The Boston Globe and Bloomberg News is reporting that Needham based Trip Advisor is cutting hundreds of jobs due to competition from Google.
Trip Advisor to cut hundreds of jobs
by Amy Sangiolo | Jan 23, 2020 | Newton | 35 comments
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The amount of revenue google is getting from travel sites would probably show up as rounding error for them… in the mean time they get to destroy a locally built company…
Needham is going to wish it had been more expeditious in getting the Muzi and Coca-Cola sites rezoned and redeveloped while it had still been able, because now that the big guys like PTC and TripAdvisor have begun pulling out and axing jobs, there’s going to be little risk appetite for the type of commercial development that was supposed to pay for our shiny no-expense-spared schools and public safety complexes.
@Amy: What’s your point?
@Micheal: This is a complete misrepresentation of reality. Businesses grow and contract all the time, due to market pressure, competition, economic trends etc. Trip Advisor has about 4,000 employees and are reducing their staff by 200. That doesn’t mean their “pulling out” of anywhere.
As Chuck notes, PTC did leave Newton to move downtown but they’re still paying rent in Needham so the property owner is in no rush to do anything. However that campus is considered a prime location and there will be a lot of interest in that prime location property.
Meanwhile, NBC Universal just invested $125 million in its new building right next to Trip and across the street from PTC where it is consolidating its four Boston-area stations under one roof: NBC10 Boston, Telemundo Boston, NECN, and NBC Sports Boston.
And Childrens Hospital is seeking a special permit to build not one, not two, but three, new buildings in that same part of the N-Squared Innovation District. And while they’re a nonprofit they’ve agreed to pay full commercial property taxes.
There have also been two new hotels built there in the past four years and a third has been permitted.
And they built some 400 apartments there too, which allowed Needham to meet its 40B requirement.
Oh and Work Bar is opening there too!
That’s a boatload of new tax revenue, jobs and housing for Needham.
And not one referendum campaign by anyone who thinks it’s not the right size.
That strip of land in Needham is the perfect place for development of any kind. It will just keep growing.
Greg, I’m surprised that Children’s Hospital has agreed to pay “full commercial property taxes.” That’s a pretty amazing feat of negotiation.
Needham had 14 overrides in past years. I suspect they had something to do with paying for their excellent facilities.
@Michael you’re forgetting that SharNinja, NBCUniversal, Workbar, Candel Therapeutics, Steward Healthcare and 2 hotels have all moved in since TripAdvisor put up its building. Those are just the bigger names. Needham has done just fine with that patch of land. PTC is still paying the lease on it’s space, so Boston Properties, which owns it, isn’t going to do anything to fill it until that’s done. They’re huge owners on the 128 belt and aren’t selling it. So there will be someone in it eventually. Don’t cry for Needham, they’ve done just fine.
Interesting article of why silicon valley overtook boston for tech. In the mid 90s boston area was actually on par with silicon valley…. and then came the internet
Luckily, Boston is number 1 for Biotech
https://www.briancmanning.com/blog/2019/4/7/how-silicon-valley-became-silicon-valley
Honestly, it’s not a surprise. This is going on all over metro Boston. Just last week State Street cut a few hundred jobs. Fuze just cut many too. The list goes on. We’re starting to see a pullback as companies cut mid-level jobs as competition from reputable firms (Perhaps not for the poor workers, but in terms of work output) in the developing world and powerhouse US-based companies squeeze them out. There was an article that came out a few weeks ago with the headline, “The Golden Age of the Internet and social media is over.” And, of course, the gap between the rich and the poor grows by the day.
Greg,
Housing demand “grows and contracts all the time” as well.
Jim Epstein – No, not really.
Individual companies do expand and contract all the time but housing demand is dictated primarily by population and housing supply and neither of those “grow and contract” all the time.
Jerry,
Housing is subject to the law of supply and demand like anything else.
So we should just tell all the people who can’t find or afford a place to live to just not live anywhere until the demand to magically goes away?
Jim, housing prices are subject to supply and demand. Housing supply is a tad more complex
Jack,
Yes, supply inelasticity must be factored into the law of supply and demand in housing.
Happy Lunar New Year’s Eve to all!
#GungHayFatChoy
@Greg
Interesting thought coming from a chamber-of-commerce kind of person.
“So we should just tell all the people who can’t find or afford to just not until the goes away?”
For example fill in food, healthcare, higher education.
I assume you would fill in at least food and healthcare along with housing. And the government – does provide benefits for those items, albeit not enough. But it’s still a slippery slope to socialism, some ( not me ) might say.
oops. The text editor saw my angle brackets as html or something. Here’s what it should look like
“So we should just tell all the people who can’t find or afford — fill in social good — to just not — have social good — until the — cause of lack of social good — goes away?”
