June/July 2017 55 MASS EXIT? Wunderman said a poll of 1,000 Bay Area residents by the Bay Area Council released in March revealed 40 percent of respondents want to leave the region in the next few years—up from 33 percent in 2016. And it’s even worse among millennials, or those born between 1982 and 2000. In that age group, 46 percent of the respondents hope to put Silicon Valley and the Bay Area in their rear-view mirrors sometime soon. Among those who have been here for decades, however, there has started a long, gradual withdrawal from the job market. The leading edge of baby boomers—the 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964—has begun retiring from full-time employment, creating another factor pumping the breaks on growth of the Bay Area job market, according to Stephen Levy, director and senior economist of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. Coupled with lower birthrates in recent years, the number of workers in the region could be in for a long, slow decline, so 2016, as Levy noted, could end up being the largest increase we see for a long time. Iconic Silicon Valley tech companies that have employed many of those workers—like Apple, Google and Facebook—continued to expand in 2016. They increasingly snapped up comparatively lower-cost office space in North San Jose, or made plans to build there. But the dizzying cost of housing in the region, traffic gridlock and the suddenly uncertain future of such infrastructure improvements as the electrification of the Caltrain commuter rail line between San Jose and San Francisco under a Trump administration cast shadows on a potentially bright future. Levy does see reason for optimism coming out of recent publicprivate partnerships and private-sector initiatives to ease problems. The city of Palo Alto and Stanford University are partnering to deal with traffic congestion, and company-sponsored shuttle buses that will ferry employees from the soon-to-open Berryessa BART station in North San Jose to the First Street business corridor along with companies like Uber and Lyft are lessening the need for parking. “Among the areas of biggest job growth in Silicon Valley are AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics, and in 2016, we saw the emergence of the automobile as fertile ground for new technology,” Hancock said. “You have self-driving cars, even flying cars, and credible people are engaged in this work. Silicon Valley is stepping in to attack a really difficult problem.” GRIDLOCK SOLUTIONS? Maddening may be a better word to describe local traffic. Small gains in alternatives to commuters driving to work alone—mainly taking public transit or bicycling to the office— have been offset by an increase of 228,000 commuters in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties alone between 2005 and 2016, according to the Index. The public sector, Hancock said, can’t build enough roads to handle traffic congestion, and the expansion of public transportation isn’t fast enough. Companies like Uber and Lyft are an example of how the socalled sharing economy can lessen the need for individuals to own automobiles and facilitate overnight delivery of goods and services during off-peak traffic hours. And drones can use the air space above those jammed freeways to make product deliveries, he said. These and other developments are an integral part of an innovative Silicon Valley culture, according to Robert Henderschott, associate professor of finance at Santa Clara University’s Leavey. “If you were naming this area today, you might have to call ‘Silicon’ Valley something different,” Henderschott said, referring to the production of silicon “chips” that drove the region’s economy years ago, “Intel was the bellwether company back in those days, but today it’s Google and Facebook. The industry today is dominated by internet, software and social media businesses.” Twenty-five years from now, Henderschott said, we will look back on this time as very different. “There will continue to be shifts in technology, just like we have seen from our perspective today. You will see many more creative jobs in the industry, and employees will become as important or more important than the technology.” How they get to and from work quickly and easily remains to be worked out. But if the past predicts the future, Silicon Valley’s innovators won’t get stuck in gridlock; there are just too many rewards for using very advanced technology to solve very human problems. SHUTTERSTOCK (2)
South Bay Accent - June/July 2017
To see the actual publication please follow the link above