Location location location

You are a business that, like every business, is in the business of making money. You can locate your offices anywhere you like; money is no object to you. Here are your choices: 1) anywhere else, or 2) this one particular place that is crowded, looks bad, smells bad, is exceedingly expensive, has traffic is so bad that nobody--neither your employees nor clients--wants to commute there, your employees have to park several blocks away and for a monthly fee, the surrounding streets are so dangerous your employees are afraid to walk to their cars after dark and so they use a shuttle instead (whose cost is invariably passed on to the employer/employee), there’s nowhere for your employees to grab a late lunch or dinner after 4pm because the place turns into a ghost town, your employees don’t want to live nearby and couldn’t afford to pay the premium to live nearby despite this place being a dump. Oh, this place does have one arguably redeeming feature: other similarly-situated businesses are clamoring to move in so there’s a bit of caché that comes with locating your offices here.

If it was your business where would you locate? It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? And you still think so-called urban sprawl (live where you work and work where you live) is a bad thing? This is a discussion for another day, but detractors of "urban sprawl," I think, operate under a misguided idealism that old cities--these bastions of culture and the epitome of civilization--ought to be the center of our lives, literally. Ya right. Tell that to families who live in a nice planned community with nice new schools and a local town center that just opened up.

Incidentally, the place I describe above is downtown Los Angeles.