or portfolio.
I'd be surprised if the company in the building is the one who owns it - yes all Google, of course - but surely there's some tax avoidance possible ...
Google is just one of the tenants along with Food Network and Major League Baseball. They also own the building across the street, 111 Eighth Ave. Some other companies rent space in there too. Google has the cash, doesn't want to pay rent, and knows they are going to be there for a long time. Might as well buy the place. Not really a tax avoidance, although it certainly could be, but it's more like a cost avoidance. Estimated rent for 1.2m sqf is $6.1m/month for your typical office space in Chelsea. For a price of $2b, Google would get their money back in 30 years from collecting rent, assuming it never changes. I'm sure they are looking at closer to 15 years.
There are some corporate structures that seem better suited for owning real estate, like a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Maybe there is a proxy "Google REIT" that is 100% owned by Google. Or some other proxy entity accounting stuff going on, such that Google is not "technically" the owner of the building, but a subsidiary with a different tax structure. I think that's what the parent meant.
> Maybe there is a proxy "Google REIT" that is 100% owned by Google.
There is no such thing under US law. A REIT must have at least 100 separate owners, and no group of 5 can own more than 50% in the second half of a given tax year.
They're only "in the market" if they are shopping for a new space. They just bought the same building they were in. That doesn't affect the commercial office space market.
Google NYC is literally right across the block from Chelsea Market. This transaction would mean that Google will occupy the real estate above the actual market. Chelsea Market is an amazing place with great offerings of food etc. As long as this transaction does not ruin the ecosystem of CM then New Yorkers are OK with this transaction. Lets face it who would not want to sell their real estate to The Google?
Google already occupies the majority of the space above the market - at least 3 full floors (As of a couple years ago). It's not much of a change for any New Yorkers except that they tend not to renew leases for other office space tenants.
Chelsea Market is actually 19 different buildings on the same block that have merged together over time. The floor layout is truly crazy. Some floors are staggered by a full half height at the interface between buildings, there are exterior courtyards on the inside of the block that are roofed over, and buildings are of differing height. You can see it all on Google Maps; contrast with 111 8th Ave next door (where I sit) that is all one proper building. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7402908,-74.0061411,325a,35y...
And yeah, we already have a huge amount of office space in Chelsea Market, up to six floors now, and presumably buying the entire block made sense vs continuing to rent.
Hopefully the ground floor marketspace itself won't be affected. I can't imagine we'd kick all that out, though. It wouldn't be a good look. Chelsea Market is an iconic tourist destination.
The layout is like none other. You'll walk down a spiral stairway, through some cubes, turn the corner to a ramp, more cubes, more narrow hallways and ramps.
And a lot of the space has these beautiful antique wooden floors and the ceilings are held up gigantic wooden columns and beams. Most of the buildings on the site are over a century old and predate the modern construction methods that use reinforced concrete and steel I-beams.
Contrast with 111 8th Ave, which was built contemporaneously with the Empire State Building (and in the same aesthetic). It uses reinforced concrete and steel I-beam construction throughout. The brick you see from the outside is just an aesthetic facade; this is a solid building.
Oh, and there's two skybridges -- one that goes nowhere, and one that goes across 10th Ave to our space in that building.
> ...and there's two skybridges -- one that goes nowhere, and one that goes across 10th Ave to our space in that building.
This sounds like a pretty awesome, yet harsh, way to handle internal performance reviews...
Top performers get to walk over to 10th ave for cake and coffee. Low performers get to walk the plank, taking a skybridge to "nowhere", and are never heard from again.
... Need to get a subordinate to shape up? Take her up by the skybridge to nowhere and then tell her how important your TPS reports are. She'll get the hint.
The skybridge to "nowhere" just ends in another building which Google doesn't lease space to, so it is more of a "skylounge"; open at one end to Google, closed at the other, suspended three storied above 15th St. https://goo.gl/maps/Qzc4ZEB5hdw
The building they purchased in 2010 (111 8th Ave) is a full city block that they picked up for $1.9 billion - seems to be the going rate for a block in Chelsea.
Chelsea Market is 1.2 million sqft. 111 8th Ave is 2.9 million sqft, and the fourth largest building by floor area in all of NYC. Not only is Chelsea Market much shorter on average than 111 8th Ave, its land area is smaller as well. The buildings themselves are also older and less modern, thus worth less. 111 8th Ave is an absolute tank of a building.
We got an excellent post-recession deal on 111 8th Ave. Chelsea Market looks to be at booming economy rates, hence paying about the same amount of money for much less.
Additionally, unlike other buildings in NYC with similar floor space, 111 8th Ave is not a skyscraper, which makes it more practical and useful, and much cheaper in maintenance.
Four more are in the works, just being held up by the city's permitting process.
The building was originally not built as an office space, which is painfully obvious when you consider that it had more freight and truck elevators than people elevators.
Maybe better for employee's health. >95% of people shouldn't require an elevator working in that building. Being forced to walk 5 floors instead of taking the elevator can have positive effects
Not true at all, especially not after the construction of Stairwell J. You almost never see any sort of crowding on the stairs. You see crowding at the elevators frequently.
I visited MLB.com in Chelsea Market once (I wonder where they're moving now) and it was definitely the most unique office building I've encountered. The spirits of the fig newtons of old danced around us!
> The floor layout is truly crazy. Some floors are staggered by a full half height at the interface between buildings, there are exterior courtyards on the inside of the block that are roofed over, and buildings are of differing height.
complexity should be no problem for Google engineers
There are other office occupants though, and it sounds like Google's going to squeeze them out. So the food offerings might stay, but it's going to begin to feel like a Google cafeteria.
Why would it begin to feel like a Google cafeteria? We have actual Google cafeterias (including in Chelsea Market, on the eighth floor). Chelsea Market is a huge tourist draw. Googlers generally don't eat there because it's crowded and the food costs money.
We do go out at night to The Tippler, a bar beneath the market, though. That definitely feels like an extension of Google space on weeknights.
Google employees already eat for free at 5-6 internal restaurants within the Google office space. I used to work at Google NYC and would occasionally eat at a nice Thai spot in Chelsea Market but most of the time I'd just take the free lunch.
