支持城市的人们欣喜不已。“这好过举办奥运会。”《波士顿环球报》的专栏作家梁雪莉（Shirley Leung，音译）谈到通用电气回迁时说道。企业高管的口吻就像第一次读完理查德·佛罗里达（Richard Florida，一位热爱城市生活的知识分子）所著的《创意阶层的崛起》（The Rise of the Creative Class）的研究生一般。通用电气的首席执行官杰夫·伊梅尔特（Jeff Immelt）表示，“我们希望在这个大家有着同样抱负的生态系统里占据中心位置。”他还指出，波士顿吸引着“一批多元化、精通科技的劳动者”。安·克利（Ann Klee）正参与指挥通用电气到波士顿的搬迁工作，她表示，新的总部将不设停车场，为的是鼓励员工们使用公共交通工具。总部也没有安全门，鼓励公众走进园区。摩托罗拉解决方案的CEO雷格·布朗（GregBrown）称赞芝加哥市中心“充满能量、活力，多元纷呈”。
如果想了解美国企业的迁徙模式，最佳读物并非上文提到的佛罗里达的著作，而是近期的一项研究——比尔·毕肖普（Bill Bishop）的《大归类》（The Big Sort）。该书认为，美国人逐渐按自己的职业及社会价值而聚居至不同区域。企业把精英职位分配到城市、将常规性职位分配在郊区的“总部革命”只是书中描述的归类过程的又一体现。企业的分解运作无疑是对资源的合理运用。但随着许多企业老板选择与广大美国人（包括他们自己的雇员）大不相同的办公地，分裂美国的那股拉力又进一步增强了。
Schumpeter
Leaving for the city
Lots of prominent American companies are moving downtown
FIFTY years ago American companies started to move their headquarters away from city centres to the suburbs. Some critics blamed the exodus on “white flight”, as businesses followed their employees out of increasingly crime-ridden cities. The firms themselves ascribed it to corporate responsibility. They provided offices in safe neighbourhoods and near good schools—one academic, Louise Mozingo, of the University of California, Berkeley, calls it “pastoral capitalism”. Whatever the reason, it created a new type of HQ: not an office tower in the pumping heart of a metropolis but a leafy campus in the middle of nowhere.
Now a growing number of companies are moving back again. The most prominent example is General Electric, which abandoned New York City for a 68-acre campus in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1974, but is now swapping its bucolic site for a collection of warehouses on the Boston waterfront. There are legions more. Chicago’s downtown has attracted an impressive collection of HQs, from both the surrounding suburbs and from farther afield, including McDonald’s, Kraft Heinz, Motorola Solutions, Boeing, and Archer Daniels Midland, a food-commodities giant. Zappos, an online retailer, has moved from an office park outside Las Vegas into the city’s old downtown. Biogen moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the Boston suburbs in 2011 only to return a year later. Many tech companies were born urban and couldn’t be any other way. Twitter and Salesforce are in downtown San Francisco, and Jeff Bezos is building a huge campus for Amazon in downtown Seattle.
City boosters are delighted. “This
is better than hosting the Olympics,” says Shirley Leung, a columnist with the
Boston
Globe
, of GE’s move. Corporate executives sound like graduate students after their first reading of “The Rise of the Creative Class” by Richard Florida, an urbanophile intellectual. Jeff Immelt, GE’s chief executive, says that “we want to be at the centre of an ecosystem that shares our aspiration”, and notes that Boston attracts “a diverse, technologically fluent workforce”. Ann Klee, who is helping to oversee GE’s move to Boston, says that the new headquarters will do without a car park, in order to encourage workers to use public transport. It will dispense with security gates and wants the public to come in. Greg Brown, the CEO of Motorola Solutions, commends downtown Chicago for its “energy, vibrancy and diversity”.
Is the new urbanism all it is cracked up to be? It is easy to find counter-trends, given America’s size and variety: many CEOs continue to see a future in the suburbs of the sunbelt. ExxonMobil is building a headquarters for 10,000 people in the outskirts of Houston. Toyota is moving its North American headquarters from Torrance, California, to suburban Dallas. There is also tax-and-benefits arbitrage going on: over the past decades, the suburbs have become complacent and downtowns have got hungrier. GE’s affection for its old home in Connecticut was no doubt weakened by the state’s decision in 2015 to raise business taxes by $750m. Boston provided an estimated $145m in incentives to secure the deal.
Still, something is clearly changing in America’s older cities. They are much less crime-ridden than before, thanks to a combination of better policing and demographic change. The homicide rate fell by 16.8% from 2000 to 2010 in big cities. Now these urban centres are magnets for millennials fresh from university and with few responsibilities. Young professionals are reconquering former no-go areas and shifting the problem of urban blight into the suburbs. Hiring such people in Boston, GE reckons, will help it shift its focus from hardware to software and from selling things to offering services over the internet.
Yet the new downtown headquarters are very different from the old ones, and not just because they are open-plan and trendy. They are far smaller. Often, firms are moving their senior managers to the city along with a few hundred digital workers. Moving back to Chicago’s centre has usually involved downsizing: Motorola Solutions’ HQ shrank from 2,900 to 1,100, and that of Archer Daniels Midland from 4,400 to 70. Many companies are deconstructing their headquarters and scattering different units and functions across the landscape, leaving most middle managers in the old buildings, or else moving them to cheaper places in the southern states. Aaron Renn of the Manhattan Institute, a think-tank, reckons that head offices are splitting into two types: old-fashioned “mass” headquarters in the sunbelt cities, and new-style “executive headquarters” of senior managers and wired workers in elite cities such as San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.
That suggests there will be no return to the broad-based urban prosperity of America’s golden age. San Francisco could be the template of the future. Its centre is divided between affluent young people who frequent vegan cafés and homeless people who smoke crack and urinate in the streets. Long-standing San Franciscans resent the way that the urban professionals have driven up property prices. And those young workers may fall out of love with the city centre when they have children and start worrying about the quality of schools and the safety of streets.
To the top of the pyramid
The best book to read if you want to understand corporate America’s migration patterns is not Mr Florida’s but a more recent study, Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort”. It argues that Americans are increasingly clustering in distinct areas on the basis of their jobs and social values. The headquarters revolution is yet another iteration of the sorting process that the book describes, as companies allocate elite jobs to the cities and routine jobs to the provinces. Corporate disaggregation is no doubt a sensible use of resources. But it will also add to the tensions that are tearing America apart as many bosses choose to work in very different worlds from the vast majority of Americans, including their own employees.
