What is funny is I complain about all the "woke" companies like Tesla, Facebarf, Oracle, Crapple and Giggle being so dominated by Trump like CEOs (demanding, hard to work for, etc.) that can't trust their top level managers to manage large divisions so they ALL had their expansion in the Bay Area.
This was VERY different that HP where Bill and Dave respected the communities and wanted workers to be able to afford good housing and schools for their kids plus have access to furthering their own education, so expansion went to college towns in ALL the states you mention!
It was good for the employees and the company but it was mixed for the cities. I got one of my best buddies a job at HP Corvallis out of UC then went and visited him and his wife he met there for a summer vacation. They bought a local house in town with the goal to save and someday return to the Bay Area, but many of the others were in "HP Town" which was a rich, maybe gated offshoot of the town and that didn't sit well with the locals. HP left so I've wondered what became of those homes....
Anyway, fill any town with young, recently graduated educated people and it will get more liberal. It changed those states a huge amount, not just HP, but others moving there.
What is really funny now is those companies find it tough to attract new people to the messes they've made so they have to expand to lower cost areas that they haven't ruined yet.
I'm not sure any of this is really new.... that is why I took so much debt to invest in land here in a nice part of the Silicon Valley. Look at history... the top cities that attract the new ideas never really go out of favor... is housing cheap in Rome or Paris or London or NYC or Tokyo or HK? Now the past 20 years it is gotten quite expensive in Shanghai, Singapore and the Bay Area with Oregon and Washington still much cheaper but still expensive after 20+ years of Amazon and Microsoft expansion. |
