The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town • Hacker News Board

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#101

Post by tosseraccount » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

skolor wrote: post #37

bunderbunder wrote: post #26

I think suburbia might be a victim of its own success. As people moved out to more widely-dispersed communities, that caused commuting all the way downtown for work to be increasingly problematic. So of course that encouraged demand for business to also move out to the suburbs. Eventually things got so dispersed that people had to start driving everywhere. Roads got congested. It became increasingly common for people…

We've seen the reverse of this now. Everything I've seen has shown that newer generations are moving more into the cities, back to closer to their employers.

They always have.

Then they have kids.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#102

Post by toomuchtodo » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #97

toomuchtodo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Hacker News would strip out affiliate codes.

We're capitalists here, mostly, so people don't mind. People who are just here to spam get turfed out pretty quickly. I don't recommend stuff that I don't think is pertinent to a conversation.

> We're capitalists here, mostly, so people don't mind.

I have never thought [citation required] was more necessary than with this comment.

We're technology professionals or enthusiasts primarily here.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#103

Post by Tiktaalik » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

LordKano wrote: post #86

Tiktaalik wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure anyone really loves suburbia, but once in place, car oriented development has a way of being self sustaining. This "Cycle of automobile dependency" image shows it pretty well. http://imgur.com/Y9vxbNN Only recently, with huge effort and many setbacks, are we starting to see cities break out of car oriented development and this endless suburban sprawl creating loop. I'm a bit concerned that the advent of…

I'm not sure anyone really loves suburbia I would guess that has a lot to do with how one defines the term. I love living outside of the city. I wouldn't have it any other way. When I'm ready to retire, I plan to move even further away from the city. I grew up in the suburbs. I am raising my children in the suburbs. I detest going into the city. The traffic, the parking, the population density and the crammed nature…

Yeah absolutely I'm critical of suburbia as I see it currently implemented.

There's nothing wrong with the concept of living outside of the city, but the problem is the design and form of development that many suburban cities have taken.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#104

Post by Balgair » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #26

I think suburbia might be a victim of its own success. As people moved out to more widely-dispersed communities, that caused commuting all the way downtown for work to be increasingly problematic. So of course that encouraged demand for business to also move out to the suburbs. Eventually things got so dispersed that people had to start driving everywhere. Roads got congested. It became increasingly common for people…

I'll caution that the situation that we came out of in the 1950s and today are very different. There are many things that are driving the congestion of the roadways in the US. One is, for sure, the move to more urban environments. Why that is depends on a multitude of factors. I'll caution that we have significantly more people in the US than we did when the Levitt-towns were being made. In `950, ~150 million americans were alive, today there are ~320 million, a 110% increase [0]. I'll also say that anecdotally, people are congregating in urban areas because there is more flexibility and agility there. You used to be able to live in a small rural town and work there just fine. Now, if that steel mill or logging operation goes out, you have to move very far. In a city, you can find another job somewhere, and possible through referrals.

[0]http://www.demographia.com/db-uspop1900.htm

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#105

Post by joshyeager » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #98

joshyeager wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love suburbia. Living in a city is stressful and crowded. I'd like to live in a rural environment, but then I'd have to drive a very long way to get to work, stores, and entertainment. Living in a quiet suburb gives me the best of both worlds. It's only a 10 minute drive to the downtown library, good restaurants, and other fun stuff. Since I picked a job that's located near my suburb, my commute is also short and a…

You're doing it right by living close to your work. Suburbs work well when they're really just small complete cities. Nothing wrong with that. What I was thinking when I when I wrote "I'm not sure anyone loves suburbia" was that I'm not sure anyone loves that big suburban commute to the city. If that's eliminated, or mitigated by excellent transit connections (ie. pre-automobile street car suburbs), then a lot of neg…

Oh, yeah. I definitely agree with that.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#106

Post by rm_-rf_slash » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:40 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #26

I think suburbia might be a victim of its own success. As people moved out to more widely-dispersed communities, that caused commuting all the way downtown for work to be increasingly problematic. So of course that encouraged demand for business to also move out to the suburbs. Eventually things got so dispersed that people had to start driving everywhere. Roads got congested. It became increasingly common for people…

Perhaps the problem is less suburbia, more "hyperbia." Mid century planners focused heavily on recreating mini-cities to feed expansion from a central core. Everything you'd need (hospitals, schools, etc) should be within the city limits.