If the food is at least as good as Google Waterloo (alas, I was only visiting.), then holy hell—I don't blame you. Coming from a more traditional office (with a gradually updating for-pay cafeteria) I could hardly believe it. It was really great food with an active policy of reducing waste (with published counts).
As a Google Waterloo employee I personally think much of the food at Google NYC is better, maybe the best I've had at Google. Not all of it, but some. There are certainly more options, as we have only one cafe here but there are many in NYC.
But I haven't been there in 5 years, so I can't say that with certainty, things may have changed.
They had an enclosure containing an environment for growing micro greens you could pick yourself. lol. It wasn't for us I/O'ers, though. I was impressed, but maybe I haven't been spoiled yet.
They did just have the one cafeteria when I was there, but I wouldn't talk it down. Waterloo isn't that large of an office, relatively speaking.
I wouldn't be surprised that the NYC location is slaying Kitchener/Waterloo. I'd hope so! I think the last time I was up that way was pre-university drinking with friends in Guelph and at the Sleeman Brewery. It's a nice place, and becoming more of a research and development hub, but still has a way to go.
The microgreens are not for self-picking, but the kitchen staff picks from it.
It's impressive to get fed 3 meals a daily, yes. Many things are impressive. But you'd be amazed how entitled the average Googler gets after a few months.
Do the businesses in Chelsea Market rely heavily on traffic from the office-workers above? Store-fronts in NYC tend to be pretty disconnected from the office/residential spaces above, with a few notable exceptions.
I don't think so. I work upstairs at a non-Google company. Most of the time, the market floor is filled with non office workers. The lunch crowd might suffer a little bit since Google employees won't need to go down for meals.
Last time I went to Chelsea Market I got the feeling of "Nobody (local) goes here... there are too many tourists and the experience walking around here is miserable" Times Square-esque
I live in the neighborhood. It's a nightmare to walk throthere during the day, but fairly quiet in the morning until 10. Also a decent place to pick up dinner after 6:00, especially if you enter through one of the side doors.
It's a great place but so busy that id be loathe to drop in for a working lunch. That place and the Rockefeller center concourse are some of the rare places in the world where getting lunch can be more stressful than work
MLB occupies some space. But they were moving to midtown in 2019 but their lease is until 2022. Bamtech (recently acquired by Disney is there). I don't know what's going to happen for us. We'll find out.
"BAMTech" aka the old live video streaming arm started by MLB. They were bought out by Disney, which will be using the tech as the backbone of their own streaming service which is coming out in 2020 or so
Speaking of, I passed the Google building recently, and most of the windows have two protuding panels mounted horizontally. Can be seen here [1]. Anyone know what it is? Just solar shades? Or solar panels? I don't think I've seen this before.
Just solar shades, likely – they look exactly like what my high school installed on the classroom windows many years ago, and those were purely for keeping the rooms from heating up too much in the high summer noon sun. Solar panels wouldn't make much sense, they aren't angled toward the sun's average position at all and would just shade each other out for most of the day.
> Chelsea Market is an amazing place with great offerings of food etc.
It really isn't. It's a tourist trap, especially with the completion of the High Line. The food isn't good and it's overpriced to take advantage of the tourists.
> As long as this transaction does not ruin the ecosystem of CM then New Yorkers are OK with this transaction.
Like new yorkers' opinions matters in manhattan. The only thing that matters in manhattan are billionaires - whether they be from california, israel, russia, china or anywhere else.
I don't think anyone really believes Chelsea Market is a culinary wonder, or that it's catering to the True(tm) New Yorker. It's pretty, it's in a fairly nice area, there's no entry fee, and it's easy to have fun there if you take it for what it is.
Yeah don't know what the complaint is about. The lobster place, tacos stand, Vietnamese sandwich shop are all really good spots to eat. And not expensive
Speaking from experience, the main office (111 8th/76 9th) is amazing. I think Google's decision to buy that years ago has totally been vindicated. I'm surprised more high cash surplus companies don't do this, just to control their destiny in a way you simply can't as a tenant (eg if you're a large tenant, each floor you rent in the same building is going to get more expensive, being a tenant limits what you can do).
Other posters have pointed out the Chelsea Market is a mishmash of other buildings (4 IIRC). All true. It's a super-annoying building to get around in though. To get from the 6th floor on one side to the 6th floor on the other side you might have to go to the ground floor and find the right elevator (out of like 20 in 12 different locations) that goes to that floor in that building. Some parts are only served by a single elevator. Others have a bank. Honestly I'd hate to work there, particularly if you had to go through the crowds to get to your one blessed elevator.
One outcome of this might be that Google may well fix this situation by combining floors and elevator banks.
I don't think anything will happen to the ground floor of Chelsea Market.
Fun historical note, IBM generated cash in its early days as Google and Apple do today, it bought a lot of real estate all around the world. In the 90's when it seemed liked it was doomed, it "saved itself" by selling off big chunks of that real estate. That gave the company operating capital without having to go to the equity markets or debt markets.
Given the ups and downs of tech, it seems like a much better place to hold your spare cash than t-bills or other cash equivalent securities.
The interesting thing is that there are at least 10 buildings/floors leased by IBM just in Manhattan.
The prominent ones are the "IBM Building" in midtown (that used to be owned by IBM) and still has its name on the building and the somewhat iconic 51 Astor Place which is the Watson HQ.
>In the 90's when it seemed liked it was doomed, it "saved itself" by selling off big chunks of that real estate.
Wonder if that was during Lou Gerstner's time as CEO at IBM. I had read his book Who says Elephants can't Dance, about what he did to turn IBM around. It was an interesting read.
Don't remember if selling off some of their real estate was part of what they did, though it could have been.
The real estate fire sale started in 1992 along with the spin–outs of various divisions (some of which completed, like IBM Federal Systems and Lexmark, others were halted by Gerstner like AdStar (storage systems) and Pennant (big printers).
Something to remember with that book is that it's a highly selective perspective. Gerstner did do a lot to turn IBM around, possibly the best thing he did was to cut through tradition and corporate poltics with a chainsaw to make decisions. IBM in the early 90s was catastrophically stuck in between knowing the world was shifting and an inability to address the changing world.
