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Meta (Facebook) Leases All Office Space in Austin's Tallest

Wendell Cox — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 19:13:58 -0500

The Austin Business Journal reports that Meta (former Facebook) has leased all 33 office floors of the under construction Sixth and Guadeloupe Tower, which is due to open in 2023. The building will be Austin’s tallest building, at 66 floors and a height of 873 feet and is located downtown.

This will make the building the fifth tallest in Texas, behind the Houston’s JP Morgan Chase Tower (former Texas Commerce Bank), the Wells Fargo Plaza, and the Williams Tower, the tallest building in the United States outside a central business district (located in the Houston Galleria). One downtown Dallas building is also taller, the Bank of America Tower, which ranks third in the state, following Wells Fargo Plaza.

The building is mixed use and will have 349 residential units. It will be interesting to see how many Facebook employees will be able to afford living in the building, which would eliminate physical commuting almost as much as remote work.

Downtown Austin is developing rapidly and now is indicated by Cushman and Wakefield to have about 13 million square feet of office space (before Sixth and Guadeloupe), about equal to Cincinnati’s strong central business district. In this regard, Austin is following earlier models of dense downtown development in Calgary and Charlotte.

Downtown Austin is experiencing a building boom, which as of 2022 will have opened 15 buildings 400 feet high or more since 2010, when there were only four. In addition to the Sixth and Guadeloupe Tower, there are a number of new residential buildings planned for the Rainey Street District, adjacent on the east to downtown.

Austin was the fastest growing among the 56 major metropolitan areas (more than 1,000,000 population) in each of the last two decades. From 2010 to 2020, Austin added 567,000 residents, a 33% increase. Austin attracted 337,000 net domestic migrants between 2010 and 2020. This is more than all major metropolitan areas except for Dallas-Fort Worth, which is three times as large, and Phoenix, which is twice as large. Most of the new Austin residents settled in the suburban counties, which accounted for about two-thirds of the metropolitan area’s net domestic migration.

For decades, Austin has been playing a larger information technology role. Meta lease, and the new downtown “Google Tower” (Block 185) add significantly to this development.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Feudal Future Podcast — How COVID is Shifting Corporate Location Strategy with Jay Garner

Charlie Stephens — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 12:23:28 -0400

On today's episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky welcome Jay Garner. Jay is CEO of Garner Economics as well as the Chair of the Site Selectors Guild. This episode explores the topic of site selection and how companies are choosing sites for their expansions. The group talks about how these types of decisions have been affected by the pandemic. Jay explains to listeners that the Site Selectors Guild are peer-selected location advisors that help facilitate location decisions of companies all over the world.

Joel asks Jay how site selection has changed during the pandemic. Jay explains that there was a pivot - He says, “...what we did pre-pandemic and what companies seem to be doing differently, with respect to different industry sectors - is changing significantly.” Jay explains information found in a survey or their membership that happened in April of 2020. About 49% of corporations surveyed said they were not continuing projects at that time. In June 2020, when the membership was surveyed again, there was an increase of global activity with companies moving forward with their projects. Another survey will be done in September.

Marshall talks about how he and Joel have researched future housing trends. He describes the trend of people moving out of expensive, big cities to more affordable and smaller cities. Marshall asks if Jay has seen a trend in projects in these areas. Jay explains that these were actually trends before the pandemic! Other than the price, another reason for this is that millennials are getting to the age where they want more space. He also says that public safety is very important to people.

The group talks about how remote work is affecting large companies. Jay talks specifically about remote work and productivity, cost, and how it is affecting employees’ creativity. Teamwork and creativity could be negatively affected by remote work. Jay says that long term, he thinks we will get back to working socially (depending on the status of therapeutics and a vaccine). The group talks about the potential changes in people after the pandemic.

Jay explains that most of his comments are his opinions, not necessarily that of the Site Selectors Guild.

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Feudal Future Podcast — Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All with Mike Shellenberger

Charlie Stephens — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 18:52:55 -0400

In this episode of the Feudal Future podcast, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky interview Mike Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never. Many of Mike’s views overlap with those of Joel and Marshall, and his role as an influential writer of social critique make him an insightful contributor to this conversation about issues in California, the media, and beyond.

The first topic of the conversation is Mike’s work, which will soon include a book dealing with the homeless crisis in San Francisco. This segues into broader conversation about problems in the social and political fabric of California, and Mike comments on the need to understand values and a vision for California, ways in which such things as environmentalism and housing are mishandled, the objectionable morality of how mental illness and drug addiction are managed in the state, and his vision of the sort of governor and political revolution necessary to effect the change California requires.

Next, the group turns to the subject of the mainstream media, which attempts to control popular thought and at times operates dishonestly. Mike explains his experiences with censorship, which testify to regulation of speech and information in ways that uphold political agendas at the expense of truth. Being censored is a trying experience, but Mike has noticed that his persistence in truth-telling has actually bolstered his following. Mike and his hosts consider dealing with bullies, the project of “de-civilization,” and Maoist ideology in the US.

The ideology behind the ruling social and political trends in the US is pushed by the oligarchs of the day. The group considers the rationale behind this phenomenon, the reality of an “apocalyptic mindset,” the need for love to combat hate, and the value of an ad absurdum suggestion to force people to face reality. Finally, Joel and Marshall ask Mike about what he imagines the beginning of a Biden presidential administration to look like. His answer, put simply? Chaos. But a chaos presenting hope and opportunity.