You guys cry too much about things that aren't even close to being concrete, and are we really getting our underwear bunched up about a measly 10 mil? This would be the equivalent of Amazon just asking for 100 million in tax incentives, compared to the billions they want (also fuck Amazon).

I think we can all step away from the bridge and breathe a little lmao

Wow, poor 130 N Franklin passed over again. It's probably shuffling down the sidewalk with a Dangerfield impression.

"No respect, I don't get no respect!"

I was just thinking about 130 N Franklin. I guess it is not visible enough for what SF wants?

Also, why not the Old Post Office site? I’m sure they could get naming rights for 5000 jobs. Still a lot more than Walgreen’s 1800, and it’s also a prominent site

I am new to Chicago (10 months) and what I said was purely based on conjecture. I'm not trying to go toe to toe with the resident population expert but is it not fair to assume that at least a portion of those employees will live outside of city proper limits? If I had my wish all 5000 would live downtown and several new construction projects for all of us to follow will come from it!

Of course a portion will live outside of the city. That's just inevitable. Maybe I interpreted when you said "large portion" incorrectly. I took it to mean more than 50%. Maybe that's not what you meant. Personally my guess would be more around 25%..I guess that's large based purely on the fact that 5000 new hires for one company in one location is big.

Are we even sure there would be 5,000 new hires? Salesforce currently has an office in River North with its name plastered on it. An additional 3-4,000 new jobs is nothing to scoff at, but I question the figures being thrown out there (source: used to support economic development efforts on business relocation deals where projections of hiring were rosy at best).

Blair Kamin with an article today about this (can’t read it due to paywall), but predictably he’s griping about signage on the riverfront.

No, it's "up to" 5,000 jobs. But pretty sure we can expect a big hiring spree.

It says up to 5000 new hires, so I think it's more than what you are thinking. My office has around 125k square ft and 900 people. We also have numerous conference rooms, entire area with pool tables, ping pong, etc, cafeteria, etc. Salesforce wants at least 500k square ft, which is realistically around or over 4000 employees, possibly 5000, especially since it's minimum of 500k square ft of space.

And as mentioned before, there are tax vehicles like EDGE where the company only starts getting their tax break after they suffice a certain number of new hires and retain certain percentage of workers over a period of time. Chicago could probably do this.

Lol he quotes Lady Bird Johnson in the piece. You can view the article if you open it in an incognito window btw.

"Good design is good business. So channel your inner Lady Bird, Mr. Mayor. I’m referring, as I’m sure you know, to Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of former President Lyndon Johnson. When Lady Bird crusaded in the 1960s to clear the nation’s highways of ugly billboards, her call to arms was 'Keep America Beautiful.'"

Yes, some portion of the new employees will undoubtedly live outside of city limits, but the kind of person Salesforce hires skews wildly into the "urban liberal" category. My guess would be that very very few of these employees will locate in places like Schaumburg and the majority of employees who do end up outside of city limits will be living places like Park Ridge or Oak Park or Evanston that are still fairly urban with good transit connections.

Yeah, the article also says that there's potential for "significant additional expansion" to the lease they are considering. In other words the new space can accommodate 5000 new hires but they might just keep hiring from there.

So here's some food for thought:

Amazon HQ2 is expected to be "up to 50,000 employees and 5,000,000 SF" starting with a 500,000 SF initial chunk of space.

Salesforce alone is adding 5,000 employees and 500,000 SF which is 10% of the ultimate "total" HQ2 might yield. Their initial requirement is the same size as the HQ2 initial requirement of 500,000.

A few weeks ago Facebook just added 250,000 SF expected to add another 2,000 jobs. That brings our total to 750,000 SF and 7,000 tech jobs. Between Facebook and Salesforce alone Chicago just added the same number of SF of tech as the largest office lease in San Francisco history which was 750,000 SF Facebook took downtown SF earlier this year.

Google also announced a 100,000 SF expansion again in line with the rumored Google operations center which might also be about 500,000 SF with 5,000 employees. So in the last month Chicago has added 850,000 SF of new tech offices which could provide about 8,000 additional tech jobs.

We've already won, that's an HQ 2 in it's own right. Yes it's not 50,000 workers day one, but neither is HQ2. Over time these significant investments by FAANG companies all but guarantee continued investment in Chicago's tech scene by these companies. If you consider the recent moves by McD, Walgreen, et. al. to the CBD we have probably already added a diversified HQ2 to downtown over a couple of years. The best part about all of this is that Chicago is demonstrating why Amazon should come here by actually going out and doing what Amazon needs it's candidate city to be capable of doing: absorbing tens of thousands of jobs in the labor market and millions of square feet of office in the office market. And Chicago is doing this with ease, making it look simple. "Oh you need a 500,000 SF block of space, just put it in this premier waterfront space in supertall tower, NBD"...