Decisions you don't hear much about are things like selling off the IBM Global Network at the height of the dot com era, probbaly short term brilliance, but the sale included much of IBM's commercial web hosting, which left IBM blind to the shift to cloud a decade ago.
Or the decision to effectively axe OS/2 almost immediately after the Warp release, not so much because Windows 95 was better, but because the continued existence of OS/2 was inconvenient to the PC division.
Not saying it's a bad book, but like much history it tells a story from the perspective of the victor.
Incidentally, I had read good reviews of OS/2 Warp in a computer magazine, PC Quest. I think they included a trial or full copy of Warp with that issue on a CD. (They used to do that now and then, and I got to try out QNX for a while that way - very fast and light OS.) It was a while back, but I remember a few things, like they said it (Warp) was very stable, maybe fast, and probably a few more good points.
I remember terms like System Object Model and Workplace Shell, although I probably did not understand all of those concepts fully - a bit too junior at the time, maybe.
I’m obviously biased but I thought it was a decent O/S. App support was minimal but with the WinOS2 support you could run most Windows code. I thought the TCP/IP stack was years ahead of Windows, not quite comparable to what you'd find on SunOS/Solaris or whatever DEC ran on the microvax workstations.
IBM, being IBM, charged an arm and both legs for the development kit, even to internal employees.
I managed to use it until June 1998 when I found it was getting to be too much of a pain to dual boot to Windows to open Netscape (there was a Netscape browser for OS/2 but it was web years behind what they were distributing on Windows and *nix).
>I thought the TCP/IP stack was years ahead of Windows, not quite comparable to what you'd find on SunOS/Solaris or whatever DEC ran on the microvax workstations.
I remember back in the day, people saying that the TCP/IP and Internet layers on Windows were not good. There was this software called Trumpet Winsock, which may have tried to make things better.
MULTI has yet to be installed in an actual building and from what I recall, they believed it would likely be used in new buildings that are designed with MULTI in mind rather than retrofitting older buildings.
It seems like a good use case in my mind, though I don't expect it would be implemented for at least several years while the new technology is adapted and tested in real-world scenarios
Is it fully tested yet, that page says their new tower "will" (not does) provide testing? It's not the sort of thing I'd want to be an early adopter on.
Tom Scott did a video[1] on it last summer. They have a working version in a test tower in Germany, but have not installed it in an actual for-public-use building yet and I'm unsure if testing phases have been completed
Between this $2B deal and the $5B Apple Park deal, I start to wonder how companies are justifying these purchases as remote and distributed work becomes more feasible.
They're probably focused on the fact that productivity is still higher in co-located settings and the best talent pools are in major metro areas. But what if, instead, they invested $500M in remote work research and $500M in building a remote work infrastructure for the company. Then they can go ahead and pocket that extra $1-4B in real estate costs, and perhaps another ~$10B long term as they avoid future real estate purchases and scale this across the company. Also, save several hundred million in hiring and retention, as they attract more talent from around the world and retain employees by offering remote work as a benefit.
Could this be a more forward-thinking approach? I'm merely posing the question.
Real estate is super expensive, and most people would consider being able to live anywhere a huge perk. In other words, the only reason talent is so concentrated in New York, is because it has to be right now. But what will happen as more companies offer distributed work? Will people choose to continue living in metro areas with astronomical costs of living (perhaps even away from family or in a climate they don't prefer)? Or will they leave and work from wherever they want? And then what will happen to the value of this real estate? And what will happen to the companies that invested in it?
I find it odd that innovative tech companies seem to not be questioning one of the more non-innovative and dogmatic practices of today - physical office space. Not only that, but they're investing billions into that idea. Why not challenge it?
Or what if you took a hybrid approach? Have a collaborative space in New York that everyone can use to come together, but everyone can also work from home. You may be able to cut down the required space by 3-4x.
Definitely. But there's also been very little investment into remote work, both from a research and infrastructure perspective.
I just wonder, if they were to take some of this cash and invest it into proving out remote work, would it turn out to be a better long term investment?
In most of the cases that I've observed, companies enter into remote work literally by just letting their employees start working remotely. Maybe they get a nice contract with Zoom and hire a specialized lawyer or two. But what if we were to really try investing in it, in the same way (or even in a fraction of the way) that we're investing in real estate?
Another point that I’m not sure gets much attention is that, as these companies build huge campuses and spread out to multiple locations across a region, how co-located are employees anyway? Sure you can move people around to be with primary teams but it’s certainly not like everyone can pop over to talk with someone or can depend on a lot of serendipitous hallway conversations.
That's a great point. Google tends to collocate teams by product, so that may be their answer to this. But it's true that you'll eventually reach a scale where you're going to have daily remote interactions, regardless of whether those people are in an office or not. Even at the Googleplex, if you're in an office across campus, it's better to connect to the meeting remotely than walk over.
Google has experimented with that idea in London: https://www.campus.co/london/en. Free space with wifi and coffee and obviously nice furniture. They use the event space to hold tech talks and the like -- I wonder if it's worked out as more than just a brand investment.
I first heard about this deal around Thanksgiving. I am curious how everyone kept the real estate brokers' mouths shut for this long. For New York City, this might be a record.
$1600/ft seems shockingly high for commercial real estate, even in New York. Just because you have lots of money (that theoretically belongs to your shareholders) doesn’t mean you should overpay.
They want the entire building badly for years now so it makes sense to overpay and grab the deal right now before another developer comes in with a more competitive offer, knowing Google would not move away! $2B for this is not expensive, considered how much they had paid to other short-term leases. Moving to and decorating new office space will cost them many millions. If they can own the building, $2B is a big saving in the next decade (and I presume the purchase would come with a property tax credit). Google has enough money to buy ten of these in NYC. Finally consider the property value should Google ever want to sell the property or lending out.
Though if this was up to me, I would buy a land and build another giant Google Campus. But that's just me.
For $2B you could probably buy a nice village by the sea with great weather all year round. Having worked in downtown NYC, I'd pick a beach any day of the week. But I can see the value of a large marketing, finance and sales presence for a Google type firm in the city. Engineering not so much.
