They're still there, at the least last time I ventured down Market.
I would be genuinely interested to find out how many Twitter employees actually lived around the Tenderloin, versus the Mission (which has gentrified dramatically more than mid-Market).
They're doing something very similar here in Seattle. I don't know the vacancy rate, but they're moving into the Century Square building, which is at 3rd and Pike, which as any Seattleite knows, is one of the shadier blocks downtown, and has been resistant to being cleaned up.
I used to live in Seattle and heard people talk similarly about 3rd and Pike, and I didn't get it. Used to pass by there all the time to get to the post office on Union St. Never once felt unsafe. It is a lot like the other blocks in the area. Largely unremarkable. (Though I do recall hearing about a random shooting there once.)
In contrast, I find it much easier to have an unpleasant experience on 6th St. in SF, a place where I've actually been physically threatened with violence. I moved to SF thinking it was pretty culturally similar to Seattle, but there was definitely a "getting used to more visible crime" adjustment period for me. Seattle's CBD is pretty much Disneyland by comparison. :-)
It's all relative. Seattle is pretty much pleasantville compared to other large cities. He'll, I grew up in South Seattle and don't even consider that unsafe.
Mid-Market makes that intersection look like a children's playground. It's not even remotely unsafe -- and I've walked through there many times, day and night.
To be honest, there really isn't a comparable area in downtown Seattle. Perhaps down by the Stadiums or over by Chinatown, but even that is pretty tame by comparison.
I honestly can't say that the Tenderloin is really coming around that much. I don't live in the city anymore, so maybe it has changed since I left, but I honestly would have never guessed Twitter worked in that building if I hadn't known so myself. The area is still the same: dirty, lots of homeless, run-down establishments, etc. Now there is just new construction going on.
I think we are going to have to wait a year or two until these towers are finished before we know how receptive the tech workers will be to living in such an area, and whether or not their presence will really spark gentrification in an area that has resisted it thus far.
Nothing has changed, people still go to bars on Folsom, not off Market. There are still seedy ass looking people hanging around at night who may or may not jump you while you wait for your MUNI bus that comes every 45 minutes.
Not really, Zendesk has being there since Aug 2011 and the block between 6th and 5th is way better. I walk this block everyday and it changed, for good.
Twitter is between 9th and 10th street, so comparing the changes between 5th/6th isn't really describing what's happening around Twitter. The whole article talks about some transformation that hasn't happened yet. 5th/6th isn't really that safe anyways. Maybe during the day and when work gets out around 5-6PM, but I wouldn't recommend staying out there after 8PM
This article is probably a little too rosy, but Market has come a long way. When we moved Meldium from Seattle to San Francisco, we decided to set up our HQ between 6th and 7th right at the Civic Center and I've been very happy with the decision (and we're not even eligible for the tax break). We have offices in an historic and newly renovated building with a great view of the city at a very reasonable monthly rent. There are excellent lunch and happy hour options in SOMA and the Tenderloin, good (for SF at least :-)) coffee at Machine and Sightglass, and we have a transit-friendly location for our employees in SF and the East Bay, since we're right on top of Muni and BART stations. Come join us!
So glad the city did away with the stock option tax threat. That was added by some dumb schmucks in the lull between the dot-com boom and this one, when nobody was paying attention or doing new startups. No startup in their right mind would choose a city that taxes stock options.
The reporting on this is rather poor. It characterizes this as an additional "cost" or "loss" to the city, e.g. "Twitter tax break to cost far more than estimates".[1]
But what's missing from the reports is that this component, the stock option tax, is relatively new (2004) and has never been enforced. It's not that the city is losing something they had. They never had it. It was a bad idea that was slipped in during a down cycle when nobody understood or cared about the implications.
I think Zynga calculated that they would end up paying more in local taxes than they pay for their building itself.
