The death of the light rail line will doom RTP. The traffic - and more to come - is soul crushing. This is lipstick on a pig.
At least in Office Space, they could walk to Chotchkie’s.
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You can gild the lilly all you want, but these isolated office "parks", with their drab soulless architecture, will always be dismal places to work. No thank you.
8
In these conversations about millennial working space, it is often forgotten that many of us can’t afford car loans or the suburban homes we were raised in. Student loan debt is not a choice for our generation (please don’t respond by saying, “buy less coffee.” Many of us view Starbucks as a treat, not a necessity.) I believed many millennials would choose suburbia and the associated suburban office park, yes with updated amenities, but can’t afford to move out of the city. Also, people used to commit their lives to The Company so it made sense to arrange your life so you had a 25 min commute for eternity. Today, there’s no commitment from said Company that you’ll have a job Forever so you’re not going to buy that house 25 mins away. You can’t afford it anyway.
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@L A car loan or lease coupled with the lower cost of housing away from the city center is a much cheaper route than living in a city center regardless of commuting method.
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I went to RTP for a job interview and was shocked by the lack of amenities. I was expecting something fun and cool, but the most interesting thing was a volleyball net.
I would have liked to have heard about more of the re-use of some of these office parks into housing, senior living communities and schools.
Overall, would have been nice to hear about whether people really want or need offices anymore? Maybe the office is dying?
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@Daniel I mostly work at home but see the benefit of going to the office. The other members of my team live in far-flung suburbs and coming into the city is a long, nightmarish drive of at least 45 minutes. That is the way most people live here. I think until people make the decision to live near where they work and that housing options are available to actually do so people will take home office options. I have made the choice to live where there are a lot of job options for me should be present job end but not all industries provide this flexibility. All I really know is that for me car ownership is not sustainable and offers no value to my life. If I have to have a car to get to work, it's not the right job for me.
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Interesting, Apple bought a large piece of land in RTP, last December. Apple seems to prefer these "old fashioned" suburban office parks like RTP, possibly because most are surrounded by several world-class research universities.
Still, traffic here is awful.
5
Here in Chicago, you look up at the former Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) rising out of the buzzing and humming of the Loop... Then you drive past the quiet, ghostly, mostly vacant Sears headquarters out in the suburbs. You read the latest headline about more Sears stores closing and employees getting laid off, and you can almost pinpoint the moment things took a turn for the worse.
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The same vapid, empty, soulless aesthetic that has ruined this country.
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"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
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Big miss not to include Bellworks in central NJ, iconic former home of Bell Labs.
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Turn the buildings into apartments. We are short on affordable housing. Fill the space in no time at all.
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I worked in office parks for 5 years. They had parking, were clean, and usually had some kind of deli/restaurant on site. Most were in walking distance dry cleaners, grocery stores, and restaurants. For the past 12 years, I've worked in a "historic" downtown area full of antique shops and a few overpriced restaurants, a jail, a public hospital, and a refinery. Some of the architecture is quite nice and I enjoy walking around during my lunch. I am unable to do any kind of errand without getting in my car. In the past few years there has been influx of mentally ill and/or drug addled people to the downtown. They have made the parks their own and hang out on the streets all day. It's not so easy to walk around anymore and not always very safe.
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“After all, with downtowns everywhere becoming increasingly expensive, workers are starting to look farther afield, to areas with affordable homes and good schools.”
And so the cycle begins again.
Wow, that was fast.
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Where's the public transport? It doesn't matter how many bocce courts (really?) there are if people can't get there other than in a car per person.
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There is no public transport in North Carolina. Even the busses stink here. And it’s never going to change.
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@Vanyali. I know it's easy to talk when sitting in a major European city with great public transportation. It's easy to be discouraged. Even our cities are islands in the midst of suburbs accessible only by car. Our inner cities are being gutted by big box store developments in the suburbs, just like American city centers were back in the 50s and 60s. But the first thing that's necessary for change is to talk about it. To bring up this question every time someone talks about housing and business development, city (mostly not) planning, business planning, etc, without even mentioning the transport question. Yes, sigh.
