Berlin has an amazing start up scene, certainly unique for and unrivaled in Germany. That being said, Berlin hosts a lot of NIMBYism. Particularly by people who gentrified the city in the first place and immediately turned to become fierce gentrification enemies. Essentially locking in their gains.
Though presumably not financial gains? Gentrification usually implies skyrocketing property valuations, so early movers should stand to win big from the trend.
I used to know someone that bought a flat in Soho, central London, in the mid-90s. She sold it when she married 8 years later and made over half a million quid. No idea what it would be worth now.
People generally do not own their flats in German cities, its almost entirely a rental market. Can't find entirely up-to-date numbers, but <20 %, probably closer to 15 % in Berlin (including people owning single-family homes in the periphery)
Germany in general, and Berlin in particular has a very low percentage of home owners. Therefore, financial profit from gentrification goes to a small elite, maybe the upper 15%.
Berlin has a very different attitude to all of this than the UK. Rent control; graffiti isn’t property damage; very low rates of property ownership; city centre anarchist camps (at least, I think that’s what I saw); blurred Google Street View images all over the place… I have recently moved here from the UK and it feels like much I have barely scratched the surface of the differences.
I doubt the concept of gentrification translates as well as a dictionary might suggest.
It's gentrificators that become anti-gentrification activists once they secured their gain.
The "gain" in this case is:
1) Getting to transform a neighbourhood (that you weren't a part of before) however it fancies you, while simultaneously prohibiting those that come after you from doing the same.
2) locking in the low rents you have to pay. While keeping supply of housing artificially low you're thus increasing the rent-gap between what you have to pay and those that move in after you.
As the other commenters noted, Germany has a low home-ownership rate (good thing IMO but a whole different story). Because of strict laws on how to increase rents, gentrificators can secure themselves the low rents from before gentrification. It is not uncommon that one neighbour tenant in the same house pays two times your rent.
But building on the idea, that because Germany/Berlin being a tenant place there are no gains to lock in - that logic would then conclude that there can't be gentrification at all. Which is of course nonsensical.
Gentrificators don't need to be property owners, in fact gentrification theory explicitly states the opposite: that it's usually new tenants that change poor/working-class neighborhoods and spark the gentrification process. Those tenants are so called "pioneers", usually high educated, creative class, affluent and thus able to buy property even after the gentrification process has started.
It's also that Berlin is heavily radicalized and can radicalize even the worst STEMlord. So after moving here it's not rare to get into politics and understand that, on a local scale, your decisions matter.
I'd be interested to hear the opinions of any Berlin residents. Vocal NIMBY minority driving away new jobs and beneficial development? Genuine victory in preserving local culture and character? Bit of both? Other?
It's a good thing IMHO, Berlin is already overrun by IT tech and really needs a bit more diversity in that regard. The city is getting too expensive too fast, rent is exploding, and 'normal people' are driven out and entire areas are becoming 'elite ghettos'. There's plenty of smaller cities within a few hundred kilometers that would actually benefit from a Google Campus, and where Google might be better welcome.
Sure but Berlin is already close to an IT monoculture. More of the same just makes things worse when the IT industry will be made obsolete by something else.
Establishing hubs elsewhere would be good for the rest of the country, too. For example in the coal mining regions that fear getting the short end of the stick in the transition to renewable energy.
Compared to the situation in the US ("fly-over states"), it's still trivial to get to your trendy night time activities: Eastern coal mining hubs are 2 hours or less by car from Berlin, and less from Dresden or Leipzig. Western coal mining is in an area with one of the highest population density of the country. That makes me think that the regular "who wants to move there" argument isn't as convincing here as in the US.
I feel like Google could have avoided this easily by picking more or less any other location in the city. Even ~1 km from their planned location there are large tech offices that didn't get hit by this level of opposition, right next to te main public transport link, because they are a bit out of the way there, but Google wanted to be right in the middle of it. Further away it's even less of a problem (one of the slogans of the protesters was "Google out to Adlershof", which is a technology/business park area 20-25 min out by public transport from the proposed location). On the other hand, Google is a prime target: everyone has heard (vague or not) bad stuff about Google, and the others in the wider area might very well have primed the sentiment. Gentrification and rent prices are a big topic in Berlin.
The building is adjacent to a lot of housing with a diverse crowd, it borders to north-Neukölln on "the kanal", what is compared to central Kreuzberg a classical working-man district that undergoes it's own challenges. The whole area has more of a homely vibe. I concur with the ~1km. Towards the Spree river its presence would've been easily tolerated (there are business parks), Mozilla has its office there too. Not to speak of anything Berlin central or indeed Adlershof.
The Ab/Umspannwerk is a nice building of course, Berlin has a lot of these now obsolete electric facilities. A datacenter provider and other tech shops reside there for years, so did local grown startups. I wonder if the connectivity played any role, but there's lots of metro-fiber under the curbs in that part of town anyway. I still think there is opportunity for Google to pick the right location without community backlash not too far away.
- Most residents in Berlin (and in Germany for that matter) rent their apartments.
- There's a fairly good supply of newly built homes. It's still not enough to absorb the population growth, but it's much better than in many German cities.
People complain because they can see the downside of this influx of tech workers very clearly, while the benefits aren't obvious, at least not yet. Rents have doubled in some areas. Government offices are understaffed. So are kindergartens, schools, ...
While the government is partly to blame, a lot of startups haven taken advantage of Berlin's situation in questionable ways. The time where you could hire cheap developers is definitely over, but it's still very common to underpay and abuse people in non-engineering positions, who very often are interns and freelancers.
Kreuzberg is maybe too emblematic and Google is a scapegoat here, but I can understand the resentment against tech incubators.
Like with most societal problems in Germany, money is probably not an issue.
It will just keep getting harder to hire staff. Candidates know that their purchasing power and quality of life are threatened by the gentrification quicker than the government is willing to raise wages and invest in the infrastructure.
First thought is the time it takes to train new teachers and build new schools.
However: I literally cannot confirm or refute the possibility of blame shifting, as my German comprehension is at the level of headlines and 50% of content, I can’t do in-depth news coverage yet.
If you've ever been to the San Francisco Bay Area, you'll find that this never happens. Quite the opposite in some cases, the influx of thousands of upper middle-class young techies has priced out families (and teachers). This lowers enrollment, which results in school closures. Circularly, school closures reduces educational funding to the detriment of schools while increasing distance for children to travel to schools, encouraging more families to move away.
Logically you would think as these rich 20-somethings become rich 30-somethings they will start having children, but after 10 years they cannot afford SF either, so they also move away.
Sure, forcing out Google doesn't solve the problem, but it sends a very clear message: Profits are not more important than livable communities.
Exactly the same dynamic is happening in Amsterdam, where schools are closing down fast as less teachers can afford to live within the ring and move out to Almere and other satellites. Some local politici were even celebrating and advocating this displacement but were trounced at the last municipal elections, but the process continues and these schools are being refurbished and sold as elegant lofts in Hartje Hoofdstad.
I moved to Berlin ten years ago. I live close to Rosenthalerplatz right at the epicenter of the startup scene in Berlin. Gentrification is definitely a thing here. The neighborhood I live in has changed beyond recognition in that timespan. Lots of construction throughout the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis; most of the local shops have been replaced by hip restaurants, bars, and coffee shops; rents have gone up substantially; etc.
I would argue it is mostly for the better. But of course it is not necessarily that nice for the locals who are confronted with vastly increased prices for basically anything.
The city has changed a lot and is growing and projected to continue to grow by about 50K people a year for the foreseeable future. This is good for Berlin because it definitely needs economic development as it has been living well beyond its means for some time and because it is still catching up in terms of economic activity that was lost between WW II and the fall of the wall. All this growth is increasing employment opportunities and lots investment money is being spent in this city, which is definitely benefiting local businesses.
Meeting actual Berliners born and raised in Berlin is actually not that common. Change is very much the local culture. Major changes of the 19th and 20th century originated here and were fueled by waves of people moving here. So most people you meet here are part of the problem (in terms of gentrification). So complaining about gentrification is a bit disingenuous for most.
I would say it's a shame that a bunch of anarchists get to push back economic development in what is still one of the poorer neighborhoods. They're a vocal minority and they don't speak for all. They live in Kreuzberg because it used to be a dump before the wall fell and was thus cheap. Basically, this area was heavily damaged in WW II and the West Germans put a lot of cheap housing for immigrants there (these are not the people doing the protesting). After the wall fell, it happened to be conveniently close to the former East German historical center and it became a popular place for young people moving to Berlin to settle and for poor startups to open up cheap offices.
