Tag Archives: Silicon Valley

The possibilities of intentional community in McMansions

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A Craigslist ad for living in a Silicon Valley McMansion highlights the potential for intentional community:

What is Le Chateau McMansion?

At the end of the day, after everyone has gotten home from work, and we’ve shared good food and good stories with the people we find ourselves surrounded by, we are a family. It means we care for each other, for each other’s things, and for the home we’ve created. It means spontaneous trips to National Parks, creative and fun house projects, and weekends you wish would never end. Sometimes it is kitchen dance parties, rooftop lemon golf, costumed 7-course dinners, farmers market trips by bike, homebrew beer contests, or chill weekends of grilling and gardening balanced by late-night deep philosophical debates. Without a doubt, it is a place to experience learning and growth, friendship, adventures, acceptance, and awesomeness in our home. We are more than roommates. We are community.

Who lives at McMansion?

A French roboticist, a talented couple from Texas whose music will pluck on your heartstrings, a rowdy outdoorsmen who can prepare the best breakfast burrito this side of the Mississippi river, a spunky dude from the dark corners of Tennessee, a project engineer from the Chicago suburbs, a sweet heart from Boston, and a troop of native Californians.. each with a hand in the tech industry, rock climbing, and a passion for cycling. Oh, and another techie as well. He flies balloons. He’s always gone though. Forget we mentioned him.

McMansions are often criticized for having too much space for not enough people. Even as the average household size has shrunk in the United States, new homes have gotten larger. Does a family of four really need 3,000+ square feet? (Perhaps it is not for the people; perhaps it is for their stuff.)

Yet, McMansions could often house a lot more people. Those big spaces that may seem empty with just a few residents could easily accommodate a larger crowd. This is especially needed in tight housing markets like Silicon Valley. As noted in this ad, a renter would get a lot of space (and utilities and food) for $1,210 a month. And having a lot of residents doesn’t even require splitting the McMansions into multiple housing units. However, it does require living in close proximity to more people, a feature probably more amenable to (1) younger adults and (2) people in tight housing markets.

It is also intriguing that this McMansion opportunity is listed as an opportunity to participate in intentional community. Don’t many people buy McMansions (and perhaps many single-family homes) to get away from other people? Again, this sounds like a feature that would appeal to a certain demographic.

When Silicon Valley communities have too many tech jobs, new residents

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Many communities would love to have a tech company headquarters in town but what happens if that company is Google and it brings many residents and employees?

Google owns or leases about 7.3 million square feet of office space in Mountain View — roughly equivalent to three Empire State Buildings. That includes most of the property around its headquarters on the north side of the city near Highway 101, which cuts the length of the valley, according to Transwestern, a commercial real estate brokerage.

That success has brought Mountain View loads of tax dollars and a 3.3 percent unemployment rate, as well as skyrocketing home prices and intolerable gridlock. Good and bad, tech is responsible for most of it: Technology companies account for 27 percent of the jobs in the Silicon Valley region, compared with 7 percent in California and about 5 percent nationally, according to Moody’s Analytics.

The result is an existential argument that pits residents who want to halt the city’s growth against people who think Mountain View needs to grow up and become a real city.

Mountain View, about 40 miles south of San Francisco, has close to 80,000 people; with its strip-mall thoroughfares and streets of single-family homes, it looks like a sleepy suburb. But since hiring has boomed, the city’s roads swell with commuters during the morning and evening rush.

While this may get extra attention because it involves Google (does that do no evil pledge apply to the communities in which its offices are based?), this is a question that many suburbs face at one point or another. When new developments are proposed, whether commercial, industrial, residential, or something else, how might these change the existing character of the community? Jobs are often seen as good things: they provide employment and the buildings for employees generate property tax dollars, reducing the dependence on residential property taxes. Yet, what if those same jobs lead to new office parks that take up a lot of land, new infrastructure needs such as roads, water and sewer lines, and schools, and an influx of traffic? Or, what if such jobs require tax breaks or special deals for a single business or industry?

Two possible outcomes here (and this is not an exhaustive list):

1. Why aren’t urbanists calling for companies like Google to move to large cities? A lot of the issues with infrastructure and space could be more easily absorbed by a major city. Three Empire State Buildings worth of space is still hard to come by but Granted, this hasn’t gone smoothly recently in San Francisco but developing new land leads to particular challenges, especially in places used to a smaller population.

2. At some point, Google could go the way of other companies and organizations and start making demands to push Mountain View to accept what they want. The end of the article hints at this; if Google brings in a lot of new employees, they could even sway local elections. Could Google hold the suburb hostage to get what it wants?

You don’t want to win the McMansion award from protesters

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Some antitech protestors recently handed out a McMansion award in San Francisco:

Wearing a pig mask and sequined suit jacket, Amy Gilgan stood outside of Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday night to accept the McMansion award at the second annual Crappys on behalf of Jack Halprin, a Google lawyer, landlord and frequent target of San Francisco’s antitech ire.

