BCBUSINESS.CA NOVEMBER 2017 BCBUSINESS 71
with large oorplates amenable to col-
laboration. Compared with nance or
professional services tenants, they t
more workstations in a given area yet
also demand more amenity space.
More than just landlords are having
to adapt to the tech industry's arrival.
The inux of technolo•y workers has
Dunn's Tailors selling more casual shirts
and pants than it used to, says Jordan
Smith, general manager of the 81-year-
old downtown Vancouver haberdash-
ery. "IT guys aren't suits," Smith says,
though he's had people run into his
shop in a panic saying they have a meet-
ing in Toronto the next day and need to
buy one.
Hy's Steakhouse & Cocktail Bar, a
downtown institution for 55 years, now
caters to software developers the way
it once welcomed Howe Street stock-
brokers and forest and mining execu-
tives. They may not wear jackets and
ties, but they're just as apt to splurge on
a carnivorous dinner, says general man-
ager Chris Langridge. "When [social
media company Hootsuite Media Inc.]
hits their targets, they'll take the team
out for dinner at Hy's," he says. "It's a
thing they have going there."
If there's a problem, it's that a few
tech-happy cities like Vancouver and
Seattle may get too much of a good
thing and lose some of their diversity
and vitality as a result. It wasn't just the
employees' preference that prompted
Amazon to stay downtown back in
2009.
CEO Bezos had his own reasons:
he thought the suburban option would
stif le workers' creativity and discon-
nect them from their customers. "Je™
believed that, working in a city, they are
more vibrant and engaged because they
are not surrounded by folks who are
working at Amazon. They are around
people who work at other companies
who have many other di™erent kinds of
jobs," tour guide Flicker says.
Amazon's current expansion plans,
however, call for this one company to
occupy more than a fth of Seattle's
downtown of›ice inventory (some 10
million square feet) by 2019. As the ever-
larger tech industry clusters in urban
cores, the people tech workers encoun-
ter on the street and in the elevators
may stop looking so diverse and start to
look increasingly just like them.
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