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.

现今有许多知名美国公司迁往闹市区。五十年前美国公司开始将其总部从市中心迁至郊区。许多批评家将这种企业成群撤离的现象归罪到“白人航班”上——雇员因城市犯罪愈加猖獗而搬出城市，企业随雇员搬迁而转移。公司自己则将之归因为“企业责任”，他们将办公场所设在安全的城区或者好的学校附近——Louise Mozingo，加州大学伯克利分校的教师称其为“田园资本主义。”无论如何，这诞生了一种新式的公司总部：并非矗立于大都会的闹市中心的办公大厦，而是处在茫茫蛮荒中绿树成荫的园区。

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.

而现在越来越多的公司又迁回了闹市区。通用电气（财富500强公司之一，总部位于美国）就是最典型的例子。1974，通用电气从纽约市迁到康涅狄格州的费尔菲尔德，新址园区面积达68英亩；但如今它用这块地换了波士顿滨水区的一批仓库。这类例子数不胜数。