If Work Is Going Remote, Why Is Big Tech Still Building?

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Summary

• Kim Walesh has lived steps from downtown San Jose for two decades, and she readily admits that her neighborhood is not what you'd expect for the so-called “capital” of Silicon Valley—“small” and “undeveloped” are her first words to describe it.
• That didn’t factor in Google, which, after a six-month delay, will be up for a final city council vote in May.
• Altogether, the projects amount to millions of square feet of new office space and capacity for thousands of workers in downtown San Jose.
• In the depths of the pandemic, “it’s easy to lose track of the bigger picture,” says Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies how cities attract high-tech development.
• One thing that is known, he says, is that markets like San Francisco were overheated before the virus.