So, most of the protesters moved there because it was cheap and now they feel entitled to live cheaply in the middle of a major world capital that is once again flourishing around them.
This city is not done growing. There is plenty of room to build and expand.
I've also been living in Berlin for the last 2 years. I want to point out that you said "immigrants, these are not the people doing the protesting" is basically wrong. Of course you can not see homogenous group in the protests, and it's easy to pick the people who fits to the stereotypes in your head. ("These guys wearing antifa hoodies, they can't be immigrant they must be leftist germans so the immigrants are not protesting" or "Oh this guy definitely looks Turkish, so the protesters are immigrants")
As it's stated by others also, the area was ghetto and the border to East Berlin, separated by the death strip and the wall. So "the unwanted" people located here. (they've been invited by the German government to repair the country after the young working population died in WWII)
Now the wall is gone, the place become hip again, and the people are "unwanted" again. And if you say that the local immigrants (mostly Turkish) doesn't protest, it's basically misinformation and not recognising their efforts to keep the area what it's been for many decades: a cultural hub of the misfits. (immigrants, punks, musicians, artists etc.)
https://www.bizim-kiez.de
One of the main initiatives by the local immigrants.
(Bizim means "our" in Turkish, and Kiez means "neighbourhood" in German)
Most of the people moved here because it was cheap and the society was welcoming the misfits. But what you say as "economic development" is destroying the culture there and pushing people out of the town. If you create a big startup hub there, all the shops will transform into hipster cafes and restaurants... Which is happening for many years and if you can't see this, open your eyes a bit. How can you expect people who live there for the last 50-60 years to pay the increasing rent, while their income doesn't because they don't work in a Startup? How can you expect a grocery store who sells cheap vegetables to compete with a vegan smoothie store, which sells the exact vegetables for 5 times the price, or even more? And after all the places will be gentrified, the rents will go even more up... then you will start protesting the smoothie prices goes up. (Which you think is happening there, which is not!)
This is not so much about preserving local culture and character, but just about economic circumstances of the local population.
Especially the campus idea - which in London, for example, attracts tens of thousands of techbros and -sises per year - puts more burden on the neighborhood as "just" a regular startup office. Neither google nor the city of Berlin could address any of the concerns, housing costs, general costs of living, traffic situation, just to name a few.
Berlin in general suffers a lot from rising real estate prices and rents - and the area where google wanted to put their campus is even more heavily affected than other parts of the city. This neighborhood - I am living a mere 500 m from that place - suffered from an influx of people probably more than other parts of Berlin. On top of that it turned into one of the hip party areas.
Given that this neighborhood historically houses lower-income families, which won't gain anything from google moving here, but will have to face even faster rising cost of living, and at the same time have no chance to move to other parts of the city - with the housing market being as tight as it is - it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that this move saw local opposition.
Programmer in Berlin here. I'm very happy Google gave up. The political implications of being anti-gentrification are complicated: here I know many anarchists that are fervently in favor and others that are fervently against. Same for the commies. I have my opinion but I don't think it's worthy to bring it into the discussion.
I'm happy for a single reason: as long as Berlin startup scene preserves its working culture (that reflects German working culture in general), it will be a better working environment than the Silicon Valley. Big campuses and the presence of foreign corporations in general will have a slow but steady cultural influence on the IT workforce, normalizing the level of individual and systemic exploitation that is acceptable in the USA but not in Germany. Unpaid hours, unclear separation between work time and leisure time, ideological brainwashing, identity politics are all things I wouldn't like to see in the company I work for, but if a majority of my colleagues have worked for American corporations before (because they can afford to offer good salaries), it's more likely for it to happen.
Zalando is enough of a meat-grinder, we don't want more.
The Berlin protesters are full-blown fascists. They are violent and don't respect other people and their opinions.
They also regularly burn cars and attack the police. Absolute scum.
Many of them are also poor by choice. Housing prices going up sucks, but when you refuse to participate in the society, you really don't get to complain about it.
Why not build in e.g. Leipzig or other beautiful but jobs-starved city?
Come to think of it, why no campuses in Italy or Spain? Those countries have kinda lowish expenses, good weather and people will pay a premium to be able to move there. Instead everybody is opening in London and Switzerland which are overpriced and kinda meh.
Spain and Italy currently have weakened economies caused by large unemployment and government debt.
Italy in particular is at risk of defaulting on its debts (which are 131% of GDP compared to 87.7% for the U.K and 64.1% in Germany as of 2017) and the ECB and other lenders are going to be reluctant to lend to them. This is turn puts the banks and all kinds of public services at risk.
I don't understand why it will be harder to attract software developers to Italy versus Poland. Weather and environment are much nicer and if this job ends you just move elsewhere.
I would easily move to a cheap locale even if tech scene there is not abundant. I'd not move to London or Switzerland since you will always be 2nd class citizen compared to e.g. bankers. Which is just non issue in southern europe.
Also, those places are way more international than most places in Europe, which makes relocation more attractive. Good luck attracting non-Italians to Italy, or non-Polish to Poland.
Is not it obvious? When you tell you do software in Perugia you sound important, when you tell the same in London you basically say you're a nobody.
I would gladly move to Italy with its amazing culture. I would not move to a place so diverse and full of recent immigrants that it no longer has any specific culture. Am I unique here?
And yes, people relocate to Poland a lot, from ex-USSR countries for example.
I'm pretty sure both London and Switzerland have cultures (OK, UK culture is mostly just drinking but still...).
Large software hubs generally need to pull in people from around the world, not just USSR. And that's the crux of the problem. London, Berlin, Paris, Zurich are all major international cities - it's easier for people from all around the world to settle down there than in places like Warsaw or Perugia.
I (as a neither Polish or Italian person) wouldn't mind moving to either, but given the current political climate in Poland I'd rather move to Italy tbh.
> hire local underemployed (and Soviet era educated) talent
You are aware that the Soviet era is long ago and the youngest people educated under a Soviet system are mid-30 by now? There is plenty of universities in Poland teaching among other things also Computer Science.
Wrong. Weak economics, low employment, and large government debt (US anyone?) are not relevant when you bring talents, Quality of life is, and Spain or Italy are high above the mentioned countries. Also is much more cost-effective and secure. Ask yourself why many Europeans choose to retire to Spain.
But I do agree, we export talent to anywhere, where Spanish professionals, executives or researchers lead the way on many fields.
>low employment [is] not relevant when you bring talents
While I agree with the rest, I wouldn't be too sure about this. I suppose a tech talent doesn't plan on working at the same place their whole lives, so they would take into consideration the availability of tech jobs in the area.
The comparison to the US is not apt because the US has control over its own currency. This is critical for high debt scenarios because it leaves the option of essentially printing money via a program like quantitative easing to always ensure interest rates on fed bonds don't get out of control. This serves the purpose of providing favorable rates for the government as well as inflating away the value of the outstanding debt.
Countries bound to the Euro do not have this option so it usually means growth-killing austerity+taxes is the only way out.
For a software engineering campus this is relevant how?
E.g. in Poland software is more Krakow based than Warsaw. Because why would you be wasting on rent, being in a large city where you aren't that important?
The selection process is strange indeed. Google's first German office was in Munich of all places. Extremely expensive, not very exciting (for people to move to), and very high competition for IT workforce. So they have one of Germany's best universities for IT, but the differences between universities actually aren't that large here.
True, some years ago I was seriously looking for jobs there. But the only options sounded very boring, very corporate and non-IT'ish at the same time. Something like Dynamics AX programming or Office 365 administration.
If I read the article correctly, this wasn't about building a new 'Google campus' (i.e. a huge building to house a large number of Google employees as their main regional HQ). This was about building Campus Berlin, an incubator for startups like they pioneered first in London and then brought to other cities.
It's easy to misunderstand this because of what the term 'campus' is typically associated with. I live in London, and when I say 'I'm going to Google's Campus', I often need to qualify that I'm not going to their main office complex at King's Cross.
There may still be very valid reasons to protest Google in Berlin, but I wonder if the people objecting understood the distinction: that this wasn't a hub for all of Google's employees, but rather a place that would help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources.
The kind of smaller startups that would be home at a Campus style incubator would not be fueling high paid Google salaries and would be a lot less likely to drive up rents e.g..
