We can complain about the skyrocketing prices of New York and San Franciso all we want, but nothing is going to change unless someone builds a new city that finally makes some sense. Oh wait, Google is doing just that.
GOOGLE TO BUILD THE CITY OF THE FUTURE
After dropping some clues at a recent event, Google’s parent company Alphabet may be building its own city-sized laboratory. The rumored Sidewalk Labs apparently has 100 urban experts who are working on the plan, aptly named Project Sidewalk. In a few weeks, CEO Dan Doctoroff will be showing the idea for the city to Alphabet CEO Larry Page. Further rumors state that Sidewalk Labs won’t just be building the place for their personal ventures. It may even encompass some of Alphabet’s experiments like Google Fiber and self-driving car project.
WILL NEW CITY TAKE OVER SAN FRANCISCO?
The biggest decision Google has about building their techno-utopia is where to put it. One logical place would be to put in San Francisco since that’s where the company is based for the most part. Retrofitting an existing city is one of the plans Alphabet has for construction but is it really possible to retrofit San Francisco? Perhaps they’d be better off building one from scratch. Whatever they decided, it needs to accommodate hundreds of thousands of people. Alphabet has already taken over former places like an old Air Force base to make their testing facility for autonomous cars. They also have MCity, the fake city in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Who could forget CITE , the self-contain city being built in New Mexico? Also, Google’s new HQ is pretty much a city in itself. With all the influence the company has, taking over San Francisco actually doesn’t seem to weird. What about the Big Apple?
NEW YORK TO COMPETE WITH SILICON VALLEY
Despite the outrageous prices of New York, the city is one of the best places to start a tech company. Believe it or not, New York is in the midst of a boom. Housing certainly isn’t cheap, but it’s much more affordable than San Francisco. In addition, New York is adding jobs and growing wages faster than you can say Golden Gate Bridge. Their share in the tech industry is growing slowly, but surely. They diversity is greater than San Francisco and let’s face it, in terms of energy, New York can’t be beat. Perhaps we’ll see Alphabet build their new universe right there in the Big Apple.
