The alternative (California’s current solution) is commuting, as tech companies and their tens of thousands of employees are scattered throughout the peninsula, forced to find shelter anywhere they can. The Bay Area suffers from one of the worst commutes in the country. For decades, Silicon Valley’s suburbs have refused to accommodate high-rise apartments for tech workers and their massive campuses, which have slowly been pushed up north, from San Jose to San Francisco.
This article proposes the construction of high density, hi-rise housing in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley to alleviate the high cost of shuttling people to and from their homes and centralized commuter offices (CCOs). The problem is it’s based on Industrial Age thinking updated for the 21st century that promotes the false notion that knowledge and creative workers needs to be physically co-located daily in order to collaborate and be productive.
Is that really true? Couldn’t they easily use the information and communications technologies these Bay Area companies innovate to collaborate without the commute by moving bytes, not their bodies? That way people could skip the commute and work in home offices or co-working spaces in their communities. That’s an obvious and much lower cost solution to the traffic congestion that’s strangling the Bay Area. Colleagues could still get together for team building and in-person collaboration. But as needed and on their own schedules and not 8-5, Monday through Friday.