The article lists that reason (gentrification) explicitly. The only other one given in there is that Google is evil (data collection, tax evasion, etc.). Someone else pointed out that the type of hosted campus would not lead to the same gentrification when the startups don't offer high salaries, but I think the point is still valid. At least, I do not know of another Google campus where this was not the case... I could be wrong.
As an aside, I dislike the term "techbro." It's obviously pejorative and I hardly ever see anything kind used to describe men working in the IT/CS sector. Just that and "neckbeard."
To me, it shows haters' level of intellect. And perhaps explains why they feel left out. They're attached to an ideal of what 'art' (additionally, activism[1]) should be. An outdated, 20th century one.
I personally don't like Google. And I understand your framing is hypothetical.
But why is tech framed the opposite of art?
Why is tech equal to techbro?
Yea there are always bad apples. But I wonder what Da Vinci would think about holding art in the opposite category as tech?
I'd argue they're more synonymous than opposite. To me, there's creativity. Both art and tech are creative. Applied creativity pertains to both code or a paint canvas.
Either way, the best, most valuable work to society is often never been done before.
Can anyone name an art piece (or if I'm being generous, an art movement) in the last 15 years that's made the level of impact as Google? Or cryptocurrency?
Ultimately, to me, the 'artists' need to up their game. Big time.
[1] Protest city hall if you feel gentrified. Especially in SF where it's largely illegal to build housing. Also, regarding gentrification, you don't hear the positive stories of immigrant families whose businesses flourish because of increased capital in an area, or those who feel safer, or even those who cashed out and sold their 50k house for 1.2 million. Again you hear a largely misdirected, dated and one-sided argument.
I think your comment is extremely patronizing and arrogant ("To me, it shows haters' level of intellect.") and a "let them eat cake" attitude that to me shows a clear lack of understanding of why people have become so anti-tech over the past 2 decades.
Yup, on both sides of the argument. But in any way, there is some deeper truth here, the whole discussion went ad hominem already years ago.
Also it sucks for "the good guys" - literally - that tech has a bad reputation in that sense and on the other hand this is improving only so slowly.
On the other hand it's of course naive to say that artists are good people per se, that is just not true. This is almost biblical, considering that artists are always poor and thus good. We all need to progress, not only people in tech.
They're not empty terms. They're appropriate qualifiers. And they're not even close to being ad hominem. Don't invoke logical fallacies if you don't understand their usage.
Just so you know, your entire comments reacts of bitterness and ignorance. You think their view point on art is stuck in the 20th century, but that's only because you clearly don't understand the type of community you're dealing with. In fact your view point seems extremely myopic and appears to be constrained around your own motivations and hobbies.
>But why is tech framed the opposite of art?
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the issue. It's not tech vs. art. It's a "here's these people that make a lot of money and end up just being really big consumers" vs people that are the "creatives." The type that give a neighborhood flare.
Consider a programmer who perhaps love the "art" of programming and spends the majority of their time coding/tinkering without compensation (a rare prospect these days, admittedly), versus someone who works at a corporate job, does what they need to do, and goes home. Neither is better than the other, but they will end up creating radically different communities.
>Why is tech equal to techbro?
Because it's just the type of people it attracts these days. Name one neighborhood where a group of IT people came into that neighborhood and made it a creative space. Without fail, it just becomes a giant consumer hub with absurd rent prices. Artists tend to congregate in areas with other artists and areas that have cheap rent. Tech tends to drive up rent, and it certainly isn't an industry that attracts artists not centered around digital design.
>Or cryptocurrency?
The technology that did absolutely nothing, soaked up huge amount of raw resources, so techbros could play a game about who's going to be left holding the bag?
This is exactly why I used the term myopic. You might find it interesting and cool, and that's great! But it hasn't done anything for anyone else outside the tech sphere. In fact it's actually pretty easy to argue it's been a net-negative across the board.
I've lived in these communities of 'creatives'. For years. I know its a lot of drugs, idealism and not a lot of action.
Except for complaining about how wronged they've been by the system. Is that your 'another world is possible'? So maybe I am bitter...
Don't get me wrong, the system is fucked up in many ways. And I agree with your distinction of a grey blandness that permeates the tech culture.
I'm more interested in how all the enlightened 'creatives' can engage with this boring grey techbro community. Because frankly, they're the ones paying for most of their free shit.
It's always the same everywhere I go, "artists" invading our nice clean spaces, begging for handouts(heroin money). I live near a "creative space" and it's just gross white people puking on each other. I'm going to start calling the police on them and laugh as they are beaten and hopefully shot.
A lot of developers who work at places like Google also:
* Develop software on the side for free (art)
* Work on open source software during working hours sponsored by their host company
* Can afford to have families (I notice "vibrant" communities didn't include those with children in them)
> Or cryptocurrency?
Like it or not, Bitcoin is very artistic. Innovative, novel, spurs conversation and strong reactions...
I think it's you who's actually stuck in the 20th century mentality. Cultivating urban hipster hotspots full of "artists" is pure 20th century bohemian chic.
The building was originally renovated by ID Media, one of the largest digital media/web development companies in Berlin at the end of the nineties. It’s been filled with IT companies ever since they went bankrupt and currently has an incubator as one of the renters. It’s never been full of artists for the last 20 years.
So while I’m not surprised (and very much not sad) that the plans didn’t work out for a host of reasons I really don’t think that the campus would have led to substantial gentrification in that region.
Disclosure: we (still) have our office in the complex.
The mere mention of google already turned up into most housing and office space sale adverts. The effect on housing costs is real but the amount debatable. Rents in the neighborhood have gone through the roof the past couple years and protestors are looking for symbolic wins to make the city more urgently address the problem.
What makes "artists" better to live around than "techbros"? Having lived in my fair share of neighborhoods inhabited by both, I can say neither is better/worse than the other.
It's basically the difference to people living off their parent's money (artists) vs. people living off money they make themselves (tech workers).
These people are artists? It's not art if it's ugly. These creative types are almost always the same, white failures who think they can talk back to their superiors. I think I might buy up some trendy property just so I can throw these disgusting junky whites on to the street.
I live in Berlin and have not followed this topic closely, and only heard about this not being a typical Google office days ago when Google changed plans. The talk on the street over the last months was always centered on Google wanting to create a big office and the residents not wanting any big corporations there.
This could be how the message was advertised by some but most people i met from the protestors understood googles plans were at least recently rather moderated. They all understood google was a symbolic target for a bigger problem.
> The fear was that the incubator would accelerate gentrification.
Sort of understood, given that Germans are a nation of life-long renters (as opposed to home-owners). Gentrification is generally great for the owner and terrible for the renter.
> Gentrification is generally great for the owner and terrible for the renter.
Well not entirely.
Gentrification is started and driven by new groups of tenants moving into a neighbourhood. Property owners and investors will only jump onto the bandwagon afterwards. With German restrictions on rent-increases, being one of those original gentrificators (OG) you can lock in an incredibly low rent in a place where rents for new leases skyrocket. As long as you stay in your flat, you're shielded from those rent-hikes.
Growing up, I've had many friends who lived literally in city mansions (4m++ ceiling height, art deco, 6-10 rooms for a family of three) in a fully gentrified area paying a rent lower than I paid for my no-go-area 25sqm studio. All because their parents kept the lease from their 1970s flatshare (pre-gentrification, no-go-area then).
Today even more than 20yrs ago, those OGs often live in an opaque, inaccessible grey housing market: If they want to move (because e.g. the 6 people they share a flat with became 1 spouse and a kid), they first look out for other OGs to do a lease-switch. Which means their rent level stays pre-gentrification forever. If nothing comes across they can still "resell" the lease.
well you would have thought that after a while Germans should have realised that renting (long term is a mugs game). - Just entrenches the power of the elites.
It's not – at least in Germany. Laws prohibit intense rent hikes, thus you can lock in a low rent, with a delta to new leases that is just ever increasing.
Also, the idea to make everyone a landlord while widely accepted in housing economics to be a good thing, I happen to think is shortsighted and contradicts the principle of "economics of scale".
Housing companies (can be non-profit co-ops as well) often provide much more quality/€ to tenants than the landlord, who owns 1 flat and is always overstrained with the simplest maintnance requests.
Gentrification is great for wealthy landowners. For poor/middle-class homeowners (in the USA, anyway), there is about 100 asterisks attached to that "great". And in various situations, gentrification can hurt poor/middle-class people even if they own a property.
