Years ago, in the Neolithic 1980s, I was job captain on the
planning of a number of then high tech campuses for some of the up-and-coming
companies of the day, Sun Microsystems, Rolm, HP and maybe even an IBM. I also
did some master planning of campuses that were incubator developments that
would later become the Apples and Ciscos. I worked in Scotland, Texas,
Colorado, and of course the mothership of technocracies, California.
What was common was not just a cohesive master plan with
hundreds of thousands of square feet, but a land use plan with lakes and
gymnasiums, restaurants/cafeterias, and other cool stuff. The goal was not
unlike a college campus – thus the high-tech business campus began. These ancestors
of the 21st century tech campus, especially in Silicon valley, have now been
dissolved and reimagined as the technocratic social media campus and other
multi-use business parks (old school term) we see today. But what is the future
for these companies and their insatiable need for space?
An article that crossed my desk GO HERE from the San Francisco Bay Area real estate
news company The Registry, got me thinking. They dug
into the past reasons and the murky futures of the high tech campus, albeit
from a totally different perspective – the high-density, vertical, downtown
mega building in the mega city and its future as “THE” place for this type of campus
growth. I wondered what could be expected from these
non-suburban company GHQs? Why downtown San Francisco, why New York, why not?
Most tech campuses are still suburban or at least within
the urban ring, they are near airports and freeways – workers, even those on
the web, still needed to show-up to work. They are near other tech campuses
(potential employees), near universities (highly educated – low-pay employees),
and less expensive housing (especially now), think Austin, Texas and Raleigh,
North Carolina. The vision now is an uber-technocrat in SOHO, New York
or SOMO, San Francisco with everything they need just a subway or taxi drive away. That would have never even passed as a shadow through the mind of a
business owner back in the day. Then, as even now, home base was near where
the owner/founder lived, not where a bunch of black jeaned techies with moussed
hair, live. A problem that Silicon Valley has today is that all the cool kids want
to live in San Francisco and work in Mountain View, or have a loft in New York City and not work in New
Jersey. So the “factory” is moving - a boon to the
landlords of the once old and cheap (not anymore) warehouse space in the south
of Market area of San Francisco and the Bowery of New York. These are the metro-technicals of the future.
With this comes all the usual problems that retrofits
have: severe lack of the essentials such as power, fiber optics, water, sewerage,
parking and transit. Cities are bribing these companies to come and rebuild
their old infrastructures for deferrals of taxes and fees. Suburban communities
would kill for some of these companies, unfortunately the employees would
rather be found dead than use the window at a drive-up Starbucks. Such is the life of the
urban uber-techie; which black tee shirt to wear with which black jeans? but I
generalize and I'm old. For the better cities these can be home runs, ask Boston and even
Chicago.
This too will change, and soon, and morph into
something different. Is face to face necessary in a high tech world? We are instantaneous and everywhere, so why a
campus at all? A million square feet of old creaky wood flooring and spalling
concrete columns is urban-chic, but you still need to put people in it. So a longer
term vision may be in order.
The billions being spent by Apple for their new
“suburban” campus is, maybe, up in the air (my speculation), especially when you lose more than 1/3rd of your market cap in less than six months. So we will wait and see.
Back in the day, when these were developer driven
campuses, the first question was “What will it cost to retrofit this complex
when the lease is up or the company has been bought out. What will I do with
this dinosaur then?”
Not my problem I thought to myself, not my problem.
Stay Tuned . . . . . .
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