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Myriad reasons:
1. Establishing an HQ near fun cool places for very young workers to live is way down the list of cares for any CEO and board of directors.
2. Large companies are much more concerned about locating in a areas appealing to middle managers and longer serving employees - things like great schools, quiet neighborhoods, safe neighborhoods and reasonable home values/prices carry the day.
3. Most DISD middle schools and beyond are awful in all reasonable terms, homes right around Uptown, downtown are very expensive relative to the 'burbs. That's a killer for families.
4. Office space near downtown is more expensive that the 'burbs. Building a giant campus as Toyota is doing would be significantly more expensive in/close to Uptown.
5. TI's HQ has been were it is since long before Uptown was even a notion let alone a real place.
+1
When I was a young, childless employee I was willing to endure a long commute to legacy to live where i wanted to socialize. If i had had children to worry about, i'd have been more inclined to live close to work and near good schools and probably would have chosen Plano.
Ronnie and TurtleCreek hit some good points. I'd focus on the Design District and the zips Ronnie mentioned. And if possible, raise your budget a little bit more or do a 2 bedroom apartment with a roommate.
I have noticed that in the DFW area, there are a few big companies with headquarters in locations that their younger workers would not find appealing due to being far away from the Central Dallas hot spots. These companies include, but are not limited to, the following:
-American Airlines
-Frito Lay
-Dr. Pepper Snapple Group
-Toyota
Can anyone shed any insight into why this could be? Wouldn't it be easier to recruit under 35 talent with a more Central Dallas HQ? Texas Instruments is an example of a company has an HQ that is within commutable distance of Uptown, and I would think that would help recruiting there.
EDS gave you a great list of reasons. I'll just add emphasis to his #1 point....people under the age of 30-35 are nomadic (will generally move anywhere for a job opportunity) and typically do multiple 2-3 year stints at companies during their 20-30's. They also typically aren't the ones making the big bucks for these huge companies (top performers will be by 35, but an average 20-30 something person is still very disposable/ replaceable). So choosing HQ locations that appeal to this group is silly.
Middle managers and executives are the most important to the company. They are driving strategy and making money for the company / shareholders. They tend to have longer stints (5-10+ years, with 20+ years not rare at an AA, EDS, JCP, etc) and families, meaning they don't move around as much as single 20-30 something's. It's important for a company to HQ where their median salary managers can find affordable housing and good schools within a 10 mile radius. HQ's in Uptown don't make sense for companies where those middle managers make $80-130k. They can't afford a $400-500k home in the neighborhoods of Dallas with good elementary schools and they sure can't afford $50k in tuition...they'd be commuting in from the suburbs where many HQ's are located today....in heavy traffic.
Now if you think about Big Law (with salaries starting at $160k and managing partners making $750k-$1M++), it makes total sense that all of those firms are downtown. With those salaries, all but the secretaries & paralegals can afford to live in the Park Cities, Preston Hollow, Lakewood, etc. They can easily afford private schools, too.
Myriad reasons:
1. Establishing an HQ near fun cool places for very young workers to live is way down the list of cares for any CEO and board of directors.
2. Large companies are much more concerned about locating in a areas appealing to middle managers and longer serving employees - things like great schools, quiet neighborhoods, safe neighborhoods and reasonable home values/prices carry the day.
3. Most DISD middle schools and beyond are awful in all reasonable terms, homes right around Uptown, downtown are very expensive relative to the 'burbs. That's a killer for families.
4. Office space near downtown is more expensive that the 'burbs. Building a giant campus as Toyota is doing would be significantly more expensive in/close to Uptown.
5. TI's HQ has been were it is since long before Uptown was even a notion let alone a real place.
Good list. I'm quoting EDS here, but my response will cover both EDS' points and TC80's. I think both of them generally did a good job explaining the phenomenon with reasons that make logical sense, and I considered some points of view that I had not entirely considered.
The tangent to this conversation that I originally posted had been something on my mind for a while, and in a couple of those examples, I had some experiences with the companies I listed. For instance, an MBA classmate of mine got a job with American Airlines upon graduation. She is many years older than I am and is married, whereas I have never been married. I need to live in the center of the action for my social life, she can live in a sleepy 'burb (she lives in Grapevine). Since she lives in Grapevine and I live in Central Dallas, I have not seen her once since I moved to Dallas in 2011. We also weren't even that close in grad school to begin with.
