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?
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.