| > People in the suburbs of Silicon Valley don't use iPhones? Agreed, I thought Cupertino was a silly example. It's actually funny that you say "suburbs of Silicon Valley," because the entire valley is suburban. Where's the urban area that Apple is supposed to move to? Downtown San Jose? If anything "the communities their products were supposed to impact" (Which are what by the way? Rich people?) are concentrated more heavily in Cupertino than anywhere else in the valley.* Aside from that, I'm sure Apple is enjoying the position that comes with literally owning half a city. Imagine getting any other city that obsessed with property values and traffic to approve the new campus. *Downtown San Jose's office spaces are criminally underoccupied, but I imagine there's not nearly enough vacancies to fill the needs of a giant like Apple. > The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake. The article is massively oversimplifying, but it's not wrong. The mid 1900s saw southern, rural blacks move into cities and urban whites move into suburbs. You could write a book about the relationship between those two trends (and I'm sure many have) and I don't doubt that it played a part in corporations resettling as well, whether they had race in mind or not. |
The amusing thing is that in my tech suburb, we have a significantly higher population of non-whites because of the tech industry (employing many Asians). Moving a tech company to the suburbs actually increases their diversity.