I’m not surprised. TripAdvisor’s business model always struck me as extremely risky, and I couldn’t believe it when I saw the size of their headquarters. Traffic-based ad revenue seems like a very weak foundation for a company. For the life of me, I have never ever purchased anything as a result of it being advertised on a website and don’t understand how it’s worth any money.
That said, they will have no problem sub-leasing some of their space.
@Greg: I posted this because this is big news. This is a fairly sizeable business/employer in the area – yes – it’s not in Newton but it’s right over the line in Needham.
Needham has been really thoughtful about how it attracts great employers while also getting appropriate gives back to benefit the community. It’s a model any municipality could learn from.
Yes, Greg, Needham has been really thoughtful about how it allows “great employers” to avoid paying taxes. If only Newton had played along and joined in the race to the corporate-welfare bottom.
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2012/11/28/needham-town-meeting-to-consider-tax-break-for-tripadvisor
http://www.normandyrealty.com/nbcuniversal-plans-125m-headquarters-needham/
As shown above, the Town of Needham had already given away $4 million in Tax Increment Financing that it could scarcely afford, first to a $4 billion corporation and then to a $210 billion corporation, under the premise that those companies would attract significant tax-generating development in adjoining parcels.
It would’ve been a political non-starter for a multi-billion dollar organization like Children’s to propose the construction of a tax-exempt campus on parcels that had already been indirectly subsidized by the TIF plan.
So there wasn’t any amazing feat of negotiation – Children’s knew that they would have to fulfill their tax obligations under the commercial rates, and did so voluntarily, as they’ve also done in Brookline and to a certain extent in Waltham.
@Michael: I wish you wouldn’t mislead folks. Both Tripadvisor and NBC have been really beneficial for Needham’s bottom line. While both did get partial property tax break to locate there (and they expire over time) both contribute significantly in property taxes. And before Trip moved in that office park was desolate. Now every single parcel has something significant happening.
@Greg: Huh? What part of what I said was misleading? I’m not disputing that the outcome of the TIF has been beneficial for Needham, although the Needham Industrial Park had already been a major source of tax revenue for the town over last 60 years and its redevelopment as a technology hub was inevitable.
If anything’s misleading, it’s your statement that Needham’s is “a model any municipality could learn from.” It’s absolutely not a model that any municipality could learn from, because if other municipalities had chosen to play the TIF game with Needham, then there would have been a race to the bottom and Needham would have eventually lost.
For example, should Newton have outbid Needham’s five-year, 76% TripAdvisor tax credit proposal by offering them a ten-year, 99% credit to stay on Needham Street? Or maybe Newton should’ve offered 100% for 20 years to keep NBC Universal over at Wells Ave.? (The irony is that at the time the TIF concessions were awarded, both companies had long decided to relocate to Needham and the TIFs were just a means to game the gullible townspeople, but that’s another issue entirely).
It’s irresponsible, unjust, immoral, and unsustainable for municipalities to poach employers from neighboring towns using these taxpayer subsidies.
The CoC may not like it, but among the reasons why innovative Massachusetts companies lose out in the long term is because of non-competes. Our businesses lock up employee talent in restraint of trade. That short-sighted view ends up hurting all businesses. When our best skilled workers don’t want to sit out the market for 6 months or a year, they move to California where non-competes are unenforceable, and keep right on working. California companies cherry-pick talent, and they never come back.
Dulles: I don’t disagree. A change is long overdue.
Thanks Greg. Besides my own business, I haven’t worked for a Massachusetts based employer since 1996. There are companies in my industry all around the greater Boston area, including two right here in Newton. But over the past ~24 years, I’ve been treated better working for employers in Virginia, New York City and London. Hooray for home offices. On the upside, the city and state still get my income taxes. 🙂
“Needham Industrial Park had already been a major source of tax revenue for the town over last 60 years and its redevelopment as a technology hub was inevitable.”
Sorry, but this is disproven by the facts. Back in the early 2000s Needham tried a redevelopment project by rezoning according to what the town wanted it to look like. It put in place a series of zoning restrictions based on this report: https://www.needhamma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/19486/Goody-Clancy-Report-June-2001?bidId=
While places like Waltham saw significant development at that time, Needham didn’t. What they found, when speaking with the property owners, was that the zoning put in restrictions that made development entirely unprofitable.
So they went back and rezoned the area, this time working with the developers and owners to better understand what would encourage development. That process, coupled with the TIFs, which were offered strategically to bring in large numbers of employees, helped fuel the growth.