In sparkles and sneakers, technorati streamed past protesters and into the concert hall for the eighth annual Crunchies Awards, the supposed Oscars of Silicon Valley. Few turned their heads to witness the sidewalk satire. Investor Ron Conway, who last year stood on the Crunchies stage and offered his sympathy to the protesters, buzzed by a group of taxi drivers rallying against Uber. Evening news crews scaled back their coverage.

This year the pig masks were new, but the message was old. The verve of the antitech demonstrators felt diminished, and even they noted that the turnout was low.

McMansion sounds like an invasive species for the self-interested and wealthy. Some of the backstory:

Tirado said things started off  badly  as soon as Halprin bought and moved into the seven-unit building two years ago. First, Halprin forced one tenant out under owner move-in laws. Then another existing tenant was evicted,  again through the owner move-in process. Halprin told tenants that his domestic partner would be taking over the second unit. That partner, however, never materialized, according to Erin McElroy, an organizer with Eviction Free San Francisco. The affected tenant has since filed a wrongful eviction lawsuit against Halprin.

The remaining six tenants, which includes two teachers, a small child, an artist and a disabled senior, received Ellis Act eviction notifications in February of this year.

The protests continued through December. This is a big issue right now in San Francisco: in a very expensive housing market, Silicon Valley employees and companies have been perceived by some as throwing their weight around regarding properties and sending buses for workers. While this could be thought of as a more localized issue in some cities – perhaps gentrification occurring in particular neighborhoods – it is bigger than that since prices are high all over the Bay Area.

Two other quick thoughts:

1. It is interesting that we don’t hear as much about protests on this issue in New York City even though Manhattan is similarly expensive and luxury construction is booming. Perhaps the land there is being redeveloped from non-residential uses and/or fewer people are being displaced?

2. Generally, I don’t think winning an award with McMansion in the title is intended as a compliment.

The of effects tech company shuttle buses from San Francisco to Silicon Valley

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A number of Silicon Valley workers live in San Francisco and a number of the biggest tech companies offer private shuttle buses for employees. This has led to changes in a number of San Francisco neighborhoods:

Take the public transportation provided by corporate shuttle buses from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, and others. It’s not news that these shuttles, and the big digital tech companies that run them, are changing the fabric of San Francisco as we’ve known it. What feels new is that it’s not enough to say that change is coming soon. It’s already, very much here…

On one hand, some have called the shuttles “a vivid emblem of the tech boom’s stratifying effect in the Bay Area” because they allow the “techy progeny” of Silicon Valley to be “launched into SF proper.” That the shuttles are “alienating everyone who isn’t in technology” — or that there’s simply too much tech for one city to take.

Others are of the mind that it’s simply time to get over it and recognize a new reality; cities change, neighborhoods rise and fall. That in fact a paradox of Silicon Valley is in its “distributing meaningful equity” to ordinary people who wouldn’t otherwise access such wealth. (And then there’s the logic that wonders whether public transportation is yet another bit of infrastructure that should be upended by the Valley’s “meritocratic“ spirit.)…

What we’re talking about isn’t simply the replacement of presumably authentic recent immigrants by their presumably younger, whiter, or better educated new neighbors. What we’re talking about is the replacement of an entire system of urban inter-relationships, built up over generations and stratified in ways that make sense within an urban context — now short-circuited by the inexorable demands of the (suburban) digital technology landscape.

This is a reminder of a few things:

1. The arrival of “the creative class” is not just a positive occurrence. This is a group many big cities would love to have for their wealth (think of the tax money!) as well as their innovative and creative spirits. Yet, as the term gentrification describes, this group can at the least change the character of places and more problematically push out existing residents.

2. This hints at the interdependence within metropolitan regions. Tech workers may like their jobs in Silicon Valley but San Francisco offers a more exciting, urban, and cultured place to live. And, San Francisco benefits from its business connections to Silicon Valley. It would also be interesting to consider the role of San Jose which offers a bigger city closer to Silicon Valley but one that has less of a reputation for social life.

With these changes, it puts officials in San Francisco in an interesting position. Existing urban residents tend to resist major changes to their neighborhoods. But, as noted above, cities have a hard time turning down new money.

Silicon Valley to eventually lose out to cities?

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An urbanist argues that Silicon Valley will die out because workers want to be in cities:

Why is Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley?

“You’ve got Stanford, you’ve got federal expenditures, and you’ve got an ecosystem” of start-up mentors and established institutions, said Bruce Katz, the founding director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. But Silicon Valley’s stranglehold on West Coast innovation is in danger, he said at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Friday. The main problem?

It’s no fun to live in Silicon Valley.