How many of them lived and worked there before that? How many of them are making the community around them better for this? Look, I work for startups, I'm not remotely out of this myself, but most startups create net-negative externalities on the places around them (I'd say that most create net-negative externalities societally, and I refuse to work for those, but that's a different kettle of fish.) It isn't "sad" that a countercultural and art-focused area doesn't want techbros milquetoasting the community and causing CoL spikes--even if that means they don't want me around, either.
The distinction between campus vs. incubator is within the current gentrification discussion in Berlin probably not too important.
They main issue to tackle for the Berlin government—from my point of view—is to find the right balance of luxury and affordable housing. People making above average salaries in the growing tech scene should/would pay the higher prices for luxury properties, while the art and counter culture scene would not need to be gentrified if there was a higher supply of affordable housing.
As a Berliner for the past 5 years, I really believe that most the unique vibe of the city comes from the art and left-oriented community here. A lot of us working in the tech world support it, enjoy it and even adapt to their ways (while keeping quiet about how much more money we earn). I really hope that the government makes an effort on affordable housing to keep the balance that makes the city special.
at the end of the day, what matters is the supply of jobs vs the supply of places to live. And if there's already too many jobs to residential areas, then I think it's quite responsible of them to say no to more jobs. It's better to put those jobs in areas that have enough housing. the bay area was not so smart and look where it got us.
I’m honestly kind of surprised at Google’s complete lack of cultural or diplomatic knowledge about Berlin. Kreuzberg is/was the center of artistic culture in the city, and choosing to have a presence there, no matter how small, would clearly be viewed as a corporate American attack on local countercultural values. As another commenter stated, they could have avoided this entire issue by picking somewhere in Mitte or a western suburb.
Yeah but XBerg is so hip & happening and whoever lobbied for this move at Google must have loved their stay at one of the many AirBnB apartments in the area! /s
Don't know, it has probably more to do with the fact that it's Google trying to open something there.
Otto Bock (market leader in prosthetics and wheelchairs) just bought a old brewery for several hundred million € in Prenzlauer Berg [1] with the goal to convert it into a research center. I don't remember any kind of protest or outrage against that.
1. Prenzlauerberg is known as an upper-middle class/family/“safe” area, not a haven for artists or counterculture.
2. A prosthetics company is a far cry from the omnipresent, omnipotent entity that is Google. Everyone on planet Earth knows what Google is. Many people take issue with their behavior.
1. Without wanting to offend I think it's quite funny that you think so, because before Prenzlauer Berg became what it is today it was one of the most prominent "art districts" in Berlin, and many artists had their workshops there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenzlauer_Berg). Now as you say it's mostly an area where hip and affluent families live in the many luxuriously renovated old buildings (Altbau). Seems gentrification has progressed so much that people don't even remember what the neighborhood used to be before. That said, the process wasn't triggered by large tech companies setting up shop there, more by the choices of affluent people moving to Berlin from other parts of Germany. Swabians are particularly hated for allegedly moving there in order to live in a big city but then slowly turning that city into the small Swabian town they moved away from in the first place (I don't think it's a very fair judgement though).
2. That's what I said, and I think it's sad that Google won't open the campus there, as I think the area and the city could profit from it.
Also, this is a personal opinion but I think Kreuzberg is far from being a "haven for artists or counterculture". Already now the district has some of the highest rents in Berlin and many flats are being rented out as AirBnBs (often by the same people that complain about companies gentrifying the area). Also, the counterculture that you're describing can be quite snobbish and exclusive as well, at least for people that don't conform to the Berlin "hipster" ideal. I think Berlin really needs more corporations and large enterprises that set up shop there and create jobs, as the startup ecosystem has so far failed to deliver much in terms of well-paying jobs (at least if you don't want to work for Zalando). Just my 2 cents.
I think arbitrary restrictions on groups that can purchase or lease space in a neighborhood is bad for a free society. I guess people say it depends on what group you're imposing. Now it's Google which you may or may not like, but other groups can be harmed in the future. This is part of the whole NIMBY movement.
As long as the group is following laws and zoning restrictions, there should be nothing preventing them from joining a community
I used to agree with you, but considering the fact that San Francisco has gone from “semi-affordable haven for weirdos and off-beat culture” to “single most expensive city in America filled primarily with tech workers and the homeless” in less than 30 years, I don’t any more. Semi-similar situations for lower Manhattan, Paris, East London, ad infinitum.
A place can have a unique culture that’s worth maintaining. How to maintain it - I don’t know. But converting everything to MegaCo offices probably isn’t the solution.
San Francisco is actually a good example of what NIMBYism does. Zoning restrictions and rent controls that are unrivaled in the US did everything to that city you've just stated as things to avoid while attributing them to "MegaCo".
The housing market by its nature has a weak flexibility to adapt to new demand. NIMBYism acts like a lever on that inflexibility.
Nobody is restricting Google from doing anything. They are expressing--in a way that is part of, and frankly should be expected of being a member of, one of those "free societies" you mention--that Google is unwelcome, and no, nobody is obligated to make you feel welcome. There are cases where not making somebody welcome kinda makes you an asshole, but that does not, frankly, apply to anybody who's got a stock ticker symbol.
This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious.
> Nobody is restricting Google from doing anything
From the article: In September activists occupied the building it was to be located in for several hours.
That seems like the activists were preventing them
> This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious.
Saying you do [something I don't like] and I don't want you to do [thing I don't like] in my neighborhood is exactly NIMBY
You realize that Google has billions upon billions of dollars and effectively unlimited weight to throw around, yes? A few protestors hanging out in a building does not prevent them from doing anything they want to. They have run the numbers and presumably realized that having your neighbors not want you there is not worth the PR hit of doing it--but literally nobody is stopping it from happening.
This poor-benighted-Google thing is gross. These companies are not on anyone's side.
> Saying you do [something I don't like] and I don't want you to do [thing I don't like] in my neighborhood is exactly NIMBY
No, that's most definitely not NIMBY. NIMBY means you support something when it's farther away but oppose it happening close to you. It stands for "not in my backyard", not "not in any backyard".
If I had to guess, a lot of those protestors probably don't care if Google ever opens an office anywhere--but, not being billion-dollar panopticons-as-a-service, they are constrained to act locally rather than globally.
"You use the services that have functionally become required for daily life regardless of whether you like them or not, so it is in some way hand-flappingly hypocritical not to let them step on your community too" is not really the winning argument here.
> What Google services are required for daily life? Don't they all have competitors?
Not really. It's sort of like RMS with open-source hardware: yes there are a handful of modern computers that can be made to work without binary blobs, but it's a lot of trouble and only a few people will actually do that out of principle. It's practically requred to run proprietary binary blobs. Similarly, Bing, Duckduckgo, and OpenStreetMap exist, but Google services are practically required for modern daily life.
For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.
> For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.
That's a great example, thanks for mentioning it. I'll probably use it from now on.
It's not about whether "they want Google to exist", that's just reducing the whole thing to absurdity. It's not about mere existence. It's about whether they're fine with the approaches taken by the company and whether they're suddenly opposing it when it directly affects them.
Well your not welcome (google in this case) but that doesn't give you the right to deny others who might want to move to berlin and work for google - that sound s like UKip policy in the uk.
And what does having a stock ticker matter presumably you took advantage of the German miracle and the rise of VW and others.
This would go against the interests of the locals, that, frankly, in a community should come before the interests of some programmer that would find a job somewhere else.
They aren't denying Google and it's employees the right to move to Berlin, there's tons of areas in Berlin for tech companies to be, some tolerant of them, some actively trying to get more companies to move in. (and of course Google legally would have been free to move in despite the protests, but choose not to). That's needlessly over-the-top rhetoric for a localized protest.
Next time I see the junky tattooed white garbage that passes for "counter-cultural creative types" I am going to make them feel very unwelcome. Why do these so called artists(heroin addicts) think they can dictate anything to anyone? Tear down the squats and build a parking lot, it would be an improvement.
> This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious
It's also the same line of thinking behind Trump's wall and hostility to immigration in general: "people I don't like should stay out."
Resistance from a community is not a "restriction", and characterising this as NIMBYism would be intellectually dishonest if it weren't so ridiculous. Google is not a group, it's a vastly wealthy and powerful corporate entity, and objecting to its presence in a community is not a slippery slope or precedent-setting in the sense which you (again, preposterously) imply.
