If Work Is Going Remote, Why Is Big Tech Still Building?
Kim Walesh has lived steps from downtown San Jose for two decades, and she readily admits that her neighborhood is not what you'd expect for the so-called “capital” of Silicon Valley—“small” and “undeveloped” are her first words to describe it. But Walesh, who directs economic development for the city, has long worked to enliven it, and four years ago she helped secure a crown jewel: a new Google campus on the west side of downtown. Unlike the region’s infamously cloistered office parks, Google’s plan embraced a newer model integrating tech offices with housing, transit, and public spaces. These brought with them concerns about gentrification and crowding, but after years of difficult negotiations with the developers and community groups, the city was nearing an agreement. “There was this sense of, ‘Oh my gosh, this is actually going to happen,’” Walesh says.
Instead, Covid-19 happened. Offices closed. Sharks hockey games—one of downtown’s big draws—abruptly ended. Beloved stores and restaurants were boarded up, their fates thrown into question. The same could be said for the much larger fate of the San Francisco Bay Area, home to large numbers of tech workers with the option and means to work from anywhere. Investors and startup founders, vowing to make their sabbaticals permanent, share their schadenfreude via tweet from the beaches of San Diego and Miami under the hashtag #techexodus. They have plenty of ammo: Companies including Pinterest, Dropbox, Twitter, and Yelp have charted out a hard pivot from swanky, perk-filled offices to embrace remote-working futures, while larger firms, like Facebook and Salesforce, have said they plan on more flexible schedules. And so, as her own staff pivoted to Zoom, Walesh couldn’t help but wonder about the big plans she had helped put in place for Google and San Jose. A remote work revolution was upon us. If people didn’t need offices anymore, did they need downtowns either?