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@Margaret it really isn't needed. Driving 15 minutes in a car to work is a lot more convenient than just about any other commuting option. If you are an employee, along with the short commute, you can avoid the much higher costs of the housing that is closer to city centers (you could easily afford a car with the difference in costs). Add in that the vast majority of people already have cars, they really don't have any appetite for expensive public transportation projects.
The crystal ball says they will put in Starbucks, Popeyes and TGI Fridays and call it food. Transportation will be a lean to with cracked windows and a broken bench on an obscure bus line only service staff will use. But the trees will get cut and the land paved over to turn vacant land into money.
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And these suburban "town centers" will include all of the same chains. I prefer the city. (And yes, the irony that I currently live in the burbs is not lost on me.)
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Public transport, good bike paths, and affordable housing are key to making the work environments with the worst carbon footprint appealing to a new generation of well educated office workers. Good food makes a great difference, too!
13
Keep the "park" in office park!
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Ah, urban living. They'll tire of it soon enough.
After finally ca$hing out of San Francisco, where the streets sparkle with shattered auto glass and discarded syringes, where residents play hopscotch with the human waste on the sidewalks and dodge the homeless, where everyone seems on edge and the public transit is filthy and unreliable, I am grateful for a peaceful suburban life and a six-burner range.
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@Randy I'm happy for you that you could cash out of S.F. and move, apparently to Santa Fe, another fairly affluent city where the govt. and wealthy retirees help anchor the economy. It would be interesting to do a study of how many U.S. cities have had enough real estate price inflation to allow people to "cash out" in the grand manner and whether this phenomenon can continue indefinitely. I wonder what the future populations of places like S.F. LaJolla, River Oaks, Winnetka, Buckhead, Chevy Chase, Bloomfield Hills, Wellesley, Greenwich, and their ilk are going to look like? Black or brown? Probably not. But there'll be plenty of office parks close by.
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@Randy While I don't live in SF, I visit a couple of times a year and always stay downtown, biking and walking everywhere. I am looking out for the landscape of garage you report and just don't see it. (Yes, there are a lot of homeless, also a present in Phoenix due to the great weather most of the year. Homelessness is a tragedy that is partly a choice CA voters have made due to voting down legislation that would have allowed more building of housing, including affordable and workforce housing.). I have not once found myself stepping over syringes, human waste, or unhoused people, nor did I sense a city on edge. I saw people living their lives, many walking, on bicycles, a growing number on scooters. If I had the income, I'd relocate there tomorrow.
4
I work in Midtown Atlanta, in a historic building, renovated into an office building. Just this afternoon, I walked to a Vietnamese restaurant to pick up lunch today, and it occurred to me how very lucky I was to be able to walk to a place nearby, and a small-business, specializing in great and different food to boot! There are lots of other options nearby by - a great pizza/Mediterranean place, a fantastic taco place, a nice brewpub, a Publix, a CVS, a bank, an Amazon-pick-up location, and access to Atlanta's rapid-rail system, all within easy walking distance. I love it! I can't imagine being stuck in the middle of no-where. GIven a choice, I would choose a company in a vibrant and pedestrian-friendly environment.
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@Surviving - The local river trail and state park are quite pedestrian friendly - in fact you won't see a car. I can literally fish/kayak in my backyard. Eagles and Hummingbirds frequent the back yard. The air is fresh and free from smog. I love visiting the city (Boston) occasionally but don't see ever living there again.
7
The public transportation scene in the Triangle communities is pretty dismal, with a light rail plan that failed, and local alternatives that don't connect the cities. Traffic jams are horrendous on the local roads. This "new" RTP development will just make those situations worse.