I interviewed with Frito Lay while I was still in my MBA program. I didn't get an offer, so I didn't really even consider the commute at all while I was interviewing there, but if I had gotten an offer to work at Frito Lay, in order to have a reasonable social experience, I would have had to have gotten a place in Uptown and reverse commuted up the Dallas North Tollway. Lot of mileage on the car and costly due to tolls, but not horrendous in terms of traffic.
With American Airlines being out by the airport and Frito Lay being in Plano (I'm not intending to single them out but they are good examples), it is really difficult for a younger, low-level employees to be attracted to want to work at the company long term. This is the future pipeline of the middle managers and senior executives that make the real impact to stay with the company. Procter & Gamble, an organization that is very big on hiring a person right out of undergrad or grad school and promoting from within (it is very difficult to get hired mid-career at P&G), has their HQ in Downtown Cincinnati, which is probably closer to fun stuff that appeals to the 22-35 set there.
There are arguments about school quality made by both TC and EDS. I think that is relevant in the present, but should become less relevant in the future. There are fewer traditional nuclear families these days and fewer children per capita. Single, unmarried people and childless couples are becoming a much larger piece of the population.
And how do you two account for a company like The Richards Group, who already had a well located HQ at 75 and Northwest Highway, moving their HQ to a new building at 75 and Blackburn? Don't you think that senior management there knew that their workforce would really like the West Village/Uptown-ish location?
There's certainly more to the discussion than I've brought here. This was written somewhat in a stream of consciousness manner.
Good list. I'm quoting EDS here, but my response will cover both EDS' points and TC80's. I think both of them generally did a good job explaining the phenomenon with reasons that make logical sense, and I considered some points of view that I had not entirely considered.
The tangent to this conversation that I originally posted had been something on my mind for a while, and in a couple of those examples, I had some experiences with the companies I listed. For instance, an MBA classmate of mine got a job with American Airlines upon graduation. She is many years older than I am and is married, whereas I have never been married. I need to live in the center of the action for my social life, she can live in a sleepy 'burb (she lives in Grapevine). Since she lives in Grapevine and I live in Central Dallas, I have not seen her once since I moved to Dallas in 2011. We also weren't even that close in grad school to begin with.
I interviewed with Frito Lay while I was still in my MBA program. I didn't get an offer, so I didn't really even consider the commute at all while I was interviewing there, but if I had gotten an offer to work at Frito Lay, in order to have a reasonable social experience, I would have had to have gotten a place in Uptown and reverse commuted up the Dallas North Tollway. Lot of mileage on the car and costly due to tolls, but not horrendous in terms of traffic.
With American Airlines being out by the airport and Frito Lay being in Plano (I'm not intending to single them out but they are good examples), it is really difficult for a younger, low-level employees to be attracted to want to work at the company long term. This is the future pipeline of the middle managers and senior executives that make the real impact to stay with the company. Procter & Gamble, an organization that is very big on hiring a person right out of undergrad or grad school and promoting from within (it is very difficult to get hired mid-career at P&G), has their HQ in Downtown Cincinnati, which is probably closer to fun stuff that appeals to the 22-35 set there.
There are arguments about school quality made by both TC and EDS. I think that is relevant in the present, but should become less relevant in the future. There are fewer traditional nuclear families these days and fewer children per capita. Single, unmarried people and childless couples are becoming a much larger piece of the population.
And how do you two account for a company like The Richards Group, who already had a well located HQ at 75 and Northwest Highway, moving their HQ to a new building at 75 and Blackburn? Don't you think that senior management there knew that their workforce would really like the West Village/Uptown-ish location?
There's certainly more to the discussion than I've brought here. This was written somewhat in a stream of consciousness manner.
Like the other poster said, companies are not usually locating in a place to try to appeal to younger workers.
Remember, urban living has only started to make a comeback in the US very recently, as in 10-15 years ago. Urban living has always been popular in places like Manhattan, but in the rest of the US, there was that period from 1965 until roughly mid to late 90's where everyone wanted to live in the suburbs, regardless of your age (except for some urban campuses of large colleges that happened to be in the city, where students would live nearby).
