Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  After all, it is your baby.

  The third limit to Edge City is Mobility—the ease with which you can get around within an Edge City area.

  Mobility is primarily a measure of commutability. All over metropolitan America the average speed on freeways is going down, and news reports focus on how grim the commuting experience has become. Boston is no exception. Massachusetts has always been famous for its insane drivers. But Route 128 is the only place where I’ve ever been passed, on the right, by two school buses, each marked as carrying handicapped kids, traveling bumper to bumper, at sixty miles an hour, in the breakdown lane.

  Scholars have demonstrated that for thousands of years, no matter what the transportation technology, the maximum desirable commute has been forty-five minutes. When state-of-the-art transportation was shoe leather, a city like Istanbul in the sixteenth century was never more than six miles across: it took forty-five minutes to walk three miles from the edge of town to the center.

  This is why the goal in Edge City today is finding the magic combination of home and work that is at most a forty-five-minute trip for each person in the family.

  But Mobility is also a measure of getting around once the workday has started—to make deliveries, sales calls, and the like. Mobility is so bad in the old downtowns that afternoon newspapers are extinct. You can’t move the delivery trucks around sufficiently to give evening commuters a paper that includes closing stock prices. Big Edge Cities are beginning to rival downtowns in those problems.

  One might think there would be a simple solution. Why don’t Boston employers leapfrog their problems of Affordability and Mobility by moving even more jobs out to southern New Hampshire? For that matter, why stop there? Why not head out into the Berkshires or toward the Canadian border?

  It turns out that Edge Cities have limits that control that, too. They are Accessibility and Nice.

  If Mobility is the measure of how hard it is to get around within an area, Accessibility is the measure of how hard it is to get into it from outside.

  Nobody that I’m aware of has ever mathematically proven any Law of Accessibility. But there was a good one being thrown around as a strong hunch by people shepherding a lot of Edge City real estate. It went: Your boss’s boss will never approve a remote Edge City location unless he can personally imagine traveling therefor a meeting without having to stay overnight.

  That choke point is one and a half hours by car, one way. Or three hours by plane, nonstop.

  The thinking behind this is that no matter what advantages the boonies offer, sooner or later there will occur out there a memorable, first-rate screw-up. When that happens, somebody from headquarters will have to come out to fix it. When that highly wound and highly paid executive has to go out to clear up the problem, she will be unhappy.

  The Law of Accessibility states that if you think that, in matters involving white-collar jobs, she will put up with Wyoming or the Philippines under these circumstances, you are out of your mind.

  Who knows whether this Law of Accessibility is absolutely correct? Maybe it’s four hours by plane or two hours by car. (The Law of Accessibility simply assumes, by the way, that any potential remote location is electronically Accessible. No location is ever even discussed that is not served by high-quality, high-speed digital phone service. In a place with only rotary-dial service, Touchtone beeps are worthless. You can’t even make your answering machine talk to you, much less access the home office’s computer. Forget it.) The Law of Accessibility, nonetheless, is the best explanation anybody offered me as to why southern New Hampshire, despite its growth and its apparent advantages, did not in the early 1990s even approach the Edge City pivot point of five million square feet of leasable office space.

  “Southern New Hampshire is just too far from Logan,” explains David Shulman, director of research at Salomon Brothers in New York, and a pioneering Edge City analyst.

  Boston only has one major airport, Logan International, built on landfill out into Boston Harbor. It is separated from New England by water and downtown. It has little room to expand, and is less and less Accessible. Two multibillion-dollar roads, which will be in the works for the next decade, are supposed to address this problem. One will be a third tunnel under Boston Harbor to the airport, and the other, known officially as the Depressed Central Artery, locally referred to as the Big Dig, will try to offer a bypass through downtown. As of this writing, both projects have done little save offer more cruel Dukakis jokes, poor man. Example: “We figured Dukakis could give the road a speech and depress it all by himself.”

  The only other serious commercial airports in the Boston area are Worcester, which is small and built on top of a hill, which limits expansion, and Providence, which is picking up a lot of traffic, but is more than halfway to Connecticut, which also is a problem. The number one topic among regional growth advocates is where to put a new superairport. Air Force bases are being eyed covetously. But in the absence of such a facility, the Law of Accessibility rules. “For all our reputation for liberal politics,” says Glenn R. Miller, a professor of urban geography at Bridgewater State College, “we in Massachusetts are pretty conservative and hide-bound. New Hampshire is just too far away to put anything important.”

  A spectacular demonstration of the lengths to which people have gone to overcome the limit of Accessibility is the experience of Digital Equipment Corporation. Digital is the second-largest computer maker in America. It is also the largest private employer in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. As a result, it has had to create its own “Air Force.”