OTOH it seems like a dumb move by the city to offer these tax breaks to twitter in the first place. Were they really going to up and move to mountain view? To save on payroll tax? I'm not sure what the precedence for something like that happening is, but it seems highly unlikely.
Why would a company pay tens of millions to the government when they can either report that same money as profit or invest it back into their company? A company like Twitter would not lose talent by having their headquarters in one of the suburbs in the peninsula (palo alto, redwood city, mountain view). Google, Facebook, Oracle would all be precedence for that case being that they're all located in the peninsula and not San Francisco.
The precedence is very real, and it's gone on for years. Companies will up and relocate when it makes fiscal sense.
Boeing, for example, was headquartered in Seattle for decades -- very established, entrenched locally, big production plants nearby. Chicago came along and offered serious tax breaks if they would relo HQ. This isn't down the road -- it's Seattle to Chicago, involving something like 1000 employees and their families. Boeing took the deal and gained millions in tax concessions.
At the time, Twitter did an evaluation of payroll & stock option taxes and determined that it would be worth a lot of money to everyone (it's not just the company, it's the people) if they have a shop outside SF geographic boundaries. Pick up and move down the street? Yeah, easy choice.
They don't have to "up and move" all at once; they could easily have just capped their SF headcount and expanded offices in other cities. Then the CEO starts spending more and more time in one of those "remote" offices, then they declare that desk to be their primary location, and before you know it, the company's de facto HQ is somewhere else.
You're talking about the payroll tax holiday. You may be right about that, if we're only discussing a small tax on paychecks.
But I'm talking about the options tax provision specifically. If this were enforced, successful startups would be faced with a MASSIVE, GIGANTIC tax bill. It's theoretical; no city has actually taxed stock options before (that I know of). So whatever your impression of local city tax is, throw it out. This would literally tax the rise in value of a company, so, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.. in local city tax.
Yes, every single startup would move out of San Francisco if the city actually taxed stock options.
Tax breaks are considered government spending. Spending money and giving tax breaks has the same effect on the books, the government has larger deficits/smaller surplus, and the goal is the same: to support or encourage behaviour which benefits the government or its citizenry.
That is not some universal law. It is a convention that assumes a certain scenario, namely where the government has been receiving a certain amount of tax revenue which they will now lose by giving a break.
In a scenario where a crazy new tax was passed that was never enforced, then noticed a few years later and abolished because enforcing it would blow up an entire local industry, it is a stretch to categorizing it as "spending". That'd be like writing a note you're owed $1B, tucking it in a drawer, and then when it's ripped up a few years later saying you just "spent" a billion dollars. The city never had the tax revenue to begin with.
The changes are generational, and to some extent preceded Twitter. If you went back 10 years, even mid-day, there were visibly more angry young men standing around. You didn't have the theater presence that is building up now, or the pedestrian traffic coming from the direction of 5th - which used to mark a clear boundary for mid-Market, but isn't nearly as much so now, as the retail presence has made visible changes more recently, and the traffic patterns have changed with it.
The inner parts of the TL aren't likely to change soon - as with the Mission and SOMA areas, the old population is going to stick around even as the neighborhood is changing around them. The gentrification of those other neighborhoods had its genesis in the dot-com era, and some 15+ years on, it's still nowhere near complete.
They may have improved the geographical area but not the people who lived there. Twitter and other tech companies moving into "seedy neighbourhoods" just moved people who need help and compassion to another part of the city.
WeWork Golden Gate in this neighbourhood is an amazing co-working building, with 6 floors they're building out and affordable prices. With everything you'd expect from coworking (beer on tap, fast wifi, big conference rooms, etc) with private offices. We're based in there in Central Market and couldn't recommend it more.
As someone who's recently been back on the market for office space, I find it enlightening as to how much of the revenue and/or funding for a company has to go for rents in SF. $58/SF is massive. Imagine a small startup that needs 1k SQFT, pre-revenue paying nearly $5k a month on rent. Not to mention, that's probably pre-triple-net load...