Kreuzberg is the center of left activism in Berlin which is anti-globalisitic, anti-corporate, anti-american and anti-gentrification, Google (and its entourage) is the embodiment of that. Ironically however, Google is present in Kreuzberg at "Factory community".
The irony is that this activism is often made up of people who are highly educated, affluent (because of parents or soon-to-be paying off high-education) who weren't born in Berlin themselves – in other words: By gentrificators.
Yes, by people who moved there from other areas of Germany (for example to elude the draft). The "swabian invasion" many Berliners face is not a recent thing.
...and Berlin was a counter-cultural center in the 1920s.
I'm not really sure what point you're getting at. Berlin is prized by its inhabitants for its unique culture - a modern, western city that for nearly 20 years was dominated by artistic culture. It has nothing to do with the "original inhabitants vs. the new transplants" and very little to do with NIMBYism from property owners, especially considering the the overwhelming majority of Germans rent, not own.
Connecting today’s or even 1970s counter-culture with that of the 1920s is really far fetched as most counter-culturalists where driven out shortly after (see 1930s) and never came back.
Following your logic, that it shouldn’t matter where new tenants come from - isn’t that what anti-gentrification activism effectively is about? Prohibiting new tenants to move in?
Understanding context is one of the most important thing, when you're trying understand the content/situation.
You repeatedly write that this happens because of some snowflakes' NIMBYism. Which is definitely not.
If we were talking about any other city in the world, whatever you're saying would make sense... because from the outside it looks like "oh the people who moved to city center doesn't want anybody else to move there".
That's not the case with Berlin.
Maybe you missed the topic recently but there was WWII and then East Germany, with Berlin Wall, death strip in between and East German State Police Stasi... and people who wants to escape from East.
Of course all of these happened in the city center, because the wall separated the city from the middle of it, and the areas once city center, become the dangerous ghettos.
The canals in Kreuzberg has become grave for some immigrant (and German alike) children, because it belonged to the East. If any child accidentally falls in the waters and scream for help nobody could save them. Because anyone who would enter the canals would be shot by East German police. And they did. And people couldn't save their kids from the waters, after these incidents happened. This is just one of the disadvantages of living next to a death strip, in the epicentre of the nuclear cold war.
Because of these dangerous properties, the place was cheap. And people in more "hip" areas didn't wanted to rent their flats to young people, artists, punks etc. So these people find home in Kreuzberg.
But yeah, feel free to forget about these context and try to blindly invalidate peoples experiences.
---
I gave the same example in another comment: There are many shops in Kreuzberg, which are located there for let's say 50-60 years. There are grocery stores, bakeries, markets, shoe repair shops, cheap quality restaurants, local bookstores etc.
But these people has to go now, because there is better buyer, who can afford the prices that these people can not. Or they have to increase their prices too. You were buying a croissant for 0,40€... now it's 4€. But hey, you can like our instagram page!
Now you're accusing these people of b+ching about the development, and you think they're greedy and they get what they wanted, now they're protesting so others can not get what they have?
Or do they want to live in the area, where they've been living for the last 60 years, and experienced many many disadvantages of the area?
The area was ghetto, so unwanted people located there. Now the area is hip again (after 100 years), and the people who lives there is unwanted again.
The real NIMBYists are the ones who pushed these people to ghettos, next to Berlin Wall.
I want my city to be better and i want workers to do this.
-Immigrants? Not in my backyard.
I want my city to be culturally rich and i want to be proud of the art that created in my city.
-Punks? Unemployed artists? Not in my backyard.
Because of this, these people located in Kreuzberg... many many years ago, before the Wall even came down.
Now the wall came down and the same people say:
I want to have a nice and cheap(er than my area) office next to Landwehrkanal in Kreuzberg.
-Immigrants and artists next to my office? Not in my backyard.
FWIW, they're not that active at the Factory (a coworking space / startup community with offices in Kreuzburg and Mitte). Members have limited access to a global network of Google coworking spaces, and Google hosts office hours for entrepreneurs every so often, but IIRC those also tend to be in the Mitte location rather than Xberg.
Google probably thought "Hey, what's the coolest part of Berlin, where we'd make engineers happy to be in?" and that's about it. "Subtleties"[1] about why it's cool, or what its response to Google being there, probably weren't considered.
After the selection had occurred, the procurement machine had been tasked and at that point it takes a lot of resistance to stop that machinery.
[1] For some real estate group in Google determining office locations.
Yep, that's roughly how it must have went. They even hired a friend of mine to come up with PR strategies against the resistance. Needless to say, it didn't work out.
> ...what's the coolest part of Berlin, where we'd make engineers happy to be in?
but i also wonder: does Google consider itself to be one of the "cool kids?" i mean, when it tries to create a new campus like this, does Google think it will be welcomed with open arms?
I do not know Berlin very well, I've only spent a few weeks there, but I get the impression they would have faced a lot less backlash if the announcement had been "hey we're gonna build this awesome new office campus at Aleksanderplatz".
I think it's less likely that Google was unaware of Kreuzberg's identity, and more likely that Googlers still think they're "cool". The sort of people who have offices with built-in slides and ball pits and crud may feel like they "belong" there.
Google people want to work where there is culture because they don't have any. They just consume it with algorithms, extract the value, reprocess it and redistribute it. They pull everything out of context so it looses its broader meaning.
For instance, if I google image search for "women in bikinis" I get hundreds of thousands of women in bikinis, but not the broader narrative of their lives and personalities. It is completely decontextualized and drops all the other dimensions of the context in which these photos were taken.
In the same way, Google employees lack context because everything is a component, they moved from somewhere else and have been assimilated into the great corporate standardization. They crave things with context, but when they try and coexist with it, their enormous economic superiority draws the interest of the whole world to extract from that environment that which promotes their ability to decontextualize and conform the world around them and the decontextualization whirlwind grows around them.
You forgot to give the entire context for your comment, which completely decontextualizes it and drops all other dimensions in which this comment was taken. ;-)
You see the simple answer to your query because Google decides what to show based on what users will prefer, and most users just don't give a fuck about "the broader narrative of their lives and personalities".
I would also assume that people interested in broader narrative of women's lives and personalities will not expect to find such narrative by googling for images of women in bikinis.
Sehr viel drastischer formulierte es Ulrike Schneider, Aktivistin beim Initiativkreis „Google-Campus & Co verhindern“, die den Konzern beschimpfte: „Google ist und bleibt ein Scheiß-Konzern, der seine Gewinne mit Überwachung, Ausschnüffelei, Zusammenarbeit mit Militär und Geheimdiensten sowie Steuertricks macht.“
> Ulrike Schneider, an activist at the initiative group "Stop Google-Campus & Co", criticized the company even more drastically: "Google is and will always be a shit company, that makes its profit through monitoring, snooping, working with the military and secret services, and tax [evasion] tricks."
I'm sure most local residents mostly care about rent prices going up in that area, though, rather than a specific anti-Google sentiment. They probably don't want it to be gentrified as another district, similar to what happened/is happening to Prenzlauer Berg.
Berlin is going nuts in recent times, it's unbearable. There are literally billboards around the city agitating against Facebook and Google (sic!).
Somehow, the same activists with dubious motivations don't mind domestic entities like infamous credit rating agency or the debt collection agency collecting the public media fee. The public media debt collection agency has the most complete database of who lives where and with whom in the whole country, probably the most comprehensive database on domestic households that exists in the world, certainly in the EU. What about it, fraudulent privacy zealots?
> the same activists with dubious motivations don't mind domestic entities
[citation needed]. The examples you mention are widely disliked and fought too. + of course conflating privacy activists and those protesting Google here likely is not very accurate.
There is a city called Hamilton in Ontario, Canada. Houses a good University called McMaster and is near Waterloo University - premier Computer Science university in Canada.
City (Hamilton) is fairly well developed with a functioning International Airport and since it was initially built around manufacturing, its prestige within Canada has suffered somewhat in last 20-25 years. If firms like Google would be so kind to invest there, the locals and the children of locals and other Canadians would welcome them with open arms.
Google already has an office in Kitchener/Waterloo (which they are expanding, afaik), and Toronto, so I don't think they would want to build an office in Hamilton, since it is pretty much right in the middle of those two offices.
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[ 9.3 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadBerlin has an amazing start up scene, certainly unique for and unrivaled in Germany. That being said, Berlin hosts a lot of NIMBYism. Particularly by people who gentrified the city in the first place and immediately turned to become fierce gentrification enemies. Essentially locking in their gains.