I agree. I think the convenience of locating in Manhattan makes sense. For CA, since everyone travels, it doesn't matter (though they do have an office in SF!) I wouldn't mind traveling to NJ if Google picks me up like Google does in CA :-) Bell Lab would have been the perfect campus location for Google :/ (see [1])
> Data analyzed by COMMERCIALCafé shows a steady rise in the average yearly sale price per square foot, starting at 2012’s $959. The price increased by 40% over 5 years, resting at $1,347 in 2016. The Y-o-Y increase was 7%. Midtown remains the highest priced NYC submarket. Last year, 50 office properties were sold at an average price of $1,531 per square foot.
Chelsea Market is an above-average property, though. It's in an excellent location, one block away from the A/C/E/L lines, two blocks away from the 1/2/3 lines, and three blocks away from the F/M lines. The market on the ground floor is an internationally known tourist destination, and the High Line, another huge internationally known tourist destination, actually goes through the building on the second floor by 10th Ave. And Chelsea/Meatpacking are desirable and pricey neighborhoods in general.
They're paying 4% above average (and that's the 2016 average - prices may be higher in 2018). The average likely includes a range far greater than 4% depending on the properties involved.
Google is clearly not paying anything remotely describable as "shockingly high".
I’ll get more downvotes for this, but 4% when billions are involved is a shocking amount of money. In this case, that’s roughly $80 million - enough for Eric Schmidt to buy another G650.
The same link I posted said the average increased 7% YOY. If that kept up in 2017, Google just paid below average. But hey, maybe you're a better negotiator than Google's team of real estate experts and lawyers.
$80M probably isn't even a shocking number to a company who made $12,660M profit last year.
If the average is $1500, then a number of transactions have been above average, so this isn't that unusual. There are a lot of reasons you might pay 5-10% above average: location, building quality and condition, how much deferred maintenance there is, historical or architectural significance, etc, etc.
An average is just that, meaning prices below and above. Chelsea is a much more desired neighborhood than midtown, which is one of the least desired neighborhoods.
So a 5-10% premium for Chelsea is actually on the low side, and isn't really a premium for the area as that sounds to be right on target compared to the average price.
If they paid $2,000 a sq ft then they would be paying a premium. This looks like a good standard rate for also an iconic building in Chelsea.
Wow, they really got a good deal on the 111 Eighth Avenue, they bought it in 2010 by $610/sqft, and now it is probably worth the same as the Chelsea Market, $1600/sqft, a 160% return on the investment.
Depends on just what drives the desirability, I think.
Google is covering their bases in terms of both "suburban areas" (Mountain View) and "dense cities." So they can attract people who prefer either style of living.
If there's a significant subset that prefers "cheap" directly, then they're missing out on that group. Otherwise, it might be more cost effective to simply keep offering higher wages in the high-cost areas, if cost and desirability are roughly correlated for most people.
Where I see it breaking down personally is that the expensive areas aren't that bad for 20-something folks who want to rent anyway. Say you throw an extra ten to twenty grand a year at rent, that can be easily covered by a compensation premium. But once you start looking at moving from renter to buyer, down payment requirements make expensive areas a lot rougher. This might be fine at Google-level compensation, but there's a lot of other companies who could have a harder and harder time retaining people as they age.
They haven't covered rural. I don't think they are even close.
I know people in multiple states who like to shoot rifles (AR-15 style) and shotguns in their yards. One hunts pigs in his backyard. A different one can hunt turkey.
I can't really imagine that in Mountain View or San Francisco or Manhattan.
One of the stated objectives is to actually build out a Cyber Center in NYC as part of the jobs program. This could potentially align with Alphabet's recent "Chronicle" business being launched? I looked thru the NYCEDC Suppliers/bidders, didn't see anything resembling alphabet or chronicle though.
I visited Chelsea Market Google offices by mistake. I was at the market, and not knowing so much about it, I though that was small. So me and a friend got into the elevator to go to the next floor.
The elevator just opens and there it is. It was Google´s offices with a big green Android figure. I took a picture and just went back to the market using the elevator.
As it was a weekend, I was on vacation, there was no one.
So "suddenly Google" is one of my memories to my travel to New York.
This area already is our NYC HQ, and we own the much bigger 111 8th Ave building next door too. We've got many thousands of employees here already; no speculation is needed as to its status.
Google has largely ruined Boulder, CO after building a huge new sprawling thing and effectively dictating to locals and politicians exactly how they want the neighborhood and city to be structured going forward. Everyone who isn't a googler hates them and wishes we hadn't allowed that, much less given them massive amounts of corporate welfare.
Resist googlers if you can, they destroy communities.
I live in Boulder and don't share this sentiment whatsoever. Google already has a large campus here and they're expanding into an area that frankly needed to be renovated anyway. Their entire new + old complex is supposed to house ~2,000 employees. If adding 1.5k employees and a new building is "largely ruining Boulder" in your eyes you should see a doctor.
>If adding 1.5k employees and a new building is "largely ruining Boulder" in your eyes you should see a doctor.
Put some effort into understanding perspectives before resorting to derision. Bringing thousands of highly paid employees into a smaller city is often not good for many who already lives there unless they own property. The majority of the new jobs will not go to existing residents, rents will increase, restaurants will get more expensive, traffic will get worse, and everything will get more crowded.
For rich city-dwellers, the above might sound like nothing, but for people who seek smaller cities it will suck because it quickly erodes the character of the city.
I appreciate you trying to make OP's case, and I'm genuinely interested in changing my mind about this. What do you think should be done? Should growing companies be prevented from expanding because it might 'erode the character of the city'?
I'm not in favor of the city subsidizing a company's growth, even if it does stimulate the economy in the long-run, but I just can't get behind any policy that would prevent a growing company due to something as nebulous as the erosion of the city's character.
I keep hearing this over and over in this forum, relax the code, change the zoning laws, that'll solve problems.
How many of these folks actually live in a densely populated city? Zoning laws in Manhattan have a different source and downstream effect than some suburb of SF or LA, or some other city with housing cost issues.
It's a huge topic of conversation, but I'll summarize it by offering a few items to ponder before we reduce the problem to "zoning restrictions" and people reply with "100X times this!".
--- Infrastructure is more than housing. And much more expensive. The subway system in NYC isn't scaling to capacity due to the speed of development. It may feel expensive to build a new rental building, but scaling public transportation, education, and more is deeply more expensive.