In places like Cincinnati, P&G has ALWAYS been downtown, yet, until VERY recently, downtown Cinci has almost NEVER been a place that was all that good to hang out. Sure, there was always bars here and there, but I am originally from that area of Ohio and downtown was a very weird place. Some nice architecture, fun to drive around and look at, and somewhat charming, and certainly not as sleepy as Indianapolis, but downtown at night was always VERY dangerous. You NEVER wanted to be down there alone (ESPECIALLY in Over The Rhine). Yeah, there was a handful of bars on Race Street, but most of the action in Cinci was in the Mt Adams neighborhood (very charming), or up by the U of Cinci (Clifton neighborhood) and over in Hyde Park (really more of an established old money neighborhood but also appealed to young worker crowd). But yeah, Cinci is notorious for being hardcore conservative about some aspects of nightlife; there was always a certain seediness to downtown (The original HUSTLER store was located there) and the city did everything they could to shut places that down. There was also a gay nightclub that opened up downtown called PIPELINE; it had 5 stories and the county trumped up a bunch of reasons to get it shut down.
About OTR - I remember 25+ years ago, when I was in college, I would drive around there during the day, marveling at the architecture and how amazing the neighborhood looked, and how sad that the place was not safe and sad that americans cannot live in walkable neighborhoods, and had a dream that someday, the middle and upper classes would start moving back into neighborhoods like that. And today, that is a reality; OTR is something like Cinci's version of Chicago's Wicker Park. My understanding is there are a lot of younger people living in OTR now.
However, using Cinci as the example here, these neighborhoods were always close enough to downtown to make for short commutes, but companies were locating downtown for decades, and it had nothing to do with appealing to young college grads who want to party/socialize on the weekends. It was really more of a legacy of being part of a banking and central business district, which is how things were done pre-WW2 and especially pre-automobile.
The tangent to this conversation that I originally posted had been something on my mind for a while, and in a couple of those examples, I had some experiences with the companies I listed. For instance, an MBA classmate of mine got a job with American Airlines upon graduation. She is many years older than I am and is married, whereas I have never been married. I need to live in the center of the action for my social life, she can live in a sleepy 'burb (she lives in Grapevine). Since she lives in Grapevine and I live in Central Dallas, I have not seen her once since I moved to Dallas in 2011. We also weren't even that close in grad school to begin with.
I don't even know why you brought up this example - it sounds like you haven't seen this person since grad school because you didn't have a close friendship, not because she lives in Grapevine......
Quote:
Originally Posted by RJ312
I interviewed with Frito Lay while I was still in my MBA program. I didn't get an offer, so I didn't really even consider the commute at all while I was interviewing there, but if I had gotten an offer to work at Frito Lay, in order to have a reasonable social experience, I would have had to have gotten a place in Uptown and reverse commuted up the Dallas North Tollway. Lot of mileage on the car and costly due to tolls, but not horrendous in terms of traffic.
I work near Frito Lay. Let me tell you, it's a lot easier for the small fraction of us who do reverse commute to the Legacy Corridor than for 80%+ of those company's populations to be commuting s/b on the Tollroad. The DNT is clogged up enough as is going into town!
Quote:
Originally Posted by RJ312
With American Airlines being out by the airport and Frito Lay being in Plano (I'm not intending to single them out but they are good examples), it is really difficult for a younger, low-level employees to be attracted to want to work at the company long term. This is the future pipeline of the middle managers and senior executives that make the real impact to stay with the company. Procter & Gamble, an organization that is very big on hiring a person right out of undergrad or grad school and promoting from within (it is very difficult to get hired mid-career at P&G), has their HQ in Downtown Cincinnati, which is probably closer to fun stuff that appeals to the 22-35 set there.
Re the statement I bolded, the vast majority of younger low-level employees DON'T end up being future middle managers and senior executives - at my company or at any other. In the 22-35 age group, they're doing 2-3 year stints at 4-5 companies between 22-35. It's rare - EXTREMELY RARE- for a 22 year old to still be working at the same company at 35. In my company, where many managers & execs have been here for 10+ years, I have had 9 junior level people in the 22-35 age group work for me in the past 5 years. 6 are no longer here. 66% turnover in 5 years sounds about right to me! Of the people who left, ALL 6 left Dallas to pursue opportunities with competitors. Not one took a job in Uptown because they wanted to work where they play. I see 100+ resumes a year for lower level positions.......90% of them are job hoppers. When you're single, not from Dallas, & making $50k a year and a competitor offers you $60k, most take the offer. Relocating a HQ for that age group is like chasing your tail in circles!
