LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google, Netflix

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-amazon-netflix-land-grab-20190616-story.html

by guyhance • 7 years ago

97 81 7 years ago

lacker3• 7 years ago

This article is written awkwardly enough that it's hard to tell what the facts are.

Companies including Google, Amazon and Netflix have agreed to rent entire buildings before construction has even begun.... Content creators, as such businesses are known, have rented more than 4 million square feet of Los Angeles County office space in the last three years, real estate brokerage CBRE said.

Google is not typically known as a "content creator" business. What sort of companies count towards this 4 million square feet figure?

Later the article refers to "FAANG-type tenants". FAANG is an acronym referring to 5 specific companies. What is a "FAANG-type tenant"? One of those five companies? Any tech company?

It also isn't clear from this article whether this 4 million square feet is a lot. I poked around and from https://www.reonomy.com/properties/commercial-real-estate/us... it looks like about 250 million square feet of commercial real estate changes hands in LA every year. So this tech effect is almost 2% of the real estate market.

rolltiide2• 7 years ago

Later the article refers to "FAANG-type tenants". FAANG is an acronym referring to 5 specific companies. What is a "FAANG-type tenant"? One of those five companies? Any tech company?

obviously any of those large high growth innovative tech companies of the content-creating variety

partially sarcasm. it should be further defined

a_imho• 7 years ago

Bit off tangent but how is Netflix similar to the rest of the acronym?

LAMike• 7 years ago

YouTube has a space in LA already, it's pretty huge. Maybe they're expanding it

seanmcdirmid2• 7 years ago

West side pavilion is going to supersede the Venice/Sahara Monica R&D office I’ve heard, not sure if YouTube would, though it isn’t that far from their Venice beach office already.

JMTQp8lwXL• 7 years ago

They probably mean YouTube, which is part of Google.

azernik• 7 years ago

We've been spoiled by Bay Area news sites that actually know what they're talking about when it comes to software companies.

benologist• 7 years ago

It might be because these companies are investing in movies, tv shows and games because movies, tv shows and games can bring home those sweet, disproportionate billion dollar paydays.

notatoad• 7 years ago

I think FAANG-type is defined a bit further down, he's talking about companies that have enough power and/or hype that they drive real estate demand in their surrounding areas.

“The Netflix, Google and Amazons of the world are not going to their service providers,” he said. “Their service providers are going to them.”

It all seems pretty meaningless though. This is just a PR piece for CBRE, not any sort of journalism.

choonway• 7 years ago

You can add Boeing and Seattle to that list.

Lammy• 7 years ago

I take "FAANG-type tenants" to mean "Companies that aspire to FAANG levels of prestige" in an implicitly negative way, as in companies that are chasing the visible adornments of very successful companies such as open offices, micro kitchens, interns trying and failing to stay upright on Hoverboards, etc, instead of the things that actually made those companies successful. FAANG offices all have a particular "look" and that look is currently very trendy.

Animats2• 7 years ago

Google is not typically known as a "content creator" business.

Google is trying to get into gaming.[1][2][3] More from the infrastructure/back end side than the user-facing side, but they at least produce some demo games to show off the infrastructure.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/gaming/

[2] https://improbable.io/blog/google-partnership-pr

[3] https://developers.google.com/games/

Dylan168072• 7 years ago

A couple demo games for their gaming infrastructure ambitions are basically irrelevant. You can make a demo game with 100 man-hours.

ikeyany• 7 years ago

YouTube's studios are in LA. I imagine Netflix and Amazon have studios there as well.

cjhanks• 7 years ago

Random guess, but I would assume the majority is Amazon. They are purchasing land in urban centers and repurposing them as shipping hubs. Both to expand their Network, and to improve their last mile delivery. The others afaik are simply buying office space in urban areas.

zyx321• 7 years ago

Since when are these companies "content creators"? They operate platforms such as Twitch and YouTube that the content creators use, but you wouldn't call Wal-Mart an "electronics manufacturer".

mrosett• 7 years ago

The title of this post (at time of commenting) is exceptionally misleading. A more accurate one is "Landlords rip out escalators and walls to attract tenants like Google and Netflix", which is the one from the original article.