--- Manhattan isn't dense enough for you? You realize the parent article is about Google purchasing a huge swathe of Manhattan real estate. Are the skyscrapers not high enough? Better yet, maybe we should knock down those 19th century buildings in whatever pockets are left of low density housing in Manhattan and turn everything into a giant concrete reed jungle? Not all NIMBY is mean-spirited, and if you're the traveling type you can understand the need for preservation of architectural character.
--- I live in a part of NYC where zoning laws allow for more building. As it turns out, I even own a building where I could potentially build an additional 1500 square feet, and I could convert my building into six separate apartment buildings. This would add net 4 apartments to a city which has a housing crisis. And I'd love do. However, I'd have to comply with code, which like zoning exists to protect us from ourselves, if for different reasons. To comply with code, so my tenants don't get incinerated in a fire, I'd have to spend so much money that it's cost prohibitive.
Sorry, I'm just tired of reading the same "it's the zoning laws" reductionism by people who know only suburbs.
Yes, I do live in a high density city, San Francisco, and before that I lived in NYC for 2 years.
Manhattan is absolutely not dense enough for me. It has like a couple small areas, with 40 story buildings.
The skyscrapers are not high enough for me.
Here is how things should work. We should pick a single 1 mile square area, and in this area there are zero building height limits. Every single building in this area should be 50 stories tall or higher.
And then we should leave the surrounding area, hundreds of square miles, for the low density people to live in.
Yes, high density buildings are more expensive. But the actual cost of building the building is a small percentage of the total cost of living in an area. The REAL cost is caused by artifical land supply constraints.
You want lower density? Don't want to live in the very small, designated 50 story building area? Great! You can live in the 99% of the US landmass that is low density.
Us people who disagree, and and prefer higher density living should get at least freaking 1% of the land to do what we want with!
Since you've lived in Manhattan, have you since been following the serious infrastructure issues that have been affecting the subway system here?
Have you had a chance to see the effects on massive, quick development on specifically the mass transit system in Brooklyn (downtown Brooklyn, in particular)?
Look, I'm not saying there shouldn't be density. I'm just trying to point a finger at other elements that should be thought about other than tall buildings. I don't have kids, so I won't even get started on the downstream effects density has on school crowdedness, choices and desirability of areas.
The left hand doesn't talk to the right hand in the vast bureaucracy that is NYC. If development and rezoning were done with consideration for long-term downstream factors, I wouldn't have needed to write these comments.
This doesn't work beyond a small amount. There is only so much land so you have to build up and living in an apartment is a pretty huge sacrifice if you were previously in a single family home with a yard.
There is a difference between 'fitting people' somewhere and them being happy.
Living in something dense like Tokyo/NYC is not desirable to people who seek cities like Boulder.
The other option is to keep expanding outward with single family home lots, but prices in the desirable close areas still shoot way up and traffic gets miserable (see LA).
Note 1: This is interestingly isomorphic to the immigration debate. I'm not taking sides on this point, I just find the parallels interesting.
Note 2: Thousands of highly paid employees will cause real estate prices to rise, certainly. But they'll spend on more than just real estate, so the economy as a whole will grow with a lot of incoming money to be spent. As these incoming people are already working for 1 company, their demand for products/services will fall onto the local economy. Which is good for existing residents who participate in that economy. It'll also be good for anyone else who lives (after surviving applicable rent hikes) in the same districts, as the influx of tax money will help local schools, law enforcement, libraries, etc.
I think you're overestimating how much money will pour into the pockets of renting middle class people. You only need to look to Mountain View and Sunnyvale to see how all people making less than 6 figures have either been pushed into a trailer park, pushed into a roommate situation, or pushed out entirely.
A bunch of rich people showing up does not really help most people.
Your second note about products/services falling into the local economy is probably not all too true.
A bunch of googlers will not support the local coop grocery store, but instead continue using amazon fresh/blue apron, etc. Not to mention the boutique stores they want to shop at probably don't exist yet (depending on the city).
> Bringing thousands of highly paid employees into a smaller city
When you have to twist figures so that 1.5 thousand becomes "thousands" (thereby making it sound much bigger), then it means you have no argument at all.
Boulder's population is 108,000. Adding an additional 1500 employees adds 1.5% to that population; not a huge amount.
I agree that rising housing costs are a problem and more should be done on the affordable housing front, but everything getting more crowded sounds pretty good for those businesses that are getting crowded. A growing vibrant economy is a good thing for a city to have.
I've lived and worked in Colorado my whole life, joined Google Boulder about 8 months ago. Spent a ton of time in Boulder before that; my wife is from Boulder proper. Honestly? Google is barely a speck in the whirlwind of changes that Boulder is undergoing. Tech is a huge part of it, but you can't throw that entirely at Google's feet. There's been Silicon Valley expats and tons of other folks moving to Boulder for years.
Back on Google for a moment:
Lets talk neighborhood. The older Google buildings are renovated, small buildings. One of them was a Circuit City that closed. That should already give you a good idea of the area. It isn't trendy downtown, just primarily commercial space.
The new Google building is larger, about 3 blocks away, and located in what was a basically condemned. There's empty, undeveloped lots across from it on one side, and a huge sprawling Whole Foods with a massive parking lot on the other side. Google's new building is flanked by a large Target. Overall, the building is not actually that large. It's 4 floors and built as two halves joined in the center with a bridge.
It isn't the trendy part of town. It's developed a nice building in an otherwise lower-traffic area. I know there's follow-on effects from employing new folks in the area (housing, traffic, etc.), but I don't see how that's overall different from the general influx of folks into Boulder.
Perhaps it's myopic of me, but I don't see "us" (as if us vs. them is a productive use of time) being a negative force. Google Boulder employs lots of folks, and the vast majority of them have lived in Colorado for more than the last few years.
I'd like to know what we're doing to destroy communities and how we can prevent that.
>I'd like to know what we're doing to destroy communities and how we can prevent that.
Stop moving into small cities with workers paid significantly above the average of the existing residents. Restaurants open that they can't afford, the limited housing stock gets bid up quickly, good schools get overcrowded, etc.