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@S Three words: Bus Rapid Transit
Yes, light rail is dead here, and it wouldn't have worked anyway, as this area is too spread out. Nearly all cities that have light rail also have horrible auto traffic, so fixed track choo-choo trains don't always solve the problems. Bus-Rapid-Transit.
1
Having worked in both suburbs and central cities, I can say that I prefer the latter. While both have their conveniences and benefits, one has to confront the fact that the suburban environment is a wasteful working environment: single-occupancy autos, acres of parking that prevent H2O absorption, lack of variety for lunch or after work (excepting strip malls and chain eateries), but most pernicious of all: it reinforces the lack of access to employment for people in cities or other less wealthy suburbs, especially minorities. These "cocoons" promote segregation, regardless of how well meaning HR recruitment is. Housing in the 'burbs is frequently beyond the reach of many working-class people. Let's face it, many white-collar office parks are not very diverse. A 7,000-acre office park for 300 companies, with no retail or housing? It goes against every tenet of intelligent planning. I visited RTP once on business, and pretty much concluded "there is no there there."
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@John This is a very insightful comment, I hadn't thought about access to private transportation being very key to working in office parks. Very, very true. Thanks for posting!
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@John
Housing in the Bay Area suburbs is more affordable to working class people than housing in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco. I am sure many would rather take a short bus ride, car ride, or bike ride from their homes to an office park in the suburbs than spend money on BART and parking and the time spent on a lengthy commute.
2
You’re right to point out that workers are moving east, Abby. But the east bay cities that working class people of color live in, like Antioch, are not a bike ride or Bart ride from work. A lot are mega-commuters, like you suggest.
However, I don’t see Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, Lafayette, Orinda, or god forbid San Ramon welcoming them either. There are still entrenched racial and class geographies in the region complements of the multi-pronged discriminatory strategies that east bay suburbs were built around. Changing this would depend on urbanizing, building new infrastructure, and tolerating class difference. California suburbs have done nothing but resist this on the basis that it’ll destroy their quality of life.
4
But what about transportation?
This article looked at North Carolina, Alabama and Virginia, where there isn't any public transportation anyway.
But in regions where cities are the driving force of the economy, suburban office parks are still dead. You'd have to be out of your mind to locate your business in the Boston suburbs - no one under 50 would come work for you.
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@Cousy There's lots of public transportation in Northern VA, and a fair amount in Richmond. That's where most of the employment and tax revenue is as well.
"But the fundamental characteristics that have always made the suburbs attractive continue to do so."
The fundamental characteristics that have always made the suburbs attractive are that those that live and work in the suburbs are subsidized massively with infrastructure and gas prices that they don't come close to paying for with their taxes or with tolls.
That is: they get something for nothing. And it's not sustainable because another word for that is "stealing."
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@J c Care to share the math on this? While you are at do the math on any transit authority
3
this redevelopment is precisely the bland, forced, inorganic development people have been fleeing for decades
28
Welcome to Raleigh y’all.
1
@Vanyali Thanks pardner.
@Slim This is not true.data shows that people are leaving NYC and the Bay Area for this. If you type "people leaving" into google the first 2 recommendations are "people leaving new york" and "people leaving california".
I live in Wayne, NJ where the Toys R Us headquarters was located in a giant office park. Also in Wayne, there are many more now-closed and abandoned office parks. After the companies leave, there’s no use for these spaces anymore. No one is coming to buy them.
26
@K and yet, don't you find it interesting that millenials nationwide continue to demand affordable housing in the densest urban areas? How about taking a pioneer mentality and basing a startup in Wayne where commercial real estate and housing are relative values?
5
@K -- Yes, and no one is paying the taxes they once paid to the local municipality. It's one thing if a company leaves a big city. It is quite another if it leaves a small town, devastating the local tax base. it is sometimes very challenging to repurpose suburban offices, particularly those that were custom-built for a single tenant. Examples comes to mind, such as the former Bell Labs in N.J. or Union Carbide in Danbury, Conn. Conversions of these are underway, I think, but they were fallow for a long time. And then you have old problem: you can't change the location in the middle of nowhere.
