Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays
Do people want suburbs? Sure, a lot do. But surveys and actions tend to look very different in cities with successful cores. People pay big premiums to live in those, on even on the edges of cities that have those. Often they live as close-in as they can. And when visitors come they don't go to the mall, but to the center.
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I don't think you can at all generalize. The San Francisco Bay region offers clear examples of the tendencies. Companies often want to keep their headquarters in "trophy" buildings downtown but the same companies will put everyone else in the suburbs and quite often the workers are happy not to have downtown commutes. When it comes to tech companies, I think there's a sharp distinction between hardware, whose employees tend to be older and have families, and software which is where you find the younger recently graduated code warriors.
Here, "Silicon Valley" came into existence and has flourished as a suburban phenomenon. A company like Salesforce.com, that is pure software/tech as a service, let its employees vote on where they wanted to be and they wanted to be downtown. Also, some of the Valley's oldest software/tech as service companies are having to put branches downtown because employyes want to be there but you really don't see the hardware designers doing that.
Seattle's Amazon is interesting because it is really 2 different companies: The online retailer and Amazon Web Services. Many people don't realize that there has been speculation of splitting these barely-related businesses up and it is speculated that if that were done the retailer would be worth less ($400 billion) than the web service company ($600 billion). Both parts have a software component but it would be interesting to know which dominates the downtown buildings. Certainly both Amazon's distribution centers--the majority of their employees--and its server farms can and probably should be in suburbs or smaller towns.