It's not a pleasant answer, but realistically that's ultimately what upsets a good chunk of the people that complain. If you bring in 2,000 people into any small city who make $200k/year+ when the average is down around $50k/year, it's going to result in a backlash and there is nothing you can really do unless you ban your employees from spending money there. The only real strategy is to pretend you are concerned and wait for the problem to gentrify away.
I understand the concern but as someone who grew up in Boulder, and now works at Google Boulder I feel like people are giving off this incorrect impression of Boulder. It's a small town (~120k people w/ students) but it was never a particularly affordable place. Unfortunately there's not a whole lot that can be done to shield a desirable small town from becoming more expensive as more people become aware of it's existence. You can keep Boulder small with minimal development and get the skyrocketing housing prices or you can attempt to remedy this by building significantly more housing. For a long time now it's been evident that the city council has chosen the first option.
Boulder may be the most quintessentially NIMBY community in the USA. And it's been that way for decades, so yes, this is a strange discussion to have about Boulder of all places. Importantly though, I suspect Boulder has an above average number of renters who will be disproportionately impacted by an increase in high paying job growth, as they will not see any return on equity.
It's not that simple. You can't add more land for 1000 more houses in the desirable areas of town. So people renting in the desirable houses are going to get forced out into the new apartments because the rich can outbid them for the good houses. People will still be pissed.
There is no solution to bringing a ton of people into a small area of land that preserves each person renting the same place for the same price. If you could turn Boulder into Tokyo overnight, it's still going to screw everyone who was there for single family homes and low density.
There is absolutely a way to preserve everyone's ability to live in the place that they were living before for the same price.
The solution is to pick a small, 1 mile square area, and make THAT the high density, 40 story, skyscraper area.
A single high density zone could double the size of many cities, while still leaving hundreds of square miles of area for the low density people to live in the surrounding area.
Sure, it would be a comparatively high cost of living to live in the high density area, but that's fine, as it is an extra area that you can choose not to live in.
There are lots of people who love high density living. And I think it is completely fair to give high density dwellers a single square mile of no limits 40+ story tall buildings, for ever 100 miles of area that the low density living people can choose to live in.
That absolutely does not work. The prices of all of the homes anywhere near the high density area would sky rocket. Do you realize how much a single story house with a yard within a block of Chelsea Market in NYC would be worth?
High rise costs to build are several hundred per square foot, so the cost to the tenants would be higher. Why would anyone pay several times the cost of a house a block away for a spot in the high rise?
> The prices of all of the homes anywhere near the high density area would sky rocket.
Why? I want you to genuinely think about this question.
Why is it that, non-high density areas, that are near high density areas, increase in price?
Is it perhaps because, high density areas, with tall buildings, are so amazing, so wonderful, so in demand, so useful, and so great to live in, that people WANT to live near them?
The NIMBY argument against high density areas, is that people don't like living there. But it is literally the opposite. High density areas are so great, that low density areas NEAR the high density areas, increase in price because EVERYONE WANTS TO LIVE THERE!
Thats why the price goes up. Not because of the increase in cost to live in the places, but because they places are amazing, and there aren't enough of them, and people are willing to pay a premium amount of money to live there.
So if everyone wants to live in these areas, then why aren't we building more of them?
These areas literally make everything more desireable!
And, because of supply and demand, if we build a whole bunch of these super great, amazing areas that everyone is willing to pay lost of money to live in, then the price will go down, and everyone will benefit.
Your argument is literally that we shouldn't make cities and place to live better, because if the places to live are better, then more people will want to live there.
I am of the opposite. I think we should make the world a better place, and we should make everywhere in the world better to live in.
But even so, the people who want to live in places that suck should absolutely have the freedom to do that. 99% of the land in the US is low density, and people who like those areas should keep it. But the OTHER people, who actually want to live in nice, high density areas, that are good to live in, should get at least 1% of the land to do with as we please. I am all in favor of freedom of choice for the low density people. Why can't they give the same freedom of choice to those who disagree with them?
>Why? I want you to genuinely think about this question.
You're not offering anything profound here. You are just admitting that a high density area can't just be built in the middle of a small city without affecting the prices.
>and so great to live in, that people WANT to live near them?
Of course people that love dense cities want to live in or near dense cities. People who like that will buy up the surrounding houses and keep pushing the prices up until they are on parity with the cost of the city itself. However, you know who doesn't want to live there? People who deliberately chose not to live in a dense city in the first place.
>increase in price because EVERYONE WANTS TO LIVE THERE!
That's not how supply and demand works. They increase in price because of limited supply and a large enough pool of people who like cities to outstrip supply. Expensive != everyone wants.
>and people are willing to pay a premium amount of money to live there.
Some people are. Some people are also willing to pay a premium amount of money to have a helicopter. It doesn't mean everyone wants or can afford a helicopter.
>Your argument is literally that we shouldn't make cities and place to live better, because if the places to live are better, then more people will want to live there.
No it's not. You're either being deliberately obtuse or you have never interacted with people that choose to live in small cities. Adding more density, increasing the cost of housing per square foot, increasing traffic, etc are all awful turnoffs for people who seek small cities.
>and we should make everywhere in the world better to live in.
And there is a good chunk of the population in smaller cities that would be happy for you to go ruin someone else's area with your idea of "better".
>But even so, the people who want to live in places that suck
Don't be vacuous, you have to fathom that that people like different lifestyles.
>should get at least 1% of the land to do with as we please.
There is plenty of empty land in the US for you to build your dream cities. You don't need to wreck a small city to build more dense cities. If everyone wanted to live in density like you claim, you could make billions building out cities wherever you want. Just stop screwing up existing communities.
>Why can't they give the same freedom of choice to those who disagree with them?
You have the choice, just build the density somewhere else. If you displace an entire community that likes small cities don't expect them to thank you for fundamentally altering their way of life for the worse (in their eyes).
Over half a million people live within commuting distance of Boulder. It may 'only' have 100k people in it, but you aren't forced to live in the city limits if you want to work at Google Boulder
The real answer is for cities to be built up so much that even a Google-sized company is a drop in the bucket. Google NYC right now is about one city block (111 8th), expanding to two. That's a tiny part of Manhattan, which isn't even all of NYC.