I used to know someone that bought a flat in Soho, central London, in the mid-90s. She sold it when she married 8 years later and made over half a million quid. No idea what it would be worth now.
I doubt the concept of gentrification translates as well as a dictionary might suggest.
The "gain" in this case is:
1) Getting to transform a neighbourhood (that you weren't a part of before) however it fancies you, while simultaneously prohibiting those that come after you from doing the same.
2) locking in the low rents you have to pay. While keeping supply of housing artificially low you're thus increasing the rent-gap between what you have to pay and those that move in after you.
As the other commenters noted, Germany has a low home-ownership rate (good thing IMO but a whole different story). Because of strict laws on how to increase rents, gentrificators can secure themselves the low rents from before gentrification. It is not uncommon that one neighbour tenant in the same house pays two times your rent.
But building on the idea, that because Germany/Berlin being a tenant place there are no gains to lock in - that logic would then conclude that there can't be gentrification at all. Which is of course nonsensical.
Gentrificators don't need to be property owners, in fact gentrification theory explicitly states the opposite: that it's usually new tenants that change poor/working-class neighborhoods and spark the gentrification process. Those tenants are so called "pioneers", usually high educated, creative class, affluent and thus able to buy property even after the gentrification process has started.
Historically investment in a city has benefited a city. This is the opposite.
I wonder who was behind the protest, was it the established tech players and wanted to keep competition out?
This seems like a mild form of isolationism, and again, if we use history, this seems like a bad idea.
Compared to the situation in the US ("fly-over states"), it's still trivial to get to your trendy night time activities: Eastern coal mining hubs are 2 hours or less by car from Berlin, and less from Dresden or Leipzig. Western coal mining is in an area with one of the highest population density of the country. That makes me think that the regular "who wants to move there" argument isn't as convincing here as in the US.
- Most residents in Berlin (and in Germany for that matter) rent their apartments.
- There's a fairly good supply of newly built homes. It's still not enough to absorb the population growth, but it's much better than in many German cities.
People complain because they can see the downside of this influx of tech workers very clearly, while the benefits aren't obvious, at least not yet. Rents have doubled in some areas. Government offices are understaffed. So are kindergartens, schools, ...
While the government is partly to blame, a lot of startups haven taken advantage of Berlin's situation in questionable ways. The time where you could hire cheap developers is definitely over, but it's still very common to underpay and abuse people in non-engineering positions, who very often are interns and freelancers.
Kreuzberg is maybe too emblematic and Google is a scapegoat here, but I can understand the resentment against tech incubators.
It will just keep getting harder to hire staff. Candidates know that their purchasing power and quality of life are threatened by the gentrification quicker than the government is willing to raise wages and invest in the infrastructure.
However: I literally cannot confirm or refute the possibility of blame shifting, as my German comprehension is at the level of headlines and 50% of content, I can’t do in-depth news coverage yet.
Logically you would think as these rich 20-somethings become rich 30-somethings they will start having children, but after 10 years they cannot afford SF either, so they also move away.
Sure, forcing out Google doesn't solve the problem, but it sends a very clear message: Profits are not more important than livable communities.
I would argue it is mostly for the better. But of course it is not necessarily that nice for the locals who are confronted with vastly increased prices for basically anything.
The city has changed a lot and is growing and projected to continue to grow by about 50K people a year for the foreseeable future. This is good for Berlin because it definitely needs economic development as it has been living well beyond its means for some time and because it is still catching up in terms of economic activity that was lost between WW II and the fall of the wall. All this growth is increasing employment opportunities and lots investment money is being spent in this city, which is definitely benefiting local businesses.
Meeting actual Berliners born and raised in Berlin is actually not that common. Change is very much the local culture. Major changes of the 19th and 20th century originated here and were fueled by waves of people moving here. So most people you meet here are part of the problem (in terms of gentrification). So complaining about gentrification is a bit disingenuous for most.
I would say it's a shame that a bunch of anarchists get to push back economic development in what is still one of the poorer neighborhoods. They're a vocal minority and they don't speak for all. They live in Kreuzberg because it used to be a dump before the wall fell and was thus cheap. Basically, this area was heavily damaged in WW II and the West Germans put a lot of cheap housing for immigrants there (these are not the people doing the protesting). After the wall fell, it happened to be conveniently close to the former East German historical center and it became a popular place for young people moving to Berlin to settle and for poor startups to open up cheap offices.
So, most of the protesters moved there because it was cheap and now they feel entitled to live cheaply in the middle of a major world capital that is once again flourishing around them.
This city is not done growing. There is plenty of room to build and expand.
As it's stated by others also, the area was ghetto and the border to East Berlin, separated by the death strip and the wall. So "the unwanted" people located here. (they've been invited by the German government to repair the country after the young working population died in WWII)
Now the wall is gone, the place become hip again, and the people are "unwanted" again. And if you say that the local immigrants (mostly Turkish) doesn't protest, it's basically misinformation and not recognising their efforts to keep the area what it's been for many decades: a cultural hub of the misfits. (immigrants, punks, musicians, artists etc.)
https://www.bizim-kiez.de One of the main initiatives by the local immigrants. (Bizim means "our" in Turkish, and Kiez means "neighbourhood" in German)
Most of the people moved here because it was cheap and the society was welcoming the misfits. But what you say as "economic development" is destroying the culture there and pushing people out of the town. If you create a big startup hub there, all the shops will transform into hipster cafes and restaurants... Which is happening for many years and if you can't see this, open your eyes a bit. How can you expect people who live there for the last 50-60 years to pay the increasing rent, while their income doesn't because they don't work in a Startup? How can you expect a grocery store who sells cheap vegetables to compete with a vegan smoothie store, which sells the exact vegetables for 5 times the price, or even more? And after all the places will be gentrified, the rents will go even more up... then you will start protesting the smoothie prices goes up. (Which you think is happening there, which is not!)
Especially the campus idea - which in London, for example, attracts tens of thousands of techbros and -sises per year - puts more burden on the neighborhood as "just" a regular startup office. Neither google nor the city of Berlin could address any of the concerns, housing costs, general costs of living, traffic situation, just to name a few.
Berlin in general suffers a lot from rising real estate prices and rents - and the area where google wanted to put their campus is even more heavily affected than other parts of the city. This neighborhood - I am living a mere 500 m from that place - suffered from an influx of people probably more than other parts of Berlin. On top of that it turned into one of the hip party areas.
Given that this neighborhood historically houses lower-income families, which won't gain anything from google moving here, but will have to face even faster rising cost of living, and at the same time have no chance to move to other parts of the city - with the housing market being as tight as it is - it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that this move saw local opposition.
I'm happy for a single reason: as long as Berlin startup scene preserves its working culture (that reflects German working culture in general), it will be a better working environment than the Silicon Valley. Big campuses and the presence of foreign corporations in general will have a slow but steady cultural influence on the IT workforce, normalizing the level of individual and systemic exploitation that is acceptable in the USA but not in Germany. Unpaid hours, unclear separation between work time and leisure time, ideological brainwashing, identity politics are all things I wouldn't like to see in the company I work for, but if a majority of my colleagues have worked for American corporations before (because they can afford to offer good salaries), it's more likely for it to happen.
Zalando is enough of a meat-grinder, we don't want more.
Many of them are also poor by choice. Housing prices going up sucks, but when you refuse to participate in the society, you really don't get to complain about it.
Come to think of it, why no campuses in Italy or Spain? Those countries have kinda lowish expenses, good weather and people will pay a premium to be able to move there. Instead everybody is opening in London and Switzerland which are overpriced and kinda meh.
Italy in particular is at risk of defaulting on its debts (which are 131% of GDP compared to 87.7% for the U.K and 64.1% in Germany as of 2017) and the ECB and other lenders are going to be reluctant to lend to them. This is turn puts the banks and all kinds of public services at risk.
I would easily move to a cheap locale even if tech scene there is not abundant. I'd not move to London or Switzerland since you will always be 2nd class citizen compared to e.g. bankers. Which is just non issue in southern europe.
Weak economic is a thing you leverage.
Huh?
Also, those places are way more international than most places in Europe, which makes relocation more attractive. Good luck attracting non-Italians to Italy, or non-Polish to Poland.
I would gladly move to Italy with its amazing culture. I would not move to a place so diverse and full of recent immigrants that it no longer has any specific culture. Am I unique here?
And yes, people relocate to Poland a lot, from ex-USSR countries for example.
