16 BCBusiness OCTOBER 2015 PORTRaiT: adam BlasBERg
As I write this, I'm still unpacking. My les—
the ones I was working on on Friday—appear
to be lost. There's a printer in the oce some-
where, though I can't gure out where. And
the phone won't dial out. Oh, did I mention
we're on deadline?
I hate moving for any number of reasons,
not the least of which is the upheaval it causes.
Inconvenience is a key deterrent for many
people and companies; the publisher I work
for has moved four times in 40-plus years of
operation. But the other, more-dominant
factor—especially for those who rent and are
locked into long-term leases—is cost.
Still, according to the smart thinking these
days, where you set up shop—and what kind
of space you design—is as much a matter of
employee attraction and retention as it is
prot and loss. Take a look at San Francisco.
Historically the tech sector there could rely on
the critical mass of Silicon Valley—an economi-
cally powerful yet entirely unattractive part of
suburbia—to draw creative talent from around
the world. And make no mistake: Google, Face-
book and Apple are not suˆering. But
about 10 years ago, a slew of tech start-
ups—companies like Twitter, Airbnb,
Salesforce and Uber—began making
downtown San Francisco, where most
of the sector's workers live, home. In
response, the titans of Silicon Valley
have created a full-service community
in their sprawling campuses—with
luxury shuttle buses from downtown
to the burbs—to limit the bleeding to
their upstart competition.
The old rules were that if you were
big and established, it didn't matter
where you were headquartered:
IBM,
the Google of the 1970s, is based in a
nothing town in Westchester County
north of New York City, while General
Electric, the Apple of its time, is based
in the metropolis of Faireld, Con-
necticut. But if you're competing for the talent
of tomorrow—like Twitter, Airbnb and its ilk
are—you need to be in a creative hub where
employees can seamlessly blend their personal
and professional interests.
As Richard Littlemore discovered in
researching "The Other Real Estate Boom"
(p.64), sophisticated clients in the Lower Main-
land are hyper aware of this shift. That's why,
in part, the downtown Vancouver oce mar-
ket has experienced an unprecedented boom
in 2015, with over two million square feet of
new space coming online in the next two
years, most of it by this Christmas; in a normal
year, the market adds about 200,000 square
feet. Bart Slotman of Uptown Properties, a
prominent downtown landlord, tells Richard
that it used to be
CEOs and CFOs who were tour-
ing his oces. "Now we're seeing the head of
HR. It's not just real estate anymore. You really
need the right environment to be successful."
C O N T R I B U T O R S
Matt O'Grady, Editor-in-Chief
mogrady@canadawide.com / @bCbusiness
Numerology (page 21), which
Melissa Edwards compiles for
every issue of BCBusiness, was
inspired by her 2006 book The Geist
Atlas of Canada: Meat Maps and Other
Strange Cartographies. Both involve
"that eclectic, wide-ranging type
of research where the magic starts
to happen in the most unlikely
connections." Edwards, who also
writes for Canadian Business, says
her favourite thing about magazine
writing is seeing "inside so many
working lives."
Photographer Nik West's first-ever
("La Nouvelle Provence, " June
2007) and most-recent ("Glass
Half Full, " page 72) BCBusiness
assignments were both stories
about Vancouver Island farmer
Patrick Evans, then just starting to
plant barley for his future distilling
business. In between, West,
who got his start photographing
weddings in Australia, has shot
regularly for BCBusiness.
On the Move
editor's desk
IN NOVEMBER
Seven leadership challenges plucked from the headlines—and how B.C. organizations are reacting
