Business: 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.

現今有許多知名美國公司遷往鬧市區。五十年前美國公司開始將其總部從市中心遷至郊區。許多批評家將這種企業成群撤離的現象歸罪到“白人航班”上——雇員因城市犯罪愈加猖獗而搬出城市，企業隨雇員搬遷而轉移。公司自己則將之歸因為“企業責任”，他們將辦公場所設在安全的城區或者好的學校附近——Louise Mozingo，加州大學伯克利分校的教師稱其為“田園資本主義。”無論如何，這誕生了一種新式的公司總部：并非矗立于大都會的鬧市中心的辦公大廈，而是處在茫茫蠻荒中綠樹成蔭的園區。

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, ,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 re-turn a year later. Many tech companies were born urban and couldn’t be any other way. Twitter and Sales force are in downtown San Francisco, and Jeff Bezos is building a huge campus for Amazon in downtown Seattle.

而現在越來越多的公司又遷回了鬧市區。通用電氣（財富500強公司之一，總部位于美國）就是最典型的例子。1974，通用電氣從紐約市遷到康涅狄格州的費爾菲爾德，新址園區面積達68英畝；但如今它用這塊地換了波士頓濱水區的一批倉庫。這類例子數不勝數。