Quote:
Originally Posted by RJ312
And how do you two account for a company like The Richards Group, who already had a well located HQ at 75 and Northwest Highway, moving their HQ to a new building at 75 and Blackburn? Don't you think that senior management there knew that their workforce would really like the West Village/Uptown-ish location?
IMO, Richards Group is totally different than AA, Frito Lay, etc.
1) It makes sense for creative industries to office downtown/uptown vs the suburbs.
2) I suspect a marketing firm's employee population has a much lower average age than that of a typical F500 company. For them, it makes sense to be in-town.
I don't want to sound condescending, but once you're older and have your own family, your perspective will probably change.
Remember, urban living has only started to make a comeback in the US very recently, as in 10-15 years ago. Urban living has always been popular in places like Manhattan, but in the rest of the US, there was that period from 1965 until roughly mid to late 90's where everyone wanted to live in the suburbs, regardless of your age (except for some urban campuses of large colleges that happened to be in the city, where students would live nearby)....
It was really more of a legacy of being part of a banking and central business district, which is how things were done pre-WW2 and especially pre-automobile.
It is amazing to me that from 1965-mid to late 90s that young people who were unmarried wanted to live in suburbs. My understanding of the suburbs has been that it was a place for families. I grew up in suburbs and only saw families. I am also amazed that Uptown Dallas was basically nothing in 2000, which wasn't all too long ago.
I've always thought that a good model of urban planning would be to have a dense city center that is walkable and have good public transportation. I like cities taking up less space instead of more. But, there is some appeal to the more open space of suburbia at times. Even Dallas' most urban neighborhoods like Uptown and Downtown do not eliminate the need for having a car, whereas in New York City you really don't need a car.
In the under 35 work cohort it is often advantageous to hop around a little bit if you have aspirations of being in an upper level of a large company. It lets you get varied experience and increase your pay, likely a little faster, than if you stay put.
I moved to Texas with the same company I was working for in Tennessee, but for more money. I recently changed jobs to a new company, for a better salary, and much more upward mobility. If I stayed where I was the prospects were much slimmer.
Most of the folks in my office would rather live on a couple acres outside of town than be anywhere near Uptown.
The vast majority of younger low-level employees DON'T end up being future middle managers and senior executives - at my company or at any other. In the 22-35 age group, they're doing 2-3 year stints at 4-5 companies between 22-35. It's rare - EXTREMELY RARE- for a 22 year old to still be working at the same company at 35. In my company, where many managers & execs have been here for 10+ years, I have had 9 junior level people in the 22-35 age group work for me in the past 5 years. 6 are no longer here. 66% turnover in 5 years sounds about right to me! Of the people who left, ALL 6 left Dallas to pursue opportunities with competitors. Not one took a job in Uptown because they wanted to work where they play. I see 100+ resumes a year for lower level positions.......90% of them are job hoppers. When you're single, not from Dallas, & making $50k a year and a competitor offers you $60k, most take the offer. Relocating a HQ for that age group is like chasing your tail in circles!
IMO, Richards Group is totally different than AA, Frito Lay, etc.
1) It makes sense for creative industries to office downtown/uptown vs the suburbs.
2) I suspect a marketing firm's employee population has a much lower average age than that of a typical F500 company. For them, it makes sense to be in-town.
I don't want to sound condescending, but once you're older and have your own family, your perspective will probably change.
The trajectory you talk about between 22-35 is pretty normal. In that 13 year period of most people's lives, they are usually doing a minimum of 3 jobs, but 5-6 jobs in that time frame isn't abnormal at all. Maybe they even get a Master's Degree. Big law is somewhat of a different trajectory. In most age groups, job hopping in the norm now.
I would completely agree that when you're single, not from Dallas, & making $50k a year and a competitor offers you $60k, most take the offer. Dallas attracts a lot of transplants, even more so now than say 20-30 years ago.
I perceive a shift is occurring. It used to be that the families that lived in the 'burbs had one or two parents driving into the city center to work. That was the price to paid for living in the 'burbs. Now, it seems like there is less uniformity. I am sensing that a lot of people living in the 'burbs are now working in the 'burbs and many Millennials are commuting up from the central city neighborhoods to more suburban locations. I would be interested to see if there are larger stats backing up my perception, or maybe it is statistically insignificant.
Last edited by RJ312; 03-01-2015 at 01:56 PM..
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