Reston, VA is a great example of this. Much of the workforce holds jobs elsewhere but the suburb is a community unto itself. One doesn't need to live in DC or make a long commute for a night on the town. Perhaps we can find in Reston a happy medium between distant exurbs and everybody on earth living in Manhattan.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#107

Post by bduerst » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:40 PM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #89

bduerst wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this one of the goals of self-driving cars? Having vehicles that don't require human operation means that cars can spend less time in parking lots as depreciating assets and more time filling transportation demand. By reducing inefficiencies, it should free up traffic congestion and make it easier to commute to these office parks, right?

Even supposing a high amount of self driving car sharing rather than ownership, you still run into the issue that cars fundamentally require a lot of space both in roads and parking and the sprawl creating results of accommodating this fact. Self driving cars are an example of doing the wrong thing (automobile oriented development) better. The right thing is developing cities around people, not cars. This means creat…

Automated cars require less parking than the manual cars we drive now, especially since they don't require to be parked near their passengers during off hours and can spend most of their product lives on the road.

I'm not saying we shouldn't develop cities with pedestrians in mind, just that it's much easier to adapt a fleet of cars than rebuild an entire city.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#108

Post by nickbauman » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:44 PM UTC

One of the worst working experiences I've had in recent years was working in a first ring suburb in one of those office parks. Everything was falling apart. Even the nicer parts of the building had a strong "faux-opulence" feel. The firm was a publicly traded tech company. About a year after I left their biggest customer left and eventually they were delisted. Coincidence?

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#109

Post by hodwik » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #40

dade_ wrote: post #5

Thomas Jefferson is to blame and not one mention of taxes? I would be really surprised that some research wouldn't find that many of these office parks are built outside of the borders of major cities to avoid paying taxes, or were provided incentives by neighbouring municipalities to build further out and pay lower tax. The lower cost is attractive and allows the company to operate in a big shiny building that immed…

How does that explain that these low tax buildings are now being left empty in favor of options in the higher tax cities? If they were so desirable they wouldn't be sitting empty.

The beltway has a vacancy rate of 17.1%, within the city it's 12.3%. Not that different, especially when you consider that DC has an artificially low vacancy rate due to height restrictions.

And anyway, Montgomery County, MD, is an unusual case. There was a lot of speculative building going on there due to rumors that the city of DC was going to put in a subway line through the country (going back to 2003). That dream has evaporated, with current estimates putting the project out to 2030 and later, so you have a lot of speculators left holding the bag.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#110

Post by potatolicious » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #107

Tiktaalik wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even supposing a high amount of self driving car sharing rather than ownership, you still run into the issue that cars fundamentally require a lot of space both in roads and parking and the sprawl creating results of accommodating this fact. Self driving cars are an example of doing the wrong thing (automobile oriented development) better. The right thing is developing cities around people, not cars. This means creat…

Automated cars require less parking than the manual cars we drive now, especially since they don't require to be parked near their passengers during off hours and can spend most of their product lives on the road. I'm not saying we shouldn't develop cities with pedestrians in mind, just that it's much easier to adapt a fleet of cars than rebuild an entire city.

This seems commonly stated but not actually examined.

> "especially since they don't require to be parked near their passengers during off hours and can spend most of their product lives on the road."

I'd argue that both of these points aren't actually true.

The nature of on-demand cars (human-driven or otherwise) is that they be quickly available. Automated cars might eliminate the need for the car to be figuratively outside the door like they are today, but they still need to be nearby. Making cars automated will let you stretch out the distance between user and car a bit, but there will still be plenty of infrastructure necessary to ensure cars are near their potential users.

Ditto the "spend most of their productive lives on the road" thing. This claim will likely be not true at all, considering how bursty transportation usage is. Figuratively every single mode of transportation (cars, trains, buses, you name it) is planned around massive bursts of usage, usually surrounding the working day. Automated cars are still subject to this - the reality is that if we move towards fleets of automated cars, they will be idle 80% of the time. So do you want rush-hour-traffic volumes of cars circling aimlessly for most of the day, or do you want to park them somewhere during non-peak hours? If the latter, you're back to the problem of provisioning tons of infrastructure for storing them...

IMO the most likely consequence of moving to self-driving on-demand cars is that we eliminate large parking lots in front of stores (yay!) but in exchange we get massive parking structures tying up a lot of space, and not as far from people as we'd probably like.

Height limits in construction for low-density areas will probably increase the amount of land these parking structures cover, and they'll likely be traditional ramp-based instead of some fancy robotics (that are way less reliable and can process less volume). In a sci-fi novel we'd stuff cars into hyper-efficient low-footprint parking structures when not in use, in reality we're probably just going to get gigantic, enormous versions of multi-floor parking garages in the center of the city.