“What’s happening now is workers want to be in Oakland and San Francisco,” he told Walter Isaacson. Young workers want to live in a city — somewhere they can ride bikes, shop locally, walk to their favorite restaurants and bars, and live in a dense urban or urban-lite environment with nearby amenities. But Silicon Valley isn’t like a city. It’s like a suburb. “Silicon Valley is going to have to urbanize,” Katz said. “[There is a] migration out of Silicon Valley to places where people really want to live.”

This sounds like Richard Florida’s arguments about the creative class: a younger generation of educated workers want to be in thriving urban environments. However, I’m not sure Katz’s arguments are consistent – at least as presented in this article. He suggests that groups of politicians and business leaders help create certain environments. Hence, an area like Silicon Valley exists because there was a concentration of investment and infrastructure. Yet, Florida’s argument emphasizes more the individual desires of the creative class (or perhaps some sort of class consciousness). If Silicon Valley was indeed losing workers to cities (not just the Bay Area but places like Austin or Chicago or Manhattan), it could respond by creating more urban environments. This is a popular idea these days in more suburban settings: retrofit older developments like strip malls, shopping centers, office parks, and tract home developments into something denser and mixed use. Young workers may want a certain kind of environment but business leaders and politicians can help create and develop such areas, whether in Silicon Valley or somewhere else.

Another interpretation of Katz’s arguments is that corporate efforts to build all-inclusive work campuses (like with Facebook recently building a Main Street) just isn’t as appealing as the more “authentic” urban life.

Kenya plans new Konza Technology City dubbed “Africa’s Silicon Savannah”

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Kenya is planning an ambitious new city intended to be a technology center:

Located almost 40 miles south-east of the capital Nairobi, Konza Technology City is expected to create more than 20,000 IT jobs by 2015, and around 200,000 jobs by the time it’s completed in 2030.

The 2011-hectare site will have a residential area comprising around 37,000 homes to accommodate 185,000 people…

“It is expected to spur massive trade and investment as well as create thousands of employment opportunities for young Kenyans,” said Kenya’s president Mwai Kibaki at the groundbreaking ceremony.

The project, which is part of the government’s Vision 2030 initiative to improve the Kenya’s infrastructure, is also set to include a university campus, hotels, schools, hospitals and research facilities.

Sounds impressive. See more at the city’s official website which includes this overview of the history of the project:

The idea and interest for an African Silicon Savannah in Kenya was first inspired by trends in Business Processing Outsourcing and Information Technology Enabled Services (BPO/ITES), which showed a global offshore BPO/ITES revenue estimated at US$ 110 billion in 2010 and a projected three fold growth to reach US$ 300 billion by 2015.

Currently there over 2.8 million people employed in this sub-sector world wide, however, statistics show that Africa only attracts about 1 % of the total revenues accruing from this growing industry. Only a few African countries have made effort to develop this industry; South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Ghana and Mauritius have each launched national programs to grow BPO/ITES.

It became clear that Kenya stood a good chance to attract a sizeable chunk of the expected growth in the off shoring BPO/ITES trade revenues if the Government took lead in the development of this industry.

Now we just have to wait a while to see how it all turns out. I’m not saying it will turn out badly but what if it does – who is responsible for the costs and how might this affect the technology sector in Africa?

While the term “Silicon Savannah” sounds catchy, does having such a name help the prospects for the project? I imagine it could appeal to some with the imagery of connecting Silicon Valley and Africa but it also seems derivative and something plenty of other places have tried.

All those new Facebook millionaries won’t be buying McMansions

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As Facebook prepares its IPO, you might not have considered how it would affect the real estate market in Silicon Valley:

Typically clients pay cash for the homes, he said, which can range anywhere from 4,000 to 15,000 square feet (372 to 1,393 square meters) depending on the size of the family.

Real estate agent Dawn Thomas said she is already seeing home prices rise in areas surrounding Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters and expects that to continue…

Thomas described her tech-savvy homebuyers as “very, very green-minded” and in search of smaller, tech-equipped, energy-efficient homes with high-end amenities.

“They don’t want ‘McMansions,'” she said, referring to super-sized houses that can gobble up energy.

The implication: the young and wealthy wouldn’t be caught dead buying a home that could be considered a McMansion. If the home is indeed big, and I would say 4,000 square feet is McMansion territory and 15,000 square feet is a just a plain mansion, it has to be green and energy-efficient. Is this the same argument that Gisele Bunchen tried to make recently?

This makes me think that we might need a new term to describe an abnormally large home that is intentionally not a McMansion. A “green home” or “eco-home” doesn’t cut it because these homes are still much larger than the average size of the new American home (around 2,400 square feet). A “greenwashed mansion” but be more accurate but I don’t think these tech-savvy buyers would like the connotations of this term either. Playing off the “Not So Big House,” how about the “not so polluting house”?