8
Yes, certainly that would be ideal if someone would come in and occupy these empty spaces, but I think the article is saying that no one wants to live out in these suburbs and companies can’t attract talent in these locations. It is a quandary, for sure.
I worked in a city office for a while.
Then the company moved out to the suburbs.
Now I don't have to watch my back as I walk down the street.
I don't have to pay my teeth to park.
I pay lower taxes.
Can stop on my way home at a safe store to by milk and bread.
Can look out the window at fields and trees and daydream instead of a brick wall.
Sit in a polluted traffic jam on my way to and home from work.
Can eat my lunch on clean picnic table not one surrounded with bubble gum paving and rotting trash.
Happy Now. I am.
26
@Joe Paper I'm not sure what city you worked in, but working in the burbs in NE usually means driving in heavy traffic, driving to get lunch or run errands, driving, driving and more driving. I live in Boston and work in Boston. I have a pleasant commute on the T, I have access to parks for lunch and never sit in traffic.
17
@Joe Paper
You are happy because the suburban lifestyle is massively subsidized by hard working taxpayers. Pay for what you get. Otherwise you are stealing
3
@Emily r
Do not wish to ride in a train with some that do not bath or brush teeth.
No thank you, Emmy
2
Not a Millennial but I love downtown living, especially the ability to bike and walk most places I need to go, including work, virtually all my medical needs, and arts and culture. I can bike to the light rail stations just west and south of my house and get most other places I want to go to. I can't imagine having to go to a boring office park for work, necessitating a car to come and go. If office parks could be redeveloped to act more like villages or towns that are denser and could be accessed by those who live or work outside of them by efficient public transportation, they'd be more attractive to me and probably younger generations who aren't inclined to waste half their life fighting traffic. I think the hardest barrier to overcome is the notion that abundant parking is essential and that nobody will use public transportation.
30
The article mentions hiring challenges for companies based on the suburbs. Having worked at such a place I can attest that an insurmountable challenge is attracting high quality college recruits. The younguns are not going to be impressed by a nearby faux hip coffee bar when the local housing and social scene is so totally oriented towards mid career suburbanites.
22
@GC
...as opposed to an in-town faux hip coffee bar. Coffee bars, no matter their location, are not hip. Faux or genuine.
10
The photograph of the two trees standing either side of a bike/walking path through a prairie grass like area, soon to be yet another development with shops, restaurants and coffee houses makes me ill at the thought of what is to come.
Another loss of a relatively pristine piece of nature that, while not hosting browsing livestock, certainly is a haven from the norm for so many other hundreds of thousands of acres of already developed land.
Leave this be. Please. Once it is gone, it will be decades or centuries before it returns to this state. Loss of respect for the land is quickly and easily done by those wishing to make a buck.
I would hope someone with deep pockets and a deeper appreciation of what this stands for would purchase it to place into a perpetual conservancy. I know it won't happen and feel one more battle to retain nature has been lost.
40
@reid thoughtful use of open space, including maintaining some space permanently open is a big part of urban planning. "Browsing livestock" does not connote "respect for the land."
1
@reid The land that you describe as "relatively pristine" was, a few decades back, worn out tobacco farms. Hardly a place of beauty.
1
That would have to be at least 7 decades back since that land is part of RTP, and RTP dates to the 1950’s (as explained in the article).
1
I lived in Woodcliff Lake, NJ in the early 1980s when the two old farms, Tice and Van Ripers, sold off their orchards to huge companies such as Ingersoll-Rand and BMW.
Those office parks and later banal mini-malls helped destroy a historic and environmentally lovely area and introduced monotonous, strip-windowed office parks, surrounded by parking lots, into the town.
Car dependent, un-walkable, boring, these office parks are now in need of major retrofitting but will never be fully integrated into any comprehensive town which needs alternatives to car enslavement and high housing costs.
There was greed when greed was good and today we see how bad it turned out to be.
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