Author: Michael Kimmelman / Source: New York Times
The innovation myth used to involve the back of a suburban garage or an office park in Silicon Valley. The tech industry was incubated not on the mean streets of the big city, but in sleepy hamlets like Murray Hill, N.J., and Mountain View, Calif.
So with Amazon splitting HQ2, its second headquarters, between Crystal City, a part of Arlington, Va., and Long Island City, in Queens, what are we to make of tech’s steady migration to marquee cities?
Amazon is hardly alone, after all. Google and Facebook already have headquarters here (established, not incidentally, without state subsidies). Google intends to double its work force in the city to nearly 20,000. Twitter’s second-largest office is in Manhattan.
Its largest is in downtown San Francisco.On one level, this all seems inevitable. A handful of the wealthiest American cities today have a magnetic attraction. Today’s biggest tech platforms seek them out to recruit top talent and gain access, at scale, to housing, schools and transit. The process means the rich get richer, the biggest companies, bigger. And the gulf widens between the country’s haves and have-nots.
On another level, the tech industry isn’t culturally urban. It’s insularity, secrecy, its bedrock libertarianism and algorithmic notions about progress, land use and corporate independence have never easily meshed with the slow, open-society, regulatory-heavy, greater-good mission that defines city living. Disruption is a virtue and instrument of efficiency in tech circles. But it isn’t necessarily welcome where protections and a focus on collective welfare remain abiding democratic ideals.
You may not have noticed, but New York now lags behind only San Francisco and San Jose, Calif., in tech patents. Last fall the campus of Cornell Tech, modeled after Stanford University as an innovation incubator, opened on Roosevelt Island. Negotiating that deal may very well end up being one of the most transformative moves made by Michael R.
Bloomberg, the city’s former mayor.That said, New York City is not Seattle or San Francisco. Here, tech is one sector in a megalopolis, sharing the limelight with finance, media, fashion, advertising and art. It’s absorbed into the immensity.
In contrast, San Franciscans famously rebelled against the private buses and corporate fortresses tech set up. Public officials there have proposed a ban on employee cafeterias in new office buildings because engineers and coders apparently never leave work to patronize local restaurants. Last week, San Franciscans voted in favor of a proposition to help the city’s homeless that Marc Benioff, the Salesforce chief executive and now Time magazine owner, had backed, but that Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, vehemently opposed.
And Mr. Dorsey wasn’t alone. In Seattle, Amazon raised a ruckus when officials proposed a tax on large employers to help pay for services to the homeless. The company threatened to halt…
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