I'm pretty sure both London and Switzerland have cultures (OK, UK culture is mostly just drinking but still...).
Large software hubs generally need to pull in people from around the world, not just USSR. And that's the crux of the problem. London, Berlin, Paris, Zurich are all major international cities - it's easier for people from all around the world to settle down there than in places like Warsaw or Perugia.
You are aware that the Soviet era is long ago and the youngest people educated under a Soviet system are mid-30 by now? There is plenty of universities in Poland teaching among other things also Computer Science.
Italy currently has a slow growing economy and needs a large number of younger economic migrants to increase Italy's competitiveness and pay taxes.
But I do agree, we export talent to anywhere, where Spanish professionals, executives or researchers lead the way on many fields.
While I agree with the rest, I wouldn't be too sure about this. I suppose a tech talent doesn't plan on working at the same place their whole lives, so they would take into consideration the availability of tech jobs in the area.
The comparison to the US is not apt because the US has control over its own currency. This is critical for high debt scenarios because it leaves the option of essentially printing money via a program like quantitative easing to always ensure interest rates on fed bonds don't get out of control. This serves the purpose of providing favorable rates for the government as well as inflating away the value of the outstanding debt.
Countries bound to the Euro do not have this option so it usually means growth-killing austerity+taxes is the only way out.
E.g. in Poland software is more Krakow based than Warsaw. Because why would you be wasting on rent, being in a large city where you aren't that important?
They develop for LATAM in other offices
already done: https://www.campus.co/madrid/en
The space in Berlin would have been part of the same setup, not a regular Google office - there's already Google in Munich and Hamburg for that.
See https://www.campus.co/berlin/de and https://www.campus.co/london/en.
It's easy to misunderstand this because of what the term 'campus' is typically associated with. I live in London, and when I say 'I'm going to Google's Campus', I often need to qualify that I'm not going to their main office complex at King's Cross.
There may still be very valid reasons to protest Google in Berlin, but I wonder if the people objecting understood the distinction: that this wasn't a hub for all of Google's employees, but rather a place that would help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources.
The kind of smaller startups that would be home at a Campus style incubator would not be fueling high paid Google salaries and would be a lot less likely to drive up rents e.g..
Another way of looking at that, is "gentrify the vibrant neighbourhood by trucking in techbros to displace the artists". It's not new (1)
I don't necessarily agree with that framing, but it is understandable and coherent, not a misunderstanding
1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18282143
As an aside, I dislike the term "techbro." It's obviously pejorative and I hardly ever see anything kind used to describe men working in the IT/CS sector. Just that and "neckbeard."
To me, it shows haters' level of intellect. And perhaps explains why they feel left out. They're attached to an ideal of what 'art' (additionally, activism[1]) should be. An outdated, 20th century one.
I personally don't like Google. And I understand your framing is hypothetical.
But why is tech framed the opposite of art?
Why is tech equal to techbro?
Yea there are always bad apples. But I wonder what Da Vinci would think about holding art in the opposite category as tech?
I'd argue they're more synonymous than opposite. To me, there's creativity. Both art and tech are creative. Applied creativity pertains to both code or a paint canvas.
Either way, the best, most valuable work to society is often never been done before.
Can anyone name an art piece (or if I'm being generous, an art movement) in the last 15 years that's made the level of impact as Google? Or cryptocurrency?
Ultimately, to me, the 'artists' need to up their game. Big time.
[1] Protest city hall if you feel gentrified. Especially in SF where it's largely illegal to build housing. Also, regarding gentrification, you don't hear the positive stories of immigrant families whose businesses flourish because of increased capital in an area, or those who feel safer, or even those who cashed out and sold their 50k house for 1.2 million. Again you hear a largely misdirected, dated and one-sided argument.
If you look at some of the best, most novel tech and do not see 'art' then yes I will question your intellect.
I could go on.
Also it sucks for "the good guys" - literally - that tech has a bad reputation in that sense and on the other hand this is improving only so slowly.
On the other hand it's of course naive to say that artists are good people per se, that is just not true. This is almost biblical, considering that artists are always poor and thus good. We all need to progress, not only people in tech.
>But why is tech framed the opposite of art?
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the issue. It's not tech vs. art. It's a "here's these people that make a lot of money and end up just being really big consumers" vs people that are the "creatives." The type that give a neighborhood flare.
Consider a programmer who perhaps love the "art" of programming and spends the majority of their time coding/tinkering without compensation (a rare prospect these days, admittedly), versus someone who works at a corporate job, does what they need to do, and goes home. Neither is better than the other, but they will end up creating radically different communities.
>Why is tech equal to techbro?
Because it's just the type of people it attracts these days. Name one neighborhood where a group of IT people came into that neighborhood and made it a creative space. Without fail, it just becomes a giant consumer hub with absurd rent prices. Artists tend to congregate in areas with other artists and areas that have cheap rent. Tech tends to drive up rent, and it certainly isn't an industry that attracts artists not centered around digital design.
>Or cryptocurrency?
The technology that did absolutely nothing, soaked up huge amount of raw resources, so techbros could play a game about who's going to be left holding the bag?
This is exactly why I used the term myopic. You might find it interesting and cool, and that's great! But it hasn't done anything for anyone else outside the tech sphere. In fact it's actually pretty easy to argue it's been a net-negative across the board.
I've lived in these communities of 'creatives'. For years. I know its a lot of drugs, idealism and not a lot of action.
Except for complaining about how wronged they've been by the system. Is that your 'another world is possible'? So maybe I am bitter...
Don't get me wrong, the system is fucked up in many ways. And I agree with your distinction of a grey blandness that permeates the tech culture.
I'm more interested in how all the enlightened 'creatives' can engage with this boring grey techbro community. Because frankly, they're the ones paying for most of their free shit.
>Except for complaining about how wronged they've been by the system.
You're still operating off of stereotypes instead of actually talking about the people that live in these communities and the work they do.
>I'm more interested in how all the enlightened 'creatives' can engage with this boring grey techbro community.
I think the techbro community needs to be the one doing the engaging.
* Develop software on the side for free (art)
* Work on open source software during working hours sponsored by their host company
* Can afford to have families (I notice "vibrant" communities didn't include those with children in them)
> Or cryptocurrency?
Like it or not, Bitcoin is very artistic. Innovative, novel, spurs conversation and strong reactions...
I think it's you who's actually stuck in the 20th century mentality. Cultivating urban hipster hotspots full of "artists" is pure 20th century bohemian chic.
So while I’m not surprised (and very much not sad) that the plans didn’t work out for a host of reasons I really don’t think that the campus would have led to substantial gentrification in that region.
Disclosure: we (still) have our office in the complex.
It's basically the difference to people living off their parent's money (artists) vs. people living off money they make themselves (tech workers).
I live in Berlin and have not followed this topic closely, and only heard about this not being a typical Google office days ago when Google changed plans. The talk on the street over the last months was always centered on Google wanting to create a big office and the residents not wanting any big corporations there.
Very much so. Been to a panel discussion organized by them.
The fear was that the incubator would accelerate gentrification. Doesn't matter whether the pay checks come from Google at the end of the day.
Sort of understood, given that Germans are a nation of life-long renters (as opposed to home-owners). Gentrification is generally great for the owner and terrible for the renter.
Well not entirely.
Gentrification is started and driven by new groups of tenants moving into a neighbourhood. Property owners and investors will only jump onto the bandwagon afterwards. With German restrictions on rent-increases, being one of those original gentrificators (OG) you can lock in an incredibly low rent in a place where rents for new leases skyrocket. As long as you stay in your flat, you're shielded from those rent-hikes.
Growing up, I've had many friends who lived literally in city mansions (4m++ ceiling height, art deco, 6-10 rooms for a family of three) in a fully gentrified area paying a rent lower than I paid for my no-go-area 25sqm studio. All because their parents kept the lease from their 1970s flatshare (pre-gentrification, no-go-area then).
Today even more than 20yrs ago, those OGs often live in an opaque, inaccessible grey housing market: If they want to move (because e.g. the 6 people they share a flat with became 1 spouse and a kid), they first look out for other OGs to do a lease-switch. Which means their rent level stays pre-gentrification forever. If nothing comes across they can still "resell" the lease.
Also, the idea to make everyone a landlord while widely accepted in housing economics to be a good thing, I happen to think is shortsighted and contradicts the principle of "economics of scale".