sctb2• 7 years ago

Thanks, we've updated it from the submitted “Google and Netflix Turning Real Estate Market in LA into the Bay Area” to the original (edited for length).

jfengel• 7 years ago

It does sound like the "LA" part of the original title is kind of important, though. It's implicit in the source (latimes.com), but the architectural details are only part of the story. The real point of the story, as I see it, is that these architectural changes are happening in Los Angeles. That's a new development in the type of business that LA caters to: it motivates architectural changes, and will motivate all kinds of other changes as the people actually occupy those buildings.

awinder• 7 years ago

  “The idea of getting on 
  escalators like you did in the 
  1950s and ’60s is not
  happening,” said executive Bert 
  Dezzutti of Brookfield Office 
  Properties. “People desire to 
  move around and be untethered.
  You’re not using lazy old 
  escalators anymore.”

This can’t seriously be a thing right, this is the story of 1 crazy man and his vendetta against escalators and not an entire community gone mad...

lozenge• 7 years ago

Who wants an escalator in an office building with more than two floors? They are literally designed to make it take longer to reach your destination than an elevator.

jrockway• 7 years ago

I worked at Google NYC for 6 years. It's a 16 story building that was designed to be a freight transfer terminal.

The elevators were very very slow. It was often significantly faster to walk up 10 flights of stairs than to wait. I would have killed for an escalator.

(In all fairness to the facilities team, they built new banks of elevators on a very regular basis. Still slow, depending on which floor you wanted to go to. But I'm sure it's much better now.)

slang8002• 7 years ago

It's a tradeoff between latency and throughput... Also, there are some small advantages for people who are claustrophobic, and in cases when the power goes down.

greglindahl• 7 years ago

Tons of hotels have escalators serving the bottom floors (meeting rooms, restaurants) combined with elevators (guest rooms).

In tall office buildings with many tenants, it's not that unusual for companies with multiple adjacent floors to have stairs or escalators, in order to avoid waiting for an elevator.

mehrdadn2• 7 years ago

You must've never seen slow elevators!

mprev• 7 years ago

They are literally designed to make it take longer to reach your destination than an elevator.

What makes you say that? An escalator is about delivering a constant flow of people between two fixed floors. An elevator delivers bursts of people between a choice of floors.

Which one is faster depends on availability and the journey you want to make.

slang8002• 7 years ago

Or one real estate observing the alien culture of a generation he has no connection to, and making wild assumptions to fill in the gaps.

rsynnott2• 7 years ago

I mean, I think it’s more just that office buildings don’t normally have escalators.

mc32• 7 years ago

Obviously they disagree with luxury developments in places all over the world which make liberal use of escalators in their buildings.

jayd16• 7 years ago

This article is pretty hilarious. Its mostly just quotes from someone hawking their wares so any decision they made will be trumpeted (by them) as the next big thing.

That said, LA construction is only a few stories (2-3) high and turning escalators into stairs is an easy way to save cost and make a place feel a bit bigger. You can join the up and down into one large stair and you can often put them outside too.

dqpb• 7 years ago

I don't know, if the alternative is elevators, that can quickly become a bottleneck shit show.

crazygringo2• 7 years ago

One perhaps surprising trend is the excommunication of escalators, which were long considered luxurious amenities. “The idea of getting on escalators like you did in the 1950s and ’60s is not happening,” said executive Bert Dezzutti of Brookfield Office Properties. “People desire to move around and be untethered. You’re not using lazy old escalators anymore.”

I never though about it before but that actually is a fascinating cultural shift.

White-collar workers today spend so much time sitting, and are so conscious of health and wanting to be active, that escalators aren't a luxury -- they're the antithesis of a healthy lifestyle.

If buildings necessarily express the values of the people in them, well values have changed. It's the age of Fitbit and walking around dense city centers and walking up stairs -- not being sedentary and driving and just standing on an escalator.

(While elevators are still mandated for disabilities, which escalators were never good for anyways.)

steve19• 7 years ago

I will belive that when I see workers walking up stairs, not just the type A's looking at their Apple Watch step counter, instead of escalators ;)

I think its mostly landlords wanting to look like office buildings not retail space.