If you have questions on this I suggest reaching out to Newton’s current Economic Development Director Devra Bailin, as she is the person who handled the process when she held the same role in Needham. I worked with her on presentations about this, and then worked on the marketing to attract businesses there, so I have a bit of first-hand knowledge about the process and history.
Thanks Chuck, I do have some questions –
1) Wasn’t the Needham Industrial Park already a major source of tax revenue for the town over the last 60 years and wasn’t its redevelopment as a technology hub inevitable? From my early childhood I remember major technology tenants such as Polaroid, Duracell, and General Dynamics, among others, who to my recollection contributed quite a bit to the town’s tax base.
2) Rather than being “strategic,” in actuality wasn’t it morally reprehensible and unjust for the Town of Needham to offer $4 million worth of TIFs in 2012 and 2017 to lure a pair of multi-billion dollar corporations away from the City of Newton?
3) Was the rezone of Needham Crossing much of a challenge in the traditional sense? Historically, the area’s geographic isolation from the rest of the town has meant that effective neighborhood opposition has been minimal, save for the Highland Terrace/Riverside neighborhood where the residents have always complained that they’ve been disenfranchised and ignored by the town.
4) Was the rezone of Needham Crossing a success? I walk through there quite often and IMHO, I find the whole area to be an unhealthy, architecturally-offensive, depressing dump and – aside from its revenue and employment generation – a colossal failure of suburban planning. Particularly abhorrent is the massive 8-story parking garage which was erected clandestinely over the last couple of years thanks to the new zoning – have you seen it? And anecdotally, the new pair of impersonal, underpriced highway-interchange hotels seem to me to have been purpose-built for the I-95 opioid and trafficking trade, although that’s obviously a symptom of multiple public-policy failures at the state and federal levels and only partially the result of failed planning on Needham’s part.
@Michael. Happy to have a discussion, but none of your questions are phrased as questions, they are criticisms masquerading as questions.
Did Needham design a walkable location? No, they did not. But having worked with Needham they seem to be intent on maintaining a car-culture come hell or high water. Both are likely. Needham Select Board Members have said to me that they believe Needham Street should be much wider to accommodate more cars so their residents can get to Route 9 faster.
Yes, there have always been offices at what we now call Needham Crossing. Much of that area was rendered flat in the 19th century when it was used as fill for the Back Bay. When 128 came through it became the nation’s first suburban industrial park. The buildings had grown old and tired by the 1990s and it was in need of an update. Whether you or I agree with how they ultimately designed it is truly irrelevant.
The Marriott Residence Inn has been known to maintain occupancy rates of more than 90% to the point that even TripAdvisor has trouble getting rooms there for people who come to the headquarters for training.
Both NBCUniversal and TripAdvisor had outgrown their facilities in Newton and both were going to move. Newton did not have a location that suited either of them (and we won’t for a long time, if ever. See: Riverside). While Needham did lure them with a TIF, it’s possible, even likely, that one or both would have chosen another community, such as Waltham or even downtown Boston. Had that happened, I believe, other companies would not have built there.
So….we know Needham Street cannot be widened. If Needham is unwilling to abandon their car culture…wouldn’t it be fair to say that any traffic relief created by Northland traffic mitigation…would effectively be consumed by Needham residents using Needham Street as a cut thru to Route 9?
The state just completed an expensive widening of 128 in that area that connects directly to route 9. I also believe a bridge over 128 that connects the Upper Falls Greenway to Needham would help. Needham officials would like an engineering study to understand if the greenway can be a bus / bike way. It would be great if an organization that is concerned about transportation in that corridor would champion this and help raise the money to get it done.
Since it had been mentioned that the majority of traffic on Needham st is people just driving through I had been pondering who the people were and why they would choose that way to go ….now I know it’s the people from Needham.
Needham Street is very well-studied when it comes to traffic. One planning department official told me, half-jokingly, that it was perhaps the most studied stretch of road in the city. The biggest culprit when it comes to traffic? Curb cuts. There are just too many and that slows traffic. Other issues are the traffic lights at either end. I know when I would bike home down Needham Street traffic would back up and slow as you approached Winchester Street, then be at a standstill under route 9 and up until the Walnut St./ Centre St. light.
The rebuild underway by the state addresses these issues, which is expected to increase throughput. As for whether traffic mitigation will encourage more driving…well… that’s called induced demand and traffic engineers talk about it All. The. Time. If you build more road capacity you get more cars. The answer is to put in things like a bus system and provide that bus with a dedicated lane, thereby moving more PEOPLE not just more cars.
That takes the cake. What have we Needhamites done to deserve being so completely devoid of basic leadership?
Hear, hear, Chuck – alas, as you are probably aware, in Needham we have a Select Board member who becomes irate and irrational whenever any mention is made of reusing the abandoned railroad tracks.