The Bay Area’s knowledge jobs are dispersed across a vast, car-choked landscape of suburban office parks. And that’s the way the industry likes

America is a nation of office parks. Low-rise compounds surrounded by seas of employee parking are fixtures of the suburban and exurban landscape. Usually located miles from the nearest downtown and accessible only by car, this sprawl-intensive development pattern usually comes down to expedience: That’s where space is available and where the rent is cheapest.

In Silicon Valley, though, the preference for office parks is more deeply imprinted. During the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, as the region’s tech industry grew, executives found they could quickly snap up standard-issue office buildings as business ramped up, and offload them when things got rocky. The large floor plates of these buildings allowed for easy collaboration, seen as a big advantage in the tech world. Self-contained campuses fulfilled the need for security in an industry where IP is all-important.

Over time, these real-estate practices were baked into a culture that emphasizes “churn,” a dynamic of rapid growth and decline. The result: a fragmented, auto-oriented landscape that puts a heavy burden on the environment and society.

It doesn’t have to be this way, according to a new report from SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. In “Rethinking the Corporate Campus,” the nonprofit presents a year’s worth of research into knowledge-economy workplaces in the Bay Area. SPUR has a vision of what the region can become—“a constellation of lively, well-connected urban centers ... each bustling with people sharing ideas and energy.”

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With the region’s ongoing housing crisis and the news that some families earning six figures in San Francisco qualify for federal housing assistance, the status quo is clearly not working. “We really wanted to talk to a lot of the players and get them invested in the fact that they weren’t going to be able to recruit employees anymore [because of high housing costs and transit limitations],” Arieff says. “Not all of the issues have been solved, but we have seen enough examples where it is working, and we can say it’s possible, with the recognition that it’s super hard and a lot has to change.”

As cities like Salt Lake City, Nashville, and Boise attempt, with mixed success, to refashion themselves into tech hubs, Arieff hopes SPUR’s research will help them avoid some of the Bay Area’s problems. “I would love it if those cities could look at the report and do a little looking ahead. I think what has happened in the Bay Area is what happens when your transit investment doesn’t keep up with economic and population growth,” she says. “It’s my hope that other places can learn from this, and say, ‘If we want to be the next Silicon Valley, there are some things we have to do.’”