YouTube is quite proud of the employee-only slide they have between two floors (might be gone, haven't visited in a couple of years)

crazygringo2• 7 years ago

I think, like many fitness things, it's actually as much of a discipline thing as anything else.

When we're confronted with an escalator next to stairs, we take the escalator out of laziness, even though we wish we didn't.

But we'd actually prefer there not to be an escalator at all, so we'd have to walk.

Same thing as when you choose not to keep snacks at your desk because you know you'll eat them.

We prefer an environment that nudges us in the right direction, precisely because we don't always have the discipline we wish we had.

_bxg1• 7 years ago

Yeah. To paint in broad strokes, the big cultural shifts from Boomers to Millennials seem to center around Boomers defining success and luxury very traditionally: maximizing ownership and indulgence, minimizing effort. Millennials have seen how unhealthy and wasteful those lifestyle choices are, and have largely freed themselves from the social pressures that drove them.

Of course, all is relative. Millennials have invented their own type of shallow success-signaling (social media), excessive wealth signaling (focused on experiences - trips, food, etc. - instead of possessions), and avoidance of effort (delivery services and other gig-economy apps). Society changes, but people don't really change.

kortilla2• 7 years ago

Delivery services and trips are indulgence and minimizing effort. The only noticeable difference between the two is the reduced focus on ownership, but that’s more likely related to the fact that millennials got screwed by the Great Recession more than them being oh so woke.

caymanjim• 7 years ago

This anti-escalator movement sounds like complete nonsense to me. First of all, office buildings almost never have escalators. They never did, and they never will. When a company buys an old mall or movie theatre or something else that had an escalator, it doesn't surprise me that they might gut them and not replace them, but it's not because this generation doesn't want escalators. They didn't build escalators in offices in the 50s and 60s either. This is just retail space undergoing renovation.

kevin_thibedeau• 7 years ago

They're an expensive maintenance chore. A broken down escalator drags down the whole property

rsynnott2• 7 years ago

I don’t think I’ve ever been in an office building with escalators. I think this is more just a result of them taking a shopping center, which usually has escalators, and turning it into an office, which doesn’t. They’re not really a practical way to get around; unless you have a rigid “stand to one side” rule (as on the London Underground) they’re slower than stairs.

pessimizer• 7 years ago

White-collar workers today spend so much time sitting

It would take a lot to convince me that white-collar workers of the past spent less time sitting.

kortilla2• 7 years ago

It's the age of Fitbit and walking around dense city centers

What? Most people still don’t live in dense urban city centers. Look at LA and the Bay Area. Both are still dominated by driving.

neonate• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/dieqU

thanatos_dem• 7 years ago

Thanks for this. Drives me crazy that LA Times hard blocks all website access if you’re in incognito mode

jdsully• 7 years ago

Interesting that escalators are considered passé now. Bloomberg was incredibly proud of their curved escalators and pointed them out repeatedly.

logfromblammo• 7 years ago

~From playing Dwarf Fortress, I learned that ramps are better at reducing pathing collisions than stairs. If these buildings take out their escalators and put in stairs or elevators instead, they might not see visible congestion, but their framerate will drop into the basement.~

But seriously, this is mainly about shopping mall conversions. I have only ever worked in a partially-converted shopping mall for a few months, but I thought it was great office space compared to floors in purpose-built office buildings, mainly because it still partially functioned as a mall. There was a sandwich restaurant, a movie theater, and a motor vehicles branch, and it had a public transit bus stop. The biggest problem was a lack of windows and natural light. I would argue that keeping the gross features of the interior space intact--such as the escalators--would make a better office space, as the mall was already designed to be attractive to visitors and move them around efficiently.

Besides that, the conference rooms have to be named after some of the former mall tenants. That's an unbreakable rule.

reaperducer• 7 years ago

LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google, Netflix

That's nothing. In Chicago, a real estate developer transformed a 10-story-tall refrigerator into offices for Google.

https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2013/06/17/meatpacking-d...

LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google, Netflix

Related Stories