I was balking at the $30/SF Class-A rents in my city, and even grumbling that perfect space for us was running $18/ft, because I had to get larger units (2500 SQFT+). Puts it all in perspective =)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 79.7 ms ] threadAlso, the only reason are the HUGE tax cuts the companies get:
... a city tax incentive that largely exempts them from city payroll taxes if they relocate to the Mid-Market ...
http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2011/03/16/midmarket_payroll_t...
I would be genuinely interested to find out how many Twitter employees actually lived around the Tenderloin, versus the Mission (which has gentrified dramatically more than mid-Market).
Street View of the building: https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=century+square&data=!...
In contrast, I find it much easier to have an unpleasant experience on 6th St. in SF, a place where I've actually been physically threatened with violence. I moved to SF thinking it was pretty culturally similar to Seattle, but there was definitely a "getting used to more visible crime" adjustment period for me. Seattle's CBD is pretty much Disneyland by comparison. :-)
To be honest, there really isn't a comparable area in downtown Seattle. Perhaps down by the Stadiums or over by Chinatown, but even that is pretty tame by comparison.
I think we are going to have to wait a year or two until these towers are finished before we know how receptive the tech workers will be to living in such an area, and whether or not their presence will really spark gentrification in an area that has resisted it thus far.
The reporting on this is rather poor. It characterizes this as an additional "cost" or "loss" to the city, e.g. "Twitter tax break to cost far more than estimates".[1]
But what's missing from the reports is that this component, the stock option tax, is relatively new (2004) and has never been enforced. It's not that the city is losing something they had. They never had it. It was a bad idea that was slipped in during a down cycle when nobody understood or cared about the implications.
I think Zynga calculated that they would end up paying more in local taxes than they pay for their building itself.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/Twitt...
Why would a company pay tens of millions to the government when they can either report that same money as profit or invest it back into their company? A company like Twitter would not lose talent by having their headquarters in one of the suburbs in the peninsula (palo alto, redwood city, mountain view). Google, Facebook, Oracle would all be precedence for that case being that they're all located in the peninsula and not San Francisco.
Boeing, for example, was headquartered in Seattle for decades -- very established, entrenched locally, big production plants nearby. Chicago came along and offered serious tax breaks if they would relo HQ. This isn't down the road -- it's Seattle to Chicago, involving something like 1000 employees and their families. Boeing took the deal and gained millions in tax concessions.
At the time, Twitter did an evaluation of payroll & stock option taxes and determined that it would be worth a lot of money to everyone (it's not just the company, it's the people) if they have a shop outside SF geographic boundaries. Pick up and move down the street? Yeah, easy choice.
But I'm talking about the options tax provision specifically. If this were enforced, successful startups would be faced with a MASSIVE, GIGANTIC tax bill. It's theoretical; no city has actually taxed stock options before (that I know of). So whatever your impression of local city tax is, throw it out. This would literally tax the rise in value of a company, so, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.. in local city tax.
Yes, every single startup would move out of San Francisco if the city actually taxed stock options.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_expenditure#The_politics_of...
In a scenario where a crazy new tax was passed that was never enforced, then noticed a few years later and abolished because enforcing it would blow up an entire local industry, it is a stretch to categorizing it as "spending". That'd be like writing a note you're owed $1B, tucking it in a drawer, and then when it's ripped up a few years later saying you just "spent" a billion dollars. The city never had the tax revenue to begin with.
[1] - http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/arise-tender...
The inner parts of the TL aren't likely to change soon - as with the Mission and SOMA areas, the old population is going to stick around even as the neighborhood is changing around them. The gentrification of those other neighborhoods had its genesis in the dot-com era, and some 15+ years on, it's still nowhere near complete.
I was balking at the $30/SF Class-A rents in my city, and even grumbling that perfect space for us was running $18/ft, because I had to get larger units (2500 SQFT+). Puts it all in perspective =)