Think of how many support jobs and ancillary businesses these moves will create. Salesforce on it's own is more employees than McD brought to the West Loop. How many companies that do business with Salesforce will follow to have close contact with their vendor or client? How many new restaurants does 8,000 employees in the river corridor and West Loop support? How many new apartment towers with valet guys, desk guards, maintenance men, etc does this fill? The ramifications of these three moves (Google, Facebook, Salesforce) alone spell out ongoing expansion of the central district and outlying neighborhoods. Now compound that with the ongoing flight of F500 companies from the suburbs to the core. It's really quite astounding the kind of numbers Chicago is putting up right now! And just think of the regional talent these companies will retain for Chicago. So many Big Ten or U of C grads who will stick around instead of flee to the coasts.



But you have guys like Kenmore who this this is bad for the city...

* posts deleted *

guys, no presidential politics in the development threads.

our president is so polarizing that any mention or reference to him will be summarily deleted to keep these worthwhile development threads from going completely off the rails.

if you have an opinion of the president that you feel you must express, then please take it to the current events subforum.

I believe it when I see it. I think they'll hire a lot, but the bull run can't last forever, and business services firm like Salesforce are the most vulnerable to recessions and the first to shed employees. Virtually everyone agrees now that a contraction is on the way.

I gotta say personally, too, that my experience working with Salesforce in my job has not been good. I was shocked to see how janky their tools were for managing email campaigns. Like literally half the time when i would log into the management console it would freeze up and it's a really ugly and confusing interface. For a blue chip tech company, they certainly have a lot of kinks to work out.

B2B Tech companies invest far more in sales talent than in engineering/product talent, which is why most B2B tech sucks. The "5,000 employees" will be sales and customer support roles.

The Trib's paywall is defeated by Chrome's incognito mode FYI

A contraction is literally always "on the way", the question is when not if. Also, I disagree with the notion that companies like Salesforce are the first to shed jobs. They were going on a hiring binge throughout the recession. I know this because my best friend is a computer programmer there and was part of a massive wave of hiring in 2010. Salesforce is actually core to many many businesses now that can't really operate in the modern economy without them, which brings me to my next point below:

Salesforce is not about "email management" anymore. That is a legacy business from the early days of their company. The type of stuff that Salesforce does now is, for example, host the entire website and mobile app interface of companies like Chase and Bank of America on their unified platform. Salesforce isn't interested in your email management, they are interested in getting long term contracts from Chase to build and maintain the very means through which the vast majority of Chase's customers now interact with their business. Chase cannot afford to "fire" Salesforce and they can't just not offer mobile access to your checking account. It's not about "bleeding edge tech", Salesforce is a blue chip company now by just about any definition. And the business they have built is defensible and wildly profitable.

Another thing Salesforce does is run advanced data management for F500 companies. For example, my buddy was working on the CAT account for several years where they were building cloud software that constantly communicates with the massive capital equipment CAT builds. The software basically coordinates all of the vehicles on a given jobsite and uses predictive analytics to do things like anticipate when a certain part is about to fail or when a piece of equipment needs to be serviced to avoid failure. An example is monitoring all the mega equipment in a strip mine (mining shovels, loaders, those massive dump trucks, etc.) and telling the mining company you need to get Widget B for shovel #1234 because this signal is coming from the engine that we are starting to get decreased performance from that part and it might fail causing downtime. Or telling a mining company "widget Z in dump truck #789 just failed, send dump truck #321 to pit 3 to take it's place" and then automatically ordering the part, informing the maintenance contractor, and deploying a service crew to get that valuable capital back up and running ASAP.

Again, the last thing CAT is going to cut is a contract with a company like Salesforce that is adding real value to their product. Regardless of economic conditions, the cost of Salesforce developing these features for CAT is dwarfed by value added to their products. Downtime for that kind of equipment is killer and a massive waste of resources. Eliminating that downtime is low hanging fruit for Salesforce because they can easily use their massive data management expertise to automate the logistics of it all.

^Huh, what are you talking about? its email cloud is the cornerstone of the business. And if there's a downturn, I know my business would shed a bunch of those campaigns that we run right now just bc we're flush with cash.

Yes, there's always a downturn on the way, but everyone agrees now that one is just around the corner. All the indicators are pointing to it.

This is true, it's basically a giant sales/marketing company. But even still, I was shocked that you had to constantly refresh a page just to get it to function properly.

I would also argue that because it's a giant sales firm, more employees than we think will be living in the burbs. It's not the same crowd as a Groupon or a Grub Hub.

This boom is reaching exit velocity. Don't think for one second Amazon isn't paying attention to what this is going to do demographically to the tech workforce in Chicago.

If this constitutes a proven track record for attracting talent, added to the cost differential to the coasts (e.g. Boston), added to the available real estate, added to the coming O'Hare expansion, Chicago is becoming a no-brainer choice for HQ2.

Salesforce is a huge HUGE deal. Get 'er done.

Again though, email marketing is a legacy business for them, yes they still make a lot of money off of it, but the focus of the firm is no longer sales. Salesforce has long since transitioned into a platform for businesses to offer additional services like online banking or maintenance management to their customers. Salesforce is not achieving revenue growth by convincing Chase to send their customers more spam email using their system, they are making money because Chase signs a big fat contract for Salesforce to house and build all of their digital interaction with their customers on one platform.