I wonder how easy it is for a blind person to travel in these cities,
where much of the future high-wage job growth will be.

kelly

from the New York Times


      January 24, 1999


Nerdistans: A Place to Please Techies

      By JOEL KOTKIN

   IRVINE, Calif. -- After just three years, the founders of the hot
   high-technology start-up were bumping against a familiar problem. They
   knew they had maxed out the potential of the backwater burg where they
   had founded the company. To keep attracting the number and caliber of
   skilled employees they needed, they had to move the company to where
   the action was.

   Yes, it was time for Broadcom to forsake sleepy little Los Angeles and
   make its mark in the high-technology metropolis of Irvine, an hour's
   drive south.

   "We were reaching a critical mass; we had to go somewhere that's
   suited to building a big high-tech company," explained Henry T.
   Nicholas, who with Henry Samueli started Broadcom, a communications
   chip and cable modem maker, in 1992 when the two men were professors
   at the University of California at Los Angeles.

   Nicholas, Broadcom's chief executive, says he misses the city's night
   life and cultural ambiance. But, recalling how hard it was to recruit
   people to move to Los Angeles, he felt he had little choice. "It's
   hard to relocate techies to L.A.," he said. "It's the congestion,
   expensive housing -- and there's a certain stigma to it."

   Irvine, on the other hand, is what you might call a nerdistan: a
   suburban enclave of subdivisions, shopping centers and business parks
   where scientists, engineers and technicians feel comfortable living
   and working. For technology companies, it is everything a traditional
   urban center should be but isn't: a strategic location where the
   relevant partners, competitors, money and knowhow are all close at
   hand.

   Most nerdistans have appeared on leafy peripheries of metropolitan
   areas, close to major airports, universities and science-based
   industries but far from inner-city problems and annoyances. High
   concentrations of technology workers and companies have flocked
   together in suburbs of Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York
   and Philadelphia, in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, and
   in Silicon Valley, the original and still champion nerdistan.

   Like Irvine, most nerdistans are less bedroom communities than what
   the Purdue University historian Jon C. Teaford calls post-suburbia --
   economically and culturally self-sufficient areas that ring
   traditional core cities but are largely insulated from them.

   This pattern is clear in sprawling Los Angeles County, which leads the
   nation in the number of high-technology jobs but ranks 15th in
   technology workers as a share of the work force, according to a study
   by researchers at WEFA, an economic research organization; neighboring
   Orange County, where Irvine is, ranks seventh. A map of Los Angeles
   County's technology companies finds a vast majority in peripheral
   areas miles from the center of the city.

   Similarly, despite media buzz about Silicon Alley, most technology
   jobs in the New York City area are in the suburbs, not in Manhattan.
   The periphery's share of the region's computer-related jobs grew to
   more than 80 percent in 1996 from 68 percent in 1982, according to a
   study at the University of Miami. Sections of Fairfield County, Conn.,
   and northwestern New Jersey rank among the top 15 places in the
   country for most technology workers per capita; New York City ranks
   80th, according to WEFA.

   Nerdistans can also be defined by what they generally do not have,
   said John Kasarda of the University of North Carolina. There are no
   ports or railroad yards, but technology work does not require them.
   There are no venerable art museums or symphony orchestras, but
   technology workers generally do not miss such amenities. There are
   usually no homeless people or derelict buildings in sight.

   "You get rid of the problems of the city by charging for the exits,"
   said Kasarda, who has studied the movement of high-technology
   companies in the Raleigh-Durham area and elsewhere. "For these people,
   the city is superfluous."

   Once they get started, nerdistans snowball. Richard Holcomb, president
   of the Raleigh-based Haht Software, said the presence of a herd of big
   technology companies like Data General, IBM and Burroughs-Wellcome
   provides a pool of seasoned workers for start-ups to tap. "You can get
   a great job, and if this one doesn't work out, you can just go down
   the road," he said.

   Given the technology sector's generally high pay, nerdistans are
   evolving into centers of wealth, with demographics to match. In
   Irvine, which is also home to a University of California campus,
   almost two-fifths of households earn more than $75,000 a year, and
   more than half the adult population is college-educated, compared with
   one-fifth for the country as a whole. Not quite as "white bread" as
   its reputation, Irvine has a population of 122,000 that is 70 percent
   Caucasian and 22 percent Asian.

   Not all nerdistans are alike, though. Older, unplanned centers like
   Silicon Valley and southwestern Connecticut are becoming victims of
   their own success, plagued by congestion, housing shortages and
   struggling public schools. Newer planned communities like Irvine and
   the Research Triangle seem to be coping better, Kasarda said. That
   translates into a competitive advantage in recruiting scientists and
   engineers, especially those with children.

   "It's a very planned place," said Nancy Venable, a technology support
   engineer and divorced mother of a teen-age girl who moved last year
   from Charlotte, N.C., to take a job at Wonderware, a factory
   automation company based in Irvine. "You don't have to join an
   association to get to a pool, and everything has been placed close to
   where you live. The schools are good. It's safe, it's clean, it's easy
   to get around, and it's new. Engineers love new tools."


   Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company


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