  “I hear you want to know about the Air Force,” says Nikki Richardson, of Digital’s public information. “Yeah, that’s what everybody calls it. The Air Force. Okay, we have one eight-passenger helicopter up here, and five four-passenger helicopters …

  Whoa. Background.

  “Digital is not really a 128 company,” spokesman Mark Fredrickson had explained earlier. “It is a 495 company.” Digital’s headquarters, which employs three thousand people, is in an old woolen mill in Maynard, forty miles from downtown, with its marketing, sales, and administrative unit in Marlborough, ten miles south of that. Engineering and software are headquartered at Merrimack and Nashua, to the north. Virtually all its keyboards for its worldwide markets are made in an inner-city location in Roxbury.

  As a result, Fredrickson said, Digital, being a way-out-there, second-beltway company, had relatively few problems with Mobility or Affordability. But when it came to Accessibility, he audibly sucked on his teeth. Somebody would get back to me with the facts and figures, he said. Enter Ms. Richardson.

  Slow down, I said. One eight-passenger chopper and five fours. Okay, what else?

  “We have one eight-passenger turboprop, and we have one twin-engine five-passenger job. The three jets are for going to the West Coast, the Orient, and Australia. Then there’s the turboprop in Atlanta, the fixed-wing unit in Europe, and the helicopter in Puerto Rico.”

  Wait a minute. Back up. The six choppers, the turboprop, the twin engine—are they all for local transportation, to get from one Digital installation in the Boston area to another?

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I mean, define local transportation. But those are pretty much for around here. I mean, they’re all based at Hanscom Field in Bedford,” she explained, patiently.

  “It’s impossible to get to Logan.”

  This gets us to the fifth and most intriguing limit to Edge City—Nice.

  Nice is the truly double-edged sword for Edge City. Nothing cuts both for and against the growth of Edge City like Nice.

  It has no clear definition. Like the Supreme Court and pornography, the rule is “We know it when we see it.” But at bottom, Nice is where the big boss will live. Not-Nice is where he will not live. And there is probably no more important law of Edge City location than this: Whenever a company moves its headquarters, the commute of the chief executive officer always becomes shorter.

  In fact, a sta
nding not-really-joke in the real estate industry is that a corporate headquarters move is always determined by the following methods:

  First, a blue-ribbon panel of respected corporate thinkers with long and deep understanding of the corporation’s culture is named.

  Second, they inventory all of the company’s needs and goals.

  Third, they conduct a nationwide search of all the best possible locations for the company, comparing economic, demographic, tax, labor, and other competitive issues.

  Fourth, they issue a three-inch-thick report, carefully analyzing the pros and cons of each location.

  Fifth, the report is thrown away, and the headquarters is put as close to the home of chief executive officer as is physically possible without actually lowering his personal property values.

  Little else is more important than Nice. Nice is more important than money. Some people think that Edge Cities rise primarily in locations that are cheap. Wrong. Cost is only one factor. If “cheap” was the only thing important, there would be strong development opportunities available near cheap, bombed-out, inner-city neighborhoods. Or cheap, blue-collar, white ethnic neighborhoods. Or older, cheaper, small-house suburbs.

  Forget it. William H. Whyte, in his book City, has a great map showing that of thirty-eight companies that moved out of New York City in one period “to better meet the quality-of-life needs of their employees,” thirty-one moved to the Edge City around Greenwich and Stamford, Connecticut. On Whyte’s map, black circles show where the chief executive officer lived at the time the move was planned; white circles show where the new headquarters was subsequently located. Average distance from the CEO’s home: eight miles. The bull’s-eye, Whyte reported, was “a circle about four miles in diameter, bounded on the east by the Burning Tree Country Club and on the west by the Fairfield Country Club.” The lesson? The thickest rubber band in the Rubber Band Principle of Edge City Location is attached to the peg driven into the place where you can imagine putting “executive housing.” The final limit to Edge City growth is the quality that high executives—and, even more important, their spouses—absolutely will not do without: Nice.

  What is included in Nice? Schools with astonishingly high average SAT scores. Cultural events. (“That’s another thing about New Hampshire,” says Professor Miller. “There’s just not much to do.”) Country clubs. Athletic clubs. Waterfronts. Scenic vistas. Large lots. Abundant parks. Horses.

  There is precious little that drives up the price of land like horses. In New Jersey near Far Hills where the U.S. Olympic Equestrian Team rides, or Virginia around Middleburg where Jackie Onassis rides, or California around Santa Barbara where Ronald Reagan rides, horse country causes real estate agents to roll their eyes.