My old church is located under the old Citigroup Center skyscraper at 601 Lexington, which is also an entire block; Citigroup used to have both that building and the block across the street, 399 Park, for a couple of decades. When they moved out of those buildings to another neighborhood in Manhattan, that caused a drop in noon mass attendance but that was really about it. Their presence didn't destroy the neighborhood, let alone the city, and their move didn't destroy it either.
The fact that NYC is capable of handling Citigroup-sized companies and Google-sized companies moving in and barely even noticing is one of the deep reasons I like living in NYC. I wish more other cities would do the same, because I don't think there's anything unique to NYC about the ability to do this. Maybe population - although the Denver-Aurora-Bolder metropolitan area, at 3M, isn't that much smaller than NYC (8.5M). The internet is telling me the Google Boulder office can support up to 1,500 employees. You shouldn't give them corporate welfare, but also you should just be able to accommodate them without that, they're not that big. It should just be a building, and you should have lots of those.
>The real answer is for cities to be built up so much that even a Google-sized company is a drop in the bucket.
That's a repulsive suggestion to many people who live in Boulder. Living in a city of <250k people is a feature, not a bug. Boulder is not cheap, if people wanted density they could already move to Denver for the same price and climate.
Boulder can't have it both ways: you can't ask for blockbuster skyline employers and low density; or, you can, but as you can see from SFBA, the result is inhumane.
If Boulder wants to be Ann Arbor of the Mountains, that's fine. But I suspect that's not what Boulder really wants; people who live in Boulder want to have a competitive employment market with multiple options for where to work and little risk of being forced to relocate out of town if their job doesn't work out. That's a basket of benefits that you can't humanely get while holding density constant.
Boulder doesn't 'want things' as an entity. The people that will be hurt by Google moving in were not the people clamoring for large employers for well-off people in the first place.
So it's not a case of wanting things both ways, it's a case of the city choosing economic expansion over the subset of people that want to keep things affordable and uncrowded.
but much like the bay area I'm sure a loud minority of people in boulder will express their demand for all of the above with constant density while being continually outraged that it doesn't seem to be working out as they expect.
The problem is that I don't think there's a compelling case to be made that the people who happen to live in Boulder at this exact moment in time are more deserving of the right to live there than anybody else in the United States. Other people want to live in Boulder for the same reasons you do. If enough other people want that, then it's going to grow.
Interestingly, the modern liberal position seems to be that everyone is welcome here, just, you know, not actually here here. Somewhere else, here. Not where I live, here. We talk about this in terms of immigration, but my experience is that, in actual practice, people don't even want Ohioans to move to their town.
> my experience is that, in actual practice, people don't even want Ohioans to move to their town.
Hm, most of the people I know who live in the "coastal elite" cities did not grow up in those same cities; they grew up in places like Ohio.
(Which, again, is fine if Boulder wants to be a steady size forever - make sure enough people are moving out to bigger towns to cancel out population growth, by making sure they don't have too many job opportunities locally.)
> Hm, most of the people I know who live in the "coastal elite" cities did not grow up in those same cities; they grew up in places like Ohio.
Yes, and generally speaking, if they liked Ohio, they would've stayed there, because you can still make a very nice living as a coder in middle America. That means they're going to be even more upset about Ohioans closing in, because they'll feel like the culture they left behind is sneaking back up on them.
Speaking personally, I live in NYC because I wanted to experience that, not because I don’t like home. I’m not a big fan of the kind of transplant who does nothing but trash where they’re from. There’s something distasteful and uncouth about it.
NYC metro area population is ~21M. It's way more dense than Colorado, so it's not surprising that a large company moving into NYC doesn't change it much.
Boulder has a population of ~100,000. I don't oppose the Google office, but their workforce will grow to represent 1-2% of the city's populace. That isn't a "drop in the bucket."
Sure - I'm advocating that more cities should grow to the point that it is a drop in the bucket, by inviting not only Google but other companies and not treating any of them as special.
Or, sure, they can decide that being a 100K-person town is what they want their city to be, and use zoning to actively resist any single employer having over 1K people in the town. But this isn't a Google-specific problem, and if you try to address it with Google-specific solutions (either "Take special measures to invite Google because they'll bring in high-paying jobs" or "Take special measures to exclude Google because they'll destroy your city"), you'll be in trouble when some other, possibly non-tech, employer comes along in the future.
Boulder doesn't exist on an island. Many people commute to Boulder from Denver, the L-towns(Longmont, Lousiville, Lafayette), and even Fort Collins. So the population of the region is more like 700k
60k commute to Boulder every day. I think Boulder should enact policies to enable these people to live in the city if they choose. The current situation seems to go against the spirit of the greenbelt. If you allow sprawl to happen outside the greenbelt (through slow growth policies), then what is the point?
New York is a much larger city than Boulder. I'd assume Google would have a much tougher time trying to tell the NYC government how to operate considering how small their presence is relative to the city, even if we're just talking about Manhattan.
I find the tech scene in NYC to be a lot more tolerable than other places. It seems like many of us here understand that we're small fish compared to, say, the sharks on Wall Street.
An interesting thing to note about tech in NYC is that it's not at all like tech in the west coast where it's tech for tech's sake. In NYC it's always in support of some other industry.
Yeah, unfortunately it puts you lower on the totem pole as a software engineer. This results in lower salaries in general for developers there compared to the bay.
The new office has been open for 3 months and Google has had a presence in Boulder for a decade. Google is pretty far from "dictating...how they want want the neighborhood and city to be structured". The city council has promoted low growth and high housing prices for decades and will continue to do so.
Places that have gotten expensive because they've become desirable places to live and convinced lots of people to move there? The horror!
The only real problem here is shitty local governance and NIMBYism that refuses to acknowledge reality and build more housing. In the end, it doesn't stop people from moving there, it just drives up costs and drives out natives and people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. If you want affordable housing markets, you have to build housing in response to demand.
Regardless, we're talking about NYC here, so the fact that Google is buying some building instead of leasing like they have been is a total non-story. It'll have zero effect on NYC.
> The only real problem here is shitty local governance and NIMBYism that refuses to acknowledge reality and build more housing. In the end, it doesn't stop people from moving there, it just drives up costs and drives out natives and people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. If you want affordable housing markets, you have to build housing in response to demand.
