Posted on 09/06/2016 10:23:12 AM PDT by Lorianne
My phone connection kept dropping out, which didn’t make sense because I was in the heart of Silicon Valley.
It turns out that poor cellphone reception has been a problem for years in downtown Palo Alto, which has a relationship with technology that is decidedly mixed.
Here in the city where Facebook and Google grew into the world famous companies they are today, many homeowners passionately oppose new cell towers in their upscale neighborhoods, complicating connections.
In an election year, with nearly constant squawking from presidential candidates about well-paying jobs, the mayor of Palo Alto has an unusual message for some of the cash-flush tech companies based here: Go away. Please.
“Big tech companies are choking off the downtown,” Mayor Patrick Burt said. “It’s not healthy.”
Last year, the city of 66,000 people set a cap of less than 1 percent a year on the growth of office space in most of its parts. In the charming downtown, where battalions of tech workers from companies like Amazon stroll the streets, their eyes often glued to their smartphones, the mayor is looking to enforce, in some form, an all-but-forgotten zoning regulation that bans companies whose primary business is research and development, including software coding. (To repeat: The mayor is considering enforcing a ban on coding at ground zero of Silicon Valley.)
“This is crazy,” said Kate Vershov Downing, a lawyer who lit up the internet this month when she announced that she was quitting the city’s planning commission because she was moving someplace cheaper. “This is Silicon Valley. We’ve been writing code here for decades.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Aren’t the taxes of these companies and their employees funding the city? Don’t they understand how much his works?
Liberalism is its own reward.
A local Mayor has the authority to ban people from writing code HOW, exactly?
Sounds like someone wants to spite their face.
A libtard town has a libtard Mayor who doesn’t even appreciate the great bounties of the software biz that put the place on the map.
Palo Alto is hardly hurting for tax income. Homes sell for upwards of $2000 a square foot there.
These people are really stupid.
They remember the way Palo Alto was in the 80s and even the 90s. The downtown had a suburban, middle America vibe. It was certainly affluent, with Sand Hill Road and the Stanford campus both just blocks away. There were cutting edge restaurants and hipster coffee shops, but also little family-run ice cream shops and crafts stores.
But it is not the money that has corporatized the downtown. It’s the progressives themselves, with their lack of taste and values, that have driven the charm out of Palo Alto.
They don’t need it. It’s my hometown, most of the residents would’ve preferred that it stayed a college town for Stanford, maybe with a few companies started by garage tinkerers. It’s a small city with small city infrastructure, it can in no way handle being the global “place to be” for one of the largest industries on Earth.
Palo Alto is just an upscale Berkeley these days.
A moratorium on zoning new office space is one heck of a nice gift to those who currently own these real estate assets now. Anyone wonder who were the people behind the scenes lobbying and financing this campaign to “keep downtown quaint”?
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