Housing companies (can be non-profit co-ops as well) often provide much more quality/€ to tenants than the landlord, who owns 1 flat and is always overstrained with the simplest maintnance requests.
Gentrification is great for wealthy landowners. For poor/middle-class homeowners (in the USA, anyway), there is about 100 asterisks attached to that "great". And in various situations, gentrification can hurt poor/middle-class people even if they own a property.
It's a free workspace with a lot of benefits, like wifi, cheap snacks/drinks and meeting other founders for kx.
They main issue to tackle for the Berlin government—from my point of view—is to find the right balance of luxury and affordable housing. People making above average salaries in the growing tech scene should/would pay the higher prices for luxury properties, while the art and counter culture scene would not need to be gentrified if there was a higher supply of affordable housing.
As a Berliner for the past 5 years, I really believe that most the unique vibe of the city comes from the art and left-oriented community here. A lot of us working in the tech world support it, enjoy it and even adapt to their ways (while keeping quiet about how much more money we earn). I really hope that the government makes an effort on affordable housing to keep the balance that makes the city special.
Otto Bock (market leader in prosthetics and wheelchairs) just bought a old brewery for several hundred million € in Prenzlauer Berg [1] with the goal to convert it into a research center. I don't remember any kind of protest or outrage against that.
1: https://www.ottobock.com/en/press/press-releases/ottobock-re...
2. A prosthetics company is a far cry from the omnipresent, omnipotent entity that is Google. Everyone on planet Earth knows what Google is. Many people take issue with their behavior.
2. That's what I said, and I think it's sad that Google won't open the campus there, as I think the area and the city could profit from it.
Also, this is a personal opinion but I think Kreuzberg is far from being a "haven for artists or counterculture". Already now the district has some of the highest rents in Berlin and many flats are being rented out as AirBnBs (often by the same people that complain about companies gentrifying the area). Also, the counterculture that you're describing can be quite snobbish and exclusive as well, at least for people that don't conform to the Berlin "hipster" ideal. I think Berlin really needs more corporations and large enterprises that set up shop there and create jobs, as the startup ecosystem has so far failed to deliver much in terms of well-paying jobs (at least if you don't want to work for Zalando). Just my 2 cents.
As long as the group is following laws and zoning restrictions, there should be nothing preventing them from joining a community
A place can have a unique culture that’s worth maintaining. How to maintain it - I don’t know. But converting everything to MegaCo offices probably isn’t the solution.
The housing market by its nature has a weak flexibility to adapt to new demand. NIMBYism acts like a lever on that inflexibility.
This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious.
From the article: In September activists occupied the building it was to be located in for several hours.
That seems like the activists were preventing them
> This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious.
Saying you do [something I don't like] and I don't want you to do [thing I don't like] in my neighborhood is exactly NIMBY
This poor-benighted-Google thing is gross. These companies are not on anyone's side.
No, that's most definitely not NIMBY. NIMBY means you support something when it's farther away but oppose it happening close to you. It stands for "not in my backyard", not "not in any backyard".
If I had to guess, a lot of those protestors probably don't care if Google ever opens an office anywhere--but, not being billion-dollar panopticons-as-a-service, they are constrained to act locally rather than globally.
Not really. It's sort of like RMS with open-source hardware: yes there are a handful of modern computers that can be made to work without binary blobs, but it's a lot of trouble and only a few people will actually do that out of principle. It's practically requred to run proprietary binary blobs. Similarly, Bing, Duckduckgo, and OpenStreetMap exist, but Google services are practically required for modern daily life.
For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.
That's a great example, thanks for mentioning it. I'll probably use it from now on.
And what does having a stock ticker matter presumably you took advantage of the German miracle and the rise of VW and others.
So its all right for Germany to benefit from freetrade but not allow freedom of movement - that is what the Brexit and UKip want.
So comrade when did you start colluding with the boss class
It's also the same line of thinking behind Trump's wall and hostility to immigration in general: "people I don't like should stay out."
I'm not really sure what point you're getting at. Berlin is prized by its inhabitants for its unique culture - a modern, western city that for nearly 20 years was dominated by artistic culture. It has nothing to do with the "original inhabitants vs. the new transplants" and very little to do with NIMBYism from property owners, especially considering the the overwhelming majority of Germans rent, not own.
Following your logic, that it shouldn’t matter where new tenants come from - isn’t that what anti-gentrification activism effectively is about? Prohibiting new tenants to move in?
You repeatedly write that this happens because of some snowflakes' NIMBYism. Which is definitely not.
If we were talking about any other city in the world, whatever you're saying would make sense... because from the outside it looks like "oh the people who moved to city center doesn't want anybody else to move there".
That's not the case with Berlin.
Maybe you missed the topic recently but there was WWII and then East Germany, with Berlin Wall, death strip in between and East German State Police Stasi... and people who wants to escape from East.
Of course all of these happened in the city center, because the wall separated the city from the middle of it, and the areas once city center, become the dangerous ghettos.
The canals in Kreuzberg has become grave for some immigrant (and German alike) children, because it belonged to the East. If any child accidentally falls in the waters and scream for help nobody could save them. Because anyone who would enter the canals would be shot by East German police. And they did. And people couldn't save their kids from the waters, after these incidents happened. This is just one of the disadvantages of living next to a death strip, in the epicentre of the nuclear cold war.
Because of these dangerous properties, the place was cheap. And people in more "hip" areas didn't wanted to rent their flats to young people, artists, punks etc. So these people find home in Kreuzberg.
But yeah, feel free to forget about these context and try to blindly invalidate peoples experiences.
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I gave the same example in another comment: There are many shops in Kreuzberg, which are located there for let's say 50-60 years. There are grocery stores, bakeries, markets, shoe repair shops, cheap quality restaurants, local bookstores etc.
But these people has to go now, because there is better buyer, who can afford the prices that these people can not. Or they have to increase their prices too. You were buying a croissant for 0,40€... now it's 4€. But hey, you can like our instagram page!
Now you're accusing these people of b+ching about the development, and you think they're greedy and they get what they wanted, now they're protesting so others can not get what they have?
Or do they want to live in the area, where they've been living for the last 60 years, and experienced many many disadvantages of the area?
The area was ghetto, so unwanted people located there. Now the area is hip again (after 100 years), and the people who lives there is unwanted again.
I want my city to be better and i want workers to do this. -Immigrants? Not in my backyard.
I want my city to be culturally rich and i want to be proud of the art that created in my city. -Punks? Unemployed artists? Not in my backyard.
Because of this, these people located in Kreuzberg... many many years ago, before the Wall even came down.
Now the wall came down and the same people say:
I want to have a nice and cheap(er than my area) office next to Landwehrkanal in Kreuzberg. -Immigrants and artists next to my office? Not in my backyard.
After the selection had occurred, the procurement machine had been tasked and at that point it takes a lot of resistance to stop that machinery.
[1] For some real estate group in Google determining office locations.
but i also wonder: does Google consider itself to be one of the "cool kids?" i mean, when it tries to create a new campus like this, does Google think it will be welcomed with open arms?
For instance, if I google image search for "women in bikinis" I get hundreds of thousands of women in bikinis, but not the broader narrative of their lives and personalities. It is completely decontextualized and drops all the other dimensions of the context in which these photos were taken.
In the same way, Google employees lack context because everything is a component, they moved from somewhere else and have been assimilated into the great corporate standardization. They crave things with context, but when they try and coexist with it, their enormous economic superiority draws the interest of the whole world to extract from that environment that which promotes their ability to decontextualize and conform the world around them and the decontextualization whirlwind grows around them.
I'm sure most local residents mostly care about rent prices going up in that area, though, rather than a specific anti-Google sentiment. They probably don't want it to be gentrified as another district, similar to what happened/is happening to Prenzlauer Berg.
Somehow, the same activists with dubious motivations don't mind domestic entities like infamous credit rating agency or the debt collection agency collecting the public media fee. The public media debt collection agency has the most complete database of who lives where and with whom in the whole country, probably the most comprehensive database on domestic households that exists in the world, certainly in the EU. What about it, fraudulent privacy zealots?
[citation needed]. The examples you mention are widely disliked and fought too. + of course conflating privacy activists and those protesting Google here likely is not very accurate.
City (Hamilton) is fairly well developed with a functioning International Airport and since it was initially built around manufacturing, its prestige within Canada has suffered somewhat in last 20-25 years. If firms like Google would be so kind to invest there, the locals and the children of locals and other Canadians would welcome them with open arms.