Once housing prices skyrocket and the cheapest buy-in starts at $700k+, nobody is in a rush to build housing for low-income demographics. New development is always just as unaffordably priced, and will continue to be until the current bubble bursts and a recession happens.
Yeah, generally speaking, if you are comparing the same types of housing (Single Family Homes) isn't new construction almost always more expensive than the existing inventory? Unless OP is talking about building more of different types of housing (multi-family, condos, etc.), then I don't see how the cost for housing goes down without a recession, as you said.
Another issue with the "just build more" philosophy is that it takes no account of the added infrastructure stresses that drive up other prices (gas, electricity, water, traffic, public transit, medical/police/fire) in the community and can detract from the quality of life previously enjoyed by the natives.
The purpose of building more houses, is not to make new houses for the existing, poor residents to live in. The purpose is to prevent the NEW rich residents from displacing old residents.
For every million dollar condo that is built in the marina SF, that is 1 less family in the mission that will be displaced.
Austin has been a great place to live forever. People from all over have been moving there for quite some time. And there is plenty of housing, the problem is the poor communities are being priced out of the city center and a place that was once known for its culture has become pretty bland. That only happened once it started becoming a "tech hub"
There are a couple issues with this. First, people who lived in these cities often moved there because it wasn't nearly as dense or urban feeling as bigger cities like NYC. Those cities are being basically forced to change their fundamental character just so large corporations benefit. I think it's understandable that locals would be mad.
Second, economic growth has been incredibly uneven and concentrated to just a handful of urban centers of the nation. This creates real problems. Economic inequality is amplified, and those sections of the population are separated from each other, insulating each other from the economic differences. Families, the poor, and the unexperienced simply don't have the leverage required to safely move away from their support structures into completely new cities without facing major issues. Why should economic growth be so constrained to such small areas just so big corporations benefit from cheaper labor?
They've only become desirable because of an influx of tech employers. Ergo, it makes sense for non-tech employed citizens to not want those employers to locate there (or expand).
Also, existing citizens who own and live in these locations take priority over people who want to move in. No one is entitled to additional housing when tech companies foist externalities of additional workers (workers who could work remotely!) on a geographic region.
There are a lot of things tech doesn't do right. But tech, in this context, is just a growth industry. There will be another growth industry in 30-50 years, and the exact same pressures will happen again. Will these cities be capable of supporting that industry? Or do they want to remain small towns for their existing population forever? Or, worse, do they want to treat tech as some sort of special case, so they can have entire abandoned neighborhoods full of overbuilt property just for Google because they thought there will never be another Google and they have to do special things for Google in particular?
NYC at least decided to take the first route decades ago, and has survived lots of industries moving in and out.
At the same time, these tech companies moving in tend to drive rents up unsustainably, causing huge problems for the many citizens of those cities that aren't wealthy land owners.
> Yep, wealthy land owners, clearly the group that needs protecting.
Wealthy land owners = citizens who have most of their personal wealth/retirements savings tied up in the equity of their home that has slowly appreciated over years or decades.
How terribly different than tech companies and employees using copyright (source code) and vast quantities of data to reap enormous returns and salaries (respectively).
This isn't David vs Goliath. This is New Boss vs Old Boss. Big Tech needs to get over itself. It's the new bad guy.
"wealthy landowners" is also a key phrase; they're the first (and for awhile, the only) people with a vote in democracies.
I'm not disagreeing that this is New Boss vs Old Boss. I'm disagreeing that Old Boss needs empowerment.
An interesting example is comparing Venice, CA to the "classic" gentrification: In Venice, most of the people responsible for the local culture (aka, why tech wants to be here) also own their homes; thus, as the property values rose dramatically, they benefitted. Contrast with "typical" gentrification, which just screws renters.
Hence why I'm on you about landowners versus "locals". There's a difference, and it's significant.
No tax credits for businesses (See: Amazon). You pay a tax per head of employee you intend to employee onsite that covers infrastructure and subsidizing affordable housing.
If you're a going concern, affordability should not be an issue. Otherwise, you're straining infrastructure and housing with marginal benefits to the host city. Hire remote instead.
General population voters > Tech voters making $100k/year+. Easy win when people who can't make tech salaries are barely scraping by, unable to afford food or meds sometimes because they have to make rent.
How do you improve the quality of life for the current residents without bringing in modern jobs? Many of these cities were built around industries that just aren't relevant any more, how does a city continue to thrive without new industries to replace the ones they have lost?
Attracting diverse employers from multiple industries who pay above median (but not too far above) wages. That is how you drag quality of life up for your citizens.
You don't throw gasoline on a fire. You slow stoke it while continually adding fuel.
What? Googles new office on 30th and pearl is hardly 'sprawling' - the target and wholefoods that are right next to it each take up a much bigger footprint than the office, and that is just the buildings themselves - Target and WF have surface parking which takes up huge amounts of real estate for almost zero value - whereas the Google building has 3 or 4 levels of parking underneath it, reducing their overall footprint.
Man, if only Google left this lot condemned and abandoned, along with the defunct car dealership across the corner which is just an empty lot. Boulder would be so much better off.
You can verify all this with the satellite photos and street view.
> the target and wholefoods that are right next to it each take up a much bigger footprint than the office, and that is just the buildings themselves
That's the problem: WF and Target pay minimum wages, and that seems to be OK with the OP. Paying more than minimum wages is the problem. S/he wants everyone to be poor.
Large pensions & sovereign wealth funds are so desperate for yield vs. low treasuries that they have pushed income producing commercial real estate values to all time highs.
As a result these fund managers are then forced to take on larger risks to cover their liabilities by making larger portfolio allocations into public techs like Google, and privates like AirBNB & Uber.
And this dry powder has helped the technology companies get so insanely big and sophisticated that they are hiring away the best fund guys to manage their own treasury desks and drive commercial real estate transactions like this one!
Funds would have KILLED to get a deal with Google locked into a long term lease.
But because Google is taking themselves off the market as a tenant, the funds again have to go and chase riskier yield, like larger allocations in tech . . . the entire macroeconomy is just turning into a bizarre Möbius strip . . .