  In fact, horses demonstrate why competition over Nice is the main battleground on which the issues of growth are fought. Nice is the biggest attracter of Edge City there is, because of its appeal to the families of monied executives. At the same time, resistance to the spoiling of Nice is the greatest deterrent to Edge City. This is especially true if the people who are doing the resisting are of at least the same financial, legal, rhetorical, and educational class as the forces of growth—as is always the case in horse country.

  It is this conflict—over what we shall do with our most Nice parts of the planet—that decides the fate of Edge City.

  James C. Rosenfeld is the poor guy in charge of trying to build a 148,000-square-foot office building across from Walden Pond.

  “Yeah, it’s my baby,” he says, with a sigh, of the proposed Concord Office Park, which, if built, would feature a 518-car parking lot seven hundred yards from Walden’s shore.

  Asked when the battle started for permission to build, the senior vice president of Boston Properties flips through his notes and groans. “God, has it been that long?” Five years and counting is the answer. At the time.

  “I really didn’t expect a response of this nature,” Jim Rosenfeld says. “You sound incredulous, but it’s true. There’s nothing particularly special about the site.” Rosenfeld works for Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the wealthy Boston developer who has used his profits to buy The Atlantic, in the pages of which, ironically, Henry David Thoreau first gained a national reputation.

  Jim Rosenfeld sounds like a truly wounded man. He goes on at great length about how his project offers setbacks-this and buffers-that; he’s done Environmental Impact Reports until he’s numb. Fifty percent of the eighteen-acre site, he says, would be left untouched. The Concord Office Park, he says, would make a great corporate headquarters.

  He obviously believes that.

  No, he says, no. “I didn’t sit down and read the whole thing.” Rosenfeld was referring to Walden, or Life in the Woods, the full title of the 1854 book by Thoreau that recounts how he lived for two years and two months, walking this land, reflecting on where, exactly, material wealth and civilization intersected. Yes, Rosenfeld says. He has a copy. The Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance sent every executive in the company a copy.

  “I read parts of it,” Rosenfeld mutters.

  In a burst of passion, he explodes, “They think the ground is sacred! They really do! They think his spirit is there! They think it’s hallowed ground! They literally worship him as a god!”

  Rosenfeld genuinely doesn’t get it. The only thing he can figure is that it can’t really be half the citizenry of Massachusetts that has lined up against him, the way it sometimes seems. It is just this band of fanatics who do not believe that even Route 2 should be there. Look at Lincoln, the next town down the road, he says. “It looks like the Berkshires.”

  These people forget the source of the economy that supports them, Rosenfeld says. Business is conducted in buildings like the one he wants to build. Just wait for the economic downturn, he prophesies, if people keep blocking projects like his. If people suddenly have to start worrying about their jobs, start worrying about a roof over their heads, about not having as much discretionary income, they won’t have time or resources to do all this protesting, he grumps. Then they’ll be talking out of the other side of their mouth. Lose some of their cushy jobs. That will change their minds.

  You really think that’s true? Rosenfeld is asked. That an economic downturn will change their minds?

  Well, he says, no. Maybe not. But if they were busy looking for a job, maybe they wouldn’t have as much time to protest.

  It is Jack Borden’s turn to sigh. He is a trustee of the Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance. Says Borden, “Thoreau once wrote, ‘As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind; some see only clouds there.’ By the same token, as the land developers look at land, all they see is office parks and condominiums. Then they build philosophies of progress around that bullshit to justify their greed. Thoreau is part of the nation’s psyche, its ideals—self-sacrifice, individualism, hard work, working with your hands, kinship with the American land. Can’t we keep something sacred?”

  The kind of clash at Walden Pond over the Concord Office Park is the clash that is occurring again and again across the country, between two profoundly different sets of values.

  Rosenfeld is doubtless not aware that he is playing the role of the Massachusetts Pilgrim, trying to bring what he views as civilization to this piece of howling wilderness, about which he says he sees “nothing particularly special.” But he might have saved himself a lot of time and money had he, in fact, read a little of Thoreau before putting himself into the battle of his lifetime, the battle that goes back four hundred years and forward into our futures, the battle over who we are, how we got that way, where we’re headed, and what we value.

  The developers of the town-house subdivision of Lordvale, for that matter, might also have found it food for thought.

  For in Walden, Thoreau wrote:

  The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation …

  I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to tea
ch, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived …

  At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles … In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession … I walked over every farmer’s premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him … and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on.

  This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends … The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door … and then I let it lie … for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone …

  I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty … I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheel-barrow. With respect to landscapes,—’I am the monarch of all I survey, my right there is none to dispute …’

  None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty …

  I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not—but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them … I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters …