> These areas boast an abundance of mid-rise, open-floor plan, historic buildings that create street-level interaction, where people and ideas can combine and recombine to form new innovations and startup companies.<p>Historic office buildings are anything but open-floor plan-based. Open-floor plans suck for startups because the square footage is usually immense, which means you can't rent office space cheaply. That's why early stage startups these days end up working in accelerators where they can share space, if they're operating out of commercial space at all. Where startups operate with large open floor plans, it's because they've migrated to cheap areas with lots of supply and low demand, namely vacant industrial areas. But those are becoming scarce within cities.<p>The image of startups in open floor plans is really an artifact of necessity, with rationalizations after-the-fact for why they might be better. And in any event, anybody who has worked in the 1970s and 1980s era single-story office buildings in Silicon Valley knows that the layouts were typically neither totally open nor closed, but had spaces with varying qualities.<p>I have a small (2-3 person max) private office in an historic building in San Francisco's Financial District. Since the building was constructed in 1890, it's been principally occupied by professionals--doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc--who don't typically have many employees, if any. Over the past 5 years I've increasingly seen more tech startups here and it's really ideal for them because they can rent just enough space for what they need. And while the building management has leased a few floors in their entirety to some businesses (a securities trading firm, a game company, a law firm), they seem committed to keeping most of their space in a more traditional[1] layout.<p>And I'm really thankful for that commitment because I hate open-floor layouts. I like having my own, truly private space that isn't subleased from a larger office. These types of buildings are a rarity. I don't have to walk past any other desk (other than the security desk downstairs) coming to or leaving from my office. I don't have to worry about questions about why I come at noon one day and don't leave until noon the next day (all-night hacking session), nobody knows if I'm taking a nap, doing my taxes, etc. Not that I'd be offended by such questions, it's just that real privacy makes for a much less stressful and more productive environment for me, and I imagine many other people. At the same time, I really benefit from my work space and home space being separate.<p>[1] Very traditional, I should say, given that large open floor plans started in the 1950s. One of the earliest modernist skyscrapers in the now archetypal International Style--open floors, glass curtain walls, highly segregated service areas--the Crown Zellerbach Building, is one block from here, built in 1959. It's just a completely different architectural style internally. Night & day.