TWEET THIS!!

Well Twitter has gone and done it; in less than 140 characters it has made hundreds if not thousands of new millionaires this morning. I have no idea as to the internal workings of stock distributions and stock options offered to employees during the company’s growth but there are a lot of happy people who will be filling San Francisco bars and restaurants tonight. Tomorrow the Tesla showroom will be packed. And good for them.

To show the power of an IPO just look at San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee. He has already charged Twitter and its employees to give back to the city. He has his hand out and after all the help he gave Twitter to convince them that Market Street was the place to be he has a right to get something. This seven year old company has turned the communications industry on its head in mini-bites of knowledge, information, and self-promotion, one tweet at a time. Now it can do the same thing for the troubled urban core.

If there is one social issue that comes to the fore is that this company is an urban/city business. It can be said that most of the tech growth from the early days of Sun Microsystems and IBM and HP was and continues to be in the suburbs. Their business filled the large corporate parks that ring the big cities, Silicon Valley was a countryside of prune orchards and farmland, now paved with all the big names and most prominently Apple and HP. I even worked on these developments back in the 1980s; where the Apple mothership lives was once acres of fruit trees.

Twitter’s growth and its sense of itself seems to be a different model - they go for the city center. It even has the courage to put its Michigan office in the downtown of Detroit. And with the other tech brands along with Twitter also moving into the M@dison building on Broadway nothing ill can come from it.

Twitter leased their San Francisco space from Shorenstein Properties, it’s a 1937 eleven story Art Deco styled building in one of the nastier parts of the city. And it’s just a few blocks from city hall. Urban core property, tough neighborhood, BART station a block away, bums sleeping in the alleys, perfect. They hold a ten year lease; a lot can happen in ten years.

Already Spotify, Square, and Yammer have moved into this neighborhood. The city has branded it Central Market, offered tax incentives that exempt these new companies from the city’s onerous payroll taxes, and are pushing redevelopment with new apartment towers and other opportunities. There are new restaurants and other changes that are dramatically altering everything about this once bright center of the city more than seventy years ago. Change can be good.

Todd Rufo said, “You had a once vacant and blighted area that is now a gravitational center for some of the most innovative companies in the world.” He’s the director of the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

Once the ball begins to roll it gathers a lot more than moss, there are dramatic things waiting for San Francisco and Detroit. As these newly minted tech millionaire’s cash in (but they have to wait almost six months) they will do a lot more than change the character of a neighborhood. They are pushing up apartment rents to astronomical rates, homes sales (if you can find one) are stratospheric, even the price of a drink in the tonier bars is ridiculous. But that’s what happens with success and it is a lot better than peep shows, topless bars, drug deals, and pandering politicians.

Go tweet yourself.

Stay Tuned . . . . .

Noodling Housing, Detroit, and Where America is Moving

Return to “Normal” in Housing

Are we there yet? This seems to be the tag line for almost every optimistic article about the current national trends in new home sales (old homes sales, too). This article is a good snap-shot (remember those from the pre-pixel age).

Housing Market Recovery Accelerating, Now 47% Back to Normal

And What is Normal?

In this article the authors point to a doubling of new home sales from their current level, “in the next several years.” And interesting prophecy, I throw a challenge here because there is a significant lack of planning going on to support the availability of new housing in the near future (three years or less, especially in California). It takes at least three years to plan and receive final approval for any project over one acre in size, especially if near any existing residential developments. I suggest the authors are dreaming and as a result prices will steadily climb.

New Home Sales and Distressing Gap

The 10 Most Expensive Cities to Buy a Home

My guess this is not one of the most expensive cities.

This article, and I really love these, lists the 10 cities with the highest home prices, the author notes that only two cities are not in (close to bankrupt) California. Go figure. Now as a man who believes in the marketplace and the all things supply and demand, I’m not surprised. Yet, it is a head-scratcher and you wonder either how sustainable it is in the long term, or how depressive to business it is in the short term (housing costs vs. wages).

GO HERE  and  HERE

Detroit

With everyone trying to tell Detroit what to do (and creating rancor and fear as a result), the residents are trying their best to confront the do-gooders and intellectuals using Detroit as an urban blank canvas. “Clear homes, make way for the future!” would scare any property owner hanging on by a thread. This brilliant article lays out many of the issues and planning teams involved with Detroit’s future, yet one thing is very apparent, change and rebirth will come from the bottom up, not like 20th Century planning, that forced change, hard and brutal change, from the top down.

Mapping Motown

Where Are We Going and Where Are We From?

Newgeography.com is one of my favorite urban blogs. With the talent of Joel Kotkin, Wendell Cox, and other guests it has become a touchstone on the current state of cities across the world. In this article by Kotkin, he challenges all the warm and fuzzy notions of the northeastern cities and lays out, in almost painful ways, the real changes to America that are underway. It is well worth the read and please continue to follow newgeography.com.

Where Americans Are Moving

 

Stay Tuned . . . . .