Infrastructure & Environment
A New Idea to Fight Silicon Valley Sprawl
Critics say suburban headquarters for companies like Apple and Google contribute to traffic and sprawl. The solution may lie in better connections to transit.
The Apple spaceship -- like similar Silicon Valley headquarters for Facebook and Google -- typifies the biggest challenges of the new tech economy in the San Francisco Bay Area: Massive, isolated corporate campuses plopped down in the 'burbs, which drive up housing costs and force many workers to endure hours-long commutes.
Rethinking the Corporate Campus examines the forces that shape our employment landscape, highlights the implications of different models, and recommends policies and practices to tackle two key questions:
How do we encourage employers to choose efficient, sustainable, high-performance locations?
How do we create new locations that are more efficient, sustainable and high-performing?
A new report from SPUR, a civic planning organization in the area, makes the case that many of the region’s woes could be addressed simply by encouraging major employers to set up their corporate campuses near transit stops.
That's a throwback to 1950s-style office parks, the report says. “This environment emerged in an era of wide-open spaces, cheap land and easy mobility by car -- an era that is long past. Today that same environment, built for near-term expedience, is expensive, congested and ubiquitous. Nightmarish commutes and soaring home prices are taking a toll on the Bay Area’s prized quality of life, challenging its long-term competitiveness,” the SPUR researchers write.
The SPUR report offers a number of recommendations to help change the urban design and advocates for cities to change their zoning codes to allow more growth near transit stops and encourage mixed-use development in those areas.
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