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The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

washingtonpost.com

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

#131

Post by toomuchtodo »

enjo wrote: post #118
pmorici wrote: post #30

I think this article perhaps misses the real story. That being, office parks first built in 25+ years ago are reaching an age where their long term leases are expiring and they need to be renovated for the first time since being constructed to attract new tenants. While it makes sense to renovate an old factory and turn it into trendy office space with exposed brick and vintage architectural details from decades past…

Maybe it's hard to see, but these things have a way of coming back around. In 50-60 years the office parks that still exist might very well be where all the hip YC startups of 2066 want to be.

Or they'll be vast wastelands, with YC startups employing remote workers scattered across the globe working from their homes over their high speed Internet connections.

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

#132

Post by toomuchtodo »

fixxer wrote: post #82
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 live an hour outside of Chicago and mostly work from home; I'm in the city maybe 1 day per week. I fought moving out of the city for a while, but I have really come to love it, especially when it comes to raising kids. When I have to head into Chicago, I take the train. It is weird how quickly you can go from yuppie to suburbanite. My property taxes are high, but my overall cost (and quality) of living is better th…

Have you noticed how desperate the Charlestowne real estate owner is that they're tearing up the surrounding parking lot to make pads available for tenants outside of the mall?

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

#133

Post by toomuchtodo »

fixxer wrote: post #99
bunderbunder wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I've grown rather used to seeing mostly-vacant floors in office buildings in the Loop. I wonder if perhaps we're seeing the results of a shift to the service economy in addition to the shift back to the cities. If we need fewer people to manually perform clerical work in offices, and more people to run the restaurants that we increasingly eat at, then that's going to create a definite shift in demand for…

> different kinds of commercial space. And different uses for existing space. I'm not a big believer in any economic theory, but I see supply-side drivers abound. Case in point, there are so many vacant ex-Dominick's you can rent/buy for a song.

While those ex-Dominicks buildings are for lease ("rent/buy for a song"), I have yet to see anyone acquire them at their old Bartlett, Schaumburg, or Algonquin locations.

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

#134

Post by fixxer »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #132
fixxer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live an hour outside of Chicago and mostly work from home; I'm in the city maybe 1 day per week. I fought moving out of the city for a while, but I have really come to love it, especially when it comes to raising kids. When I have to head into Chicago, I take the train. It is weird how quickly you can go from yuppie to suburbanite. My property taxes are high, but my overall cost (and quality) of living is better th…

Have you noticed how desperate the Charlestowne real estate owner is that they're tearing up the surrounding parking lot to make pads available for tenants outside of the mall ?

I heard they sold it recently; supposedly, they're going to remodel.

I like the natural prairie landscaping (weeds) by Von Mauer ;)

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

#135

Post by stephancoral »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #131
enjo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's hard to see, but these things have a way of coming back around. In 50-60 years the office parks that still exist might very well be where all the hip YC startups of 2066 want to be.

Or they'll be vast wastelands, with YC startups employing remote workers scattered across the globe working from their homes over their high speed Internet connections.

Maybe they will bulldoze them and build parks in their place.

I can dream.

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

#136

Post by ken-far »

pmorici wrote: post #30

I think this article perhaps misses the real story. That being, office parks first built in 25+ years ago are reaching an age where their long term leases are expiring and they need to be renovated for the first time since being constructed to attract new tenants. While it makes sense to renovate an old factory and turn it into trendy office space with exposed brick and vintage architectural details from decades past…

I don't think so. This quote is key: “I now say that brainy youngsters are trending urban and urbane, away from your grandfather’s office parks.”

Real estate analysis is showing that for the first time since it's been measuring more people are looking for housing in denser, more urban environments than in the traditional suburbs.

An enormous number of people, especially young people, are looking to avoid spending their lives in cars. Comparing these quiet & dull campuses to a vibrant city really makes it hard to imagine working in them any more.

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

#137

Post by potatolicious »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #63

I'm curious amongst urbanite hackers here: How many would turn down a job at Facebook, Google, Apple or any other company primarily due to their suburban office park nature? Could you see yourself choosing a poorer quality job from an urban company over a better suburban company? Right now I'm a 15 minute bike ride away from my downtown employer. It'd be pretty hard to convince me to give that up. I've done a 30 minu…

Urbanite here (Manhattan),

Have turned down offers/interviews at many companies because of non-urban location. FB/GOOG at least have urban offices, Apple does not, as much as I admire their products and would like to work on them.

Even when I lived in SF I'd routinely turn down interviews for peninsula/south bay companies because of the location. Fortunately there is no shortage of good quality jobs in my specialty in both SF proper and NYC, so I don't think I've ever been in the position of choosing a poor job in an urban area vs. a great job in a suburb.

The fact that it's in a suburb is less of a factor than the commute. Even with fancy-schmancy shuttle buses delivering you from the city it's still a giant pain in the ass. Right now my commute is a 15-minute walk where I can pick up coffee along the way, or drop into the gym which is midway between work and home. Spending 1+ hrs cooped up on a bus, even a nice bus, sounds downright nightmarish.

I already work full-time, I want the remainder of my time to be my own to do with as my please, as much as humanly possible, and long commutes are the antithesis of this (and yes, save the "but I'm productive on my laptop on the bus!" or "podcasts! audio books!" arguments, I've heard them all).

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

#138

Post by toomuchtodo »

stephancoral wrote: post #135
toomuchtodo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they'll be vast wastelands, with YC startups employing remote workers scattered across the globe working from their homes over their high speed Internet connections.

Maybe they will bulldoze them and build parks in their place. I can dream.

I too hope for that future. Megacities for some, sustainable homes for others, the rest of the world returned to the wild.

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

#139

Post by roneesh »

Don't try and ascribe a single reason here. Architecture, urban planning, the rise of the creative class, high-speed internet, remote work and America's burgeoning reckoning with it's awful racial history are all at play here. The life and death of an American city can have no single story, because a city is only a composite of American stories

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

#140

Post by raverbashing »

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.

However, the demand at off-commuting times is much smaller than at-commuting times

It is much easier when you can commute later or earlier than most people (but still, few people would work, let's say 12am to 8pm)

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